Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective (...) explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods. (shrink)

Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, (...) 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website. (shrink)

Previous studies have found differences in the cognitive and neural mechanisms between cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression in the regulation of various negative emotions and the recognition of regulated stimuli. However, whether these differences are valid for sadness remains unclear. As such, we investigated the effect of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression on sadness regulation and the recognition of sad scenes adopting event-related potentials. Twenty-eight healthy undergraduate and graduate students took part in this study. In the regulation phase, the participants (...) were asked to down-regulation, expressive suppression, or maintain their sad emotion evoked by the sad images, and then to perform an immediately unexpected recognition task involving the regulated images. The behavioral results show that down-regulation reappraisal significantly diminished subjective feelings of sadness, but expressive suppression did not; both strategies impaired the participants’ recognition of sad images, and expressive suppression had a greater damaging effect on the recognition of sad images than down-regulation reappraisal. The ERP results indicate that reappraisal and expressive suppression significantly reduced the late positive potential induced by sadness. These findings suggest that down-regulation reappraisal and expression suppression can effectively decrease sadness, and that down-regulation reappraisal is a more effective regulation strategy for sadness. Both strategies impair the recognition of sad scenes, and expression suppression leads to relatively greater impairment in the recognition of sad scenes. (shrink)

Body representations traverse the whole of the brain. They provide vital sources of information for every facet of an animal’s behavior, and such direct neural connectivity of visceral input throughout the nervous system demonstrates just how strongly cognitive systems are linked to bodily representations. At each level of the neural axis there are visceral appraisal systems that are integral in the organization of action. Cognition is not one side of a divide and viscera the other, with action merely a reflexive (...) outcome. There is no divide between cognition and bodily functions once the brain is involved. Cognitive mechanisms that permeate neural function are a cardinal piece of biological function and adaptation. (shrink)

A new experimental paradigm involving a computerised quiz was used to examine, on an intra-individual level, the strength of association between four components of the surprise syndrome: cognitive (degree of prospectively estimated unexpectedness), experiential (the feeling of surprise), behavioural (degree of response delay on a parallel task), and expressive (the facial expression of surprise). It is argued that this paradigm, together with associated methods of data analysis, effectively controls for most method factors that could in previous studies have lowered the (...) correlations among the components of emotion syndromes. It was found that (a) the components of the surprise syndrome were all positively correlated; (b) strong association existed only between the cognitive and the experiential component of surprise; (c) the coherence between syndrome components did not increase with increasing intensity of surprise; and (d) there was also only moderate coherence between the components of the facial expression of surprise (eyebrow raising, eye widening, mouth opening), although in this case, coherence tended to increase with intensity. Taken together, the findings support only a weakly probabilistic version of a behavioural syndrome view of surprise. However, the component correlations seem strong enough to support the existence of strong associations among a subset of the mental or central neurophysiological processes engaged in surprise. (shrink)

Evidence on the coherence between emotion and facial expression in adults from laboratory experiments is reviewed. High coherence has been found in several studies between amusement and smiling; low to moderate coherence between other positive emotions and smiling. The available evidence for surprise and disgust suggests that these emotions are accompanied by their “traditional” facial expressions, and even components of these expressions, only in a minority of cases. Evidence concerning sadness, anger, and fear is very limited. For sadness, one study (...) suggests that high emotion–expression coherence may exist in specific situations, whereas for anger and fear, the evidence points to low coherence. Insufficient emotion intensity and inhibition of facial expressions seem unable to account for the observed dissociations between emotion and facial expression. (shrink)

I present an overview of emotion theories, organised around the question of emotion causation. I argue that theories of emotion causation should ideally address the problems of elicitation, intensity, and differentiation. Each of these problems can be divided into a subquestion that asks about the relation between stimuli and emotions (i.e., the functional level of process description, cf. Marr, 1982) and a subquestion that asks about the mechanism and representations that intervene (i.e., the algorithmic level of process description). The overview (...) reveals that theories of emotion causation sometimes differ with regard to the kind of process that they hold responsible for emotion causation. More precisely, they hold different assumptions regarding the conditions under which the process is supposed to operate (optimal versus suboptimal), the format of the representations involved (propositional versus perceptual), and the object or input of the central process (stimulus versus responses/experience). Further, the overview reveals that theories of emotion causation sometimes differ with regard to the level of process description that they focus on. Finally, the overview brings to light several similarities among the theories discussed. (shrink)

We investigated whether motivationally determined stimulus valence can be processed in an automatic way, as is assumed in many appraisal theories (e.g., Frijda, 1986, 1993; Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, 1993a). Whereas appraisal theorists typically use conscious self-report methods to investigate their assumptions, our experiments used indirect experimental methods that leave less room for deliberate, conscious reflections of the participants. Using variants of the affective priming and Simon paradigms, we demonstrated that intrinsically neutral, but wanted stimuli facilitated responses with a positive valence, (...) whereas intrinsically neutral, but unwanted stimuli facilitated negative responses. In addition, the second experiment proved to be supportive of another assumption made by appraisal theorists according to which a relation exits between different (automatic) outcomes of motivational appraisal (positive-negative) and different action tendencies (approach-withdrawal). (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

The neural correlates of two hypothesized emotional processing modes, i.e., schematic and propositional modes, were investigated with positron emission tomography. Nineteen subjects performed an emotional mental imagery task while mentally repeating sentences linked to the meaning of the imagery script. In the schematic conditions, participants repeated metaphoric sentences, whereas in the propositional conditions, the sentences were explicit questions about specific emotional appraisals of the imagery scenario. Five types of emotional scripts were proposed to the subjects (happiness, anger, affection, sadness, and (...) a neutral scenario). The results supported the hypothesized distinction between schematic and propositional emotional processing modes. Specifically, schematic mode was associated with increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex whereas propositional mode was associated with activation of the anterolateral prefrontal cortex. In addition, interaction analyses showed that schematic versus propositional processing of happiness (compared with the neutral scenario) was associated with increased activity in the ventral striatum whereas “schematic anger” was tentatively associated with activation of the ventral pallidum. © 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. (shrink)

Different theories of emotions have been introduced since the 19th century. Even though a large number of apparent differences between these theories exist, there is a broad consensus today that emotions consist of multiple components such as cognition, physiology, motivation, and subjectively perceived feeling. Appraisal theories of emotions, such as the Component Process Model by Klaus Scherer, emphasize that the cognitive evaluation of a stimulus or event is the driving component of the emotion process. It is believed to cause changes (...) in all other components and hence to differentiate emotion states. To test the CPM and gain more insights into the multi-componential emotion process, the present thesis examines two emotion sub-processes – the link between the cognitive and the feeling component and the link between the cognitive and the physiological component – by using different predictive modeling approaches. In study 1, four theoretically informed models were implemented. The models use a weighted distance metric based on an emotion prototype approach to predict the perceived emotion of participants from self-reported cognitive appraisals. Moreover, they incorporate different weighting functions with weighting parameters that were either derived from theory or estimated from empirical data. The results substantiate the examined link based on the predictive performance of the models. In line with the CPM, the preferred model weighted the appraisal evaluations differently in the distance metric. However, the data-derived weighting parameters of this model deviate from theoretically proposed ones. Study 2 analyzed the link between cognition and physiology by predicting self-reported appraisal dimensions from a large set of physiological features using different linear and non-linear machine learning algorithms. Based on the predictive performance of the models, the study is able to confirm that most cognitive evaluations were interlinked with different physiological responses. The comparison of the different algorithms and the application of methods for interpretable machine learning showed that the relation between these two components is best represented by a non-linear model and that the studied link seems to vary among physiological signals and cognitive dimensions. Both studies substantiate the assumption that the cognitive appraisal process is interlinked with physiology and subjective feelings, accentuating the relevance of cognition in emotion as assumed in appraisal theory. They also demonstrate how computational emotion modeling can be applied in basic research on emotions. (shrink)