Emotions

Kersten et al. (2021) revealed that participants remembered negatively valenced actions better than neutral actions, but did no better at binding negative actions with the people who performed them compared to neutral actions. We were interested in testing whether emotion only enhances memory for individual features of an event, or whether emotion can also enhance binding of certain combinations of features. In particular, we tested the effect of emotionally charged objects on the ability to remember those objects and the actions associated with them. Participants saw a series of brief videos each involving an actor performing one of two different actions on one of two objects within a specific object category (e.g., guns or piñatas), some objects neutral in valence, some positive, and some negative. Participants were later tested on their ability to distinguish old events from novel conjunctions of particular objects with the actions that had been previously performed with the other members of the same object categories. Although only marginally significant, participants appeared more able to bind objects with their associated actions when those objects held a negative charge compared to neutral objects. Additionally, participants were more sensitive to changes in actions when those actions were associated with negative objects compared to neutral or positive objects. However, false memory increased when new negative objects were presented compared to novel presentation of neutral or positive objects.

Children learn from their parents’ emotional expressions because one’s parents are the main source of social information, especially on an emotional level. Depression hinders the parents’ ability to express these emotions, in turn, hindering the child’s ability to identify and express emotions as they get older. Parents self-reported their everyday depressive symptoms and were placed into two depressive categories: high and low. By means of a story-telling paradigm, each parent read 2 stories to their child, one positively and one negatively valanced. This study looked at the parent-child dyadic interaction, as well as behavioral patterns of interactions in both children and parents. Parents’ depressive symptoms affected their ability to be expressive during emotionally valenced situations. Parent-child pairs also had less dyadic unity when depressive symptoms were prevalent. Depressive symptoms in the parent also led to the child expressing fewer relevant emotions and having lower comprehension of emotions. The findings suggest that depressive symptoms in the parents, even at a subclinical level, not only affect the parents’ emotional expressivity but also leads to weaker emotional processing skills in their preschoolers.

Bilinguals commonly report experiencing emotions differently depending on which language are they speaking. Emotionally loaded words were expected to be appraised differently in first versus second language in a sample of Spanish-English bilinguals (n=117). English (L2) ratings were subtracted from Spanish (L1) ratings; the resulted scores were used as dependent variable in the analyses. Three categories of words (positive, negative and taboo) were appraised in both languages (English and Spanish)and two sensory modalities (Visual and auditory). The differences in valence scores in Spanish (L1) and English (L2) were expected to be significantly higher when presented aurally than when presented visually. Additionally, taboo words were expected to yield larger differential scores than negative and positive words. The 2 X 3 general linear model (GLM) revealed no significant effect of sensory modality but a significant effect of word type. Additional analyses of the influence of language and sensory modality within each word category resulted in significant differences in ratings between languages. Positive word ratings were higher (more positive) in English than in Spanish.

This experiment was designed to investigate the effect of emotion on an individual's ability to bind actors and actions in memories for events. Binding is the process of creating associations among features of a stimulus in order to represent that they belong together; however, errors can occur when a feature from one stimulus is incorrectly associated with a feature from another stimulus. Participants viewed a series of video clips, each depicting an actor performing a simple emotional or non-emotional action. One week later, they viewed a series of retrieval video clips consisting of old, (previously seen), conjunction (previously seen action performed by a different actor) and also new video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old clips the most, followed by both conjunction clips, and then new clips. Participants also responded "yes" more often to emotional items and also displayed higher confidence ratings to "yes" responses for emotional items.

Research on Kohlberg's theory of moral development has examined moral development by examining individuals' justice operations. However, how the moral emotions are related to moral development has been neglected. In a sample of mostly undergraduates (N=53), moral development (measured using an index of higher-level moral reasoning and one of reasoning consistency from the Defining Issues Test) and the moral emotions of guilt, shame, empathy, and self-esteem were measured. Shame was positively related to higher moral reasoning (r=.26, p<.10); guilt was not (r=-.02, ns). Empathy was also positively correlated with higher moral reasoning (r=.19). Moral consistency was positively related to shame (r=.31, p<.05) and guilt (r=.32, p<.05). Existential theory was used to explain the differentiation between shame and guilt in their correlations with higher moral reasoning. The correlations between moral consistency and guilt and between moral consistency and shame are discussed with respect to the inhibitive nature of shame and guilt.

Difficulty in communicating internal states may interfere with medical assessment of pain conditions. Individuals who score high on an assessment measure of a construct called alexithymia have difficulty in describing and/or identifying emotions. Both diffuse and low verbal communication styles have been related to alexithymia in chronic pain patients. Alexithymia has also been linked with pain intensity and various chronic pain conditions. As yet, research has not examined whether alexithymia and acute pain are related. The current research examined high-functioning individuals with chronic, acute, or no pain. No difference in alexithymia levels was found between the groups. However, pain intensity was related to difficulty in identifying feelings, and participants who scored high in alexithymia produced a low number of words per sentence in pain descriptions.