Overestimating the intensity of negative feelings in autobiographical memory: evidence from the 9/11 attack and COVID-19 pandemic.

When recalling autobiographical events, people not only retrieve event details but also the feelings they experienced. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of past feelings associated with two consequential and negatively valenced events, i.e. the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing experienced and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we discovered that people systematically recall a higher intensity of negative feelings than initially reported - overestimating the intensity of past negative emotional experiences. The COVID-19 dataset also revealed that individuals who experienced greater improvement in emotional well-being displayed smaller biases in recalling their feelings. Across both datasets, the intensity of remembered feelings was correlated with initial feelings and current feelings, but the impact of the current feelings was stronger in the COVID-19 dataset than in the 9/11 dataset. Our results demonstrate that when recalling negative autobiographical events, people tend to overestimate the intensity of prior negative emotional experiences with their degree of bias influenced by current feelings and well-being.

Trait Intolerance of Uncertainty Is Associated with Decreased Reappraisal Capacity and Increased Suppression Tendency.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of great uncertainty for the general population and highlights the need to understand how attitudes towards uncertainty may affect well-being. Intolerance of uncertainty is a trait associated with worry, anxiety, and mood disorders. As adaptive emotion regulation supports well-being and mental health, it is possible that intolerance of uncertainty is also associated with the ability and tendency to regulate emotions. However, the relationships between intolerance of uncertainty and widely studied cognitive emotion regulation strategies - such as reappraisal and suppression - have received little attention. In two studies that recruited participants online from the United States, we tested the hypotheses that higher trait intolerance of uncertainty would be associated with greater worry, decreased capacity and tendency to use reappraisal, and increased tendency to use suppression in daily life. Study 1 provided an initial test of our hypotheses. Study 2 was a confirmatory, preregistered study that replicated findings in a young adult sample, demonstrating that scores on the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (IUS) were associated with greater COVID-related worry, decreased capacity to regulate negative emotions on a task that manipulated the use of reappraisal, and greater self-reported use of suppression in daily life. Together, these results indicate that intolerance of uncertainty is associated with the capacity and tendency to use emotion regulation strategies important for well-being. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00115-8.

Social emotion regulation strategies are differentially helpful for anxiety and sadness.

Little is understood about how emotion regulation strategies typically used to regulate one's own emotions can be used to help others in distress, a process we refer to as social emotion regulation. We integrated research on social support, the self-regulation of emotion, and appraisal theories to hypothesize that different kinds of support and emotion regulation strategies should be differentially helpful for others, depending on the kind of emotion they are experiencing. Specifically, we predicted that helping others to actively modify their situation, as opposed to their appraisals and emotional responses, will be more effective for those experiencing anxiety as anxiety is a response to appraising threat in one's environment. However, helping others to modify their appraisals and emotions should be more effective for those experiencing sadness as sadness is a response to an irrevocable loss. To test this, we created a novel paradigm in which regulation targets were recruited online to write about personal events causing anxiety or sadness and regulation providers were recruited to provide written help to the targets. Study 1 supported the hypothesis using strategies drawn from the social support literature (advice vs. emotional support). Study 2 used strategies drawn from the literature on the self-regulation of emotion (situation modification vs. reappraisal) to demonstrate that as predicted, different strategies are believed to be differentially helpful depending on the target's emotion and when adjusting for individual differences in social and affective functioning, targets judge social emotion regulation strategies to be differentially helpful when implemented by providers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of empathy in experiencing vicarious anxiety.

With depictions of others facing threats common in the media, the experience of vicarious anxiety may be prevalent in the general population. However, the phenomenon of vicarious anxiety-the experience of anxiety in response to observing others expressing anxiety-and the interpersonal mechanisms underlying it have not been fully investigated in prior research. In 4 studies, we investigate the role of empathy in experiencing vicarious anxiety, using film clips depicting target victims facing threats. In Studies 1 and 2, trait emotional empathy was associated with greater self-reported anxiety when observing target victims, and with perceiving greater anxiety to be experienced by the targets. Study 3 extended these findings by demonstrating that trait empathic concern-the tendency to feel concern and compassion for others-was associated with experiencing vicarious anxiety, whereas trait personal distress-the tendency to experience distress in stressful situations-was not. Study 4 manipulated state empathy to establish a causal relationship between empathy and experience of vicarious anxiety. Participants who took an empathic perspective when observing target victims, as compared to those who took an objective perspective using reappraisal-based strategies, reported experiencing greater anxiety, risk-aversion, and sleep disruption the following night. These results highlight the impact of one's social environment on experiencing anxiety, particularly for those who are highly empathic. In addition, these findings have implications for extending basic models of anxiety to incorporate interpersonal processes, understanding the role of empathy in social learning, and potential applications for therapeutic contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record

Emotions in "Black and White" or Shades of Gray? How We Think About Emotion Shapes Our Perception and Neural Representation of Emotion.

The demands of social life often require categorically judging whether someone's continuously varying facial movements express "calm" or "fear," or whether one's fluctuating internal states mean one feels "good" or "bad." In two studies, we asked whether this kind of categorical, "black and white," thinking can shape the perception and neural representation of emotion. Using psychometric and neuroimaging methods, we found that (a) across participants, judging emotions using a categorical, "black and white" scale relative to judging emotions using a continuous, "shades of gray," scale shifted subjective emotion perception thresholds; (b) these shifts corresponded with activity in brain regions previously associated with affective responding (i.e., the amygdala and ventral anterior insula); and (c) connectivity of these regions with the medial prefrontal cortex correlated with the magnitude of categorization-related shifts. These findings suggest that categorical thinking about emotions may actively shape the perception and neural representation of the emotions in question.

Affective lability and difficulties with regulation are differentially associated with amygdala and prefrontal response in women with Borderline Personality Disorder.

The present neuroimaging study investigated two aspects of difficulties with emotion associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): affective lability and difficulty regulating emotion. While these two characteristics have been previously linked to BPD symptomology, it remains unknown whether individual differences in affective lability and emotion regulation difficulties are subserved by distinct neural substrates within a BPD sample. To address this issue, sixty women diagnosed with BPD were scanned while completing a task that assessed baseline emotional reactivity as well as top-down emotion regulation. More affective instability, as measured by the Affective Lability Scale (ALS), positively correlated with greater amygdala responses on trials assessing emotional reactivity. Greater difficulties with regulating emotion, as measured by the Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), was negatively correlated with left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) recruitment on trials assessing regulatory ability. These findings suggest that, within a sample of individuals with BPD, greater bottom-up amygdala activity is associated with heightened affective lability. By contrast, difficulties with emotion regulation are related to reduced IFG recruitment during emotion regulation. These results point to distinct neural mechanisms for different aspects of BPD symptomology.

Suicide attempters with Borderline Personality Disorder show differential orbitofrontal and parietal recruitment when reflecting on aversive memories.

Suicidal behavior and difficulty regulating emotions are hallmarks of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This study examined neural links between emotion regulation and suicide risk in BPD. 60 individuals with BPD (all female, mean age = 28.9 years), 46 of whom had attempted suicide, completed a fMRI task involving recalling aversive personal memories. Distance trials assessed the ability to regulate emotion by recalling memories from a third-person, objective viewpoint. Immerse trials assessed emotional reactivity and involved recalling memories from a first-person perspective. Behaviorally, both groups reported less negative affect on Distance as compared to Immerse trials. Neurally, two sets of findings were obtained. The first reflected differences between attempters and non-attempters. When immersing and distancing, attempters showed elevated recruitment of lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region implicated in using negative cues to guide behavior. When distancing, attempters showed diminished recruitment of the precuneus, a region implicated in memory recall and perspective taking. The second set of findings related to individual differences in regulation success - the degree to which individuals used distancing to reduce negative affect. Here, we observed that attempters who successfully regulated exhibited precuneus recruitment that was more similar to non-attempters. These data provide insight into mechanisms underlying suicide attempts in BPD. Future work may examine if these findings generalize to other diagnoses and also whether prior findings in BPD differ across attempters and non-attempters.

Concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response in adolescence and young adulthood.

This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine a novel aspect of emotion regulation in adolescent development: whether age predicts differences in both the concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response. In the first, active regulation, phase of the testing session, fMRI data were collected while 56 healthy individuals (age range: 10.50-22.92 years) reappraised aversive stimuli so as to diminish negative responses to them. After a short delay, the second, re-presentation, phase involved passively viewing the aversive images from the reappraisal task. During active regulation, older individuals showed greater drops in negative affect and inverse rostrolateral prefrontal-amygdala connectivity. During re-presentation, older individuals continued to show lasting reductions in the amygdala response to aversive stimuli they had previously reappraised, an effect mediated by rostrolateral PFC. These data suggest that one source of heightened emotionality in adolescence is a diminished ability to cognitively down-regulate aversive reactions.

The functional neural architecture of self-reports of affective experience.

BACKGROUND: The ability to self-report on affective experience is essential to both our everyday communication about emotion and our scientific understanding of it. However, the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms for how people construct statements even as simple as "I feel bad!" remain unclear. We examined whether the neural architecture underlying the ability to make statements about affective experience is composed of distinct functional systems. METHODS: In a novel functional magnetic neuroimaging paradigm, 20 participants were shown images varying in affective intensity; they were required either to attend to and judge the affective response versus to nonaffective aspects of the stimulus and either to categorize their response into a verbal label or report on a scale that did not require verbal labeling. RESULTS: We found that the ability to report on affective states involves (at least) three separable systems, one for directing attention to the affective response and making attributions about it that involves the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, one for categorizing the response into a verbal label or word that involves the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and one sensitive to the intensity of the affective response including the ventral anterior insula and amygdala. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that unified statements about affective experience rely on integrating information from several distinct neural systems. Results are discussed in the context of how disruptions to one or another of these systems may produce unique deficits in the ability to describe affective states and the implications this may hold for clinical populations.