Coping with COVID-19: Insights from cognition and emotion research.

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing efforts to contain its spread have caused major problems with public health, along with social and economic disruptions. This Special Issue addresses how coping with the pandemic has been shaped by the interplay between cognition and emotion. The various contributions to this Special Issue explore the impacts of the pandemic on: (a) How people were confronted with new risks and realities; (b) Active processes of emotional resilience and ruminative coping; and c) Moral decision-making. Taken together, this work shows how research on cognition and emotion can illuminate the social and emotional strains of the pandemic, while helping to identify risk factors that exacerbate these problems and pointing to ways to successfully address and mitigate these problems, such as emotion regulation, social support, and perspective taking. The editorial closes by briefly reporting on the present state of the journal and changes in the editorial team.

Pandemic reminders as psychological threat: thinking about COVID-19 lowers coping self-Efficacy among trauma-exposed adults.

Reminders of COVID-related problems have been pervasive throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Such reminders could have negative mental health impacts, especially among psychologically vulnerable people, including those with trauma-related problems. We experimentally examined the effects of pandemic reminders among trauma-exposed participants sampled from Prolific (N = 238). Participants were induced to think about health-related or social isolation-related aspects of COVID-19 or their favourite TV show and existential anxiety and coping self-efficacy (CSE) were then assessed. Posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) related to a prior stressor and COVID-related functional impairment were assessed as potential moderators of reactions to pandemic reminders. Results showed that both types of pandemic reminders lowered CSE among participants with either higher PTSS or COVID-related functional impairment. Pandemic reminders did not significantly affect existential anxiety. These findings suggest that reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic may undermine the mental health of psychologically vulnerable populations.

Getting lost in a story: how narrative engagement emerges from narrative perspective and individual differences in alexithymia.

The present research examines how narrative engagement, or the extent to which people immerse themselves into the world of a story, varies as a function of narrative perspective and individual differences in alexithymia. The authors hypothesised that narrative engagement would be higher when people assume a first-person (rather than third-person) perspective and for people lower (rather than higher) on alexithymia. In an online study (N = 541) and a lab study (N = 55), participants with varying levels of alexithymia read first- and/or third-person narrated texts and then rated their narrative engagement. As expected, first-person stories evoked more narrative engagement than third-person stories, and global alexithymia was negatively correlated with narrative engagement. Narrative perspective did not interact with cognitive facets of alexithymia (i.e. difficulties identifying, verbalising, and understanding feelings). However, narrative perspective did interact with affective facets of alexithymia (i.e. emotionalising and fantasising): First-person (rather than third-person) stories elicited more narrative engagement at lower levels of affective alexithymia, but not at higher levels of affective alexithymia. The interaction effect was significant in Study 1; the interaction was significant in Study 2 after controlling for trait absorption. Together, these findings suggest that alexithymia is linked to difficulties in mentally simulating narrative worlds.

Rethinking emotion science: new theory section for Cognition & Emotion.

A cumulative emotion science requires sustained investments in theory development. To encourage such investments, a new section will be added to Cognition & Emotion that is specifically devoted to theory. In this Editorial, we first lay out the rationale for the new Theory section. Next, we consider the added value of theory for research on cognition and emotion. Building on these notions, we outline the kinds of articles that are to be published in the new Theory section, with Klaus Scherer being the inaugural Editor of the Theory section.

The language of intuition: a thematic integration model of intuitive coherence judgments.

People can intuitively distinguish semantically coherent from incoherent word triads, even without knowing the common denominator. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, the present authors suggest that intuitive coherence judgments are driven by the thematic relations of the triad words. Words are thematically related when they perform different roles in the same scenario (e.g. CHICKEN and EGG are related via a production theme). Thematic relations differ from associations (CHICKEN and LITTLE are associated with a Disney movie) and taxonomic relations, which specify common attributes between concepts (CHICKEN and SPARROW are both birds). Consistent with the thematic integration model, word triads with thematic (rather than taxonomic) relations were more often judged as coherent (Study 1). Moreover, priming thematic (rather than taxonomic) processing led to more intuitive coherence judgments of word triads (Study 2). In three published datasets, thematic relations between triads' word pairs predicted over half of the variance in intuitive coherence judgments (Study 3). Finally, when the existence of a common denominator and thematic relations were independently manipulated, thematic relations drove intuitive coherence judgments (Study 4). These findings demonstrate that intuition draws on people's thematic knowledge about the world.

Preoccupied with the body: mild stress amplifies the relation between rumination and interoception.

Classic and modern emotion theories suggest that the perception of bodily sensations, or interoception, is foundational to emotion processing. The present research examined whether interoception is enhanced among people high in ruminative tendencies, especially under stress. To test this notion, the present research examined the effects of a mild stressor on subjective and objective measures of interoception among people varying in ruminative tendencies. Under conditions of mild stress, rumination was positively associated with self-reported private body consciousness -a marker of interoceptive sensibility- in Study 1 (N = 312) and with heartbeat detection accuracy (especially in the presence of auditory interference) in Study 2 (N = 180). In both studies, rumination was not significantly associated with interoceptive sensibility or accuracy in the absence of stress. These findings suggest that stress-induced amplification of bodily sensations may be important in explaining emotional dysregulation among chronic ruminators.

Becoming who you are: An integrative review of self-determination theory and personality systems interactions theory.

One of the enduring missions of personality science is to unravel what it takes to become a fully functioning person. In the present article, the authors address this matter from the perspectives of self-determination theory (SDT) and personality systems interactions (PSI) theory. SDT (a) is rooted in humanistic psychology; (b) has emphasized a first-person perspective on motivation and personality; (c) posits that the person, supported by the social environment, naturally moves toward growth through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. PSI theory (a) is rooted in German volition psychology; (b) has emphasized a third-person perspective on motivation and personality; and (c) posits that a fully functioning person can form and enact difficult intentions and integrate new experiences, and that such competencies are facilitated by affect regulation. The authors review empirical support for SDT and PSI theory, their convergences and divergences, and how the theories bear on recent empirical research on internalization, vitality, and achievement flow. The authors conclude that SDT and PSI theory offer complementary insights into developing a person's full potential.

Revisiting the past and back to the future: Horizons of cognition and emotion research.

To commemorate that Cognition & Emotion was established three decades ago, we asked some distinguished scholars to reflect on past research on the interface of cognition and emotion and prospects for the future. The resulting papers form the Special Issue on Horizons in Cognition and Emotion Research. The contributions to Horizons cover both the field in general and a diversity of specific topics, including affective neuroscience, appraisal theory, automatic evaluation, embodied emotion, emotional disorders, emotion-linked attentional bias, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, lifespan development, motivation, and social emotions. We hope that Horizons will spark constructive debates, while offering guidance for the future growth and development of research on the interface between cognition and emotion. Finally, we provide an update on how Cognition & Emotion has fared over the past year, and announce some changes in editorial policies and the editorial board.

Self-restraint spillover: Inhibitory control disrupts appetite regulation among ruminators.

OBJECTIVE: People can use inhibitory control to temporarily inhibit their personal preferences to achieve their long-term goals. According to the ego fixation model (Koole et al., 2014), ruminators have difficulties relaxing inhibitory control, leading them to continue inhibiting their personal needs, even when this is no longer required by the situation. Inhibitory control may thus disrupt healthy appetite regulation among ruminators. METHOD: Among 324 Dutch undergraduate students (218 women; Mage = 21.5), different inhibitory control states were manipulated by varying whether or not participants exerted inhibitory control (Study 1) or priming high versus low inhibitory control (Study 2). All participants then performed a food-tasting task. Healthy appetite regulation was defined as a positive correlation between level of food deprivation and preference for high-calorie foods. RESULTS: For taste ratings, the interaction between inhibitory control and rumination was significant in each study: Inhibitory control disrupted healthy appetite regulation in taste preferences among ruminators, but not among non-ruminators. For eating behavior, the same interaction effect was significant when the two studies were combined. CONCLUSIONS: Inhibitory control disrupts healthy appetite regulation among ruminators. These findings suggest the need for caution in interventions that rely on inhibitory control, especially among samples with compulsive thought tendencies.

Sharing the Now in the Social Present: Duration of Nonverbal Synchrony Is Linked With Personality.

OBJECTIVE: The social present is a novel descriptor of dyadic nowness and social sharing, extending research on individual nowness (James's [1890] specious present) to the interpersonal and intersubjective domain. We wished to connect this descriptor to personality attributes. METHOD: We define the social present by the duration of significant nonverbal synchrony, based on the phenomenon of movement synchrony that generally emerges in social interactions. It is thus an implicit and objective measure that can be implemented by automated video analyses. In this study, 168 healthy participants were invited to verbal conversations in same-sex dyads. We analyzed the associations of the social present with personality attributes and interaction types (competition, cooperation, fun task). RESULTS: The average duration of the social present was 6.0 seconds, highest in competitive interactions and in male-male dyads. People with higher Openness to Experience, higher avoidant attachment, and lower narcissistic interpersonal styles showed extended social present in their interactions. CONCLUSIONS: The concept of the social present extends personality attributes to the interpersonal domain and to intersubjectivity. The social present may be computed based on movement synchrony but also prosodic or physiological synchronies. We foresee implications for health-related interactions such as psychotherapy, where therapeutic presence is an essential property of alliance.

Three decades of Cognition & Emotion: A brief review of past highlights and future prospects.

Over the past three decades, Cognition & Emotion has been one of the world's leading outlets for emotion research. In this article, we review past highlights of and future prospects for the journal. Our tour of history covers three periods: The first period, from 1987 to 1999, was a pioneering era in which cognitive theories began to be applied to the scientific analysis of emotion. The second period, from 2000 to 2007, was characterised by a sharp increase in the number of empirical research papers, a lot of which were concerned with automatic processing biases and their implications for clinical psychology. During the third period, from 2008 to 2017, a new focus emerged on self-regulatory processes and their implications for emotion. We then turn to the present profile of Cognition & Emotion and introduce our new editorial team. Finally, we consider how the journal's future success can be continued and increased by a) providing authors with fast and high-quality feedback; b) offering attractive publication formats, including the newly introduced Registered Reports for pre-registered studies; and c) consolidating key methodological paradigms with reproducible findings.

Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013).

Prior experiments indicated that reading literary fiction improves mentalising performance relative to reading popular fiction, non-fiction, or not reading. However, the experiments had relatively small sample sizes and hence low statistical power. To address this limitation, the present authors conducted four high-powered replication experiments (combined N = 1006) testing the causal impact of reading literary fiction on mentalising. Relative to the original research, the present experiments used the same literary texts in the reading manipulation; the same mentalising task; and the same kind of participant samples. Moreover, one experiment was pre-registered as a direct replication. In none of the experiments did reading literary fiction have any effect on mentalising relative to control conditions. The results replicate earlier findings that familiarity with fiction is positively correlated with mentalising. Taken together, the present findings call into question whether a single session of reading fiction leads to immediate improvements in mentalising.

Emotionally aligned: Preliminary results on the effects of a mindfulness-based intervention for depression on congruence between implicit and explicit mood.

BACKGROUND: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are effective in treating major depression. Because mindfulness involves monitoring and accepting current experiences, it may lead people resolve incongruencies between emotional responses that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Mindfulness may thus foster congruence between implicit and explicit emotions. The current randomized controlled trial tested this notion. METHODS: N = 39 patients with an acute depressive episode were randomly assigned to an 8-week MBI (n = 24) or a psychopharmacological consultation condition (n = 15). Explicit and implicit mood and depressive symptoms were assessed before treatment and at the end of treatment. RESULTS: Compared with the control condition, patients receiving MBI demonstrated higher congruence between implicit and explicit negative mood after treatment. There was no such difference in congruence of implicit and explicit positive mood. Additional analyses showed that only within the MBI group, individual differences in explicit mood became less stable. In contrast, individual differences in implicit mood remained stable in both groups. LIMITATIONS: There was no control group including an active psychological intervention, the sample was small, and emotional congruence was not assessed within persons. CONCLUSIONS: These findings correspond with the idea that mindfulness reduces incongruencies between implicit and explicit emotional responses. We found preliminary evidence for this effect for negative emotional responses. There was suggestive evidence that congruence arose from the alignment of explicit responses (which became less stable) to implicit responses (which remained stable). Studying the interplay between implicit and explicit processes may shed light on the working mechanisms of clinical-psychological interventions.

Feeling Better When Someone Is Alike: Poor Emotion Regulators Profit From Pro-Social Values and Priming for Similarities With Close Others.

OBJECTIVE: The dispositional inability to self-regulate one's own emotions intuitively is described as state orientation and has been associated with numerous psychological impairments. The necessity to search for buffering effects against negative outcomes of state orientation is evident. Research suggests that state-oriented individuals can benefit from feeling close to others. Yet, there are individual differences in the extent to which supportive relationships are valued. The objective of the present article was to examine whether high importance of relatedness increases the utilization of its situational activation among state-oriented individuals. METHOD: In two studies, we examined whether situational activation of relatedness (by priming for similarities with a close other) is particularly advantageous for state-oriented individuals who attach high importance to relatedness (i.e., benevolence values). The sample consisted of 170 psychology undergraduates in Study 1 and 177 in Study 2. RESULTS: In both studies, state-oriented participants high in benevolence had reduced negative mood after thinking about similarities (vs. differences). State-oriented participants low in benevolence did not benefit from priming for similarities. In Study 2, physical presence of a close other did not boost priming effects for state-oriented participants but stimulated action-oriented participants to attune their self-regulatory efforts to the context. CONCLUSIONS: The results show that state-oriented individuals who value benevolence do benefit from a situational activation of relatedness.

Drawn to danger: trait anger predicts automatic approach behaviour to angry faces.

Most people automatically withdraw from socially threatening situations. However, people high in trait anger could be an exception to this rule, and may even display an eagerness to approach hostile situations. To test this hypothesis, we asked 118 participants to complete an approach-avoidance task, in which participants made approach or avoidance movements towards faces with an angry or happy expression, and a direct or averted eye gaze. As expected, higher trait anger predicted faster approach (than avoidance) movements towards angry faces. Crucially, this effect occurred only for angry faces with a direct eye gaze, presumably because they pose a specific social threat, in contrast to angry faces with an averted gaze. No parallel effects were observed for happy faces, indicating that the effects of trait anger were specific to hostile stimuli. These findings suggest that people high in trait anger may automatically approach hostile interaction partners.

Embodied mood regulation: the impact of body posture on mood recovery, negative thoughts, and mood-congruent recall.

Previous work has shown that a stooped posture may activate negative mood. Extending this work, the present experiments examine how stooped body posture influences recovery from pre-existing negative mood. In Experiment 1 (n = 229), participants were randomly assigned to receive either a negative or neutral mood induction, after which participants were instructed to take either a stooped, straight, or control posture while writing down their thoughts. Stooped posture (compared to straight or control postures) led to less mood recovery in the negative mood condition, and more negative mood in the neutral mood condition. Furthermore, stooped posture led to more negative thoughts overall compared to straight or control postures. In Experiment 2 (n = 122), all participants underwent a negative mood induction, after which half received cognitive reappraisal instructions and half received no instructions. Mood-congruent cognitions were assessed through autobiographical memory recall. Again, stooped (compared to straight) position led to less mood recovery. Notably, this was independent of regulation instruction. These findings demonstrate for the first time that posture plays an important role in recovering from negative mood.

The Extended Trust Hypothesis: Single-Attractor Self-Contagion in Day-to-Day Changes in Implicit Positive Affect Predicts Action-Oriented Coping and Psychological Symptoms.

According to the extended trust hypothesis, the ability to cope with negative experiences is grounded in intuitive positive feelings about one's existence (Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015). In the present study, the authors empirically tested this hypothesis by examining the nonlinear dynamics in a series of day-to-day autoregressive functions of affective states taken from a 30-day daily mood diary study among 40 participants. A parameter (?) related to the asymptotic level of day-to-day changes in implicit positive mood predicted action orientation, a personality variable that relates to coping with negative affect, and psychological symptoms. This effect did not emerge when using a similar parameter l for self-reported positive affect or any linear characteristic (mean or standard deviation) of changes in positive or negative mood. These findings are considered within the broader framework of Personality Systems Interaction theory (PSI theory) that interprets l, under specified conditions, as a form of basic trust that enables people to confront negative affect and permit self-growth through self-confrontational rather than defensive coping.

Resilience is more about being flexible than about staying positive.

Kalisch et al. propose a positive appraisal style as the key mechanism that underlies resilience. The present authors suggest that flexibility in emotion processing is more conducive to resilience than a general positivity bias. People may achieve emotional flexibility through counter-regulation - a dynamic processing bias toward positive stimuli in negative contexts and negative stimuli in positive contexts.

Embodied terror management: interpersonal touch alleviates existential concerns among individuals with low self-esteem.

Individuals with low (rather than high) self-esteem often struggle with existential concerns. In the present research, we examined whether these existential concerns may be alleviated by seemingly trivial experiences of both real and simulated interpersonal touch. A brief touch on the shoulder by a female experimenter led individuals with low self-esteem to experience less death anxiety (Study 1) and more social connectedness after a death reminder (Study 2). Reminding individuals with low self-esteem of death increased their desire for touch, as indicated by higher value estimates of a teddy bear, a toy animal that simulates interpersonal touch (Study 3). Finally, holding a teddy bear (vs. a cardboard box) led individuals with low self-esteem to respond to a death reminder with less defensive ethnocentrism (Study 4). Individuals with high self-esteem were unaffected by touch (Studies 1-4). These findings highlight the existential significance of embodied touch experiences, particularly for individuals with low self-esteem.

Psychotherapy for subclinical depression: meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: There is controversy about whether psychotherapies are effective in the treatment of subclinical depression, defined by clinically relevant depressive symptoms in the absence of a major depressive disorder. AIMS: To examine whether psychotherapies are effective in reducing depressive symptoms, reduce the risk of developing major depressive disorder and have comparable effects to psychological treatment of major depression. METHOD: We conducted a meta-analysis of 18 studies comparing a psychological treatment of subclinical depression with a control group. RESULTS: The target groups, therapies and characteristics of the included studies differed considerably from each other, and the quality of many studies was not optimal. Psychotherapies did have a small to moderate effect on depressive symptoms against care as usual at the post-test assessment (g = 0.35, 95% CI 0.23-0.47; NNT = 5, 95% CI 4-8) and significantly reduced the incidence of major depressive episodes at 6 months (RR = 0.61) and possibly at 12 months (RR = 0.74). The effects were significantly smaller than those of psychotherapy for major depressive disorder and could be accounted for by non-specific effects of treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Psychotherapy may be effective in the treatment of subclinical depression and reduce the incidence of major depression, but more high-quality research is needed.