Consciousness and emotion

This article focuses on the processes that lead to awareness of our own emotions, which deserve particular attention in contemporary models of emotional consciousness. The subjective component of emotion, or emotional experience, was for a long time the most neglected aspect in the study of emotions although it already constituted the initial point of discussion in the famous William James still asked question : What is an emotion? More than a century later, contemporary theories debate about this heritage. We examine the successive historic contributions to the question of the determinants of our own emotional experience: from James-Lange bodily changes to cognitive appraisal theories, also relating the major role that the fundamental emotions theory attributed to facial expressions. Twenty years after the debate about primacy of cognition or emotion, both physiological-somatic and cognitive components are integrated in contemporary approaches to emotions. However, their respective degree of implication varies according to the different levels of emotional consciousness which are modelized. It is on the last level that present models focus, level that leads to consciousness of our emotional experience, benefiting from the contributions of cognitive neurosciences. Models differ according to the role devoted to neuronal substrates in determining emotional experience, but they converge on the specification of a last level of consciousness, which is the only one that allows the subject to be conscious of emotion as it is experienced (feeling) and that what he is experiencing is an emotion. Then, different models of emotional consciousness account for different varieties of emotion experience and also for various cases of < unconscious > emotions, that is occurrence of emotion with a lack of awareness.     

Psychological factors related to prehospital delay during acute myocardial infarction

BACKGROUND. Prior studies have had difficulty identifying factors that significantly explain patients' delay in responding to symptoms of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). METHODS AND RESULTS. We therefore examined factors affecting the time between symptom onset and hospital arrival for 103 AMI patients admitted to a Detroit metropolitan hospital between October 1989 and January 1990. Variables evaluated included demographic and medical history factors, psychological characteristics of somatic and emotional awareness, and type A behavior. The mean prehospital delay time was 9.0 +/- 10.8 hours (median, 5.0 hours; range, 0.25-62.0 hours). Delay time was not significantly associated with demographic or medical history categories or with type A behavior. Of study variables that can be identified prior to evolution of an AMI, somatic and emotional awareness were the only factors significantly predictive of delay time. Patients who were more capable of identifying inner experiences of emotions and/or bodily sensations sought treatment significantly earlier than patients with low emotional or somatic awareness (low emotional awareness median delay, 12.8 hours; high emotional awareness median delay, 3.8 hours; low somatic awareness median delay, 7 hours; high somatic awareness median delay, 4 hours). CONCLUSIONS. Variations in sensitivity to bodily sensations and emotions appear to play an important role in treatment seeking and thus potentially in treatment outcome for AMI patients. Assessment of these characteristics in patients with coronary risk factors could allow early identification of persons at risk of excessive delay in responding to symptoms of AMI.     

Emotion regulation predicts change of perceived health in patients with rheumatoid arthritis

OBJECTIVES: To examine whether emotion regulation predicts change of perceived health in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS: Sixty six patients (44 female, 22 male; mean (SD) age 57.7 (11.6) years) participated in a prospective study. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to predict change of perceived health between study entry and follow up (1(1/2) years later) from the emotion regulation styles ambiguity, control, orientation, and expression at study entry. RESULTS: Valuing and intensely experiencing emotions (emotional orientation) predicted a decrease of positive affect. Difficulty recognising and expressing emotions (ambiguity) predicted an increase of perceived disease activity. Emotion regulation showed no associations with change of negative affect and social and physical functioning. CONCLUSIONS: Two styles of emotion regulation were shown to have a significant though modest role in the prediction of perceived health change in patients with RA. This suggests that the monitoring of emotion regulation may help to identify patients who are at risk for a reduction of perceived health. If our findings were confirmed by experimental research, improving emotion regulation skills might favourably affect perceived health.     

The therapeutic effects of the physician-older patient relationship: Effective communication with vulnerable older patients

There is growing evidence that the outcomes of health care for seniors are dependent not only upon patients’ physical health status and the administration of care for their biomedical needs, but also upon care for patients’ psychosocial needs and attention to their social, economic, cultural, and psychological vulnerabilities. Even when older patients have appropriate access to medical services, they also need effective and empathic communication as an essential part of their treatment. Older patients who are socially isolated, emotionally vulnerable, and economically disadvantaged are particularly in need of the social, emotional, and practical support that sensitive provider-patient communication can provide. In this review paper, we examine the complexities of communication between physicians and their older patients, and consider some of the particular challenges that manifest in providers’ interactions with their older patients, particularly those who are socially isolated, suffering from depression, or of minority status or low income. This review offers guidelines for improved physician-older patient communication in medical practice, and examines interventions to coordinate care for older patients on multiple dimensions of a biopsychosocial model of health care.     

The uncharted waters of emotion: Ethnicity, trait emotion and emotion expression in older adults

Emotions are central to contemporary theories of health, and a growingbody of psychological research has shown emotion and emotion regulatorystyles to be predictive of health outcomes. Yet despite these clear links andthe fact that patterns of emotion and expression are partially a product ofculture, there is a meager literature on the emotional characteristics ofdifferent ethnic groups. Even where ethnicity has been investigated inemotions research, it has typically been operationalized in such a way thatwithin-group differences are obscured with most individuals assigned tobroad ethnic categories, such as non-Hispanic White, or Black. In thepresent study we draw on data from a multi-ethnic sample of 755community-dwelling older adults to parse a picture of the emotionalcharacteristics of three of the largest and most culturally distinct ethnicgroups in the Northeastern United States: African Americans, West Indians (Jamaicans), andEastern Slavs (Russians and Ukrainians) from the former Soviet Republic,as well as a comparison group of US-born European Americans. Aspredicted, there were striking differences in nine of 10 trait emotions aswell as in levels of emotion expressed during conflict. The findings arediscussed in terms of emotion socialization and implications for predictionand intervention in psychosocial models of emotions, emotion regulation,and health in older ethnic populations.     

Home alone: a systematic review and meta‐analysis on the effects of individual housing on body weight,food intake and visceral fat mass in rodents

Rats and mice are widely used to study environmental effects on psychological and metabolic health. Study designs differ widely and are often characterized by varying (social) housing conditions. In itself, housing has a profound influence on physiology and behaviour of rodents, affecting energy balance and sustainable metabolic health. However, evidence for potential long‐term consequences of individual versus social housing on body weight and metabolic phenotype is inconsistent. We conducted a systematic literature review and meta‐analyses assessing effects of individual versus social housing of rats and mice, living under well‐accepted laboratory conditions, on measures of metabolic health, including body weight, food intake and visceral adipose tissue mass. Seventy‐one studies were included in this review; 59 were included in the meta‐analysis. Whilst housing did not affect body weight, both food intake and visceral adipose tissue mass were significantly higher in individually compared with socially housed animals. A combination of emotional stress and lack of social thermoregulation likely contributed to these effects. Increased awareness of consequences and improved specifications of housing conditions are necessary to accurately evaluate efficacy of drugs, diets or other interventions on metabolic and other health outcomes because housing conditions are rarely considered as possible moderators of reported outcomes.     

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading them to experience the same emotions as those around them. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments (1), in which people transfer positive and negative moods and emotions to others. Similarly, data from a large, real-world social network collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks as well (2, 3).The interpretation of this network effect as contagion of mood has come under scrutiny due to the study’s correlational nature, including concerns over misspecification of contextual variables or failure to account for shared experiences (4, 5), raising important questions regarding contagion processes in networks. An experimental approach can address this scrutiny directly; however, methods used in controlled experiments have been criticized for examining emotions after social interactions. Interacting with a happy person is pleasant (and an unhappy person, unpleasant). As such, contagion may result from experiencing an interaction rather than exposure to a partner’s emotion. Prior studies have also failed to address whether nonverbal cues are necessary for contagion to occur, or if verbal cues alone suffice. Evidence that positive and negative moods are correlated in networks (2, 3) suggests that this is possible, but the causal question of whether contagion processes occur for emotions in massive social networks remains elusive in the absence of experimental evidence. Further, others have suggested that in online social networks, exposure to the happiness of others may actually be depressing to us, producing an “alone together” social comparison effect (6).Three studies have laid the groundwork for testing these processes via Facebook, the largest online social network. This research demonstrated that (i) emotional contagion occurs via text-based computer-mediated communication (7); (ii) contagion of psychological and physiological qualities has been suggested based on correlational data for social networks generally (7, 8); and (iii) people’s emotional expressions on Facebook predict friends’ emotional expressions, even days later (7) (although some shared experiences may in fact last several days). To date, however, there is no experimental evidence that emotions or moods are contagious in the absence of direct interaction between experiencer and target.On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook’s “News Feed” product (8). Because people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. One such test is reported in this study: A test of whether posts with emotional content are more engaging.The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion. People who viewed Facebook in English were qualified for selection into the experiment. Two parallel experiments were conducted for positive and negative emotion: One in which exposure to friends’ positive emotional content in their News Feed was reduced, and one in which exposure to negative emotional content in their News Feed was reduced. In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10% and 90% chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing. It is important to note that this content was always available by viewing a friend’s content directly by going to that friend’s “wall” or “timeline,” rather than via the News Feed. Further, the omitted content may have appeared on prior or subsequent views of the News Feed. Finally, the experiment did not affect any direct messages sent from one user to another.Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC2007) (9) word counting system, which correlates with self-reported and physiological measures of well-being, and has been used in prior research on emotional expression (7, 8, 10). LIWC was adapted to run on the Hadoop Map/Reduce system (11) and in the News Feed filtering system, such that no text was seen by the researchers. As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research. Both experiments had a control condition, in which a similar proportion of posts in their News Feed were omitted entirely at random (i.e., without respect to emotional content). Separate control conditions were necessary as 22.4% of posts contained negative words, whereas 46.8% of posts contained positive words. So for a person for whom 10% of posts containing positive content were omitted, an appropriate control would withhold 10% of 46.8% (i.e., 4.68%) of posts at random, compared with omitting only 2.24% of the News Feed in the negativity-reduced control.The experiments took place for 1 wk (January 11–18, 2012). Participants were randomly selected based on their User ID, resulting in a total of ∼155,000 participants per condition who posted at least one status update during the experimental period.For each experiment, two dependent variables were examined pertaining to emotionality expressed in people’s own status updates: the percentage of all words produced by a given person that was either positive or negative during the experimental period (as in ref. 7). In total, over 3 million posts were analyzed, containing over 122 million words, 4 million of which were positive (3.6%) and 1.8 million negative (1.6%).If affective states are contagious via verbal expressions on Facebook (our operationalization of emotional contagion), people in the positivity-reduced condition should be less positive compared with their control, and people in the negativity-reduced condition should be less negative. As a secondary measure, we tested for cross-emotional contagion in which the opposite emotion should be inversely affected: People in the positivity-reduced condition should express increased negativity, whereas people in the negativity-reduced condition should express increased positivity. Emotional expression was modeled, on a per-person basis, as the percentage of words produced by that person during the experimental period that were either positive or negative. Positivity and negativity were evaluated separately given evidence that they are not simply opposite ends of the same spectrum (8, 10). Indeed, negative and positive word use scarcely correlated [r = −0.04, t(620,587) = −38.01, P < 0.001].We examined these data by comparing each emotion condition to its control. After establishing that our experimental groups did not differ in emotional expression during the week before the experiment (all t < 1.5; all P > 0.13), we examined overall posting rate via a Poisson regression, using the percent of posts omitted as a regression weight. Omitting emotional content reduced the amount of words the person subsequently produced, both when positivity was reduced (z = −4.78, P < 0.001) and when negativity was reduced (z = −7.219, P < 0.001). This effect occurred both when negative words were omitted (99.7% as many words were produced) and when positive words were omitted (96.7%). An interaction was also observed, showing that the effect was stronger when positive words were omitted (z = −77.9, P < 0.001).As such, direct examination of the frequency of positive and negative words would be inappropriate: It would be confounded with the change in overall words produced. To test our hypothesis regarding emotional contagion, we conducted weighted linear regressions, predicting the percentage of words that were positive or negative from a dummy code for condition (experimental versus control), weighted by the likelihood of that person having an emotional post omitted from their News Feed on a given viewing, such that people who had more content omitted were given higher weight in the regression. When positive posts were reduced in the News Feed, the percentage of positive words in people’s status updates decreased by B = −0.1% compared with control [t(310,044) = −5.63, P < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.02], whereas the percentage of words that were negative increased by B = 0.04% (t = 2.71, P = 0.007, d = 0.001). Conversely, when negative posts were reduced, the percent of words that were negative decreased by B = −0.07% [t(310,541) = −5.51, P < 0.001, d = 0.02] and the percentage of words that were positive, conversely, increased by B = 0.06% (t = 2.19, P < 0.003, d = 0.008).The results show emotional contagion. As Fig. 1 illustrates, for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks (3, 7, 8), and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.Open in a separate windowFig. 1.Mean number of positive (Upper) and negative (Lower) emotion words (percent) generated people, by condition. Bars represent standard errors.These results highlight several features of emotional contagion. First, because News Feed content is not “directed” toward anyone, contagion could not be just the result of some specific interaction with a happy or sad partner. Although prior research examined whether an emotion can be contracted via a direct interaction (1, 7), we show that simply failing to “overhear” a friend’s emotional expression via Facebook is enough to buffer one from its effects. Second, although nonverbal behavior is well established as one medium for contagion, these data suggest that contagion does not require nonverbal behavior (7, 8): Textual content alone appears to be a sufficient channel. This is not a simple case of mimicry, either; the cross-emotional encouragement effect (e.g., reducing negative posts led to an increase in positive posts) cannot be explained by mimicry alone, although mimicry may well have been part of the emotion-consistent effect. Further, we note the similarity of effect sizes when positivity and negativity were reduced. This absence of negativity bias suggests that our results cannot be attributed solely to the content of the post: If a person is sharing good news or bad news (thus explaining his/her emotional state), friends’ response to the news (independent of the sharer’s emotional state) should be stronger when bad news is shown rather than good (or as commonly noted, “if it bleeds, it leads;” ref. 12) if the results were being driven by reactions to news. In contrast, a response to a friend’s emotion expression (rather than news) should be proportional to exposure. A post hoc test comparing effect sizes (comparing correlation coefficients using Fisher’s method) showed no difference despite our large sample size (z = −0.36, P = 0.72).We also observed a withdrawal effect: People who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (of either valence) in their News Feed were less expressive overall on the following days, addressing the question about how emotional expression affects social engagement online. This observation, and the fact that people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison (6, 13). In fact, this is the result when people are exposed to less positive content, rather than more. This effect also showed no negativity bias in post hoc tests (z = −0.09, P = 0.93).Although these data provide, to our knowledge, some of the first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims that emotions can spread throughout a network, the effect sizes from the manipulations are small (as small as d = 0.001). These effects nonetheless matter given that the manipulation of the independent variable (presence of emotion in the News Feed) was minimal whereas the dependent variable (people’s emotional expressions) is difficult to influence given the range of daily experiences that influence mood (10). More importantly, given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences (14, 15): For example, the well-documented connection between emotions and physical well-being suggests the importance of these findings for public health. Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors. And after all, an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebook’s scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.     

Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis

A number of evolutionary theories assume that music and language have a common origin as an emotional protolanguage that remains evident in overlapping functions and shared neural circuitry. The most basic prediction of this hypothesis is that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from the capacity to process music. We examined sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody in a sample of individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in processing acoustic and structural attributes of music. Twelve individuals with congenital amusia and 12 matched control participants judged the emotional expressions of 96 spoken phrases. Phrases were semantically neutral but prosodic cues (tone of voice) communicated each of six emotional states: happy, tender, afraid, irritated, sad, and no emotion. Congenitally amusic individuals were significantly worse than matched controls at decoding emotional prosody, with decoding rates for some emotions up to 20% lower than that of matched controls. They also reported difficulty understanding emotional prosody in their daily lives, suggesting some awareness of this deficit. The findings support speculations that music and language share mechanisms that trigger emotional responses to acoustic attributes, as predicted by theories that propose a common evolutionary link between these domains.     

Promoting social behavior with oxytocin in high-functioning autism spectrum disorders

Social adaptation requires specific cognitive and emotional competences. Individuals with high-functioning autism or with Asperger syndrome cannot understand or engage in social situations despite preserved intellectual abilities. Recently, it has been suggested that oxytocin, a hormone known to promote mother-infant bonds, may be implicated in the social deficit of autism. We investigated the behavioral effects of oxytocin in 13 subjects with autism. In a simulated ball game where participants interacted with fictitious partners, we found that after oxytocin inhalation, patients exhibited stronger interactions with the most socially cooperative partner and reported enhanced feelings of trust and preference. Also, during free viewing of pictures of faces, oxytocin selectively increased patients’ gazing time on the socially informative region of the face, namely the eyes. Thus, under oxytocin, patients respond more strongly to others and exhibit more appropriate social behavior and affect, suggesting a therapeutic potential of oxytocin through its action on a core dimension of autism.     

The Influence of Face Gaze by Physicians on Patient Trust: an Observational Study

BackgroundPhysicians’ gaze towards their patients may affect patients’ trust in them. This is especially relevant considering recent developments, including the increasing use of Electronic Health Records, which affect physicians’ gaze behavior. Moreover, socially anxious patients’ trust in particular may be affected by the gaze of the physician.ObjectiveWe aimed to evaluate if physicians’ gaze towards the face of their patient influenced patient trust and to assess if this relation was stronger for socially anxious patients. We furthermore explored the relation between physicians’ gaze and patients’ perception of physician empathy and patients’ distress.DesignThis was an observational study using eye-tracking glasses and questionnaires.ParticipantsOne hundred patients and 16 residents, who had not met before, participated at an internal medicine out-patient clinic.MeasuresPhysicians wore eye-tracking glasses during medical consultations to assess their gaze towards patients’ faces. Questionnaires were used to assess patient outcomes. Multilevel analyses were conducted to assess the relation between physicians’ relative face gaze time and trust, while correcting for patient background characteristics, and including social anxiety as a moderator. Analyses were then repeated with perceived empathy and distress as outcomes.ResultsMore face gaze towards patients was associated with lower trust, after correction for gender, age, education level, presence of caregivers, and social anxiety (β=−0.17, P=0.048). There was no moderation effect of social anxiety nor a relation between face gaze and perceived empathy or distress.ConclusionsThese results challenge the notion that more physician gaze is by definition beneficial for the physician-patient relationship. For example, the extent of conversation about emotional issues might explain our findings, where more emotional talk could be associated with more intense gazing and feelings of discomfort in the patient. To better understand the relation between physician gaze and patient outcomes, future studies should assess bidirectional face gaze during consultations.KEY WORDS: face gaze, patient trust, physician empathy, eye-tracking, social anxiety     

Emotional processing in obesity: a systematic review and exploratory meta‐analysis

The role of emotional functioning in the development and maintenance of obesity has been investigated, but the literature is poorly integrated. A systematic review and meta‐analysis was performed to explore emotional processing impairments in obesity. PubMed, Web of Knowledge and PsycINFO databases were searched in March 2016, yielding 31 studies comparing emotional processing competencies in individuals with obesity, with or without binge eating disorder (BED), and control groups. Meta‐analyses demonstrated that individuals with obesity had higher scores of alexithymia (d = 0.53), difficulty in identifying feelings (d = 0.34) and externally oriented thinking style (d = 0.31), when compared with control groups. On other competencies, patients with obesity, especially those with comorbid BED, reported lower levels of emotional awareness and difficulty in using emotion regulation strategies, namely, reduced cognitive reappraisal and acceptance, and greater suppression of expression. No evidence of impaired ability to recognize emotions in others or verbally express emotions was found. A general emotion‐processing deficit in obesity was not supported. Instead, an emotional avoidance style may occur modulating later responses of emotion regulation. Additional research is needed to extend the comprehension of these conclusions and the role of BED in emotional functioning in obesity.     

Social cognition and aggression in methamphetamine dependence with and without a history of psychosis

In substance use and psychotic disorders, socially problematic behaviours, such as high aggression may, in part, be explained by deficits in social cognition skills, like the detection of emotions or intentions in others. The aim of this study was to assess the magnitude of social cognition impairment and its association with aggression in individuals with methamphetamine (MA) dependence, methamphetamine-associated psychosis (MAP), and healthy controls (CTRL). A total of 20 MAP participants, 21 MA-dependent participants without psychosis, and 21 CTRL participants performed a facial morphing emotion recognition task (ERT) across four basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness) and the reading the mind in the eyes task (RMET), and completed the aggression questionnaire. Both MA-dependent groups showed impairment in social cognition in terms of lower RMET scores relative to CTRL participants (MA; p?=?.047; MAP: p?<?.001). Additionally, performance decrements were significantly greater in MAP (p?=?.040), compared to MA-dependent participants. While deficits in recognising emotional expressions were restricted to anger in the MA group (p?=?.020), a generalized impairment across all four emotions was observed in MAP (all p?≤?.001). Additionally, both patient groups demonstrated higher levels of aggression than CTRLs, yet no association was found with social cognition. This study supported the notion of deficits in recognising facial emotional expressions and inferring mental states of others in MA dependence, with additional impairments in MAP. Failure to detect an association between social cognitive impairment and aggressive behaviour may implicate independent disturbances of the two phenomena in MA dependence.     

The effect of mass shootings on daily emotions is limited by time,geographic proximity,and political affiliation

Media coverage in the aftermath of mass shootings frequently documents expressions of sadness and outrage shared by millions of Americans. This type of collective emotion can be a powerful force in establishing shared objectives and motivating political actions. Yet, the rise in mass shootings has not translated into widespread legislative progress toward gun control across the nation. This study is designed to shed light on this puzzle by generating causal evidence on the temporal and geographic scale of collective emotional responses to mass shootings. Using a unique continuous survey on Americans’ daily emotions without reference to specific events, our empirical strategy compares the daily emotions of residents interviewed after to those interviewed before 31 mass shootings within the same city or state where the event occurred. We found that the emotional impact of mass shootings is substantial, but it is local, short-lived, and politicized. These results suggest that if policy reform efforts are to draw on collective emotional responses to these events, they will likely have to start at the local level in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.

A clear, anomalous spike stands out in the middle of Fig. 1, a graph showing the percentage of Americans who reported feeling sadness in the previous day as measured with a daily survey conducted with a national sample of Americans from 2008 through 2016. Over this entire period, the highest point in the graph is on the 15th of December in 2012 when close to 40% of respondents reported feeling sadness in the day prior, which is well more than double the percentage on a typical day. One day earlier, on December 14, 2012, a young man entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children and 6 adults before killing himself.Open in a separate windowFig. 1.The percentage of respondents to the Gallup US Daily survey reporting feeling sadness during the previous day.The shooting in Newtown, Connecticut is perhaps the most horrific example of a mass shooting; an extreme form of violence that has grown more common even as the overall level of violence in the United States has fallen (1). Mass shootings are typically defined as incidents where a shooter kills at least three or four people (not including the shooter) in a public place in a single period of time, and the act is not carried out as part of any other criminal activity. Although it is rarely possible to infer a shooter’s intent, the definition is designed to capture incidents of violence for the sake of violence. Mass shootings represent a small fraction of all gun violence, but they have a unique impact on the public’s consciousness because they usually take place in public spaces, they often appear to be indiscriminate or random, and they generate more extensive media attention than typical acts of gun violence. Unlike most acts of gun violence, which generate an intense emotional response from individuals connected with the victim or perpetrator, the emotional response to mass shootings is much more likely to be experienced collectively. For this reason, they provide a window into the way that public tragedies affect the emotions of individuals over an entire city, a state, or the nation as a whole.Evidence on the emotional responses to mass shootings also provides a way to advance scholarly understanding of the impact of mass shootings on gun policy and gun politics. The shock, sadness, and anger felt in the aftermath of Sandy Hook was shared and expressed by millions of Americans and their political representatives. Research on emotion and social movements finds that this type of collective emotion is often a powerful force in establishing shared objectives and motivating action to achieve goals in social movements and other political behavior (2–6). Yet, the wave of collective emotions expressed in the aftermath of Sandy Hook and other mass shootings has not translated into a widespread legislative effort toward gun control. Although mass shootings lead to an increase in the number of bills related to firearm accessibility and restrictions that are introduced in state legislatures (7), Luca et al. found that the occurrence of a mass shooting in a state is associated with no significant increase in the passage of firearm restrictions in Democrat-controlled legislatures and is associated with more laws enacted to loosen firearm restrictions in states with Republican-controlled legislatures (7).This article is designed to help explain this puzzle by generating causal evidence on the temporal and geographic scale of collective emotional responses to mass shootings. We draw on data from a survey of Americans’ daily emotions to assess how feelings of sadness, anger, and happiness and reports of smiling or laughing change for groups of people living in the same town or city and in the same state as a mass shooting and how those changes persist or fade over time. The survey is useful because it is carried out continuously and does not reference specific events, thus providing a way to assess the degree to which an event like a mass shooting is forefront on the minds of respondents without priming. Using methods that exploit exogenous variation in the relative timing of events and interview assessments, the analysis provides causal evidence on the impact of mass shootings on collective emotions.We have two motivations for the analysis. The first goal is to identify the effect of mass shootings on emotions in order to understand the full impact of these events across entire communities and states. The second goal is to estimate the effect of mass shootings for respondents with different political affiliations and to provide suggestive evidence to help explain why these events, and the collective emotions they generate, have not led to substantive advancement in gun control.     

The Influence of Personality Traits on Emotion Expression in Bulimic Spectrum Disorders: A Pilot Study

Facial expressions are critical in forming social bonds and in signalling one's emotional state to others. In eating disorder patients, impairments in facial emotion recognition have been associated with eating psychopathology severity. Little research however has been carried out on how bulimic spectrum disorder (BSD) patients spontaneously express emotions. Our aim was to investigate emotion expression in BSD patients and to explore the influence of personality traits. Our study comprised 28 BSD women and 15 healthy controls. Facial expressions were recorded while participants played a serious video game. Expressions of anger and joy were used as outcome measures. Overall, BSD participants displayed less facial expressiveness than controls. Among BSD women, expressions of joy were positively associated with reward dependence, novelty seeking and self‐directedness, whereas expressions of anger were associated with lower self‐directedness. Our findings suggest that specific personality traits are associated with altered emotion facial expression in patients with BSD. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.     

Looking just below the eyes is optimal across face recognition tasks

When viewing a human face, people often look toward the eyes. Maintaining good eye contact carries significant social value and allows for the extraction of information about gaze direction. When identifying faces, humans also look toward the eyes, but it is unclear whether this behavior is solely a byproduct of the socially important eye movement behavior or whether it has functional importance in basic perceptual tasks. Here, we propose that gaze behavior while determining a person’s identity, emotional state, or gender can be explained as an adaptive brain strategy to learn eye movement plans that optimize performance in these evolutionarily important perceptual tasks. We show that humans move their eyes to locations that maximize perceptual performance determining the identity, gender, and emotional state of a face. These optimal fixation points, which differ moderately across tasks, are predicted correctly by a Bayesian ideal observer that integrates information optimally across the face but is constrained by the decrease in resolution and sensitivity from the fovea toward the visual periphery (foveated ideal observer). Neither a model that disregards the foveated nature of the visual system and makes fixations on the local region with maximal information, nor a model that makes center-of-gravity fixations correctly predict human eye movements. Extension of the foveated ideal observer framework to a large database of real-world faces shows that the optimality of these strategies generalizes across the population. These results suggest that the human visual system optimizes face recognition performance through guidance of eye movements not only toward but, more precisely, just below the eyes.     

Theory of mind deficits following acute alcohol intoxication

Acute alcohol consumption is associated with socially inappropriate behaviour. Such behaviour could in part reflect the potential of alcohol to interfere with social cognition. In this experiment we tested the hypothesis that acute alcohol consumption by regular heavy social drinking young adults would compromise an aspect of social cognition, namely theory of mind (understanding intentions, emotions and beliefs). Participants who had consumed 6-8 units of alcohol showed specific impairments on two theory of mind tests: identification of faux pas and emotion recognition. This result suggests that alcohol consumption could lead to social problems secondary to difficulties in interpreting the behaviour of others due to theory of mind impairments.     

Daily relationship between positive affect and drinking to cope: the moderating role of difficulties regulating positive emotions

Background: Alcohol use is highly prevalent and linked to a wide range of negative outcomes among college students. Although emotion dysregulation has been theoretically and empirically linked to alcohol use, few studies have examined emotion dysregulation stemming from positive emotions. Objective: The goal of the current study was to extend extant research by using daily diary methods to examine the potentially moderating role of difficulties regulating positive emotions in the daily relation between positive affect and alcohol use to cope with social and non-social stressors. Methods: Participants were 165 college students (M age = 20.04; 55.2% male) who completed a baseline questionnaire assessing difficulties regulating positive emotions. Participants then responded to questions regarding state positive emotions and alcohol use once a day for 14 days. Results: Difficulties regulating positive emotions moderated the daily relation between positive affect stemming from social stressors and alcohol use to cope with social stressors. Positive affect stemming from social stressors predicted alcohol use to cope with social stressors with high (but not low) levels of difficulties regulating positive emotions. Conclusions: Findings underscore the potential utility of targeting difficulties regulating positive emotions in treatments aimed at reducing alcohol use to cope with social stressors among college students.     

Positive and Negative Self-Conscious Emotion and Transmission Risk Following HIV Diagnosis

While negative emotions are associated with risk behaviors and risk avoidance among people with HIV, emerging evidence indicates that negative self-conscious emotions, those evoked by self-reflection or self-evaluation (e.g., shame, guilt, and embarrassment), may differentially influence health-risk behaviors by producing avoidance or, conversely, pro-social behaviors. Positive emotions are associated with beneficial health behaviors, and may account for inconsistent findings related to negative self-conscious emotions. Using multinomial logistic regression, we tested whether positive emotion moderated the relationships between negative emotion and negative self-conscious emotions and level of condomless sex risk: (1) seroconcordant; (2) serodiscordant with undetectable viral load; and (3) serodiscordant with detectable viral load [potentially amplified transmission (PAT)] among people recently diagnosed with HIV (n = 276). While positive emotion did not moderate the relationship between negative emotion and condomless sex, it did moderate the relationship between negative self-conscious emotion and PAT (AOR = 0.60; 95% CI 0.41, 0.87); high negative self-conscious and high positive emotion were associated with lower PAT risk. Acknowledgment of both positive and negative self-conscious emotion may reduce transmission risk behavior among people with HIV.     

The role of paid work in Swedish chronic dialysis patients--a nation-wide survey: paid work and dialysis.

The role of paid work in chronic illness has been investigated in this nation-wide study of all Swedish-speaking patients on chronic dialysis above the age of 16 years, who were not too tired or severely ill to participate and who had been treated for at least 3 months. Young age and female gender were consistently associated with increased prevalence of self-reported depression, poor psychological health, psychosomatic symptoms and sleep disturbance. In multivariate analyses paid work, strong emotional support, and care at intermediate or small units were independently associated with a good quality of life. Chronic dialysis patients who did paid work (19.6% of the patients below 65 years of age) perceived their work as more socially supportive than did men and women in the normal working population. It may be concluded that paid work is of particular importance to this patient group because it may give extra social support to patients whose social network is in general rather poor.