People respond to stressful events in different ways, depending on the event and on the regulatory strategies they choose. Coping and emotion regulation theorists have proposed dynamic models in ...which these two factors, the person and the situation, interact over time to inform adaptation. In practice, however, researchers have tended to assume that particular regulatory strategies are consistently beneficial or maladaptive. We label this assumption the fallacy of uniform efficacy and contrast it with findings from a number of related literatures that have suggested the emergence of a broader but as yet poorly defined construct that we refer to as regulatory flexibility. In this review, we articulate this broader construct and define both its features and limitations. Specifically, we propose a heuristic individual differences framework and review research on three sequential components of flexibility for which propensities and abilities vary: sensitivity to context, availability of a diverse repertoire of regulatory strategies, and responsiveness to feedback. We consider the methodological limitations of research on each component, review questions that future research on flexibility might address, and consider how the components might relate to each other and to broader conceptualizations about stability and change across persons and situations.
How Do Simple Positive Activities Increase Well-Being? Lyubomirsky, Sonja; Layous, Kristin
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
02/2013, Volume:
22, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Theory and research suggest that people can increase their happiness through simple intentional positive activities, such as expressing gratitude or practicing kindness. Investigators have recently ...begun to study the optimal conditions under which positive activities increase happiness and the mechanisms by which these effects work. According to our positive-activity model, features of positive activities (e.g., their dosage and variety), features of persons (e.g., their motivation and effort), and person-activity fit moderate the effect of positive activities on well-being. Furthermore, the model posits four mediating variables: positive emotions, positive thoughts, positive behaviors, and need satisfaction. Empirical evidence supporting the model and future directions are discussed.
Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied ...while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions.
Emotion regulation has been conceptualized as a process by which individuals modify their emotional experiences, expressions, and physiology and the situations eliciting such emotions in order to ...produce appropriate responses to the ever-changing demands posed by the environment. Thus, context plays a central role in emotion regulation. This is particularly relevant to the work on emotion regulation in psychopathology, because psychological disorders are characterized by rigid responses to the environment. However, this recognition of the importance of context has appeared primarily in the theoretical realm, with the empirical work lagging behind. In this review, the author proposes an approach to systematically evaluate the contextual factors shaping emotion regulation. Such an approach consists of specifying the components that characterize emotion regulation and then systematically evaluating deviations within each of these components and their underlying dimensions. Initial guidelines for how to combine such dimensions and components in order to capture substantial and meaningful contextual influences are presented. This approach is offered to inspire theoretical and empirical work that it is hoped will result in the development of a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the relationship between context and emotion regulation.
Highlights • A new view of emotion as active inference on the causes of interoceptive signals. • Extension of appraisal emotion theories to a contemporary inferential framework. • A unified ...predictive model of emotion and experience of body ownership. • Interpretation of neuropsychiatric conditions as disordered interoceptive inference. • How predictive integration of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals affects self.
The work of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century Beguine, explores the reflective potential of intimate affective experiences by making deliberate use of literary and religious intertexts. The writings of ...women mystics like Hadewijch present an understudied current in the genealogy of life-writing, yet they resonate strongly with contemporary autotheoretical practices that combine theory and art with autobiography. At the same time, the fact that Hadewijch is not a contemporary author can offer a critical perspective on the genre of autotheory itself.
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind Killingsworth, Matthew A.; Gilbert, Daniel T.
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2010, Volume:
330, Issue:
6006
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We developed a smartphone technology to sample people's ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking ...about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.
Los sacerdotes buscan identificarse con Cristo, llevar toda su actividad hacia Él, y precisan integrar todas las dimensiones de su vida, en particular la afectividad. Realizamos una investigación ...cualitativa, encuesta abierta, sobre retos, riesgos, oportunidades, qué ayudó y qué faltó en su vida afectiva. Respondieron 128 participantes, con 605 respuestas abiertas y 1.039 ideas diferentes. Destacan los conceptos referidos a lo relacional (vida espiritual con Dios, amistad general y sacerdotal, trato con muchas personas) en contraste con la soledad. Proponemos ocho dimensiones de desarrollo de la vida afectiva sacerdotal: relación con Dios, amistad, acompañamiento, fraternidad sacerdotal, formación, cuidado personal, conocimiento psicológico y misión.
Contemporary emotion regulation research emphasizes intrapersonal processes such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, but people experiencing affect commonly choose not to go it ...alone. Instead, individuals often turn to others for help in shaping their affective lives. How and under what circumstances does such interpersonal regulation modulate emotional experience? Although scientists have examined allied phenomena such as social sharing, empathy, social support, and prosocial behavior for decades, there have been surprisingly few attempts to integrate these data into a single conceptual framework of interpersonal regulation. Here we propose such a framework. We first map a "space" differentiating classes of interpersonal regulation according to whether an individual uses an interpersonal regulatory episode to alter their own or another person's emotion. We then identify 2 types of processes-response-dependent and response-independent-that could support interpersonal regulation. This framework classifies an array of processes through which interpersonal contact fulfills regulatory goals. More broadly, it organizes diffuse, heretofore independent data on "pieces" of interpersonal regulation, and identifies growth points for this young and exciting research domain.
Sex-specific differences in DNA methylation of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) have been shown in adults and are related to several mental disorders. Negative affectivity early in life is a ...trans-diagnostic risk marker of later psychopathology and is partly under genetic control. However, sex-specific variations in OXTR methylation (OXTRm) in infants and their associations with negative affectivity are still unknown.
Here, we explored sex differences in the association between infant OXTRm at birth and negative affectivity at 3 months of age.
Infants and their mothers (N = 224) were recruited at delivery. Infants’ methylation status was assessed in 13 CpG sites within the OXTR gene intron 1 region (chr3: 8810654–8810919) in buccal cells at birth while 3-month-old infants’ negative affectivity was assessed by mothers using a well-validated temperament questionnaire.
OXTRm at 12 CpG sites was higher in females than in males. Moreover, higher infants’ OXTRm at 6 specific CpG sites was associated with greater negative affectivity in males, but not in females.
These results provide new insights into the role of sex-dependent epigenetic mechanisms linking OXTRm with early infants’ emotional development. Understanding the degree to which epigenetic processes relate to early temperamental variations may help inform the etiology of later childhood psychopathological outcomes.
•CpG-specific OXTR methylation (OXTRm) at birth was higher in females than in males.•Higher OXTRm was associated with greater negative emotionality in males.•No association between OXTRm and negative emotionality emerged in females.
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