Topic
Emotion research, explained
23 open-access emotion studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- How do body awareness and tracking relate to emotional vulnerability?
Being emotionally vulnerable is linked to how we perceive and react to our internal bodily signals, but not to how accurately we can track our actual heart rate.
- Does mindfulness start an upward spiral of good mood and thoughts?
After mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, people recovering from depression had more pleasant thoughts in daily life, and a good mood on one day predicted more pleasant thoughts the next day, though pleasant thoughts did not in turn predict later mood.
- How do men and women differ in emotional regulation flexibility?
Women show greater flexibility and use a wider variety of emotional coping strategies across different situations compared to men.
- How naming feelings compares to reframing thoughts in the brain
Both naming your emotional reaction and reframing a negative situation reduce activity in the brain's alarm center and lower self-reported distress, utilizing highly similar prefrontal networks.
- Does brain power help people manage their emotions?
People with higher fluid cognitive abilities are better at both increasing and decreasing their emotional responses to sad situations.
- Does rejecting negative emotions impact your heart rate?
People who struggle to accept negative emotions tend to have lower heart rate variability, which indicates a less flexible physiological response to stress.
- Do fearful faces slow our actions only when emotion matters?
People were slower and made more errors when a fearful face, rather than a happy one, told them to move, but only when they were judging emotion; when judging gender the difference disappeared.
- How emotional distractions affect working and long-term memory
Distracting emotional images can impair immediate working memory while simultaneously boosting long-term memory for those distractions through a brain-activity shift.
- How Emotional Intensity Shapes Brain Regulation in Aging
Older adults naturally regulate low-intensity negative emotions using specific frontal brain areas, while highly intense negative emotions trigger similar deep-brain emotional responses in both young and older adults.
- How Geriatric Nurses Manage Daily Emotions and Stress
On days when geriatric nurses actively boosted their positive emotions, they experienced higher well-being and lower stress, whereas holding back positive expressions had the opposite effect.
- Can virtual reality trigger awe and actual goose bumps?
Immersive and personalized virtual reality can successfully trigger strong subjective feelings of awe as well as physical goose bumps, especially when users visit personally meaningful places.
- Can specific body movements change how you feel?
Moving your body with specific qualities, like lightness for happiness or suddenness for anger, can directly evoke or enhance those corresponding emotions.
- How do emotions and anxiety affect our logical reasoning?
People think less logically when they are in a positive or negative mood, and highly specific fears can further disrupt reasoning about the feared topic.
- How managing emotions helps men cope with stress
Being good at managing emotions helps men buffer the effects of stress on happiness and depression, but this buffering effect was not found in women.
- Is the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire actually useful?
While the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire helps predict cognitive flexibility and coping, it does not add much predictive power beyond basic personality traits for general emotional states.
- Does the chance to win money change how we process emotional words?
Expecting to win money and reading an emotional word each changed brain responses, but at different times and in different places, and the two effects did not combine.
- How do CRC couples share burden and distress?
In 200 patient–spouse dyads, self-perceived and caregiver burden linked both partners’ anxiety/depression and mediated paths from dyadic coping.
- Does bad sleep and mood make pain feel worse?
Interrupted sleep slightly increases how intensely people feel pain, but induced positive or negative moods do not change this effect.
- How does heart biology protect us from hiding our feelings?
People who frequently suppress their emotions suffer fewer depressive symptoms if they have higher resting heart rate variability.
- Is switching how you manage others' feelings bad for you?
People who regulated others' emotions very differently from one relationship to another reported less close relationships, lower mood and more emotional exhaustion.
- Does smiling unconsciously make negative memories feel less sad?
Forcing an unconscious smile while remembering a sad story reduces how negative that memory feels later without hurting factual recall of the event.
- How do emoticons and text combine to show our mood?
When text messages and emoticons contradict each other, people tend to assume the sender is in a bad mood, especially when the emoticon itself is negative.
- Do mood swings matter more than average mood for learning a skill?
How good or bad people felt on average predicted their attention and game performance much better than how much their emotions fluctuated.