Category: Emotion

Emotion, guest blogger, Personality, Social

Self-Compassion Can Protect You From Feeling Like A Burden When You Mess Things Up For Your Group

By guest blogger Itamar Shatz

It feels bad to know that you’ve messed up, especially when other people have to pay a price for your actions. Unfortunately, this feeling is something that most of us end up experiencing at one point or another — when we’re placed on a team with other people at school or at a job, for instance, and make a mistake that forces our team members to do more work as a result.

However, recent research, published in Social Psychology by James Wirth at Ohio State University and his colleagues, shows that there is a trait that can reduce those negative feelings, called “self-compassion”.

Continue reading “Self-Compassion Can Protect You From Feeling Like A Burden When You Mess Things Up For Your Group” →

Emotion, Social

We’re Less Likely To Spread Alarming Information While Experiencing Physiological Stress

By Emily Reynolds

The spread of bad news — fake or otherwise — is likely to be on everybody’s minds at the moment. Whether it’s legitimate updates on the spread or symptoms of coronavirus, or sensationalism more to do with page clicks than scientific fact, it can be hard to tune out of the news cycle — and to know what information you should be passing on to friends and family.

Past research has found that alarming information is likely to spread further than positive information; we’re also more likely to share news that confirms our own beliefs and biases. But what impact does the experience of stress have on the sharing of negative or alarming news? A new study published in Scientific Reports suggests a complex relationship between the two.

Continue reading “We’re Less Likely To Spread Alarming Information While Experiencing Physiological Stress” →

Developmental, Emotion

Children Can “Catch” Their Mother’s Stress — Particularly If She Tries To Hide It

By Emily Reynolds

The way parents feel and behave often rubs off on their children. Kids’ own life paths can be influenced by the strength of their parents’ romantic relationship, for example, or how often their parents lie to them.

We may also pick things up as our parents try to hide them, as new research published in the Journal of Family Psychology suggests. Even when parents try to hide their stress, the team finds, they can still pass on those feelings to their children anyway.

Continue reading “Children Can “Catch” Their Mother’s Stress — Particularly If She Tries To Hide It” →

Emotion, Mental health, Sleep and dreaming, Thought

Night Owls May Use Poorer Emotion Regulation Strategies Than Early Birds

By Emma Young

Are you an evening person — an owl? Or a morning person — a lark? No end of studies have reported variations in the functioning of people who like to wake and go to bed late, versus those who are early to bed and early to rise. And now a new study, published in PLoS One, has found links between our “chronotype” and the way we handle emotions, reflect on our thoughts and feelings, and assert ourselves. Overall, owls do worse. And this, argues Juan Manuel Antúnez at the University of Malaga, Spain, could help to explain links between being an owl and poorer psychological well-being.

Continue reading “Night Owls May Use Poorer Emotion Regulation Strategies Than Early Birds” →

Brain, Emotion

Emotions Are Represented In The Brain In A Surprisingly Similar Way To Visual Information, Study Argues

By Emma Young

Love it or loathe it, Forrest Gump has now gone way beyond introducing “Life is like a box of chocolates” and “Run, Forrest! Run!” into our vernacular. It’s been used to do something truly remarkable: to reveal the location of a map of emotions in the human brain.

This new work, published in Nature Communications, shows that a spherical bit of cortex, about three centimetres in diameter, represents not only the kind of emotion we’re feeling in any given moment, but how strongly we’re feeling it. In revealing objective brain-based correlates of our feelings, the work potentially has all kinds of implications for psychiatry. Continue reading “Emotions Are Represented In The Brain In A Surprisingly Similar Way To Visual Information, Study Argues” →

Emotion, Health, Podcast, Technology

Episode 20: How To Cope With Pain

This is Episode 20 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here.

 

What can psychology teach us about dealing with pain? Our presenter Ginny Smith learns that swearing can have a pain-reducing effect, and puts the theory to the test with an experiment on editor Matthew Warren. Ginny also hears about how virtual reality could provide a welcome distraction to patients suffering from chronic pain. Continue reading “Episode 20: How To Cope With Pain” →

Emotion, Morality, Personality, Political

Liberals And Conservatives Feel Moral Outrage In Different Parts Of The Body — But There’s Also A Lot Of Overlap

By Emily Reynolds

There are lots of differences between those who express opposing political affiliations — and they may not just be ideological. Liberals and conservatives have different shopping habits, for instance, with one series of studies finding that liberals preferred products that made them feel unique, whilst conservatives picked brands that made them feel better than others. They even view health risks differently when they’re choosing what to eat.

But could there also be physiological differences between liberals and conservatives? Some evidence seems to suggest this might be the case, though as we reported earlier this month past findings, such as differences in physiological responses to fear, may not be as solid as previously thought. However, new research in Psychological Science has found that people of different political affiliations may differ in another way: where in the body they feel emotions relating to moral concerns. Continue reading “Liberals And Conservatives Feel Moral Outrage In Different Parts Of The Body — But There’s Also A Lot Of Overlap” →

Emotion, Media, Mental health

People With Depression May Find Sad Memes Funnier And More Uplifting

By Matthew Warren

Memes have become an integral part of online communication — and a ripe area for research. Underlying the simplicity of a grainy picture and a few words of text are countless more complex psychological questions. What determines why some memes go viral? How do they shape people’s political or social views? And in what ways do our perceptions of memes change depending on our personalities — or even on our mental health?

To this latter question, at least, a new study in Scientific Reports has some answers. Researchers have found that depressed people seem to enjoy memes with depression-related themes more than non-depressed individuals — a finding that points at differences in how people with mental health difficulties use humour as a coping mechanism.

Continue reading “People With Depression May Find Sad Memes Funnier And More Uplifting” →

Emotion, guest blogger, Methodological, Political, Replications

Conservatives Might Not Have A More Potent Fear Response Than Liberals After All

Terrifying SceneBy guest blogger Jesse Singal

If you follow mainstream science coverage, you have likely heard by now that many scientists believe that the differences between liberals and conservatives aren’t just ideological, but biological or neurological. That is, these differences are driven by deeply-seated features of our bodies and minds which exist prior to any sort of conscious evaluation of a given issue.

Lately, though, follow-up research has been poking some holes in this general theory. In November, for example, Emma Young wrote about findings which undermined past suggestions that conservatives are more readily disgusted than liberals. More broadly, as I wrote in 2018, there’s a burgeoning movement in social and political psychology to re-evaluate some of the strongest claims about liberal-conservative personality differences, with at least some evidence to suggest that the nature and magnitude of these differences has been overblown by shoddy or biased research.

Now, a new study set to appear in the Journal of Politics and available in preprint here suggests that another key claim about liberal-conservative differences may be less sturdy than it appears.

Continue reading “Conservatives Might Not Have A More Potent Fear Response Than Liberals After All” →

Cross-cultural, Emotion, Language

The Precise Meaning Of Emotion Words Is Different Around The World

love multilingual wordBy Emily Reynolds

When you can’t quite put your finger on how you’re feeling, don’t worry — there may be a non-English word that can help you out. There are hundreds of words across the world for emotional states and concepts, from the Spanish word for the desire to eat simply for the taste (gula) to the Sanskrit for revelling in someone else’s joy (mudita).

But what about those words that exist across many languages — “anger”, for example, or “happiness”? Do they mean the same thing in every language, or do we experience emotions differently based on the culture we are brought up in? Is the experience we call “love” in English emotionally analogous with its direct translation into Hungarian, “szerelem”, for example?

Continue reading “The Precise Meaning Of Emotion Words Is Different Around The World” →