Job stress and dyadic synchrony in police marriages: a preliminary investigation

Despite reports documenting adverse effects of stress on police marriages, few empirical studies focus on actual emotional behaviors of officers and spouses. In this preliminary investigation, 17 male police officers and their nonpolice wives completed daily stress diaries for 1 week and then participated in a laboratory-based discussion about their respective days. Conversations were video-recorded and coded for specific emotional behaviors reflecting hostility and affection, which are strong predictors of marital outcomes. We examined associations between officers' job stress (per diaries and the Police Stress Survey) and couples' emotional behavior (mean levels and behavioral synchrony) using a dyadic repeated measures design capitalizing on the large number of observations available for each couple (1020 observations). When officers reported more job stress, they showed less hostility, less synchrony with their wives' hostility, and more synchrony with their wives' affection; their wives showed greater synchrony with officers' hostility and less synchrony with officers' affection. Therefore, for officers, greater job stress was associated with less behavioral negativity, potentially less attunement to wives' negativity, but potentially greater attunement to wives' affection-perhaps a compensatory strategy or attempt to buffer their marriage from stress. These attempts may be less effective, however, if, as our synchrony findings may suggest, wives are focusing on officers' hostility rather than affection. Although it will be important to replicate these results given the small sample, our findings reveal that patterns of behavioral synchrony may be a key means to better understand how job stress exacts a toll on police marriages.

Aging and emotion recognition: not just a losing matter

Past studies on emotion recognition and aging have found evidence of age-related decline when emotion recognition was assessed by having participants detect single emotions depicted in static images of full or partial (e.g., eye region) faces. These tests afford good experimental control but do not capture the dynamic nature of real-world emotion recognition, which is often characterized by continuous emotional judgments and dynamic multimodal stimuli. Research suggests that older adults often perform better under conditions that better mimic real-world social contexts. We assessed emotion recognition in young, middle-aged, and older adults using two traditional methods (single emotion judgments of static images of faces and eyes) and an additional method in which participants made continuous emotion judgments of dynamic, multimodal stimuli (videotaped interactions between young, middle-aged, and older couples). Results revealed an Age × Test interaction. Largely consistent with prior research, we found some evidence that older adults performed worse than young adults when judging single emotions from images of faces (for sad and disgust faces only) and eyes (for older eyes only), with middle-aged adults falling in between. In contrast, older adults did better than young adults on the test involving continuous emotion judgments of dyadic interactions, with middle-aged adults falling in between. In tests in which target stimuli differed in age, emotion recognition was not facilitated by an age match between participant and target. These findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological implications for the study of aging and emotional processing.

The effect of the serotonin transporter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) on empathic and self-conscious emotional reactivity

We examined the relationship between a functional polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) and individual differences in emotional reactivity in two laboratory studies. In Study 1, empathic responding and physiological reactivity to viewing films of others in distress were assessed in healthy adults in three age groups. In Study 2, emotional responding to watching oneself in an embarrassing situation was assessed in healthy adults and in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. In Study 1, participants with two short alleles of 5-HTTLPR reported more personal distress and showed higher levels of physiological responses in response to the films than participants with long alleles. In Study 2, participants with two short alleles reported more anger and amusement and displayed more emotional expressive behaviors in response to the embarrassing situation than participants with long alleles. These two findings from diverse samples of participants converge to indicate that individuals who are homozygous for the short allele variant of 5-HTTLPR have greater levels of emotional reactivity in two quite different socially embedded contexts.

Turn down the volume or change the channel? Emotional effects of detached versus positive reappraisal

Cognitive reappraisal, or changing one's interpretation of an event in order to alter the emotional response to it, is thought to be a healthy and an effective emotion regulation strategy. Although researchers recognize several distinct varieties of reappraisal, few studies have explicitly compared the effects of multiple reappraisal strategies on emotional responding. The present study compares the effects of detached and positive reappraisal on thought content, subjective emotional experience, physiological reactivity, and facial expressions of emotion while viewing film clips evoking sadness and disgust. Although both forms of reappraisal reduced overall emotional responding to unpleasant stimuli, the effects of detached reappraisal were stronger in this regard, and positive reappraisal was more likely to maintain subjective experience and facial expression of stimulus-appropriate positive emotions. The two reappraisal strategies also produced somewhat different profiles of physiological responding. Differences between detached and positive reappraisal with respect to subjective experience and facial expression were more pronounced among men than women; the reverse was true for differences with respect to physiological responding. Beyond these effects on individual emotion response systems, detached and positive reappraisal also had somewhat different effects on coherence in change across response systems. Implications for our understanding of emotion regulation processes, and for emotion theory more broadly, are discussed.

Meditation and the startle response: a case study

The effects of two kinds of meditation (open presence and focused) on the facial and physiological aspects of the defensive response to an aversive startle stimulus were studied in a Buddhist monk with approximately 40 years of meditation experience. The participant was exposed to a 115-db, 100-ms acoustic startle stimulus under the 2 meditation conditions, a distraction condition (to control for cognitive and attentional load) and an unanticipated condition (startle presented without warning or instruction). A completely counterbalanced 24-trial, single-subject design was used, with each condition repeated 6 times. Most aspects of the participant's responses in the unanticipated condition did not differ from those of a comparison group of 12 age-matched male controls. Both kinds of meditation produced physiological and facial responses to the startle that were smaller than in the distraction condition. Within meditation conditions, open presence meditation produced smaller physiological and facial responses than focused meditation. These results from a single highly expert meditator indicate that these 2 kinds of meditation can differentially alter the magnitude of a primitive defensive response.

Role of right pregenual anterior cingulate cortex in self-conscious emotional reactivity

Self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment arise when one's actions fail to meet salient social expectations and are accompanied by marked physiological and behavioral activation. We investigated the neural correlates of self-conscious emotional reactivity in 27 patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a neurodegenerative disease that disrupts self-conscious emotion and targets brain regions critical for emotional functioning early in the disease course, and in 33 healthy older controls. Subjects participated in an embarrassing karaoke task in which they watched a video clip of themselves singing. They also watched a sad film clip; these data were used to control for non-self-conscious emotional reactivity in response to audiovisual stimuli. Using Freesurfer to quantify regional brain volumes from structural magnetic resonance imaging, right pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) gray matter volume was the only brain region that was a significant predictor of self-conscious emotion. Smaller pACC volume was associated with attenuated physiological and behavioral self-conscious emotional reactivity, and this relationship was not specific to diagnosis. We argue that these results reflect the significant role that right pACC plays in the visceromotor responding that accompanies self-conscious emotion and that neurodegeneration in this region may underlie the self-conscious emotional decline seen in bvFTD.

Diminished disgust reactivity in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia

Frontotemporal dementia is a neurodegenerative disease that impacts emotion and social behavior. Using laboratory measures of emotional reactivity, our past work has found that reactivity to loud noises and to thematically simple happy and sad emotional films are preserved in the early stages of the disease while other emotional responses (e.g., embarrassment) are severely compromised. In the present study we examined disgust, an emotion whose function is to distance us from offending objects and situations. We measured disgust reactivity in 21 patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, a subtype of frontotemporal dementia characterized by emotional blunting) and 25 neurologically healthy controls. Disgust is an emotion of particular interest in bvFTD, due to caregiver and clinician reports that patients engage in acts that suggest this emotion may be compromised; in addition, the pattern of neurodegeneration in bvFTD includes atrophy of key frontotemporal structures (e.g., anterior insula) with known roles in visceral emotions such as disgust. In the present study, participants had their emotional facial behavior, physiology, and self-reported emotional experience measured while watching a disgust-eliciting film. We found that behavioral, physiological, and self-reported experiential responses were all reduced in bvFTD patients compared to controls (with behavioral and physiological differences still found after controlling for patients' cognitive deficits). We discuss the implications of these findings for bvFTD patients' problems in social functioning and their typical patterns of neurodegeneration.

Elevated Baseline Anxiety Among African Americans in Laboratory Research Settings

We tested the hypothesis that African Americans would show greater anxiety than their European American counterparts when entering laboratory research settings. We examined subjective and physiological anxiety measures obtained both inside and outside the research laboratory from 126 African Americans and 147 European Americans in three separate studies. Consistent with our hypotheses, African Americans reported experiencing significantly more baseline anxiety and showed greater baseline physiological arousal consistent with anxiety than European Americans. These differences were evident when controlling for anxiety observed outside of the research setting as well as baseline differences in overall emotional experience. Our findings highlight the need to consider laboratory-induced anxiety as a potential confound in studies involving African Americans. This may be especially important in race comparison studies in which undetected baseline anxiety could alter the interpretation of subsequent race comparisons.

Behaviour, physiology and experience of pathological laughing and crying in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Pathological laughing and crying is a disorder of emotional expression seen in a number of neurological diseases. The aetiology is poorly understood, but clinical descriptions suggest a disorder of emotion regulation. The goals of this study were: (i) to characterize the subjective, behavioural and physiological emotional reactions that occur during episodes of pathological laughing and crying; (ii) to compare responses during these episodes to those that occur when emotions are elicited under standard conditions (watching sad and amusing emotional films, being startled); and (iii) to examine the ability of patients with this disorder to regulate their emotions under standardized conditions. Twenty-one patients with pathological laughing and crying due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and 14 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis but no pathological laughing and crying were studied. Emotional measures included self-reported emotional experience, video recordings of facial reactivity and peripheral physiological responses (skin conductance, heart rate and somatic activity). Nineteen of the 21 patients with histories of pathological laughing and crying had at least one episode in the laboratory that they agreed constituted pathological laughing or crying (a total of 56 episodes were documented). Compared with viewing sad and amusing films, the episodes were associated with greater facial and physiological activation. Contrary to many clinical descriptions, episodes were often induced by contextually appropriate stimuli and associated with strong experiences of emotion that were consistent with the display. When instructed to regulate their facial responses to emotion-eliciting films, patients with pathological laughing and crying showed impairments compared with patients who did not have a history of this disorder. These findings support the idea that pathological laughing and crying represents activation of all channels of emotional responding (i.e. behavioural, physiological and subjective). Furthermore, they support previously advanced theories that, rather than being associated with general emotional hyperreactivity, this disorder may be due to dysfunction in frontal neural systems that support voluntary regulation of emotion.

Basic Emotion Questions

Among discrete emotions, basic emotions are the most elemental; most distinct; most continuous across species, time, and place; and most intimately related to survival-critical functions. For an emotion to be afforded basic emotion status it must meet criteria of: (a) distinctness (primarily in behavioral and physiological characteristics), (b) hard-wiredness (circuitry built into the nervous system), and (c) functionality (provides a generalized solution to a particular survival-relevant challenge or opportunity). A set of six emotions that most clearly meet these criteria (enjoyment, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, sadness) and three additional emotions (relief/contentment, interest, love) for which the evidence is not yet quite as strong is described. Empirical approaches that are most and least useful for establishing basic-emotion status are discussed. Basic emotions are thought to have a central organizing mechanism and to have the capacity to influence behavior, thoughts, and other fundamental processes.

Greater emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in late life

Emotional empathy and prosocial behavior were assessed in older, middle-aged, and young adults. Participants watched two films depicting individuals in need, one uplifting and the other distressing. Physiological responses were monitored during the films, and participants rated their levels of emotional empathy following each film. As a measure of prosocial behavior, participants were given an additional payment they could contribute to charities supporting the individuals in the films. Age-related linear increases were found for both emotional empathy (self-reported empathic concern and cardiac and electrodermal responding) and prosocial behavior (size of contribution) across both films and in self-reported personal distress to the distressing film. Empathic concern and cardiac reactivity to both films, along with personal distress to the distressing film only, were associated with greater prosocial behavior. Empathic concern partially mediated the age-related differences in prosocial behavior. Results are discussed in terms of our understanding both of adult development and of the nature of these vital aspects of human emotion.

Anger and sadness in response to an emotionally neutral film: evidence for age-specific associations with well-being

When the association between emotion and well-being is being considered, positive emotions usually come to mind. However, negative emotions serve important adaptive functions and particular negative emotions may be especially adaptive at different stages of adult development. We examined the associations between self-reported negative emotions in response to an emotionally neutral, thematically ambiguous film and subjective well-being among 76 young (age 20-29), 73 middle-aged (age 40-49), and 73 older (age 60-69) adults. Results indicated that higher self-reported anger in response to the film was associated with higher well-being for middle-aged adults, but not for young and older adults. Higher self-reported sadness in response to the film was associated with higher well-being for older adults, but not for young and middle-aged adults. These findings were stronger for cognitive well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life) than for affective well-being (i.e., ratio of dispositional positive to negative affect) and were specific to these emotions (not found for self-reported disgust or fear) and to the emotionally neutral film (not found for sad or disgusting films). Results are discussed in terms of the functions that anger and sadness are thought to serve and the control opportunities afforded in midlife and late life that render these functions differentially adaptive.

Alexithymia in neurodegenerative disease

We investigated alexithymia, a deficit in the ability to identify and describe one's emotions, in a sample that included patients with neurodegenerative disease and healthy controls. In addition, we investigated the relationship that alexithymia has with behavioral disturbance and with regional gray matter volumes. Alexithymia was examined with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20, behavioral disturbance was assessed with the Neuropsychiatric Inventory, and regional gray matter volumes were obtained from structural magnetic resonance images. Group analyses revealed higher levels of alexithymia in patients than controls. Alexithymia scores were positively correlated with behavioral disturbance (apathy and informant distress, in particular) and negatively correlated with the gray matter volume of the right pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that is thought to play an important role in self and emotion processing.

Executive functions and the down-regulation and up-regulation of emotion

This study examined the relationship between individual differences in executive functions (EF; assessed by measures of working memory, Stroop, trail making, and verbal fluency) and ability to down-regulate and up-regulate responses to emotionally evocative film clips. To ensure a wide range of EF, 48 participants with diverse neurodegenerative disorders and 21 older neurologically normal ageing participants were included. Participants were exposed to three different movie clips that were designed to elicit a mix of disgust and amusement. While watching the films they were either instructed to watch, down-regulate, and up-regulate their visible emotional responses. Heart rate and facial behaviours were monitored throughout. Emotion regulatory ability was operationalised as changes in heart rate and facial behaviour in the down- and up-regulation conditions, controlling for responses in the watch condition. Results indicated that higher verbal fluency scores were related to greater ability to regulate emotion in both the down-regulation and up-regulation conditions. This finding remained significant even after controlling for age and general cognitive functioning. No relationships were found between emotion regulation and the other EF measures. We believe these results derive from differences among EF measures, with verbal-fluency performance best capturing the complex sequence of controlled planning, activation, and monitoring required for successful emotion regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of emotion-cognition interaction, suggesting a link between emotion-regulatory abilities and individual differences in complex executive functions.

Greater sadness reactivity in late life

Although previous research suggests that overall emotional reactivity does not change with normal aging, it is possible that different emotions follow different developmental courses. We examined emotional reactivity to films selected to elicit sadness, disgust, and a neutral state in young, middle-aged and older adults (total N = 222). Physiology and expressive behavior were measured continuously and reports of subjective emotional experience were obtained following each film. Results indicated that older adults reported greater sadness in response to all films and greater physiological responses to the sadness film than did the younger age groups. There were no age differences found in self-reported disgust or in behavioral expressions of sadness or disgust in response to any film. The age differences that were found were maintained even after controlling for pre-film self-reported sadness and for personal experiences of loss. These findings support the notion that sadness reactivity is heightened with age.

Coherence between emotional experience and physiology: does body awareness training have an impact?

Two fundamental issues in emotion theory and research concern: (a) the role of emotion in promoting response coherence across different emotion systems; and (b) the role of awareness of bodily sensations in the experience of emotion. The present study poses a question bridging the two domains; namely, whether training in Vipassana meditation or dance, both of which promote attention to certain kinds of bodily sensations, is associated with greater coherence between the subjective and physiological aspects of emotion. We used lag correlations to examine second-by-second coherence between subjective emotional experience and heart period within individuals across four different films. Participants were either: (a) experienced Vipassana meditators (attention to visceral sensations), (b) experienced dancers (attention to somatic sensations), and (c) controls with no meditation or dance experience. Results indicated a linear relationship in coherence, with meditators having highest levels, dancers having intermediary levels, and controls having lowest levels. We conclude that the coherence between subjective and cardiac aspects of emotion is greater in those who have specialized training that promotes greater body awareness.

The ability to regulate emotion is associated with greater well-being, income, and socioeconomic status

Are people who are best able to implement strategies to regulate their emotional expressive behavior happier and more successful than their counterparts? Although past research has examined individual variation in knowledge of the most effective emotion regulation strategies, little is known about how individual differences in the ability to actually implement these strategies, as assessed objectively in the laboratory, are associated with external criteria. In two studies, we examined how individual variation in the ability to modify emotional expressive behavior in response to evocative stimuli is related to well-being and financial success. Study 1 showed that individuals who can best suppress their emotional reaction to an acoustic startle are happiest with their lives. Study 2 showed that individuals who can best amplify their emotional reaction to a disgust-eliciting movie are happiest with their lives and have the highest disposable income and socioeconomic status. Thus, being able to implement emotion regulation strategies in the laboratory is closely linked to well-being and financial success.

Physiological down-regulation and positive emotion in marital interaction

Previous studies have demonstrated that 1 function of positive emotion is the undoing of physiological arousal produced by negative emotions. These studies have used single-subject paradigms, in which emotions were induced by films in college-age individuals. In the present study, we examined the relationship between physiological down-regulation and positive emotion in a sample of 149 middle-aged and older married couples engaged in a 15-min discussion of an area of marital conflict. During the conversation, autonomic and somatic physiological activity was measured, and emotional behaviors were recorded and subsequently coded. We found that during 20-s periods of down-regulation (where physiology transitioned from high arousal to low arousal), couples showed an increase in positive emotional behavior compared with periods without down-regulation. The finding was quite robust, suggesting that the undoing effect of positive emotion generalizes across age, sex, and marital satisfaction. The advantages of using positive emotion as an emotion regulation strategy are discussed.

Mutual gaze in Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal and semantic dementia couples

Alzheimer's disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and semantic dementia (SD) are neurodegenerative diseases that differ in their socioemotional presentations. Mutual gaze (i.e. when two individuals make eye contact) is a building block of social behavior that may be differentially affected by these diseases. We studied 13 AD patients, 11 FTD patients, 9 SD patients and 22 normal controls as they engaged in conversations with partners about relationship conflicts. Physiological reactivity was monitored during the conversations and trained raters coded mutual gaze from videotaped recordings. Results indicated that mutual gaze was preserved in AD couples. Mutual gaze was diminished in FTD couples while SD couples showed evidence of greater mutual gaze. SD couples also showed lower physiological reactivity compared to controls. Across patient groups, reduced mutual gaze was associated with greater behavioral disturbance as measured by the Neuropsychiatric Inventory, especially on the disinhibition and apathy subscales. These results point to subtle differences between the three types of dementia in the social realm that help to illuminate the nature of the disease process and could aid in differential diagnosis.

Emotion regulation deficits in frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer's disease

We examined instructed and spontaneous emotion regulation in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD, N = 32), which presents with profound emotional and personality changes; patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD, N = 17), which presents with profound memory impairment; and neurologically normal controls (N = 25). Participants were exposed to an aversive acoustic startle stimulus (115 dB) under 3 different conditions: (a) unwarned without instructions to down-regulate, (b) warned without instructions to down-regulate, and (c) warned with instructions to down-regulate. In the last 2 conditions, the warning took the form of a 20-s countdown. In all conditions, visible aspects of the startle response were assessed by measuring overall somatic activity and coding emotional facial expressions. FTLD patients, AD patients, and control participants showed similar patterns of down-regulation in somatic activity across the 3 startle trials. However, differences between the 3 groups emerged in the amount of emotional facial behavior expressed in the startle trials. There were no group differences in response in the unwarned condition, indicating that the startle response was intact in the patients. In the warned with instructions condition, both FTLD and AD patients were moderately impaired in down-regulatory ability compared with controls. In the warned without instructions condition, AD patients and normal controls spontaneously down-regulated their emotional responses, but FTLD patients did not. These findings illuminate specific problems that these patients have in the emotional realm.

Emotion recognition across cultures: the influence of ethnicity on empathic accuracy and physiological linkage

The present study tested whether empathic accuracy and physiological linkage during an emotion recognition task are facilitated by a cultural match between rater and target (cultural advantage model) or unaffected (cultural equivalence model). Participants were 161 college students of African American, Chinese American, European American, or Mexican American ethnicity. To assess empathic accuracy-knowing what another person is feeling-participant's (raters) used a rating dial to provide continuous, real-time ratings of the valence and intensity of emotions being experienced by 4 strangers (targets). Targets were African American, Chinese American, European American, or Mexican American women who had been videotaped having a conversation with their dating partner in a previous study and had rated their own feelings during the interaction. Empathic accuracy was defined as the similarity between ratings of the videotaped interactions obtained from raters and targets. To assess emotional empathy--feeling what another person is feeling--we examined physiological linkage (similarity between raters' and targets' physiology). Our findings for empathic accuracy supported the cultural equivalence model, while those for physiological linkage provided some support for the cultural advantage model.

Relationship satisfaction and emotional language in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer disease patients and spousal caregivers

We studied the impact of 2 types of dementia on marital satisfaction and on the emotional language that spouses use during conflictive marital interactions. Fifteen frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and 16 Alzheimer disease (AD) patient-caregiver couples, and 21 control couples, discussed a relationship problem in a laboratory setting. Marital satisfaction was assessed through questionnaire, and emotion language was quantified using text analysis. FTD couples reported lower marital satisfaction than AD and control couples. During the interactions, FTD and AD caregivers used significantly more negative emotion words than their patient spouses (no spousal differences were found in control couples). FTD caregivers also used more negative words than AD caregivers and controls. We interpret these findings as reflecting challenges that the behavioral changes in FTD create for maintaining a healthy marital bond.

Exploring the basis for gender differences in the demand-withdraw pattern

During marital conflict, wives tend to demand and husbands tend to withdraw. These behaviors were historically thought to stem from essential differences between men and women. An alternative explanation implicates one form of power differences-wives desire more change and, therefore, demand; husbands desire less change and withdraw to maintain status quo. Studying same-sex as well as cross-sex couples enables an evaluation of both explanations. We examined demand-withdraw behaviors in 63 heterosexual, gay, and lesbian couples. The demand-withdraw pattern was seen regardless of type of couple. Further, for all couples, differences in the amount of change desired in partners during a conflict interaction predicted differences in demand and withdraw behaviors. These results offer further evidence that an often-observed difference in heterosexual relationships may result from social conventions that afford men greater power and women less power.