A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts

A positive experience in response to a piece of music or a work of art (hence ‘music/art’) has been linked to health and wellbeing outcomes but can often be reported as indescribable (ineffable), creating challenges for research. What do these positive experiences feel like, beyond ‘positive’? How are loved works that evoke profoundly negative emotions explained? To address these questions, two simultaneously occurring classes of experience are proposed: the ‘emotion class’ of experience (ECE) and the positive ‘affect class’ of experience (PACE). ECE consists of conventional, discrete, and communicable emotions with a reasonably well-established lexicon. PACE relates to a more private world of prototypical aesthetic emotions and experiences investigated in positive psychology. After a review of the literature, this paper proposes that PACE consists of physical correlates (tears, racing heart…) and varied amounts of ‘hedonic tone’ (HT), which range from shallow, personal leanings (preference, liking, attraction, etc.) to deep ones that include awe, being-moved, thrills, and wonder. PACE is a separate, simultaneously activated class of experience to ECE. The approach resolves long-standing debates about powerful, positive experiences taking place during negative emotion evocation by music/art. A list of possible terms for describing PACE is proposed.

Regulating Obsessive-Like Thoughts: Comparison of Two Forms of Affective Labeling with Exposure Only in Participants with High Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms

OBJECTIVE

A growing body of research has shown that mere expression of affective words (affect labeling) can help dampen emotional responses, as reflected by these words. Previous studies revealed that affect labeling can reduce physiological anxiety responses of subjects suffering from anxiety disorders. In addition, multiple studies have shown that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) individuals have difficulty understanding their own emotions. However, the effect of affect labeling is unknown for people with high- OC symptoms.

METHOD

We used different forms of affect labeling (emotion generation vs. emotion categorization) to examine their effect on participants with high-OC symptoms, and to find if these forms can be learned and generalized. Using a mix-model design, we compared the effects of emotion generation labeling, emotion categorization labeling, and exposure alone during exposure to distressing obsessive thoughts, at two different times, using both physiological and self-reported fear measures.

RESULTS

At the first session, the emotion categorization group exhibited reduced fear physiological responses, compared to the other groups; however, it did not differ from the other groups in self-reported fear responses. At the second session, all groups revealed reduced physiological and self-reported fear responses, suggesting that affect labeling was neither learned nor generalized.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that affect labeling may help attenuate physiological anxiety responses in high-OC subjects. Furthermore, they suggest different effects for the different affect labeling forms. Future research exposing participants for longer durations may further elucidate the role of labeling in facilitating exposure effects.

Brain serotonin 4 receptor binding is inversely associated with verbal memory recall

BACKGROUND

We have previously identified an inverse relationship between cerebral serotonin 4 receptor (5-HT ₄R) binding and nonaffective episodic memory in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate in a novel sample if the association is related to affective components of memory, by examining the association between cerebral 5-HT ₄R binding and affective verbal memory recall.

METHODS

Twenty-four healthy volunteers were scanned with the 5-HT ₄R radioligand [¹¹C]SB207145 and positron emission tomography, and were tested with the Verbal Affective Memory Test-24. The association between 5-HT ₄R binding and affective verbal memory was evaluated using a linear latent variable structural equation model.

RESULTS

We observed a significant inverse association across all regions between 5-HT ₄R binding and affective verbal memory performances for positive (p = 5.5 × 10^-4) and neutral (p = .004) word recall, and an inverse but nonsignificant association for negative (p = .07) word recall. Differences in the associations with 5-HT ₄R binding between word categories (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral) did not reach statistical significance.

CONCLUSION

Our findings replicate our previous observation of a negative association between 5-HT ₄R binding and memory performance in an independent cohort and provide novel evidence linking 5-HT ₄R binding, as a biomarker for synaptic 5-HT levels, to the mnestic processing of positive and neutral word stimuli in healthy humans.

Association of affect with vertical position in L1 but not in L2 in unbalanced bilinguals

After judging the valence of the positive (e.g., happy) and the negative words (e.g., sad), the participants' response to the letter (q or p) was faster and slower, respectively, when the letter appeared at the upper end than at the lower end of the screen in Meier and Robinson's (2004) second experiment. To compare this metaphorical association of affect with vertical position in Chinese-English bilinguals' first language (L1) and second language (L2) (language), we conducted four experiments in an affective priming task. The targets were one set of positive or negative words (valence), which were shown vertically above or below the center of the screen (position). The primes, presented at the center of the screen, were affective words that were semantically related to the targets, affective words that were not semantically related to the targets, affective icon-pictures, and neutral strings in Experiment 1-4, respectively. In judging the targets' valence, the participants showed different patterns of interactions between language, valence, and position in reaction times across the experiments. We concluded that metaphorical association between affect and vertical position works in L1 but not in L2 for unbalanced bilinguals.