Sequential effects of reappraisal and rumination on anger during recall of an anger-provoking event.

In everyday life, people often combine strategies to regulate their emotions. However, to date, most research has investigated emotion regulation strategies as if they occur independently from one another. The current study aims to better understand the sequential interplay between strategies by investigating how reappraisal and rumination interact to affect anger experience.

Why I don't always know what I'm feeling: The role of stress in within-person fluctuations in emotion differentiation.

Emotion differentiation, the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between emotional states, has mainly been studied as a trait. In this research, we examine within-person fluctuations in emotion differentiation and hypothesize that stress is a central factor in predicting these fluctuations. We predict that experiencing stress will result in lower levels of emotion differentiation.

Revisiting Depression Contagion as a Mediator of the Relation Between Depression and Rejection: A Speed-Dating Study.

Interpersonal theories of depression postulate that depressed individuals' experience of social isolation is attributable, in part, to their tendency to behave in ways that elicit rejection from others. Depression contagion has been implicated as a factor that may account for the rejection of depressed individuals. The current study revisits this hypothesis using a controlled, but realistically motivated setting: speed-dating.

Assessing Temporal Emotion Dynamics Using Networks.

Multivariate psychological processes have recently been studied, visualized, and analyzed as networks. In this network approach, psychological constructs are represented as complex systems of interacting components. In addition to insightful visualization of dynamics, a network perspective leads to a new way of thinking about the nature of psychological phenomena by offering new tools for studying dynamical processes in psychology.

Perceived social pressure not to experience negative emotion is linked to selective attention for negative information.

Social norms and values may be important predictors of how people engage with and regulate their negative emotional experiences. Previous research has shown that social expectancies (the perceived social pressure not to feel negative emotion (NE)) exacerbate feelings of sadness. In the current research, we examined whether social expectancies may be linked to how people process emotional information.

Affective updating ability and stressful events interact to prospectively predict increases in depressive symptoms over time.

Previous research has emphasized the critical role of negative cognitions as a vulnerability factor in predicting depressive symptoms. Here, the authors argue that processes that function to maintain negative cognitions may serve as a catalyst for the development of depressive symptoms in the context of negative circumstances, and they suggest that poor updating of affective information in working memory is 1 such process. Thus, they posit that under high levels of stress, individuals with poor affective updating are hindered in changing the negative content in working memory associated with stressful events and, therefore, are more likely to experience increased depressive symptoms over time.

Updating in working memory predicts greater emotion reactivity to and facilitated recovery from negative emotion-eliciting stimuli.

That emotions change in response to emotion-eliciting events is a natural part of human life. However, it is equally important for emotions to return to baseline once the emotion-eliciting events have passed. This suggests that the ability to emotionally react to and recover from emotion-eliciting events is critical for healthy psychological functioning.

Emotional inertia and external events: The roles of exposure, reactivity, and recovery.

Increased moment-to-moment predictability, or inertia, of negative affect has been identified as an important dynamic marker of psychological maladjustment, and increased vulnerability to depression in particular. However, little is known about the processes underlying emotional inertia. The current article examines how the emotional context, and people's responses to it, are related to emotional inertia.

Affect dynamics in relation to depressive symptoms: variable, unstable or inert?

Depression not only involves disturbances in prevailing affect, but also in how affect fluctuates over time. Yet, precisely which patterns of affect dynamics are associated with depressive symptoms remains unclear; depression has been linked with increased affective variability and instability, but also with greater resistance to affective change (inertia). In this paper, we argue that these paradoxical findings stem from a number of neglected methodological/analytical factors, which we address using a novel paradigm and analytic approach.

The cognitive building blocks of emotion regulation: ability to update working memory moderates the efficacy of rumination and reappraisal on emotion.

The ability to regulate emotions is a critical component of healthy emotional functioning. Therefore, it is important to determine factors that contribute to the efficacy of emotion regulation. The present article examined whether the ability to update emotional information in working memory is a predictor of the efficacy of rumination and reappraisal on affective experience both at the trait level (Study 1) and in daily life (Study 2).

A diffusion model account of the relationship between the emotional flanker task and rumination and depression.

Although there exists a consensus that depression is characterized by preferential processing of negative information, empirical findings to support the association between depression and rumination on the one hand and selective attention for negative stimuli on the other hand have been elusive. We argue that one of the reasons for the inconsistent findings may be the use of aggregate measures of response times and accuracies to measure attentional bias. Diffusion model analysis allows to partial out the information processing component from other components that comprise the decision-making process.

Executive well-being: updating of positive stimuli in working memory is associated with subjective well-being.

A growing literature shows that the ability to control affective information in working memory (WM) plays an important role in emotional functioning. Whereas most studies have focused on executive processes relating to emotion dysregulation and mood disorders, few, if any, have looked at such processes in association with happiness. In this study, we examined whether the ability to update positive and negative stimuli in WM (assessed with an affective n-back task) is related to the cognitive and affective components of subjective well-being.

Interference resolution moderates the impact of rumination and reappraisal on affective experiences in daily life.

Research has shown that cognitive control processes play a central role in emotion regulation. While most research has examined whether individual differences in such processes are related to the use of these strategies, a crucial next step involves examining whether such differences influence their impact on people's feelings, especially in normal daily life. The present study examined whether impairments in cognitive control (measured using an affective interference resolution task) moderate the impact of using rumination and reappraisal on affective experiences in everyday life (assessed using experience sampling methods).

The dynamic interplay between emotions in daily life: augmentation, blunting, and the role of appraisal overlap.

Our emotions don't have lives of their own, but mutually influence each other across time. Augmentation and blunting occur when experience of a current emotion increases or decreases the experience of another, subsequent emotion, and play a role in many everyday phenomena. In this study, we investigated patterns of augmentation and blunting between the experience of anger, sadness, relaxation, and happiness in daily life.

The cognitive underpinnings of emerging mathematical skills: executive functioning, patterns, numeracy, and arithmetic.

Background: Exposure to mathematical pattern tasks is often deemed important for developing children's algebraic thinking skills. Yet, there is a dearth of evidence on the cognitive underpinnings of pattern tasks and how early competencies on these tasks are related to later development.

Aims: We examined the domain-specific and domain-general determinants of performances on pattern tasks by using (a) a standardized test of numerical and arithmetic proficiency and (b) measures of executive functioning, respectively.