The impact bias in self and others: Affective and empathic forecasting in individuals with social anxiety.

People tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of affect (i.e., impact bias) when making predictions about their own and others' responding, termed affective and empathic forecasting, respectively.

Individual differences in reappraisal effectiveness: the role of affective flexibility.

The present study examined the relation between a specific type of executive control and cognitive emotion regulation. The authors propose that successful reappraisal is related to "affective flexibility": The ability to flexibly attend to and disengage from emotional aspects of a situation or a stimulus. A new affective task-switching paradigm that required participants to shift between categorizing positive and negative affective pictures according to emotional or nonemotional features was used to assess individual differences in affective flexibility.

Flexibility is not always adaptive: affective flexibility and inflexibility predict rumination use in everyday life.

The present study examined whether cognitive flexibility in the processing of emotional material (i.e., affective flexibility) predicts the use of rumination in response to negative events in daily life.

Rumination moderates the effects of daily events on negative mood: results from a diary study.

Rumination describes a detrimental response to distress that involves repetitive thoughts about one's emotional state and its causes and potential consequences. Many experimental studies have shown that induced state rumination exacerbates the effect of laboratory stressors on negative affect. The current study examines whether use of rumination in response to specific real-life events moderates the association between unpleasant daily events and negative mood.

Implicit interpretation biases affect emotional vulnerability: a training study.

Cognitive theories of emotion propose that the interpretation of emotion-eliciting situations crucially shapes affective responses. Implicit or automatic biases in these interpretations may hinder emotion regulation and thereby increase risk for the onset and maintenance of psychological disorders. In this study, participants were randomly assigned to a positive or negative interpretation bias training using ambiguous social scenarios.

Flexible control in processing affective and non-affective material predicts individual differences in trait resilience.

Trait resilience is a stable personality characteristic that involves the self-reported ability to flexibly adapt to emotional events and situations. The present study examined cognitive processes that may explain individual differences in trait resilience. Participants completed self-report measures of trait resilience, cognitive flexibility and working memory capacity tasks, and a novel affective task-switching paradigm that assesses the ability to flexibly switch between processing the affective versus non-affective qualities of affective stimuli (i.

Mood regulation in depression: Differential effects of distraction and recall of happy memories on sad mood.

Recent research suggests that the recall of positive memories plays an important role in mood regulation. In this study, the authors examined the ability of currently depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants to regulate sad mood through the recall of positive memories or through distraction. Although improvement in mood was found for all participants in response to distraction, under instructions to recall positive memories, never-depressed participants' moods improved, whereas formerly depressed participants' sad moods remained unchanged.

Same situation--different emotions: how appraisals shape our emotions.

Appraisal theories of emotion hold that it is the way a person interprets a situation--rather than the situation itself--that gives rise to one emotion rather than another emotion (or no emotion at all). Unfortunately, most prior tests of this foundational hypothesis have simultaneously varied situations and appraisals, making an evaluation of this assumption difficult. In the present study, participants responded to a standardized laboratory situation with a variety of different emotions.

Emotions and appraisals: can you have one without the other?

In his commentary on M. Siemer and R. Reisenzein (2007), B.

The process of emotion inference.

Three experiments investigated the process of inferring emotions from brief descriptions of typical eliciting situations, using response time methodology. The initial hypothesis was that emotion inferences are mediated by inferred cognitive appraisals of the eliciting event (concerning e.g.

Mood-congruent cognitions constitute mood experience.

Three studies tested the assumption of a dispositional theory of moods that mood-related cognitions constitute essential parts of the phenomenal mood experience. In Study 1, after a hot- versus a cold-, sad-, or angry-mood induction, participants reported their momentary moods and their momentary mood-related cognitions. Self-reported moods and mood-related cognitions changed in a strictly parallel fashion in all mood induction groups.

Memory accessibility, mood regulation, and dysphoria: difficulties in repairing sad mood with happy memories?

Recent studies have suggested that mood-incongruency effects are due to mood-regulatory processes, in which people retrieve positive memories to repair negative moods. In Study 1, the authors investigated whether dysphoria influences the accessibility of autobiographical memories following a positive or a negative mood induction combined with subsequent rumination or distraction. The results showed a mood-repair effect for nondysphoric but not for dysphoric participants following rumination.

Assumptions and consequences of treating providers in therapy studies as fixed versus random effects: reply to Crits-Christoph, Tu, and Gallop (2003) and Serlin, Wampold, and Levin (2003).

In their comments on the authors' article, R. C. Serlin, B.

Power and measures of effect size in analysis of variance with fixed versus random nested factors.

Ignoring a nested factor can influence the validity of statistical decisions about treatment effectiveness. Previous discussions have centered on consequences of ignoring nested factors versus treating them as random factors on Type I errors and measures of effect size (B. E.