Reduced heart rate variability (HRV) is proposed to mediate the relation between depressive symptoms and cardiovascular health problems. Yet, several studies have found that in women depression is associated with higher HRV levels, whereas in men depression is associated with lower HRV levels. So far, these studies have only examined gender differences in HRV levels using a single assessment. T...

Objectives: While fears of negative or aversive emotions are linked to experiential avoidance and psychopathology, recent studies have also focused on the relation between psychopathology and fear of positive emotions. This study explores 1. which negative emotions of anger, anxiety and sadness on most feared and avoided and 2. the links between fears and avoidance of negative emotions, with fe...

OBJECTIVE The study addressed the hypothesis that adults reporting sexual abuse are more likely to exhibit a general tendency to ruminate on sadness. The relations between reported abuse, rumination on sadness, and dysphoria were also examined. METHOD Undergraduate students (101 women and 100 men) reported on childhood and adult sexual abuse and instances of intimidation, as well as completin...

We investigated whether sadness elicited by two different situations-loss of someone (loss) and failure to achieve a goal (failure)-had different physiological responses. Seventy-four participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (loss, failure, and neutral). Physiological responses were recorded during an imagery task that was designed to evoke sadness. The results of characte...

Studies of children with atypical emotional experience demonstrate that childhood exposure to high levels of hostility and threat biases emotion perception. This study investigates emotion processing, in former child soldiers and non-combatant civilians. All participants have experienced prolonged violence exposure during childhood. The study, carried out in Sierra Leone, aimed to examine the e...

BACKGROUND Neuroticism is a personality component frequently found in anxious and depressive psychiatric disorders. The influence of neuroticism on negative emotions could be due to its action on stimuli related to fear and sadness, but this remains debated. Our goal was thus to better understand the impact of neuroticism through verbal and physiological assessment in response to stimuli induci...

Several functional neuroimaging studies have been carried out in healthy subjects to investigate the neural correlates of sadness. Importantly, there is little consistency among the results of these studies. Hypothesizing that individual differences may account for the discrepancies among these investigations, we conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to identify the...

Social context plays an important role in everyday emotional interactions, and others' faces often provide contextual cues in social situations. Investigating this complex social process is a challenge that can be addressed with the use of computergenerated facial expressions. In the current research, we use synthesized facial expressions to investigate the influence of socioaffective inferenti...

This study examined neural responses in nine right-handed healthy individuals while they viewed mild and intense expressions of four emotions (fear, disgust, happiness, and sadness) contrasted with neutral faces in four event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments. Orthogonal polynomial trend analysis revealed a significant linear increase in the fusiform extrastriate cortica...