Uncertainty has been defined as a lack of information about an event and has been characterized as an aversive state that people are motivated to reduce. The authors propose an uncertainty intensification hypothesis, whereby uncertainty during an emotional event makes unpleasant events more unpleasant and pleasant events more pleasant. The authors hypothesized that this would happen even when u...

Previous studies investigated the effects of interpersonal relationships on facial expressions by comparing friends with strangers. This study examined facial expressions in the course of relationship formation. Twenty pairs of female strangers met once a week for three weeks watching film clips aimed to elicit a positive emotions. We measured smiles and gazes during and after presentation of t...

Autobiographical memory is intimately linked to the self. However, the relation between the self and involuntary recall has been understudied. Theoretically, the more relevant an event is to the self the more accessible the memory should be. In line with this prediction, the present study tested the hypothesis that self-relevance of a stressor modulates involuntary recall. Healthy student parti...

Previously, the authors found that during idiosyncratic emotional events (relived emotions, discussions about marital conflict), older European American adults demonstrated smaller changes in cardiovascular responding than their younger counterparts (R. W. Levenson, L. L. Carstensen, W. V. Friesen, & P. Ekman, 1991; R. W. Levenson, L. L. Carstensen, & J. M. Gottman, 1994). This study examined w...

Emotion regulation difficulties among nonclinical uncued panickers were examined in two studies. In Study 1, participants with a recent history of uncued panic attacks (n=91), compared to a nonpanic sample (n=91), reported significantly greater levels of experiential avoidance, lack of emotional acceptance, and lack of emotional clarity. In Study 2, a subset of uncued panickers and nonpanickers...

Jedda Online is an interactive self-guided tutorial in which students study film language through viewing moving clips from Charles Chauvel’s 1955 classic Australian film Jedda. The module is part of a series of tutorials, based on films taken from the Australian canon, which deal with aspects of Australia’s social and political history. It makes use of a new question and submission authoring a...

BACKGROUND How is emotion disrupted in bipolar disorder? Two studies are presented that adopt a multi-method approach to investigate emotion reactivity and emotion recovery in bipolar I disorder. METHODS Across both studies, individuals with inter-episode bipolar disorder and healthy controls were shown three emotion-eliciting films (neutral, happy, and sad) and experiential and physiological...

BACKGROUND Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is associated with a profound decline in social and emotional behavior; however, current understanding regarding the specific aspects of emotional functioning that are preserved and disrupted is limited. OBJECTIVE To assess preservation of function and deficits in two aspects of emotional processing (emotional reactivity and emotion recognit...