Models of stress and health suggest that emotions mediate the effects of stress on health; yet meta-analytic reviews have not confirmed these relationships. Categorizations of emotions along broad dimensions such as valence (e.g., positive and negative affect) may obscure important information about the effects of specific emotions on physiology. Within the context of the integrated specificity...

A better understanding of animal emotion is an important goal in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to animal welfare science. The conscious experience of emotion cannot be assessed directly, but neural, behavioural and physiological indicators of emotion can be measured. Researchers have used these measures to characterize how animals respond to situations assumed to induce discrete emotion...

Even though the use of actors is a popular method for researching the expression of emotion, little is known about the relation between acted and real emotions. To shed some light on this, we set up a novel experiment, based on the Velten mood induction procedure, during which participants have to utter pre-defined sentences with a strong emotional content. In one group of participants, real po...

92 As early as 1968, Velten proposed a method for inducing mood states in controlled laboratory situations, opening up a new chapter in basic research on human emotions. The procedure used by Velten consisted in drawing up three lists of 60 sentences in the first person (i.e., self-referential). Each list had a different emotional content: depressive, euphoric or neutral. There were three group...

Many studies have investigated the effect of waking experience, e.g., pre-sleep stimuli, stress, major life events, traumata, on dream content and have supported the so-called continuity hypothesis of dreaming, i. e. waking experience is reflected in dreams (Overviews: 1-3). On the other hand, systematic research on the effects of drams on subsequent waking life is scarce, although a considerab...

In this paper a computational model is presented that describes the role of emotion regulation to reduce the influences of negative events on mood. Emotion regulation is a process based on a set of regulatory strategies used by persons to down-regulate their negative emotions or to up-regulate their positive emotions. For a given situation the selection of specific regulation strategies is depe...

Although earlier studies have related positive emotions to attentional broadening, recent findings point out the complexity of this relation and show that these broadening effects interact with factors such as characteristics of the information that is presented. Besides stimuli characteristics, individual characteristics such as the presence of depressive symptoms could also influence the broa...

Positive and negative moods have been shown to increase likelihood estimates of future events matching these states in valence (e.g., E. J. Johnson & A. Tversky, 1983). In the present article, 4 studies provide evidence that this congruency bias (a) is not limited to valence but functions in an emotion-specific manner, (b) derives from the informational value of emotions, and (c) is not the ine...

Emotional responses to art have long been subject of debate, but only recently have they started to be investigated in affective science. The aim of this study was to compare perceptions regarding frequency of aesthetic emotions, contributing factors, and motivation which characterize the experiences of looking at painting and listening to music. Parallel surveys were filled in online by partic...