Recovery from emotional challenge and increased tolerance of negative affect are both hallmarks of mental health. Mindfulness training (MT) has been shown to facilitate these outcomes, yet little is known about its mechanisms of action. The present study employed functional MRI (fMRI) to compare neural reactivity to sadness provocation in participants completing 8 weeks of MT and waitlisted con...

This paper conducts a set of perceptual experiments together with an F0 acoustic analysis on emotional speech of Mandarin Chinese. Sixty utterances spoken by two actors in five basic emotions (i.e. happiness, fear, anger, sadness, and boredom) as well as in the neutral style served as stimuli. The perceptual experiments showed the following results: (1) For Mandarin Chinese, the rates of identi...

Attentional biases for sadness are integral to cognitive theories of depression, but do not emerge under all conditions. Some researchers have argued that depression is associated with delayed withdrawal from, but not facilitated initial allocation of attention toward, sadness. We compared two types of withdrawal processes in clinically depressed and non-depressed individuals: (1) withdrawal re...

We examined the Hurst exponent of heart rate time series and its relation with the subjective measures of valence and arousal in two groups of subjects. The electrocardiogram (ECG) and the subjective valence and arousal were measured during the administration of emotional film stimuli (happiness, sadness, anger and fear). The results showed that there is a difference in the Hurst exponent for t...

Within the debate on the structure of affect, a consensus began emerging in the last decade regarding the bipolarity of happiness–sadness. We argue that this consensus is premature. Focusing on the psychometrics of momentary affect, particularly happiness and sadness, and using a simulation study, a large-scale data set, and 2 experiments manipulating affect, we plot a map of affective space th...