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Project

Time Dynamics of Emotions: Psychological mechanisms and neural correlates

Emotions are dynamic processes that unfold over time. One way to study their dynamic properties is through the intensity profile tracking approach, which consists in asking people to draw profiles reflecting how their emotion continuously changed during an emotional episode. The resulting intensity profiles can take many shapes that are found to primarily differ in emotion explosiveness (i.e., steepness of the emotion response at onset) and accumulation (i.e., intensification of the response after onset). The overall aim of this dissertation is to obtain a better understanding of the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the explosiveness and accumulation of negative affect.

For this purpose, we mainly collected the data on emotion dynamics in the lab (all Chapters) but also in daily life (Chapter 1, Study 2) using the intensity profile tracking approach. The resulting profiles were decomposed into explosiveness and accumulation using dimension reduction techniques. Subsequently, we identified psychological (Chapters 1 & 3) and neural (Chapter 2 & 4) mechanisms associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation.

In Chapter 1, we examined in two studies whether (trait and state) emotion regulation strategies are predictive of the degree of emotion explosiveness and accumulation. State rumination was found to be positively associated with both emotion explosiveness and accumulation (Study 2). Trait rumination (especially the brooding component) was found to be positively associated with emotion accumulation only (Study 1 & 2).

In Chapter 2, we examined whether emotion explosiveness and accumulation have distinctive neural correlates. This was found to be the case, with explosiveness being associated with regions known to be involved in self-referential processing (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex) and accumulation being associated with regions involved in sustained monitoring of visceral arousal (e.g., posterior insula).

In Chapter 3, we assessed whether manipulating perspective taking influences emotion explosiveness and accumulation, and whether depression severity moderated these effects. We found that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective decreased levels of both explosiveness and accumulation. The effect of perspective taking on emotion accumulation (but not explosiveness) was moderated by depression severity.

In Chapter 4, we replicated the distinctive neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation (as observed in Chapter 2), and the downregulating impact of adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective on both dynamic features at the level of self-report (as observed in Chapter 3). However, the type of perspective adopted did not seem to influence the level of activity in the neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation.

Together, these findings add to our understanding of the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Both dynamic features were shown to be governed by partially different neural mechanisms and were to some extent differentially affected by emotion regulation strategies.

Date:15 Sep 2014 →  28 Sep 2017
Keywords:emotion dynamics, affective neuroscience, emotion regulation
Disciplines:Applied psychology
Project type:PhD project