Emotional inertia, the resistance to change in feelings, is a central construct in emotion dynamics. However, standard inertia models rely on a simplified assumption of symmetry: They assume that the temporal carryover of affect is identical regardless of whether an individual is feeling better or worse than usual. This masks potentially critical individual differences, as theories of adaptive affective functioning propose rapid recovery from worsened affective states alongside sustained persistence of desirable affective states as hallmarks of healthy affect regulation. To capture individual differences in this asymmetry, we introduce Tilt, a curvilinear autoregressive parameter that models inertia not as a fixed constant but as a slope that varies depending on the individual's momentary deviation from baseline. Applying a Bayesian multilevel model to daily diary data collected in 2018-2019 (N = 485; 25 days), we examined Tilt in positive affect and explored its association with neuroticism as an illustrative example. Replicating established findings, neuroticism predicted lower mean levels and greater variability in positive affect. Neuroticism was unrelated to standard linear inertia but was significantly associated with Tilt. While the average participant exhibited a convex Tilt (high persistence during peaks, rapid recovery from troughs), individuals high in neuroticism showed a concave Tilt, a "dampening" pattern where positive deviations decayed rapidly while drops below baseline became entrenched. These findings suggest that modeling the state dependence of affective persistence reveals individual differences in asymmetric affective dynamics that linear models miss. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Loneliness, a perceived discrepancy between desired and actual social relationships, shifts cognition in ways that support heightened sensitivity to potential social threat. These cognitive biases are thought to perpetuate loneliness and subsequent long-term health risk. One such shift is an increased tendency to assume hostile intent behind others' ambiguous actions, referred to as a hostile attribution bias. While loneliness has been associated with increased hostile attribution biases, empirical studies have yet to assess whether loneliness directly causes increased hostile attributions. Here, we tested whether experimentally induced changes in momentary loneliness can shift hostile attribution biases by randomly assigning 142 undergraduate students (ages 18-29 years old) to one of three conditions: a loneliness induction (journaling about a lonely memory), a loneliness reduction (prosocial gratitude), or a control (description of morning routine) condition. As expected, loneliness increased after journaling and decreased after prosocial gratitude. In addition, baseline loneliness was associated with a bias toward hostile attributions. However, acute changes in loneliness did not produce corresponding changes in hostile attribution biases, and there was no interaction with baseline loneliness levels. These findings have implications for the design of loneliness interventions, suggesting that targeting momentary feelings of loneliness may have limited effects on the hostile attribution biases associated with feelings of loneliness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Parent-child emotion synchrony plays a critical role in children's emotional development, yet most existing research has been conducted in laboratory settings with limited ecological validity. This study drew on data collected between 2014 and 2018 and used daylong, naturalistic audio recordings and sentiment analysis to examine real-time verbalized emotion synchrony between preschool-aged children and both mothers and fathers during everyday interactions at home. Eighty-four families participated, with 1-min audio recordings captured every 10 min using wearable recording devices. Sentiment scores were derived from transcribed speech using Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner, a lexicon-based sentiment analysis tool, and used to compute momentary emotional valence for each family member. Multilevel models tested whether parent momentary emotional valence predicted child momentary emotional valence at the same moment and whether child temperament (negative emotionality, effortful control, and extraversion) moderated these associations. Results revealed that both mother-child and father-child dyads exhibited emotion synchrony when children expressed positive emotion but only for children with average or high levels of negative emotionality (mother-child) or extraversion (father-child). In negative emotion contexts, exploratory analyses indicated that emotion synchrony was observed only between fathers and children and only for children with low or average effortful control. Findings highlight how child temperament shapes emotion coregulation processes in naturalistic environments and underscore the need to consider parent gender, emotional context, and individual child characteristics in understanding emotional dynamics in families. The study also demonstrates the utility of naturalistic, audio-based approaches for capturing subtle affective processes as they unfold in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Research on emotion regulation has increasingly emphasized the flexible use of strategies in response to situational demands, highlighting the importance of strategy-situation fit. Despite its theoretical prominence, empirical evidence remains limited. In the present study, we examined whether individuals show context-sensitive preferences for distraction versus reappraisal as a function of negative affect intensity and whether such preferences are associated with greater well-being, reflecting strategy-situation fit. We reanalyzed 12 ambulatory assessment data sets (1,511 participants with 161,513 measurement occasions) collected from predominantly White samples including both student and community samples and used a coordinated data analysis approach and dynamic structural equation modeling. Results indicated a very small but statistically significant tendency for individuals to shift toward distraction relative to reappraisal as negative affect increased (β¯ = .02), consistent with context-sensitive strategy use. However, individual differences in this tendency were not predicted by baseline depressive symptoms nor were these differences associated with aggregated positive affect and negative affect in daily life (|β¯|s ≤ .03), providing no support for strategy-situation fit as operationalized here. These findings suggest that although individuals exhibit modest context-sensitive adjustments in strategy use, such adjustments may not reflect differences in mental health and may not translate into improved well-being in everyday life. We highlight methodological and conceptual challenges in capturing context sensitivity in naturalistic settings, discuss limitations of current operationalizations, and outline directions for future research to better assess emotion regulation flexibility in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Social trust is a key component to relationships between individuals and within communities. Failure to correctly choose to trust or not can have significant consequences in interpersonal relationships, employment, and more. While work has identified cognitive and affective processes relevant to trust, relatively less has examined the role of cognitive control during trust decisions and its interaction with affective processing. This study modifies an expectancy AX task to incorporate trusting behavior in two ways: first by establishing the trust component in a similar framework as AX variants and then by adding an emotional distractor during the paradigm. We conducted a between-subjects analysis of task performance on undergraduates (n = 262) in 2017-2018 to examine the efficacy of the new variant, the effect of an emotional distractor on task performance, and individual difference effects related to social trust. We found that the Trust-AX paradigm provided performance patterns consistent with proactive control of trust decisions. Adding a distractor decreased proactive control as the distractor increased in emotional salience. Last, individuals who had greater social distrust also performed worse on proactive control, suggesting a potential shared mechanism with cognitive control in trust decisions. The Trust-AX paradigm may be a useful measure to examine cognitive control during trust and provide insights into how "cold" cognitive processes interact with affective processes to influence trust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Are women more emotionally intelligent than men? Emotional intelligence (EI) is often colloquially ascribed to women, yet the extant empirical literature yields inconclusive results and EI theories are largely oblivious to gender as an explanatory dimension. To re-evaluate the literature, test key moderators, and develop stronger theory on EI, we examine whether and to what extent gender differences manifest in EI through a meta-analytic review of 1,279 articles comprised of 1,428 samples containing 609,278 participants drawn from published and unpublished work until December 31, 2023. The results suggest gender differences in general EI such that women appear to have higher EI on average, as well as more nuanced gender differences across specific emotional abilities, including some where there may be no difference. Women's advantage is stronger for other- than self-focused emotional abilities and varies by measurement type, with smaller differences in subjective than in performance-based assessments. Additionally, we find that contextual moderators, including leadership position, male-dominated industry, data collection year, participant age, and geographical region, are associated with the presence, magnitude, and direction of gender differences, suggesting that gender differences in EI vary across contexts. Overall, these findings show that women hold advantages in many emotional abilities, but that gender differences in EI are contingent on the target of emotional abilities, measurement type, and context, informing future research and theory building. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The quality of the mother-child bond is vital to children's socioemotional development. A mother's attitude toward her child might be especially important in this regard; however, assessing such attitudes is difficult given strong reporting biases in close relationships and especially mother-child relationships. Implicit attitudes-thought to reflect the summary of evaluative associations developed through personal experiences with a (close) other-may be one way to circumvent such biases. We investigated the link between mothers' implicit attitudes about her child and the quality of the mother-child bond, indexed by mothers' and their child's behavior during a dyadic interaction. Child sex (male/female) was also evaluated as the dynamics of mother-son and mother-daughter dyads can differ. Between 2012 and 2015, mother-child dyads (N = 217) were recruited from a longitudinal study; dyads were videotaped during a free-play interaction, and their behavior was coded for emotional availability (EA). Mothers completed the MyChild Implicit Association Test indexing their implicit attitudes toward their child. Maternal implicit attitudes were positively associated with mothers' EA, an effect driven by mother-son dyads; these effects held when controlling for child behavior, supporting the unique role of implicit attitudes in guiding mothers' EA. Regarding the child's EA (responsivity, inclusion), mother-son and mother-daughter dyads showed the opposite pattern: Maternal implicit attitudes were positively associated with sons' EA but negatively associated with daughters' EA. These findings highlight the importance of implicit attitudes in the mother-child relationship and are among the few to link implicit attitudes to the attitude target's behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotions are always expressed and perceived in context. Context can provide key information about the meaning of the emotional expression, such as cues regarding the expresser's intentions. We examined how contextually inferred intent (Study 1, N = 212) as well as explicitly stated intent (Study 2, N = 229) shape emotion perception (accuracy/bias), interpersonal closeness, emotional contagion, and emotional mimicry. A further goal was to assess whether mimicry and contagion are tightly coupled or can dissociate depending on how the expression is interpreted in context. In Study 1, adolescent avatars expressed happiness or sadness in scenarios wherein the context suggested that the expression was either normative (norm consistent) or nonnormative (norm challenging). In Study 2, videos of adult avatars in wedding/funeral scenes were paired with benevolent versus malicious intent captions that were explicitly normative or nonnormative. Across studies, nonnormative, ill-intentioned expressions were evaluated more negatively, reduced closeness, altered emotion attributions, elicited negative emotional reactions, and reduced contagion (especially for nonnormative/malicious smiles). Mimicry was highly selective such that it robustly occurred only for well-intentioned, normative smiles. Overall, the pattern supports a dual-path account in which mimicry and contagion are partly separable rather than tightly coupled. Specifically, both mimicry and contagion varied with how observers interpret the expresser's intent. However, mimicry, which is a visible response, was additionally constrained by the social cost of public alignment. Our samples (collected in 2023 and 2024) consisted primarily of female, university-educated participants from a Western cultural context; findings should be interpreted with this limitation in mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In our increasingly digital world, understanding how negative online social experiences shape the value of social opportunities is critical. We examined whether social rejection alters individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for hypothetical social versus nonsocial experiences. In a two-part preregistered experiment (N = 98), participants uploaded Instagram photos and completed a simulated social media task in which they received randomized positive and negative feedback on their photos from anonymous peers. During the task, participants also made 100 decisions in which they could hypothetically "purchase" personally meaningful social and nonsocial activities. Participants preferred social experiences overall but, following social rejection, spent significantly less of an endowment on social options. Exploratory analyses revealed that individual differences in social connectedness and reward sensitivity modulated sensitivity to the relative cost of social experiences. These findings suggest that rejection does not reduce the underlying value of social connection but influences choice by increasing sensitivity to emotional and contextual factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Pictures depicting naturalistic scenes are widely used in studies of human emotion. However, the practical use of affective pictures is limited by several factors, including the difficulty of obtaining content-diverse, high-quality, openly accessible, and standardized stimuli that are necessary for specific research questions. The use of artificially generated (AI) pictures could address this limitation, but it is unclear if AI-generated pictures evoke reliable emotional responses. The present study sought to address these challenges by comparing emotional responses to AI-generated pictures with responses to original, standardized pictures. In two iterations of the study, standardized pictures containing pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant content were selected from the International Affective Picture System and other sources. Then, a matched AI counterpart was created for each original picture using generative deep neural networks. A total of 109 participants viewed the picture sets, while pupil diameter and electroencephalography data were recorded. Evaluative ratings of hedonic valence and emotional arousal were also collected. For both AI and original exemplars, pictures depicting emotional content elicited stronger responses than neutral content for ratings and electroencephalography-derived variables, with weaker effect sizes for the AI-generated pictures. Furthermore, picture-level analyses found that ratings and electroencephalography measures were strongly correlated between matched AI and original pictures. Pupil data showed the expected content effects in the second iteration of the study but not in the first iteration. Together, this initial study suggests that AI-generated picture sets can effectively elicit well-established self-reported affect and physiological responses, presenting a promising avenue for future studies of human emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Alexithymia, difficulty identifying and describing feelings, is associated with posttraumatic stress symptomology, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We tested whether alexithymia's regulatory effects operate through disrupted emotion regulation monitoring, the capacity to accurately evaluate whether regulation has succeeded, or broader interoceptive deficits that compromise access to bodily emotional signals. Trauma-exposed participants (N = 49) completed baseline measures of alexithymia, posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, anxiety, and interoceptive awareness, followed by three waves of ecological momentary assessment. At each wave, participants received five daily prompts for 5 consecutive days across 3 months (2,420 observations), reporting emotional clarity, perceived regulation success, body connection, and response-focused strategies (rumination, emotional hiding, pretending). Lagged models showed that among individuals high in alexithymia, higher perceived regulation success paradoxically predicted lower next-assessment emotional clarity, and greater emotional hiding and perceived success predicted worsening posttraumatic stress symptoms over 3 months. Interoceptive findings were mixed: Emotional awareness predicted better outcomes at the person level, but momentary body connection showed inconsistent associations. These findings reveal a paradoxical pattern in which subjective impressions of regulatory success precede worsening downstream emotional outcomes among individuals high in alexithymia. This pattern is consistent with a disrupted regulatory monitoring account, although whether it reflects miscalibrated evaluation, divergent regulatory goals, or systematic reporting biases cannot be determined from self-report alone and warrants replication in larger samples with objective indicators of emotional change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion theories should explain when and how emotions co-occur. Investigating emotion co-occurrence, Lange and Zickfeld (2023) found support for the network theory of emotions. This theory suggests that emotions co-occur because the networks of interacting components that represent emotions partly overlap. However, Lange and Zickfeld's evidence is limited to self-reports and between-person analyses. We substantially extended their work by applying between- and within-person network analytic tools to self-report, physiological (i.e., heart rate, respiration rate, skin conductance, goosebumps), and facial expression data of awe and fear. We compared five parsimonious, formalized theories of emotion co-occurrence derived from distinct emotion, network, and dimensional approaches to emotions. Consistent with Lange and Zickfeld's findings, between-person analyses showed that the network theory best explains the co-occurrence of awe and fear. In contrast, the within-person analyses did not allow definitive conclusions regarding the competing theories. We discuss the utility of theory formalization and highlight the need for the collection of within-person, multimodal emotion data for advancing research on emotion co-occurrence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Drawing on the robust literature on the benefits of gratitude, we present two preregistered studies demonstrating the advantages of expressing gratitude in the context of high-quality relationships-namely, gratitude for people who foster feelings of being cherished, protected, or accepted (i.e., safe haven gratitude). In a longitudinal experiment conducted in 2023 (N = 485), expressing gratitude for safe haven relationships and gratitude for gifts predicted immediate improvements in positive emotions and perceived partner responsiveness, along with reductions in negative emotions, relative to control, which predicted greater well-being and relationship quality 1 week later. Safe haven gratitude also predicted greater perceived partner responsiveness than gift gratitude, suggesting a unique mechanism differentiating this form of gratitude expression. Second, in a 2 (gratitude target: safe haven, gift) × 3 (gratitude expression: safe haven gratitude, gift gratitude, control) longitudinal experiment (N = 755) conducted in 2023-2024, we found that prompting people to consider a safe haven target led them to choose someone they perceived as more responsive than someone who gave them a gift. Further, when expressed to a safe haven target, both forms of gratitude expression were similarly beneficial; however, when expressed to a general target, focusing on the ways the person made participants feel cherished, protected, or accepted led to even greater feelings of gratitude than gift gratitude expression or control, which in turn predicted well-being and relationship quality 1 week later. Taken together, these findings highlight the well-being benefits of expressing gratitude for high-quality relationships and responsive behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Parents' daily experience of childcare has garnered considerable attention following Kahneman et al.'s (2004) finding that childcare ranked among the least enjoyable daily activities. Subsequent studies have generally found that fathers report more positive valence during childcare compared to mothers. Here, we used experience sampling to examine daily experiences of first-time parents in Denmark between 2022 and 2024, where parental leave policies aim to promote involvement of fathers in infant care. Parents responded to 7 days of prompts during maternity and paternity leave, assessing valence (0-100 scale), sleepiness (Karolinska Sleepiness Scale), and current activities, including direct infant care, indirect care, and play (N = 227). Data were analyzed using Bayesian multilevel beta regression models. We found no credible evidence for the previously documented father advantage in valence during childcare. Mothers showed less positive valence during caregiving activities relative to other activities; effects for fathers were uncertain, and valence patterns differed across maternity and paternity leave. Sleepiness was strongly associated with less positive valence for both parents, with mothers showing steeper declines compared to fathers. Sleepiness moderated activity-valence associations in gender-specific ways: attenuating negative associations with direct care for mothers while reducing positive associations with play for fathers. In a country where paternal caregiving is supported through paid leave policies, mothers and fathers report largely similar valence patterns during infant care. The robust association between sleepiness and less positive valence points to sleep disruption as impacting parental emotion experiences, with mothers showing more vulnerability to its negative effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Negative emotion differentiation, the tendency to represent negative emotional experiences with specificity, is associated with more adaptive emotional functioning. Although typically operationalized as an individual difference, negative emotion differentiation can also be conceptualized as a momentary process of structuring affective experience. Distinguishing among semantically related negative emotions requires selectively endorsing some emotion categories while inhibiting others, thereby increasing conceptual precision and constraining affective interpretations. If emotional intensity is shaped in part by how affective states are represented, experimentally engaging differentiation may alter ongoing negative affect. Using a novel within-subjects experimental paradigm, across three studies we investigated whether differentiating emotions influences negative affect in response to brief video clips. Across two studies (Experiment 1, n = 79 undergraduates, and Experiment 2, n = 106 community adults, collected in 2024), there was a large effect of differentiating emotions (vs. "look" control) on negative affect (Cohen's ds = -0.698, -0.852). Although this effect did not replicate in a shorter version of the task (Experiment 3, n = 52 undergraduates), an internal meta-analysis across all three experiments revealed a significant overall effect, indicating that engaging in differentiation reliably attenuated negative affect on average. Although the comparison condition does not isolate differentiation from all forms of regulatory engagement, the results are consistent with the possibility that increasing representational specificity may function as an implicitly regulatory process, although primarily White and female samples limit generalizability. This open-source paradigm facilitates further research to elucidate the process of differentiating emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).