Can young children report coherently on their emotions, and how do their reports contribute to our understanding of emotional development? Two-hundred six children ages 3 to 6 years participated in structured laboratory tasks designed to elicit a range of positive and negative emotions and indicated their emotional state following each task. Children's reports of their emotions meaningfully var...

Article history: Received 10 February 2009 Received in revised form 19 August 2009 Accepted 24 August 2009 Available online 26 September 2009 Although we know a great deal about the relationship between self-employment and the experience of positive emotions such as passion, excitement, happiness, satisfaction, and flow, there is some research that suggests that the self-employed may be more su...

Experiencing positive and negative emotions together (i.e., co-occurrence) has been described as a marker of positive adaptation during stress and a strength of socioemotional aging. Using data from daily diary (N = 2,022; ages 33-84) and ecological momentary assessment (N = 190; ages 20-80) studies, we evaluate the utility of a common operationalization of co-occurrence, the within-person corr...

Using an improved Sternberg working memory paradigm and affective pictures of different valences, this study investigates the emotional experience capability of 22 first-onset and untreated major depressive disorder patients (MDD) compared with the matching 22 healthy control participants (HC) and whether there is a moodcongruent working memory effect. We employed a general linear model analysi...

The valence-space metaphor posits that emotion concepts map onto vertical space such that positive concepts are in upper locations and negative in lower locations. Whilst previous studies have demonstrated this pattern for positive and negative emotions e.g. 'joy' and 'sadness', the spatial location of neutral emotions, e.g. 'surprise', has not been investigated, and little is known about the e...

Emotion differentiation (ED) refers to the precision with which people can identify and distinguish their emotions and has been associated with well-being in adults. This study investigated ED and its relation with emotional well-being (i.e. depressive symptoms, positivity and negativity intensity and propensity, implicit theories of emotions) in adolescents. We used an experience sampling meth...

The experience of mixed emotions increases with age. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that mixed emotions are associated with shifting time horizons. Theoretically, perceived constraints on future time increase appreciation for life, which, in turn, elicits positive emotions such as happiness. Yet, the very same temporal constraints heighten awareness that these positive experiences c...