In general, sad music is thought to cause us to experience sadness, which is considered an unpleasant emotion. As a result, the question arises as to why we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness. One possible answer to this question is that we may actually feel positive emotions when we listen to sad music. This suggestion may appear to be counterintuitive; however, in this study, by dividin...

Three experiments examined the impact of incidental emotions on implicit intergroup evaluations. Experiment 1 demonstrated that for unknown social groups, two negative emotions that are broadly applicable to intergroup conflict (anger and disgust) both created implicit bias where none had existed before. However, for known groups about which perceivers had prior knowledge, emotions increased im...

OBJECTIVE To reconcile empirical inconsistencies in the relationship between emotionally-negative families and daughters' abnormal eating, we hypothesized a critical moderating variable: daughters' vulnerability to emotion contagion. METHOD A nonclinical sample of undergraduate females (N = 92) was recruited via an advertisement and completed self-report measures validated for assessing: fami...

Previous studies have demonstrated that 1 function of positive emotion is the undoing of physiological arousal produced by negative emotions. These studies have used single-subject paradigms, in which emotions were induced by films in college-age individuals. In the present study, we examined the relationship between physiological down-regulation and positive emotion in a sample of 149 middle-a...

In the context of picture viewing, consistent and specific relationships have been found between two emotion dimensions (valence and arousal) and self-report, physiological and overt behavioral responses. Relationships between stimulus content and the emotion-response profile can also be modulated by the formal properties of stimulus presentation such as screen size. The present experiment expl...

OBJECTIVES Studies have found that empathy is important in moral development and violence suppression, and emotion also affects empathy. However, the combinatorial effect of emotion and empathy on the processing of conflicts is not known. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 44 undergraduate students (23 in low-empathy group and 21 in high-empathy group) were enrolled in this study. They were sub...

When people search for targets within rapid streams of images, irrelevant emotional distractors*relative to neutral distractors*spontaneously demand attention and impair subsequent target detection, an effect that can be likened to an emotioninduced ‘‘attentional blink’’. But what happens when emotional distractors appear after a target has already come and gone? Here, we describe new findings ...

This study investigated the effects of voluntarily empathizing with a musical performer (i.e., cognitive empathy) on music-induced emotions and their underlying physiological activity. N = 56 participants watched video-clips of two operatic compositions performed in concerts, with low or high empathy instructions. Heart rate and heart rate variability, skin conductance level (SCL), and respirat...

Recent dual-process models of decision making have suggested that emotion plays an important role in decision making; however, the impact of incidental moods (i.e., emotions unrelated to the immediate situation) on decisions remains poorly explored. This question was investigated by inducing 2 basic emotional states (amusement or sadness) that were compared with a neutral-emotion control group....