2015 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Emotion Pre
Transcrição
2015 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Emotion Pre
2015 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Emotion Pre-conference Long Beach, CA Poster Abstracts 1. The Relationship Between Fitness-Related Pride and Positive Affect: A Serial Mediation Analysis Jenna D. Gilchrist, Diane E. Mack, & Catherine M. Sabiston University of Toronto This study examined the relationship between fitness-related pride and positive affect in a physically active sample using Organismic Integration Theory (OIT; Deci & Ryan, 2002) as the guiding framework. The regulations housed within OIT were hypothesized to act as serial mediators between pride and positive affect over a 4-week period. Young adults (N = 119; Mage = 20.34; SDage = 1.48) completed self-report instruments of fitness-related pride, behavioural regulations for exercise, and positive affect. Support for the relative autonomy of the regulations at Time 1 resulting from pride was found to increase participants’ relative autonomy at Time 2 which in turn produced greater positive affect. These results are in line Fredrickson (2001) whereby positive emotions promote well-being not simply in the present moment, but over time through enabling various thought-action tendencies that build enduring personal resources. 2. Feeling Bad when Should be Feeling Good: Heightened Negative Emotions in Positive Contexts among Individuals with a History of Non-suicidal Self-injury Jaya Roy, Emily A.K. Finney, & Tchiki S. Davis University of California – Berkeley Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is defined as the deliberate act of inflicting harm on one’s body in absence of suicidal intent. This behavior, although common, is not very well understood. Theories suggest that NSSI is associated with amplified negative emotions during negative situations. To build on and extend this research, we conducted four studies in which we showed that individuals with a prior history of NSSI also experience greater negative emotions during positive situations. The aim of our current study is to understand why individuals with a history of NSSI display greater negative emotions in positive situations. We hypothesized that negative self-beliefs might be responsible for this relationship. In order to test our hypothesis, we measured negative self-beliefs and negative emotions in response to a positive film clip in a community sample. To assess whether individuals with a history of NSSI demonstrate heightened negative emotions in a positive situation compared to controls, and if negative self-beliefs mediate this relationship, we conducted GLMs. Our findings indicate that the NSSI group displayed heightened negative emotions in response to the positive film clip, compared to the control group, but this relationship was no longer significant when accounting for negative self-beliefs. This study provides new directions in research and treatment development by providing an understanding why individuals who engage in NSSI experience heightened negative emotions in positive situations. 3. A Neural Model of Self-Control Failure Due to Negative Emotion David S. Chester, Richard Milich, Donald R. Lynam, David K. Powell, Anders H. Andersen, Ruth A. Baer, & C. Nathan DeWall University of Kentucky The inhibition of prepotent responses is the cornerstone of effective self-regulation. However, inhibitory selfregulation becomes impaired under conditions of negative affect. To assess the neural underpinnings of this effect, we recruited 41 individuals who tended to respond to negative affect with impulsivity (i.e., high in negative urgency) and 39 individuals who did not. Both groups completed an inhibitory task under negative, neutral, and positive affective states while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Under conditions of negative affect alone, participants high in negative urgency showed greater bilateral recruitment of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior insula than their less negatively urgent counterparts. Greater recruitment of these regions was associated with impaired inhibition. Among these regions, right anterior insula activity mediated the effect of negative urgency on greater alcohol use for both the year prior to the scan and the month afterwards. These findings suggest that individuals who tend to experience inhibitory failure under negative affect do so because of an excessive recruitment of brain regions implicated in inhibition and error awareness. This tendency may put individuals at risk for real-world negative outcomes such as substance abuse. 4. Positive Empathy Promotes Generosity Rucha Makati, Brittany Torrez, Sylvia Morelli, & Jamil Zaki Stanford University Past research suggests that individuals often behave generously because they empathize with and hope to alleviate others’ distress. However, it’s also possible that individuals may act generously because they anticipate sharing in the recipient’s joy (i.e., positive empathy). Therefore, we investigated if witnessing a recipient's positive emotional reaction increases prosociality between strangers. In the positive feedback condition participants saw their partner’s (a confederate's) positive reaction after making a generous choice. In the anonymous condition, participants could not see their partner, but knew their partner would still be affected by the choices. We tested different types of allocations to see if different monetary amounts can change the generosity. Initial results indicate that participants are more generous when the total monetary amount was smaller than if allocations involved larger monetary amounts. Each choice would involve two types of allocations: 1) keeping more money for themselves (i.e. not generous) or (2) giving more money to the other person (i.e., generous). Initial results suggest that participants make more generous allocations in the positive feedback condition compared to the anonymous condition. This suggests that positive empathy encourages generosity. 5. Social Power Leads to a Discordance Between Neural and Self-reported Responses Jennifer M. Perry,1 Petra C. Schmid,2 Katharina Koch,3 & David M. Amodio2 1. Tufts University, 2. New York University, 3. Sapienza University of Rome Social power is often thought to decrease empathy for others, yet questions remain regarding the nature of this effect: are powerful people insensitive to others’ suffering? Or is there a disconnect between their sensitivity to suffering and their expression of empathy? We examined these questions by testing the effect of power on subjects’ sensitivity to others’ pain, as measured by self-report and neural responses. Participants’ feelings of power were manipulated with a combination of power posing (expansive vs. restricted posture) and imagination of being in highvs. low-power situations. Participants then viewed photographs of hands and feet in painful and non-painful situations while EEG was recorded. For each image, participants rated their personal distress, and amplitudes of the N2 event-related potential, an index of anterior cingulate activity, were assessed. Participants then viewed the stimuli again, rating the pain experienced by the pictured individuals. Results revealed no effect of power on ratings of self-distress or other-pain, or on N2 responses to painful stimuli. However, for low-power subjects, greater N2 responses to painful stimuli significantly predicted greater pain ratings, suggesting their sensitivity to pain guided their empathic response. This link was not found in high-power participants, suggesting that despite sensitivity to others’ pain, their expressions of empathy may be driven by other processes. These findings suggest a more complex relationship between power and empathy that may reflect high-power individuals’ strategic responses rather than an inability to experience empathy. 6. Interactions with the Homeless and Emotions Experienced: The Role of Mental Contamination Rosemond Travis, Thomas A. Fergus, & Wade C. Rowatt Baylor University Mental contamination is a contamination fear that can occur without direct physical contact with a contaminant. It is a phenomenon characterized by feeling dirty or contaminated in a non-physical way, but is associated with negative outcomes and emotions such as disgust. Because prejudice toward certain groups is associated with disgust, the purpose of this experiment was to examine the role of mental contamination in regard to emotions toward homeless individuals. This study examined negative emotions and empathetic emotions following an imagined contact with an individual who was either homeless or not homeless. Participants were community adults recruited through the internet (N = 119). The results suggest that trait mental contamination has a moderating effect on the relationship between the status of the character in the imagined contact scenario and emotions following the imagined contact. When trait mental contamination was high, there was a significant increase of negative emotions experienced when the imagined contact scenario involved a homeless man. When trait mental contamination was low, no group difference was found in negative emotion; however, empathy significantly increased when the man was homeless and trait mental contamination was low. When mental contamination was high, there was no group difference in empathetic emotions. The interaction was robust to the effects of trait neuroticism and physical cleanliness of the man in the scenario. These results indicate that individual differences in mental contamination could influence the types of emotions felt toward marginalized groups and the possible resulting outcomes. Application for these results are explored. 7. Brain Bases of Social Affective Experience: A Meta-analysis of Human Neuroimaging Studies Michael H. Parrish, Jeffrey A. Brooks, Holly Shablack, & Kristen A. Lindquist University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Human beings are social animals. It thus stands to reason that affective experiences that occur in social contexts are particularly evocative to humans. Although recent meta-analyses explored the neural basis of human affect and emotion (Kober et al. 2008; Lindquist et al. 2012; Vytal & Hamann, 2009), no meta-analytic research to date has systematically explored how the brain responds during social v. non-social affective experiences. To address this question, we performed a meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature using 86 studies (182 contrasts) of affect and emotion published between 1992 and 2013. We used the Multivel Kernel Density Analysis to assess whether there are relative differences in neural activity during affective experiences in response to social stimuli (including other people) versus non-social stimuli (not including other people). We found more consistent activation in the left anterior insula (AI) during social v. non-social affective experiences. A second analysis revealed that this effect is driven by the experience of unpleasant affect in social contexts. Unpleasant, social experiences resulted in consistent activity in the AI, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), caudate, pre-SMA and amygdala; there were no consistent activations associated with pleasant, social experiences, however. The brain areas observed comprise the “salience network” that is implicated in attention (Corbetta & Shulman, 2008) and highly arousing affective experiences (Seeley et al. 2007; Touroutoglou et al. 2011). Our findings thus suggest that social contexts may tune the experience of affect, resulting in greater vigilance and more arousal. 8. Empathy Avoidance: Individual Differences and Effects on prosocial behavior Erika Weisz & Jamil Zaki Stanford University Empathy is a social bridge that facilitates interpersonal interaction, and yet sometimes people don’t want to experience it. In two studies, we examined factors that influenced people’s decisions to experience or avoid empathy and subsequent prosocial behavior. In study 1, participants were given a 50-cent bonus and told that they could watch a neutral video and donate a minimum of 10 cents to a charity (avoid group), or watch an emotionally evocative video and choose how much to donate to charity (approach group). 37% of participants chose to sacrifice part of their bonus and avoid empathy. Participants in the avoid group donated significantly more money than participants in the empathize group. Among avoid group participants, those with high trait personal distress donated more than those with low trait personal distress. In another version of the paradigm, we framed the payment accompanying the neutral video as a forfeit of 10 cents instead of a donation of 10 cents, and found that participants who avoided empathy still donated more money to charity than those who experienced empathy. In study 2 participants were given the same two options, but this time half of the participants watched their video of choice and half were forced to watch the other video. When forced to watch the emotionally evocative video, participants who tried to avoid empathy donated significantly more than participants who voluntarily watched the emotionally evocative video. These studies provide novel insights about people’s empathic tendencies and the factors that influence prosocial behavior. 9. P300 Amplitude Predicts Intuitive Prosociality towards Empathized Targets Ryan W. Carlson, Lara B. Aknin, Patrick L. Carolan, & Mario Liotti Simon Fraser University Recent research suggests that making quick, intuitive decisions often leads to greater cooperation than making slow, reflective ones (Rand, Greene, & Nowak, 2012). But in what contexts is this most likely to occur? One potential situation is when our decision impacts an empathized target (de Waal, 2008). Here, we explored this possibility by using event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine rapid neural responses during intuitive and reflective prosocial decisions. Specifically, we tested whether the P300 - an ERP wave that is reflexively enhanced when viewing emotional and motivational stimuli - would be influenced by target empathy and predict intuitive prosociality. Participants (N = 22) received $20 and were asked to accept or reject donation offers either quickly (intuitively, <5 s) or slowly (reflectively, >5 s). The recipients of these donations were charities that participants had previously labelled as high or low empathy targets. We found that significantly larger P300 amplitude occurred during donation decisions affecting high-empathy (vs. low-empathy) targets; however this was only true when decisions were intuitive, not reflective. Interestingly, increased P300 amplitude also predicted subjects’ subsequent decisions to accept (vs. reject) offers to high-empathy targets. Together, these findings suggest that P300 responses may signal intuitive prosocial motivation and predict engagement in prosocial behavior. This work offers novel insight into how prosocial behaviors, such as helping and giving, may arise intuitively toward targets we care for. 10. Encouraging Cognitive Reappraisal in Expressive Writing Has Immediate and Longer-term Psychological Benefits in Daily Life Victoria A. Floerke, Maryna Raskin, Lara Vujovic, & Heather L. Urry Tufts University Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is effective at regulating emotions in laboratory studies. And yet, evidence suggests that people do not often use CR in daily life. In the present study, we used expressive writing as a medium through which to encourage CR use with the idea that doing so might bring psychological benefits. Participants wrote for several minutes about a stressful event on consecutive days (1 to 6) outside the laboratory. By random assignment, half of them did CR Writing (CRW; n = 101) in which they were encouraged to rethink the day’s stressful event so they felt less stressed; the other half did expressive writing (EW; n = 90) in which they simply wrote about their thoughts and feelings about the day’s stressful event. Participants rated current negative emotion before and after writing and depressive symptoms on days 1 and 7. As hypothesized, the CRW group used CR more in their writing (assessed via blind coding) and experienced less negative emotion after writing each day compared to the EW group. Although depressive symptoms on day 7 were similar in the CRW and EW groups, there was a significant indirect effect of group such that, relative to the EW group, the CRW group reported less negative emotion after writing, which was in turn associated with lower depressive symptoms at the end of the week. Overall, these findings indicate that one can encourage the use of CR in expressive writing in daily life and doing so confers immediate and longer-term psychological benefits. / Keywords: cognitive reappraisal, stress, daily writing 11. Are Relationships Good for Regulation? Emotion Regulation and Relationship Status among Patients with Seizure Disorders Victoria Bryant, Lori Hermosillo, Nicole Roberts, & Mary Burleson Arizona State University Past research shows the importance of emotion regulation and close partner relationships for mental and physical health. In the present study we examined reports of positive and negative emotional experience, reported difficulties in emotion regulation, and relationship status among 67 individuals suffering from seizure disorders. Seizure disorders such as epilepsy are often associated with disruptions in emotion and emotion regulation. The ways in which partner relationships may mitigate or exacerbate these emotional difficulties, however, is relatively understudied. We hypothesized that participants who were married or cohabiting would report fewer emotion regulation difficulties, which in turn would be associated with a lesser impact of seizures on overall functioning, than unmarried participants (not married nor in a committed relationship). Across the sample, greater reported emotion regulation difficulties (per the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale) were associated with a greater reported impact of seizures in multiple domains of functioning. Contrary to our predictions, the impact of seizures on one’s life was worse for married than unmarried participants. Further, greater reported emotion regulation difficulties, particularly a lack of emotional acceptance, were associated with a greater negative impact of seizures on one’s life only for married/cohabiting participants. These findings suggest that difficulties regulating emotions (though not general positive and negative affective experience) are associated with a more widespread impact of seizures, and that, paradoxically, such difficulties may be more evident and therefore more problematic among those who are in a committed partner relationship. Findings may be applicable to other neurological or mental health conditions. 12. Promoting Emotion Regulation through Affectionate Touch Laura Phrasavath, Mary H. Burleson, & Nicole A. Roberts Arizona State University Affectionate touch may serve as a mechanism through which individuals regulate their own and others’ emotions. We examined both the frequency and desire for affectionate touch in a multi-ethnic college student sample. For European American women (n=411), greater frequency of affectionate touch with close persons was associated with reports of more successful negative mood regulation, lower levels of perceived stress, and lower levels of depressive symptoms; touch in general (not necessarily affectionate touch with close persons) was associated with more successful negative mood regulation, yet was not associated with reports of stress or depression. For European American men (n = 163), greater frequency of touch in general and affectionate touch with close persons in particular were associated with lower reported levels of emotion regulation difficulties. In addition, women reporting greater emotion regulation difficulties, perceived stress, depressive symptoms, and trait hostility, and men reporting greater emotion regulation difficulties and depressive symptoms, reported a greater desire for affectionate touch. These patterns were largely replicated among Mexican/Mexican American participants (129 women, 44 men), whose culture is considered to show greater acceptability and encouragement of touch. Findings are consistent with previous research and theories suggesting that affectionate touch serves an emotion regulatory or “coregulation” function, as well as perhaps an “emotion homeostatic” function, whereby a desire for affectionate touch may not simply reflect a lack of emotional connection to others, but also perhaps emerges in response to an individual’s emotion regulatory deficits, as a mechanism for restoring adaptive emotion regulatory capacity. 13. Pride and Joy: Using Trait Ratings and Mousetracking to Evaluate Positive Emotion Expressions Elizabeth B. DaSilva & Aina Puce Indiana University – Bloomington Distinguishing between positive expressions has important consequences for interpersonal relationships, especially regarding affiliation, attraction and social status (see Shariff & Tracy, 2009; 2011). Happiness and pride are two distinct positive emotions that are sometimes confused as both can feature smiles; pride expressions typically also include upright posture and slight head tilt (e.g. Tracy & Robins, 2004). We studied how raters characterize static nonverbal facial expressions of happiness and pride for three female actors. Sixty-two undergraduate participants completed a forced-choice emotion recognition paradigm and evaluated expressions on several trait dimensions. During trait judgments, happy expressions were rated as significantly more positive and arousing compared to proud expressions, as well as significantly more ‘extraverted’ and ‘affiliative.’ Recognition accuracy exceeded 90% for both expressions, with no response time differences between emotions. Analyzing mouse trajectories during stimulus classification using MouseTracker software (Freeman & Ambady, 2010) found larger deviation scores and more mouse movements across the enter (e.g. 'x-flips') during pride compared to happiness classification. These results suggest participants are more confident evaluating happy expressions and experience greater attraction towards the “happy” alternative when evaluating pride expressions. Moreover, the response profile for two additional actors whose happiness and pride expressions could not be differentiated featured high happiness accuracy with high false alarm rates; participants may consider happiness as the default positive emotion category until there is sufficient information otherwise. Collectively these results offer converging evidence that for most actors, happy and proud expressions can be distinguished using nonverbal facial cues. 14. Not Everyone Essentializes Emotions: Exploring the Construct of Emotion Incrementalism Jennifer K. MacCormack & Kristen A. Lindquist University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Some individuals essentialize emotions, viewing emotions as discrete entities with immutable essences (Lindquist et al., 2013). We explored whether incrementalism—the perspective that emotions are situated and variable—relates to greater emotional complexity. Eighty-seven participants completed scales assessing their beliefs about the nature of emotion (Tamir et al., 2007), the role of context in emotion (Owe et al., 2013), need for cognition (Cacioppo et al., 1984), alexithymia (Bagby et al., 1994), and interoceptive awareness (Mehling et al., 2013). As hypothesized, incrementalism was predicted by the emotionally complex view that emotions are situated and variable and inversely associated with difficulty identifying emotions (alexithymia). Emotion incrementalism was also predicted by adaptive traits such as need for cognition, the belief that the body is predictable, and self-rated interoceptive awareness. Finally, emotion incrementalism predicted regulatory self-efficacy. Emotion incrementalists may thus differ from emotion essentialists, and benefit from perceiving emotions as situated and complex. 15. Practice Makes Perfect? The Effects of Habitual Emotional Suppression on Physiological Response to Disgust Films Jeong Ha Choi, Sinhae Cho, & Jose Soto The Pennsylvania State University Previous studies have shown that suppression of emotional expression in a laboratory setting can lead to increased physiological responding to emotional stimuli. However, habitual use of expressive suppression across varied contexts and over time may actually be associated with a dampening of the physiological response to emotional stimuli as a result of repeated practice in moderating one’s reaction. Given that the correlates of expressive suppression have also been shown to vary across cultures, this study investigated the effects of habitual expressive suppression on physiological responding to negative emotional stimuli and whether this relationship was moderated by ethnicity. Seventy-one college students from four different ethnic backgrounds (25 Whites, 19 Asians, 17 Latinos, and 10 Blacks) completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and subsequently watched five different films while their skin conductance level (SCL) and other cardiovascular physiology was monitored. The films consisted of a neutral film, followed by three disgust films and one positive film at the end, with different regulation instructions given prior to each of the last two disgust films (Suppression or Amplification). Results revealed a significant main effect of suppression, which was qualified by a suppression x ethnicity interaction. Overall, individuals who reported greater use of habitual suppression also showed reduced SCL responding to all three disgust film conditions, but this effect was most pronounced among Latinos, relative to other groups. Thus, repeated practice of expressive suppression may lead to dampened reactivity to negative stimuli over time, especially among cultures that discourage negativity and encourage positivity (e.g. Latinos). 16. Compassion Meditation Increases the Duration of Cardiovascular Recovery following an Anger Induction Paul Condon, Ian Kleckner, Karen Quigley, Lisa Feldman Barrett, & David DeSteno Northeastern University Studies indicate that mindfulness training can help regulate emotional experiences by reducing reactivity to stressful situations. Yet other studies have shown that compassion meditation an produce increased reactivity to the suffering of others. To further explore the possible divergent effects of these two different types of meditation, we examined participants experience and reaction to a real-time anger induction in the laboratory after training. After eight-weeks of compassion- or mindfulness-based training (or an active control), 92 participants returned to the lab to complete tests of mathematical ability. During the math task, participants were subjected to an orchestrated anger induction delivered by a rude and incompetent experimenter (cf. Mass et al., 2010). We examined participants' cardiovascular reactivity and the duration of cardiovascular recovery following the anger induction, a measure that is strongly tied to long-term cardiovascular health risk. Although all three groups experienced the same amount of cardiovascular reactivity, those who completed compassion-training experienced longer duration of cardiovascular recovery compared with those in the control. Those in the mindfulness group did not differ from the control group. These results demonstrate the importance of examining cardiovascular recovery in addition to reactivity, as well as the possible divergent effects of two different types of meditation. Although delayed cardiovascular recovery has negative health consequences, this training-induced effect may be adaptive in some contexts. 17. Gratitude Intervention Increases Giving of Social Support Mona Moieni, Kate E. Byrne Haltom, Ivana Jevtic, Steve W. Cole, & Naomi I. Eisenberger, University of California – Los Angeles The expression of gratitude has been found to increase prosocial behaviors, feelings of connection to others, and social support. Building on this literature, in the present study, we conducted an intervention in which participants (n = 68) were assigned to a gratitude or control condition for 6 weeks. Those in the gratitude condition were asked to write once weekly in response to prompts meant to elicit feelings of gratitude (e.g., writing about people they are grateful for) while those in the control group wrote once weekly about a routine experience (e.g., longest distance they walked that day). Both groups were sent an excerpt of their writings later in the week and asked to reflect on how grateful and connected they felt in response to reading their writing. Directly before and after the 6-week intervention, all participants were asked about the degree to which they give social support to others using the 2- Way Social Support Scale. We found that the gratitude (vs. control) group reported increases in how much social support they gave others post-intervention (controlling for pre-intervention levels). We also found that feelings of connectedness, but not feelings of gratefulness, in response to the weekly writings moderated this effect, such that those who felt more connected reading their weekly writings reported increased giving of social support postintervention. Adding to the current literature on gratitude and prosocial behaviors, these findings suggest that gratitude increases giving of social support, and that feelings of connection are an important moderator of this relationship. 18. Awesome Day Keeps Stress Away: the Effect of Awe on Daily Hassles Gening Jin, Yang Bai, Jingxin Chen, Urara Oe, Yee Tsoi Ching, & Dacker Keltner University of California – Berkeley Positive emotions are frequently experienced in everyday life and they have substantial influence on people’s emotional well-being. Previous research has documented that positive emotions could facilitate broaden-minded stress coping style and elevate positive affects. However, research on this positive emotion “awe” and its effect on stress is sparse. In two experiments, we investigated (1) the effect of the emotion of awe on changing people’s perception on stress caused by major life events and daily hassles; (2) how such function of the emotion of awe on the perception of stress was different from other positive emotions, such as joy. Results across the two experiments demonstrated that both the emotion of awe and the emotion of joy could lead to a generally low level of perceived stress, regardless of the stressor being daily hassles or major life events. However, compared to the emotion of joy, the emotion of awe had lager effect on reducing the perceived stress caused by daily hassles. 19. Lust is Pleasant, but does that Make it Good? Examining the Relationship between Evaluative and Hedonic Judgments of Emotion. Ajay B. Satpute, Alex S. Lee, Maxine S. Garcia, & Vivian L. Carrillo Pomona College Evaluating emotion categories in terms of their “goodness” or “badness” can guide which emotions are cultivated in society (e.g. from parents to children, by a religious community, or across cultures). Prior work examining emotion knowledge often focused on the hedonic value of emotions without consideration of how people might evaluate these emotions along other dimensions. Here, we tested whether emotions differed in terms of how much their evaluation could be accounted for by hedonics alone. Participants judged several emotion words for hedonic value (“pleasantness”/“unpleasantness”), but also made evaluative judgments of them (“good”/“bad”, and “importance”). We observed that some emotions such as happiness, misery, and jealousy showed strong positive associations between their evaluative and hedonic judgments. But for other emotions, such as guilt, empathy, and fear, their hedonic value was not as strongly associated with how they were evaluated. As for importance, social emotions such as empathy and guilt were judged as more important than putative “survival” and reproduction oriented emotions such as disgust and lust. These findings suggest that several dimensions may contribute to how an emotion is evaluated, and points to several future avenues for work examining contextual, individual, and sociocultural variability in how people decide which emotions are good and which are bad. 20. Low Levels of Positive Emotional Feedback and Somatization Adam Kiss, Cayla J. Duncan, & Mary H. Burleson Arizona State University The need for interpersonal relationships and feelings of belonging has long been considered essential for positive mental health in humans. Infants learn patterns of seeking and receiving care and affection from interactions with their caregivers. These patterns develop into attachment styles, and are carried into adulthood when dealing with, for example, romantic partners. The present poster explores somatization as one possible consequence of receiving suboptimal levels of positive reinforcement manifested as feelings of being loved and cherished by a spouse. We also examined how positive and negative moods may moderate the prevalence of somatic complaints when positive emotional feedback is low. Data were gathered from a sample of 268 couples who had been married for at least 6 months. Participants completed online diary entries for two weeks and completed online questionnaires. We found that low reports of feeling loved and cherished significantly predicted reports of pain for husbands, but not for wives. Reports of negative mood were significant predictors of reporting physical pain for both sexes. 21. The Role of Emotion Words in the Experience and Perception of Emotion: A Meta-Analysis of the Neuroimaging Literature Jeffrey A. Brooks, Holly Shablack, Michael Parrish, Maria Gendron, Ajay B. Satpute, Katie Hoeman University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Northeastern University, & Pomona College Recent work supporting a psychological constructionist approach to emotion suggests that the language we use to describe emotions can also partially constitute them (Lindquist et al. in press). A constructionist approach hypothesizes that affect is represented in the brain differently when experienced or perceived in the context of emotion words. To observe the differences in neural activity when emotion words were present vs. not present in an experimental task, we performed a meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature on emotion. We included 809 contrasts across 352 studies in a Multilevel Kernel Density Analysis (MDKA) performed in NeuroElf. When emotion words were present (v. not present) in experimental tasks, there was more frequent activity in the thalamus (p < .001) and at a lower threshold (p < .02), the dorsal anterior insula, left inferior frontal gyrus, and caudate nucleus. By contrast, when emotion words were not present in experimental tasks (v. present), there was more frequent activity in the right amygdala (p < .001). Together, these findings are consistent with evidence from studies of “affect labeling” (Lieberman et al. 2007), which show decreased activity in the amygdala when participants label the meaning of facial expressions of emotion. Our findings are also consistent with the constructionist view that words help make meaning of otherwise ambiguous affective states by increasing sensory processing of affective stimuli and reducing their uncertainty. Implications for the role of emotion words in emotional experiences and perceptions will be discussed. 22. The Adaptiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies: Reappraisal Leads to More Success and Less Regret than Suppression Lameese Eldesouky &Tammy English Washington University in St. Louis Previous research has found that emotion regulation strategies can have distinct affective and social consequences. Specifically, cognitive reappraisal has been found to contribute to positive outcomes (e.g., feeling more positive emotion), while expressive suppression has been associated with negative outcomes (e.g., feeling more negative emotion). This implies that reappraisal is a more adaptive strategy to use than suppression. However, it is unclear whether people perceive reappraisal to always be more helpful than suppression in accomplishing their goals. In the current study, we examined people’s goals in a situation where they regulated their emotions and whether using reappraisal or suppression helped them accomplish their goals. 97 participants were assigned to one of two emotion regulation conditions (suppression or reappraisal) and asked to write about situations in which they used the assigned regulation strategy. For each situation, they rated how much they had various emotional and instrumental goals and how much suppression (or reappraisal) helped them achieve their goals. As expected, individuals in the reappraisal condition reported that reappraisal helped them accomplish their goals, led to positive outcomes, and was a strategy they would use again in the same context. On the other hand, individuals in the suppression condition reported that suppression made it difficult for them to accomplish their goal, led to negative outcomes, and was a strategy they regretted using. This suggests that even when considering context, reappraisal may be more generally adaptive to use than suppression. 23. Explicit and Implicit Emotion Perception Bias Predicts Romantic Relationship Outcomes William J. Brady, Jonathan B. Freeman, & Emily Balcetis New York University Emotion expressions signal internal states of the expresser, but individuals vary in the information they extract from emotion signals, and such variation may have consequences for interpersonal interactions. We proposed that people vary in emotion perception bias, or a systematic tendency to extract more frequently either positive of negative information from emotion expressions. We also posited that variation in emotion perception bias would predict romantic relationship outcomes. 280 participants categorized ambiguous (blends of happy and sad / angry expressions) and non-ambiguous emotion expressions as positive or negative. We tracked trajectories of their computer-mouse movements to the category labels to index bias in emotion perception. Participants then recalled a recent conflict experience with their relationship partner and reported how negative they felt before, during and after the conflict. When categorizing ambiguous emotions, participants showed variation in emotion perception bias measured as a) the discrepancy in the number of positive vs. negative end categorizations made, and b) in attraction toward opposite categories measured via mouse-tracking. Furthermore, participants who categorized ambiguous faces more often as negative reported greater negative affect during the recalled conflict. Additionally, for nonambiguous faces, greater attraction toward the negative category in mouse trajectories, regardless of end categorization, was related to greater escalation of negative affect leading up to conflict. These preliminary results suggest (1) that emotion perception bias can be measured with emotion stimuli of varying ambiguity if measured explicitly and implicitly, and (2) emotion perception bias measured explicitly and implicitly may be importantly related to interpersonal relationship outcomes. 24. A Default Approach Bias Following Human Amygdala Lesions Laura Harrison, Rene Hurlemann, & Ralph Adolphs California Institute of Technology & University of Bonn Approach and avoidance constitute a basic dimension of all animal behavior, important in guiding emotional reactions to stimuli. A large literature documents approach and avoidance elicited by specific sensory stimuli, yet comparatively little is known about default approach biases in the absence of specific information. The amygdala, a cluster of nuclei in the medial temporal lobe, is well-known to process threat and fear in response to stimuli, with bilateral amygdala damage resulting in a constellation of behavioral and cognitive changes that largely bias towards approaching stimuli that are normally avoided. The amygdala is also sensitive to ambiguity, a stimulus feature strongly correlated with risk-assessment - a defensive behavior common across animal species. In the present study, we tested whether the amygdala’s role in approach biases is based on a basic dimension (ambiguity) or whether it depends on certain learned stimulus features (facial features, for which a specific deficit is implicated in amygdala damage). A novel task asked three rare patients with bilateral amygdala lesions to make approach-related judgments about intact photos of faces and the same stimuli but with all internal facial features occluded. Direct comparisons of these stimuli isolated a stimulus-independent bias. The amygdala lesion patients showed a greater tendency than controls to default to rating ambiguous occluded faces as more approachable than unambiguous whole faces. This finding suggests that the amygdala is necessary for cautionary behavior given a lack of information. 25. The Self-Control of Avoidance Motivation Nicholas J. Kelley & Brandon J. Schmeichel Texas A&M University Self-control involves the inhibition of dominant response tendencies. Most research on self-control has examined the inhibition of approach-motivated tendencies. For example, experiments manipulating frontal brain activity via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have found that greater right than left frontal cortical activity increases self-control over approach-motivated responding (e.g., risk-taking in a gambling task; Fecteau et al., 2007). The current experiment assessed the effects of manipulated increases in right versus left frontal cortical asymmetry on the inhibition of avoidance-motivated responses. Prior to tDCS, participants used a joystick to pull neutral images toward and push threatening images away from the self. Then they received 15 minutes of tDCS to increase relative left frontal cortical activity, increase relative right frontal cortical activity, or sham stimulation. After stimulation, participants had to pull threatening images toward or push neutral images away from the self. This response requires self-control insofar as pushing (not pulling) threatening stimuli away is the pre-potent response tendency (e.g., Rinck & Becker, 2007). Results revealed that participants who received stimulation to increase relative right frontal cortical asymmetry pulled threats toward the self more quickly relative to other participants. These results lend support to the idea that both approach and avoidance impulses share a common neural mechanism Š—– relative right frontal cortical asymmetry. 26. Oxytocin Receptor Gene and Ingroup Bias in Empathy-related Brain Activity Siyang Luo, Yina Ma, Ting Zhang, Wenxin Li, Wenxia Zhang, Yi Rao, & Shihui Han Peking University The human brain responds more strongly to ingroup than outgroup individuals' pain. This ingroup bias varies across individuals and has been attributed to social experiences. What remains unknown is whether the ingroup bias in brain activity is associated with a genetic polymorphism. In study1, we investigated genetic associations of racial ingroup bias in brain activity to racial ingroup and outgroup faces that received painful or non-painful stimulations by scanning A/A and G/G homozygous of the oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (OXTR rs53576) using fMRI. We found that G/G compared to A/A individuals showed stronger activity in the anterior cingulate (ACC) to racial ingroup members' pain, whereas A/A relative to G/G individuals exhibited greater nucleus accumbens (NAcc) activity to racial outgroup members' pain. Moreover, the racial ingroup bias in ACC activity positively predicted participants’ racial ingroup bias in implicit attitudes and NAcc activity to racial outgroup individuals’ pain negatively predicted participants’ motivations to help racial outgroup members. In study2, we investigated whether the association between OXTR rs53576 and racial ingroup bias in empathy (RBE) was moderated by mini-group manipulation by using EEG. We found that excluding same-race individuals as one's opponent team for competitions eliminated the RBE by decreasing neural responses to pain expressions in same-race faces in G/G but not A/A individuals. Our results suggest that the two variants of OXTR rs53576 are associated with racial ingroup bias in brain regions that are linked to implicit attitude and altruistic motivation, respectively, and this association will be modulated by temporary group membership. 27. Emotional Expression in Older Adults: Exploring the Positivity Effect Alison Cooke & Lisa Emery Appalachian State University Prior research has found that older adults have more difficulty recognizing some facial expressions (anger, sadness, and fear) than others (disgust, happiness, surprise), a finding that has been attributed in part to aging-related brain changes (Ruffman et al., 2008). The current study examined whether the same pattern was found for older adults’ ability to create facial expressions. A sample of 26 adults between the ages of 61 and 81 were shown basic emotion words for 3 seconds and were asked to create the emotion with their facial expressions. Independent raters then rated the intensity and accuracy of the emotions expressed (modeled after Borod et al., 2004). Intensity was measured by separating the different expressive areas (eyes, mouth, forehead, etc.) and measuring the intensity of each area to create an overall estimate of the intensity of the emotion. Accuracy was measured by again separating the different expressive areas and assessing the accuracy for each area for an overall estimate of accuracy. The results showed that older adults produced more accurate and intense facial expressions of happiness and surprise, compared to the four negative emotions. Within the four negative emotions, fear expressions were significantly less intense and accurate than anger, disgust, and sadness. Overall, the pattern of expressivity only partially matched prior patterns of recognition accuracy. These findings suggest that older adultsŠ—È facial expressions of emotion, as opposed to their recognition of emotion, may be driven by motivational changes related to the positivity effect (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). 28. The Collapse of Compassion Revisited: The Role of Cultural Collectivism Yujin Jeong, Hu Young Jeong, Hyun Euh, & Hoon-Seok Choi Sungkyunkwan University Compassion promotes pro-social behavior and is essential for a mature society. One puzzling aspect of compassion found in the Western literature is that people feel less compassion for many victims than for a single victim. Previous studies focusing on the motivational underpinnings of the phenomenon suggest that people regulate their feelings of compassion due to the costs associated with helping many victims. Unlike the findings reported in the West, our own research involving Korean college students showed an opposite trend (i.e. the augmentation of compassion). In the current study, we examined the role of cultural collectivism in the experience of compassion. A total of seventy Korean college students participated in the study. We measured participants’ beliefs in cultural collectivism using items driven from existing IND-COL scales. We presented a picture of either a child or 8 children suffering from disease and malnutrition in the Darfur region of Sudan and asked our participants to indicate the degree of compassion and their willingness to help the victim(s). We found a significant interaction between participants’ cultural collectivism and the number of victims (one vs. eight) on both compassion and intention to help. Simple slope analysis indicated that, for individuals with a strong collectivistic orientation, the number of targets positively predicted both compassion and intention to help. In contrast, compassion was not related to the number of targets among individuals with a weak collectivistic orientation. We discuss the implications of these findings and future directions for research on compassion. 29. Emotional Extremes Inhibit Emotional Understanding Leigh K. Smith & Timothy Loving University of Texas – Austin Not all emotions are created equal — some are more difficult to understand than others. Specifically, our research demonstrates that extremely weak and extremely strong emotions may be harder to understand than moderate ones. In two studies, participants reflected on the intimate details of either recently falling in love or recently going through a breakup. Immediately following the reflection, participants indicated how strong their emotions were as well as how clear their emotions were. They also wrote for 7 minutes and their writing was coded for uncertaintyrelated phrases such as “I don’t know what I am feeling right now.” Lastly, they completed a version of the PANAS to which we added “I am not sure” as a response item so that participants could indicate a lack of clarity around any specific emotion. Multiple regression analyses confirmed that emotional intensity was curvilinearly related to all measures of emotional understanding, regardless of emotion valence. Physiological arousal (indexed by acute blood pressure and increased cortisol) mediated the relationship between emotional intensity and emotional understanding. Our results suggest that strong emotions are accompanied by correspondingly intense physiological symptoms which may in turn disrupt cognitive processes related to emotional understanding, whereas weak emotions are accompanied by such faint physiological symptoms that they may be difficult to detect or sustain attention to, and are therefore harder to label. In contrast, moderately intense emotions may produce enough physiological arousal to be consciously detected without disrupting cognitive processes related to identification, interpretation and ultimately understanding. 30. The Association between Emotional Ratings and Physiology in Dementia Patients Predicts Caregiver Wellbeing and Mental Health Casey L. Brown, Sandy Lwi, James J. Casey, Marcela Otero, & Robert W. Levenson University of California – Berkeley Many emotion theories suggest that emotional experience is highly influenced by underlying physiological activity. The integration of emotional experience and physiology is thought to involve the anterior insula. The insula is particularly vulnerable to degeneration in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disease that negatively affects emotional functioning. We assessed the association between moment-to-moment ratings of another person’s emotional state (a task that is thought to produce mimetic emotional experience in the rater) and raters’ own physiology using time-lagged cross-correlations in 33 FTD patients. Patients watched an 80-second film clip in which the main character experiences negative and positive emotions. Patients continuously rated the emotions of the main character using a rating dial while their physiology was recorded. Lower correlations between emotion ratings and physiology in patients is predictive of lower emotional well-being, b=.541, t(29)=3.0, p=.006, and worse general health, b=.541, t(29)=3.0, p=.006, in their caregivers (even after controlling for patients’ cognitive impairment and accuracy in rating the clip). Preliminary neuroanatomical data for 6 of these FTD patients also suggests that lower correlations between emotion ratings and physiology is associated with smaller right insula volume, r(4)=.845, p<.03. We believe that low association between emotional ratings and physiology is a general marker of emotional dysfunction in dementia patients and that this dysfunction adds to caregiver burden, leading to lower caregiver well-being and lower mental health. 31. Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Style Predicts Social-emotional Well-being W. Craig Williams & Jamil Zaki Stanford University Individuals often use emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal, but also often manage their emotions through social interactions. To assess whether people differ in their use of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER), and whether this predicts well-being, we developed and validated the Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire (IRQ). In Study 1 (N= 285), factor analysis of 87 test items revealed a 2x2 structure corresponding to individuals’ (1) tendency to pursue and (2) perceived efficacy of IER for (1) reducing negative and (2) increasing positive emotion. In Study 2 (N = 347), participants completed a reduced 16-item IRQ and individual difference measures. Higher IRQ scores predicted individuals’ reported social integration, tendency to socially share their emotions, and positive emotional experience, but did not track socially desirable responding. In Studies 3a (N = 186) and 3b (N = 200), participants chose whether to complete online tasks either alone or with another individual. The negative-tendency IRQ subscale predicted stronger desire to affiliate during an unpleasant math task (3a), whereas the positivetendency IRQ subscale predicted greater affiliation for a pleasant image-rating task (3b). In Studies 4a (N = 391) and 4b (N = 396), participants wrote about disclosing a recent emotional event to a friend, and rated how well their friend responded. Here, the negative-efficacy IRQ subscale predicted higher support ratings for unpleasant experiences (4a), but the positive-efficacy IRQ subscale predicted better support following pleasant experiences (4b). In sum, individuals vary in IER style, and this variation critically predicts individual difference and experimental measures of well-being. 32. Embracing Diversity on a Pale Blue Dot: Using Awe to Improve Whites’ Treatment of Blacks Rodolfo Cortes Barragan Stanford University Recent researchers have suggested that experiencing awe does not improve interracial attitudes and behaviors (Lai, Haidt, & Nosek, 2014; Lai et al., 2014). This conclusion seems to be incompatible with past perspectives suggesting that awe does, in fact, produce better relational outcomes (e.g., Keltner & Haidt, 2003.) In this research, new manipulations that targeted awe were contrasted with robust control conditions. The findings systematically showed that awe does improve interracial attitudes and behaviors. In Study 1, reading a famous description of the Earth as a “pale blue dot” that is humanity’s only home (vs. the Wikipedia description) led White participants to support the “#BlackLivesMatter” movement. In Study 2, participants who wrote about personal experiences with awe (vs. amusement) showed greater openness to learning about Black culture and befriending Blacks. Study 3 manipulated awe by having participants collect awe-inspiring images of the universe (vs. pictures of computers) and found the same effects. Study 4 suggests a mechanism: awe builds a sense of connection to the rest of humanity. Taken as a whole, the studies suggest that experiences with awe can, in fact, improve interracial attitudes and behaviors. Implications for the role of self-transcendental emotions in facilitating intergroup harmony are discussed. 33. The Causes and Consequences of ‘Parochial Empathy' during Intergroup Conflict Emile Bruneau, Mina Cikara, & Rebecca Saxe Harvard University & Massachusetts Institute of Technology Empathy can drive altruistic behavior. However, in competitive intergroup contexts, empathy may be hijacked to serve intergroup goals: increasing in-group empathy, decreasing out-group empathy, and especially generating large differences in empathy depending on group membership (i.e. 'parochial' empathy) may restrict out-group help and even license out-group harm. We predicted that parochial empathy would be independent of an individual's overall (i.e. trait) empathy, and would be particularly relevant to intergroup contexts. We tested this prediction in 3 experiments. In novel groups (Study 1), and in real groups (Americans versus Arabs, Studies 2 and 3), we found that parochial empathy is unrelated to trait empathy, but correlated with in-group versus out-group identification and social dominance orientation. Parochial empathy predicted intergroup attitudes and behaviors better than either ingroup, out-group or trait empathy. These data illuminate a construct of empathy that may be particularly relevant to intergroup conflict. 34. Too Much Emotion and Too Little Control: Group Membership and Perception of Emotional Appropriateness Jacqueline S. Smith, Marianne LaFrance, & John F. Dovidio University of Massachusetts – Amherst & Yale University When is an emotional display perceived as passionate and when is it judged as excessive? Norms of appropriate emotional expression operate in most if not all social contexts, but the boundaries of what is considered appropriate may shift depending on the group memberships of the expresser and observer. We investigated whether group membership, specifically whether targets are members of an ingroup or outgroup, leads to differences in perceptions of the appropriateness of another’s emotion. Participants read scenarios in which members of minimal groups (Study 1) or political groups (Study 2) expressed high-intensity anger or happiness in a workplace context. We examined perceptions of appropriateness of the target person’s emotion in terms of both felt and expressed emotion. As predicted, emotional expressions were perceived to be less appropriate when displayed by outgroup compared to ingroup members in both studies. Whereas there was no difference in the perceived appropriateness of felt emotion for members of minimal groups in Study 1, in Study 2 using real groups we found that outgroup members were perceived as less appropriate in terms of both experienced and expressed emotion. Furthermore, political outgroup members were actually perceived to be expressing more emotion than ingroup members and were attributed less emotional control, an effect that was mediated by both perceived intensity and perceptions of emotional appropriateness. Being perceived to deviate from emotion norms and lack sufficient emotional control likely undermines perceptions of outgroup members’ competence and may obstruct opportunities for cooperation and compromise. 35. Going Downhill? Maybe It’s Just in Your Head: The Moderating Role of Affect Discrepancy in Age and Health Decline Michael C.H. Chan & Helene H. Fung The Chinese University of Hong Kong The Affect Valuation Theory (AVT; Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006) suggested that how one ideally wants to feel, or ideal affect, and how one actually feels, or actual affect, were two distinct constructs. Previous research on the theory further suggested that bigger discrepancy between ideal and actual affect was associated with more depressive symptoms. However, little research has investigated the relationship between affect discrepancy and physical health. Aging is related to more health-related symptoms and smaller affect discrepancy (Scheibe, English, Tsai, & Carstensen, 2013). In this study, we investigated the role of affect discrepancy in the relationship between aging and physical health decline. In this study, we recruited 321 Hong Kong Chinese participants (166 Female) with age ranging from 16 to 89 years old, and they completed the Affect Valuation Inventory (Tsai et al. 2006) as well as the Wahler Physical Symptoms Inventory (Wahler, 1968). Increase in age was related to more health-related symptoms and smaller positive affect discrepancy. Furthermore, we found an Age X Lower Arousal Positivity (LAP) interaction in predicting health-related symptoms. Smaller discrepancy was related to less age-related health symptoms. We also found gender differences in the moderation (c.f. Bagozzi, Wong, & Yi, 2010). Implications of the results to the field of affective science X physical health are further discussed (c.f. DeSteno, Gross, & Kubzansky, 2013). 36. Fire on Ice: How Emotion Juxtaposition and the Temporal and Social Placement of Emotion Generates Leadership Effectiveness Anthony Silard IESE Business School While emotion and leadership is a burgeoning topic in social psychological and organizational research, little is still known about the actual emotion-related behaviors of leaders, the granulated mechanisms that underlie these behaviors, and the contingencies that influence their relevance to the generation of beneficial organizational outcomes. Through an inductive, multiple-case study drawing from 19 semi-structured interviews with individuals that have alternately occupied leader and follower roles in a wide array of contexts, I develop a model of the behaviors, mechanisms, contingencies, and outcomes of the leader employment of emotional labor and regulation tactics. I uncover that emotions are temporally and socially situated, that effective emotion-related leadership behaviors comprise three dimensions of emotion juxtaposition - valence, social, and expression-suppression - and that these dimensions are operationalized through the mechanisms of developmental concern and particularized holistic interest. I further discover that these leader behaviors lead to positive organizational outcomes such as follower loyalty, developmental growth, and engagement, and that these relationships depend on the leader traits of authenticity and competence and the contextual factors of transcendent motives and status differentiation. Implications for leadership research and practice are discussed. 37. Negating versus engaging with Stress: Types of Reappraisal Differentially Affect Response to Stress Alissa Beath, Mike Jones, & Julie Fitness Macquarie University Reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy that involves changing the interpretation of the negative emotioneliciting stimuli, is beneficial in decreasing individuals’ stress, though differences may exist between sub-types of reappraisal. The present study set out to investigate the stress response of individuals who reappraised the significance of the present situation (situation-focused reappraisal) versus those who reappraised the wider goal (goal-focused reappraisal). Forty-nine undergraduate psychology students (86% female) participated in the study, randomly allocated to receive situation-focused (n = 15), goal-focused (n = 16) or no reappraisal (n = 14) instructions. Physiological data were measured using skin conductance level (SCL), and stress was induced by telling participants they were to complete a simple task that was predictive of psychological career success, which actually consisted of difficult IQ-test items. The situation-focused group experienced the least increase in SCL, whereas the goal-focused group experienced a significantly greater increase in SCL in anticipation of the task, but less of an increase in SCL throughout the task, compared to the control group. The results demonstrate the differential benefit of types of reappraisal on responses to stress: reappraising the present situation is cognitively simpler, but might be less beneficial long-term, than reappraising the goal. 38. The Relationship between Emotion Regulation Skills and Dyadic Coping Sarah R. Holley, Sarah Wagner, Kera Mallard, Ashley K. Randall, & Casey Totenhagen San Francisco State University, Arizona State University, & University of Alabama Dyadic coping (efforts used by relationship partners to help one another deal with stressful events; Bodenmann, 2005) has important implications for individual and relationship functioning. Specifically, supportive dyadic coping (SDC; support provided to assist the partner in his/her coping efforts) is beneficial, whereas negative dyadic coping (NDC; superficial, ambivalent, or hostile support provision) is detrimental (e.g., Papp & Witt, 2010). We investigated whether emotion regulation skills (ERS) were associated with tendencies to engage in supportive versus negative dyadic coping behaviors in both partners (i.e., actor and partner effects). Given that adaptive dyadic coping requires the individual to function effectively in stressful situations, emotion regulatory abilities may be a critical factor in facilitating efforts to engage in dyadic support processes during distressing times. We hypothesized that ERS will be a) positively associated with SDC, and b) negatively associated with NDC. Two hundred forty-nine couples completed an online survey. ERS were assessed with the Difficulty with Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004); dyadic coping was assessed with the Dyadic Coping Inventory (Bodenmann, 2008). Hypotheses were evaluated using Actor-Partner Interdependence Models (Cook & Kenny, 2005). Results supported our hypotheses. For both women and men, a) ERS were positively associated with their own and their partner’s SDC; and b) ERS were negatively associated with their own and their partner’s NDC. This suggests that emotion regulation skills are linked to an individual’s ability to provide adaptive support to his/her partner during stressful times, as well as to the partner’s ability to provide such support. 39. Empathy and Appraisal: Appraisals of Other-Agency Cause Empathic Anger Joshua D. Wondra & Phoebe C. Ellsworth University of Michigan We used appraisal theories of emotion to predict that empathy, feeling what another feels, is based on interpretations (appraisals) of others’ situations, just like firsthand emotions. Appraisals that bad situations are caused by someone else (high other-agency appraisal) make people feel angry, but appraisals that they are caused by bad circumstances (high situational agency appraisal) make people feel sad. In one study, subjects read about a disadvantaged high school student who applied to college and received only rejections. Although the rejected student felt sad, subjects felt angry when the student’s friend caused the bad outcome (other-agency condition, n = 71) but not when the student’s disadvantaged circumstances caused it (situational agency condition, n = 74). The results conflict with contemporary theories that base empathy on perceptions of the other’s emotional state, but they are consistent with an appraisal theory approach where empathy is one possible outcome of general appraisal processes. 40. The Psychological Structure of Humility Aaron C. Weidman, Joey t. Cheng, & Jessica L. Tracy University of British Columbia & University of California – Irvine Religious scholars, philosophers, and psychologists have long considered humility an important emotion; it is central to modesty and prosociality more generally, and, somewhat paradoxically, may be experienced in response to both success and failure. Yet, no studies of which we are aware have systematically explored the psychological structure of this emotion, leaving open the question: what exactly is humility? To address this gap in knowledge, the present research provided the first comprehensive, bottom-up examination of the content and psychological structure of humility. Across four multi-method studies (total n = 1440) using cluster analyses of semantic similarity ratings, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of state and trait emotional experiences, evidence for two largely independent humility factors consistently emerged. The first, which we labeled appreciative humility, is comprised of items such as considerate, generous, and understanding, and is positively correlated with authentic pride, agreeableness, expressions of gratitude, and seeing oneself as moral. The second factor, labeled self-abasing humility, is comprised of items such as meek, submissive, and worthless, and is positively correlated with shame, neuroticism, social withdrawal, and low self-esteem. Based on these results we developed and validated brief sixitem scales that can be used to reliably measure each humility dimension. Together, these findings elucidate the content and dual-faceted structure of humility, and provide a novel instrument for the assessment of humility in future work. 41. Rethinking prejudice: Subjective interpretation of implicit bias as sympathy reduces the relationship between implicit bias and fear of African-American men Kent M. Lee, Kristen A. Lindquist, & B. Keith Payne University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Negative affect toward African Americans often predicts discriminatory behavior. However, some evidence suggests that negative affect might also be related to sympathy for African-Americans (Uhlmann et al., 2006). Drawing from psychological constructionist models of emotions (e.g., Barrett, 2009; Lindquist, 2013), we hypothesized that subjective interpretations of negative affect toward African Americans could result in different emotions. In two experiments, we measured participants’ negative affect toward African Americans using the Affect Misattribution Procedure. After measuring negative affect, we led one group to interpret negative affect as fear and the other group to interpret it as sympathy. Next, we asked participants to explicitly report how much fear and sympathy they felt toward African Americans. Participants with greater implicit bias endorsed greater fear of African Americans, but only when they were led to interpret negative affect as fear. Interpreting negative affect as sympathy reduced the correspondence between implicit bias and explicitly reported fear. 42. Age Differences in Neural Responses to Race Exist within the Prejudice Network Brittany S. Cassidy & Anne C. Krendl Indiana University Much work has characterized a network of brain regions responding to different aspects of race perception. For instance, amygdala activity characterizes affective responses while the engagement of cognitive control regions (e.g., dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex [dlPFC; vlPFC]) reflects regulating affective responses. This network may be particularly impacted in older adults because aging has been widely associated with impairments in regulatory function. Indeed, prior behavioral work has shown that age-related regulatory decline exacerbates older adults’ prejudice. During fMRI, 16 younger and 39 older adults viewed Black and White faces and cars. Older adults were normal functioning, but varied in their relative amount of cognitive decline. When perceiving Black versus White faces, younger adults displayed increased engagement of dlPFC and vlPFC — two regions implicated in initiating and maintaining regulation — relative to older adults. For the same contrast, younger adults also displayed enhanced posterior cingulate activity compared to older adults, suggesting less individuation of Black versus White faces with age. Given the critical role of the amygdala within the prejudice network, we extracted parameter estimates from anatomically defined amygdala ROIs to assess a potential relationship with regulatory function. Importantly, poorer executive ability predicted increased left amygdala response to Black over White faces, suggesting greater affective response given less regulatory ability. These findings are the first to reveal age differences in neural recruitment within key nodes of the prejudice network that impact the processing and regulation of attitudes and emotional responses toward racial outgroup members. 43. Positive Mood Attenuates the Happiness Superiority Effect in Visual Search for Schematic Faces Belinda M. Craig & Ottmar V. Lipp University of Queensland & Curtin University Recently, Becker, Anderson, Mortensen, Neufeld, and Neel (2011), argued that the faster detection of angry than happy faces in crowds commonly observed in the literature is due to methodological confounds which conceal a true Happiness Superiority Effect (HSE). Following their recommendations to eliminate these confounds with schematic face stimuli, Experiment 1 yielded the predicted HSE extending prior findings with photographic stimuli. In Experiment 2, the mediating role of positive expectancy was tested. A happy or sad mood was induced to enhance or reduce the positive expectancy bias prior to the same two search tasks used in Experiment 1. A HSE was observed for participants in a sad but not in a happy mood. This suggests that, unlike the categorization advantage for happy faces, the HSE observed in visual search was not due to a positive expectancy bias. 44. Positive Emotion, Drinking Motivation, and Problematic Drinking: A Case for Cultural Variations Arezou Mortazavi, Jose A. Soto, & Nicholas C. Jacobson The Pennsylvania State University Emotions have frequently been established as antecedents or correlates of maladaptive substance use. While the relationship between negative emotions and alcohol abuse is well-established, the role of positive emotions in alcohol use, and how this varies across cultural groups, is less understood. This study investigated how positive emotion states are related to motivations for drinking as well as how motivations for drinking are related to problematic outcomes, and how these relationships differ among three ethnocultural groups with different norms regarding positive emotions (Latino, Asian/Asian-American, and European-American). 99 participants completed baseline measures regarding emotional experience, current alcohol use, motives for drinking, and problematic outcomes. Across each of the next 14 days, participants reported how much positive, neutral, and negative emotion they experienced and whether they drank. Those who reported drinking were also asked how much they drank, why they drank, and whether they experienced problematic outcomes. Results indicated that positive affect predicted drinking for enhancement purposes, defined as drinking to maintain or increase positive affect, when measured daily, and this effect was moderated by ethnicity. Enhancement motivations predicted problematic outcomes at baseline and when measured daily. Drinking volume mediated this effect, and this was moderated by ethnicity such that Latinos experienced greater problematic outcomes when drinking equal amounts as Asians and Caucasians for enhancement purposes. These findings may help to explain higher rates of problematic drinking in Latinos, and indicate a need for further investigation of the ways in which positive emotion uniquely contributes to alcohol use in different cultural groups. 45. “Do Whatever it Takes?”— Intergroup Aggression as a Reaction to Group-Based Humiliation Depends on Perceived Group-Status Lisabeth Mann, Jolanda Jetten, & Alex Haslem University of Amsterdam & University of Queensland Humiliation may be conceptualized as the experience of being lowered in status compared to others. Although group-based humiliation has been related to aggression and revenge (e.g., Lickel, 2012), there is little empirical evidence that shows this link. We propose that reactions to humiliation of one’s group differ depending on perceived status of that group. In particular when the group is perceived as being of high-status, humiliation may lead to aggression as a means to compensate for the status-loss. We tested this idea in two studies in which participants were confronted with a historical defeat of their group. In Study 1, both humiliation about the defeat as well as perceived group-status predicted endorsement of aggression towards another (unrelated) group. In Study 2, humiliation predicted endorsement of aggression, but only for participants who perceived their group as being of high-status. Implications of these results are discussed. 46. Why Social Pain Lives on: Different Neural Mechanisms are Associated with Reliving Social and Physical Pain Meghan L. Meyer, Kipling D. Williams, & Naomi I. Eisenberger University of California – Los Angeles & Purdue University People easily re-experience the painful feelings of past social pains (e.g., past romantic rejection/social exclusion; Chen et al., 2008), but have difficulty re-experiencing the painful feelings of past physical pains (Morley, 1993). This dichotomy is intriguing because both kinds of pain have been found to rely on common neural and psychological mechanisms (Eisenberger et al., 2003). If the same mechanisms support both kinds of pain, then why can people easily re-experience past social, but not physical, pain? We found this dichotomy occurs because people use different top-down neurocognitive mechanisms to remember the two kinds of pain, and critically, only the topdown mechanisms used to remember social pains worked with the affective pain system to regenerate painful feelings. Eighteen participants who had experienced intense social and physical pains matched on initial reports of pain in the past five years underwent fMRI scanning while they remembered these events. Behaviorally, participants rated re-experiencing more pain after remembering social vs. physical pain memories. At the neural level of analysis, social pain reliving recruited dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, often associated with social memory retrieval, which functionally correlated with affective pain system responses. In contrast, physical pain reliving recruited inferior frontal gyrus, known to be involved in body memory retrieval, which functionally correlated with activation in the sensory pain system (but not affective pain system). These results update the physical-social pain overlap hypothesis: while overlapping mechanisms support live social and physical pain, distinct mechanisms guide remembering social and physical pain, making past social pains more easily re-experienced. 47. Depression Trajectories in Adolescence Longitudinally Predict Body-related Guilt and Shame Eva Pila, Catherine Sabiston, Michael Chaiton, & Jennifer O’Loughlin University of Toronto & University of Montreal Negative emotions of guilt and shame are commonly endorsed in self-evaluative and socially constructed domains such as body image. Since chronic experiences of guilt and shame are hallmark manifestations of psychopathology, it is important to explore proneness to experiencing these negative body-related emotions. The purpose of this study was to test if depression symptoms during adolescence predict body-related shame and guilt in adulthood. Adolescents (n=780; 45% male) participating in a prospective longitudinal cohort study reported depression symptoms every 3-4 months until the end of high school, and body-related shame and guilt six-years after graduation from high school. Trajectories of depressive symptoms were estimated using latent growth modeling which were then studied as predictors of body-related emotions. During adolescence, three depression symptoms trajectory groups were identified: low and declining depressive symptoms (n=295), moderate and stable depressive symptoms (n=328) and high increasing depressive symptoms (n=157). In MANOVA analyses, there were significant main effects for both emotions based on the depression trajectories, F(4, 1552)=26.02, p < .001. Individuals in the low depression group reported lower guilt (M=1.79) and shame (M=1.42), compared with moderate (Mguilt=2.13, Mshame=1.75) and high depression (Mguilt=2.59, Mshame=2.21) trajectory groups. In post-hoc analyses, differences in body emotions were significant across all depression trajectories (p<.001). Based on these findings, it is suggested that early onset of depressive symptoms can increase vulnerability to negative body-related emotions in adulthood. Clinical intervention strategies should focus on managing early depression symptoms to help mitigate the influence on chronic negative body emotions. 48. Automatic Facial Coding: Validation of Action Unit Analysis Using FaceReader Maurizio Mauri, Peter Lewinski, Fabio Giulini, Vincenzo Russo, Hans Theuws, & Tim M. den Uyl International University of Languages and Media – Milan, University of Amsterdam, Noldus Information Technology BV, & Vicarious Perception Technologies BV The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a common standard for coding facial expressions. It encodes the activity of individual facial muscles thus deconstructing the expression into individual Action Units. Using an automated system for analyzing Action Units can support psychologists in dealing with subjectivity issues and the time consuming coding process. FaceReader is a software tool capable of automatically analyzing a set of 20 commonly used Action Units. When using an automated tool, it is essential to know how the performance of this automated system compares to manual coding of Action Units. In this poster we will present a validation study, testing the performance of FaceReader by comparison of the automatic analysis with manually coded Action Units. Two commercials have been used as stimuli, one based on a seductive communication strategy and the other one based on an ironic communication strategy. A baseline session was carried out before the exposure to the two experimental stimuli. During the exposure to the baseline and to the experimental stimuli, facial expressions of all 15 subjects were recorded. The preliminary results are promising: the overall concordance was 0.68 across all subjects. Further analyses will be important to support a larger and more robust comparison between the two techniques for a complete validation. Another study shows the software reaches a FACS index of agreement of 0.67 on two other datasets. In this poster we will also elaborate on this validation study. 49. Reframing the Negative: The Stress-buffering Role of Cognitive Reappraisal Ability on BMI Sara J. Sagui & Sara M. Levens University of North Carolina – Charlotte An individual’s response to a stressor can contribute to adverse health outcomes including obesity, which can lead to diabetes and heart disease. Importantly, stress reaction begins with the negative appraisal of a situation. Thus, the ability to use cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy that involves reinterpreting an appraisal to change its emotional impact, could be a protective factor against the health consequences of stress reactivity. Therefore, the present study investigated if cognitive reappraisal ability acts as a stress-buffer against high body mass index (BMI). Participants (N = 174, age = 40.64 α 12.51, 56% female) completed a cognitive reappraisal ability (CRA) task where they viewed a series of sad film clips and were asked to rate their emotions after each clip. During one clip, participants were instructed to re-think (reappraise) the situation in a more positive way. A CRA change score was calculated by subtracting sadness ratings after the reappraisal clip from those after a baseline clip, with higher scores reflecting greater CRA. Participants also completed the Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale and self-reported their height and weight. Results indicated that at high levels of stress reactivity, individuals with high CRA had the lowest BMI, whereas, at low levels of stress reactivity those with low CRA exhibited the lowest BMI. These findings suggest that if an individual is highly stress reactive, high reappraisal ability is protective. However, if a person is not as stress reactive, high reappraisal ability may actually increase their reactivity, leading to physical health problems. 50. Neuroanatomical Markers of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Associations between Regional Grey and White Matter Volumes and Domain-specific Symptom Severities Tong Sheng, Jordan M. Nechvatal, J. Kaci Fairchild, Salil Soman, Ansgar J. Furst, J. Wesson Ashford, & Maheen M. Adamson Palo Alto VA Medical Center, Stanford University School of Medicine, & Harvard Medical School Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms include re-experiencing traumatic events, avoiding people and situations that can be reminders of trauma, and exhibiting increased emotional arousal and anxiety, all of which interfere with daily functioning. These distinct but co-occurring symptom domains may be supported by different affective and cognitive neural systems, and a more precise understanding of domain-specific associations between neuroanatomical markers and PTSD symptoms can potentially inform more precise treatment. In the current study, Veterans (n=101; age range: 23-71) underwent magnetic resonance brain imaging and completed the PTSD Checklist, a questionnaire that assesses global and domain-specific PTSD symptom severity. Global PTSD symptom severity was associated with greater grey matter volume (GMV) in the right inferior frontal cortex and greater white matter volume (WMV) in tracts projecting to the left occipital cortex. However, domain-specific associations between PTSD and GMV/WMV were heterogeneous. More severe re-experiencing and avoiding symptoms were associated with greater GMV in right frontal regions and greater WMV in occipital tracts, while reexperiencing symptoms were associated with less WMV in left cingulum and hyper-arousal symptoms were associated with less WMV in left hippocampus. Unfortunately, our results cannot clarify whether greater regional brain tissue volumes imply greater susceptibility to PTSD, or if they reflect neuroplastic consequences of traumatic experiences. However, as the development of PTSD may have origins in different neural systems, optimal treatment paths are also likely to differ. A greater focus on patients’ unique symptom profiles may be particularly beneficial. 51. Let's get Physical: Positive Automatic Thoughts Reflect Incentive Salience for Health Behaviors Elise Rice & Barbara L. Fredrickson University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Despite the abundance of research on unpleasant automatic cognitions such as intrusive thoughts, no prior work has addressed the role of positive automatic thoughts in daily life. In the present study, we investigate how such thoughts may be implicated in motivation; specifically, we predict that positive automatic thoughts about a target reflect heightened incentive salience, thereby mediating the relationship between “liking” and “wanting.” Ninetythree adults from the Chapel Hill community completed daily measures of physical activity including total instances of activity engagement (a behavioral index of wanting) and affect experienced during engagement (an index of liking) across one week. On the third day, participants also reported on the valence and frequency of their typical automatic thoughts about physical activity. Consistent with our hypothesis, bootstrapping analysis revealed that the indirect effect of positivity during physical activity (liking) on instances of physical activity (wanting) via positivity of automatic thoughts about physical activity was significant (unstandardized bootstrap estimate = 0.419, SE = 0.244, 95% CI [0.075, 1.080]). More specifically, greater positivity during physical activity predicted increasingly positive automatic thoughts about physical activity, and in turn, increasingly positive automatic thoughts about physical activity predicted more instances of physical activity over seven days. Implications for motivational processes and behavior change will be discussed. 52. Feeling High but Craving Low: Affect Valuation in Currently Manic and Remitted Bipolar I Disorder Alta du Pont & June Gruber University of Colorado – Boulder Bipolar I disorder (BD) is a severe illness characterized by heightened positive affect across contexts and difficulty regulating positive emotions (Gruber, 2011). Recent research underscores the importance of examining the valuation of positive emotions in influencing emotion-related difficulties in this disorder (Ford, Mauss, & Gruber, in press). Despite this work emphasizing the importance of positive emotion valuation in BD, no research to date has examined such processes Š—– and how they compare to experienced emotion Š—– among currently manic individuals with bipolar disorder. The present study analyzed actual and ideal affect among currently manic adults with bipolar disorder (BDm; n = 18), remitted adults with bipolar disorder (BDr; n = 32), and healthy controls (CTL; n = 31). Analyses for actual affect suggested that the BDm group report greater high arousal positive affect then the BDr group and increased high arousal negative affect than both BDr and CTL groups. Analyses for ideal affect revealed that the BDm group reported increased ideal low arousal positive affect compared to both BDr and CTL group. Interestingly, follow-up analyses indicated that the BDm group reported greater difference scores between actual and ideal low arousal positive emotions compared to both BDr and CTL groups. Taken together, these findings extend current research on affect valuation in BD and indicate that while currently manic individuals with BD exhibit high arousal positive feelings, they actually desire low arousal positive states. 53. Using Polygenic Scores to Delineate Relationships among Impulsivity Endophenotypes, Schizophrenia, and Bipolar Disorder Rebecca Fortgang, Amanda Zheutlin, Christina M. Hultman, Shaun Purcell, & Tyrone Cannon Yale University, Karolinska Institute, & Center for Human Genetic Research Schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) are highly heritable individually and share substantial heritability. Despite this, few individual genetic loci have been identified to confer individual or shared risk, and the variance they account for is far below that attributable broadly to genetic factors. Two approaches used to address this issue —endophenotype and polygenic score approaches — may be possible to fruitfully combine using polygenic scores trained to endophenotypes. These scores may be useful to ascertain endophenotypic overlap between disorders. Impulsivity is a multidimensional and heritable trait associated with both SZ and BD. Here, we tested whether four components of impulsivity are endophenotypes for SZ and BD in a sample of 123 twin pairs with and without psychopathology, recruited from the Swedish Twin Registry, and we used heritability modeling in Mx to test whether there is evidence for common pathways among impulsivity phenotypes and with SZ. We found that factors of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS) patterned as endophenotypes for SZ and BD, and Stop Signal Task (SST) Stop Signal Reaction Time (SSRT) did not. We found evidence of shared heritability among phenotypes using a common pathways model. We then generated polygenic scores trained to these impulsivity variables and tested for relationships among the scores. We also directly test whether these scores correlate with previously derived polygenic scores for SZ risk. We found that impulsivity polygenic scores were significantly higher in cases than controls, with effect sizes greater than the group differences observed using behavioral measures. Although twin pair was entered as a random variable in all linear mixed models tested, we also observed higher scores in co-twins than controls across all BIS phenotypes for both SZ and BP, suggesting that some genetic relationships among phenotypes may be obscured when looking only at self-report measures. Finally, we observed strong correlations between impulsivity phenotype polygenic scores and schizophrenia risk scores calculated using variants identified by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium in a large case-control sample. This suggests that common genetic variation influences impulsivity phenotypes in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and that a common set of genes may impact these phenotypes in both disorders. We plan next to test the scores in a replication sample. 54. Tears Peak at Two Angles of the Affect Circumplex Victoria C. Oleynick, Todd M. Thrash, Emil G. Moldovan College of William and Mary & Northeastern University Psychogenetic lacrimation — the shedding of emotional tears — is a uniquely human phenomenon. Tears are among the most compelling and unmistakable forms of emotional expression, yet little is known about the types of affective experiences associated with tears. In light of this gap, we tested the relation of emotional tears to core affect at three levels of analysis (person, stimulus, and person-by-stimulus levels) using cross-classified structural equation modeling. Participants (n = 153) watched a set of diverse, emotionally evocative film clips and reported on tears and core affect in response to each film clip. Results indicate that there is a similar pattern of relationships between tears and core affect at these three conceptually and statistically independent levels of analysis, such that the relation of tears to core affect is maximized at two angles within the affect circumplex. Specifically, tears related most strongly to the states of activated pleasure and deactivated displeasure. These results build on previous findings linking tears to discrete positive (e.g., joy, elation, gratitude) and negative (e.g. sadness, grief) emotions. This study, however, is the first to relate tears to core affect and the first to document peaks at two angles of the affect circumplex. The experimental design also overcomes common limitations of past studies, including retrospective recall biases, inattention to the broad range of emotional states that are associated with tears, and need for a systematic framework for testing the affective states associated with tears. 55. Exploring Socioeconomic-related Differences in Emotion Regulatory Success. Jessica Jones, Ozlem Ayduk, & Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton University of California – Berkeley Individual differences in emotion regulatory skills vary widely, and numerous factors may influence one’s ability to successfully employ certain strategies when faced with negative events. One relatively unexplored factor is the individual’s level of socioeconomic status (SES). In an emotion regulation success task, participants (N = 91) were instructed to employ cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression strategies while viewing negative and neutral images. Natural (unregulated) responses were also collected for both image groups. Trials in this within subjects design consisted of an instruction cue (“reappraise”, “suppress”, or “respond naturally”) followed by the consecutive presentation of three negative or neutral images. An affect rating concluded each trial. Initial analyses revealed that reappraisal produced significant decreases in negative affect relative to suppression (F(1,89)= 12.35, p< .001) and unregulated natural response trials (F(1,89)= 78.15, p< .0001), indicating that at the group level, participants were successful in down-regulating negative affect via reappraisal. More importantly, however, three separate indicators of SES (parent’s social class, total household income, and subjective SES) predicted reappraisal success: individuals who reported higher SES displayed significantly less reappraisal success after viewing negative images (rs > .24, ps < .016). This effect remained significant after controlling for levels of lifetime exposure to positive and negative events. Overall, these results suggest that independent of significant life events, individuals who are higher in socioeconomic status are either worse at implementing reinterpretation-based emotion regulation strategies or benefit less from them. Possible mechanisms that might explain these findings will be discussed and examined in future studies. 56. When a Neutral Face isn't Neutral Daniel Albohn & Reginald Adams The Pennsylvania State University Researchers have known for decades that perceivers utilize the face as a prominent source of information to make predictions about individuals. However, the accuracy of predictions drawn from faces has been mixed, but consistent, given certain parameters. In three preliminary studies we investigated one mechanism, emotion residue, that may be driving such differences in perception to occur. In study 1 we used pre- and post-expressive neutral faces to determine whether participants were able to correctly distinguish the temporal occurrence of the stimuli. In the second study, we compared pre- and post-expressive neutral faces for differences in trait ratings. Finally, study 3 examined mental representation of neutral utilizing a standard reverse correlation technique. For study 1, participants were able to correctly identify a face a post-expressive at better than chance levels, with ratings of “facial tension” appearing to drive this effect. For study 2, post-expressive faces were rated as significantly more dominant than pre-expressive faces, with other traits marginally significant. Finally, in study 3, individuals rated the mental representation of neutral as more angry and fearful and less happy than comparable faces. Taken together, these results suggest that one mechanism that may be driving differences in face perception is emotion residue. Furthermore, these results provide insight into how face perception should be studied in the future, especially when neutral is used as a baseline. 57. East-Asian Adolescents’ Emotional Home Life Predicts the Acquisition of an Acculturated Pattern of Correlation between Anterior Insula Activity and Social-emotional Feelings Xiao-Fei Yang & Mary Helen Immordino-Yang University of Southern California During adolescence, youths develop abilities to make complex social-cognitive inferences and to think abstractly about the social world, including through the emotional reactions they have to others. This development is shaped by cultural ideals transmitted via personal relationships, such as through family. Previously we demonstrated a cultural effect in which Chinese and American young adults’ social-emotional feelings correlated differently with neural activity in the anterior insula (AI), the cortical region associated with conscious emotional feelings (Craig, 2002; Damasio, 1999). We found that feeling strength correlated primarily with ventral AI activity (the autonomic modulatory sector) among Chinese, but with dorsal AI activity (the visceral-somatosensory/cognitive sector) among Americans (Immordino-Yang, Yang & Damasio, 2014). Here we conducted a developmental version of this neuroimaging study with bicultural adolescent participants —27 East-Asian 2nd generation Americans aged 14-17. We also collected data on the youths’ quality of home social relationships (amount of interpersonal aggression, perceived strength of love and closeness). As hypothesized, youths who reported better family relationships showed a more acculturated pattern of neural processing. Specifically, we found that the better youths’ home lives, the more closely their real-time fluctuations in reported feeling strength correlated with ventral AI activity relative to dorsal AI activity (the Chinese adult normative pattern). / The results suggest that the neural process by which adolescents’ build conscious emotional experiences is related to the quality of their family relationships, with culture-specific patterns emerging in youths from more loving and socially competent families. 58. The Neural Correlates of Self-Affirmation Janine M. Dutcher, J. David Creswell, Julienne E. Bower, & Naomi I. Eisenberger University of California – Los Angeles & Carnegie Mellon University Although self-affirmation leads to many benefits including reduced threat and stress responding; the mechanisms underlying this relationship are unclear. Here, we conducted two fMRI studies to begin to examine the neural mechanism for self-affirmation. Because self-affirmation increases feelings of social connection, we hypothesized that self-affirmation would lead to increased activity in a neural region associated with feelings of social connection, specifically the ventral striatum (VS). Critically, research has shown that greater VS activity is associated with reduced threat-related neural activity, which could offer a mechanistic explanation for self-affirmation’s threatreducing effects. In Study 1, we created a self-affirmation task in which participants made preference judgments between two highly ranked values in the self-affirmation condition, and two lower ranked values in the control condition. As an additional between-subjects control condition, a separate group of participants made judgments about others’ preferred attributes of toasters (experimental condition) and less preferred attributes (control condition). Results revealed greater activity in an anatomical VS ROI during self-affirmation (vs. control). This same pattern was not shown for the participants who viewed toasters (vs. control). In Study 2, we expanded to a community sample (older adult females). Again, we found that self-affirmation (vs. control) led to greater activity in the VS as well as greater activity in a ventromedial prefrontal cortex ROI, another region implicated in reward processing and social connection. These results suggest that self-affirmation activates reward-related regions also involved in social connection, which may offer a potential mechanism for how self-affirmation reduces stress. 59. Vasopressin, but not Oxytocin, Increases Empathic Concern among Individuals who Received Higher Levels of Paternal Warmth Benjamin A. Tabak, Meghan L. Meyer, Elizabeth Castle, Janine M. Dutcher, Michael R. Irwin, Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger University of California – Los Angeles Empathy improves our ability to communicate in social interactions and motivates prosocial behavior. The neuropeptides arginine vasopressin and oxytocin play key roles in socioemotional processes such as pair bonding and parental care, which suggests that they may be involved in empathic processing. We investigated how vasopressin and oxytocin affect empathic responding in a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled, betweensubjects study design. We also examined the moderating role of parental warmth, as reported in the early family environment, on empathic responding following vasopressin, oxytocin, or placebo administration. Among participants who reported higher levels of paternal warmth (but not maternal warmth), vasopressin (vs. placebo and oxytocin) increased ratings of empathic concern after viewing distressing and uplifting videos. No main or interaction effects were found for individuals who received oxytocin. Vasopressin has a role in enhancing empathy among individuals who received higher levels of paternal warmth.