Psychologists have long debated whether it is possible to assess how people subjectively feel without asking them. The recent proliferation of online social networks has recently added a fresh chapter to this discussion, with research now suggesting that it is possible to index people's subjective experience of emotion by simply counting the number of emotion words contained in their online social network posts. Whether the conclusions that emerge from this work are valid, however, rests on a critical assumption: that people's usage of emotion words in their posts accurately reflects how they feel. Although this assumption is widespread in psychological research, here we suggest that there are reasons to challenge it. We corroborate these assertions in 2 ways. First, using data from 4 experience-sampling studies of emotion in young adults, we show that people's reports of how they feel throughout the day neither predict, nor are predicted by, their use of emotion words on Facebook. Second, using simulations we show that although significant relationships emerge between the use of emotion words on Facebook and self-reported affect with increasingly large numbers of observations, the relationship between these variables was in the opposite of the theoretically expected direction 50% of the time (i.e., 3 of 6 models that we performed simulations on). In contrast to counting emotion words, we show that judges' ratings of the emotionality of participants' Facebook posts consistently predicts how people feel across all analyses. These findings shed light on how to draw inferences about emotion using online social network data. (PsycINFO Database Record

These results demonstrate how a simple linguistic technique can enhance rational thinking and quell worry about a pressing public health threat.

Research indicates that a subtle shift in language—silently referring to oneself using one’s own name and non–first-person-singular pronouns (i.e., distanced self-talk)—promotes emotion regulation. Yet it remains unclear whether the efficacy of distanced self-talk depends on the intensity of the negative experience reflected on and whether the benefits extend to emotionally vulnerable individuals. Two high-powered experiments addressed these issues. Distanced as opposed to immersed self-talk reduced emotional reactivity when people reflected on negative experiences that varied in their emotional intensity. These findings held when participants focused on future and past autobiographical events and when they scored high on individual difference measures of emotional vulnerability. The results also generalized across various types of negative events. These findings illuminate the functionality of language for allowing people to regulate their emotions when reflecting on negative experiences across the spectrum of emotional intensity and highlight the need for future research to examine the clinical implications of this technique.

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Individuals with hoarding disorder (HD) excessively acquire and retain goods while also exhibiting characteristics of impulsivity and addiction. However, HD individuals do not always perform impulsively in experiments, they do not appear interested in money, and they exhibit many features of risk-aversion and future-planning. To examine impulsivity in HD, we compared validated community participants high and low in hoarding tendencies on questionnaire measures of hoarding and impulsivity as well as a standard experimental measure of impulsivity (intertemporal discounting) that was modified to compare decisions about money, pens, and snacks. Common discounting effects were replicated. Compared to the low hoarding group, the high hoarding group was more impatient for consumables (pens and snacks) but they were more patient for money. This increased patience for money in high hoarding individuals is in contrast to all other studies on discounting in disordered populations, but consistent with the phenomenology of HD. HD does not appear to be driven by a fundamental inability to wait, but rather a specific, potent desire for consumable rewards.

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Creep tests were performed on single-bundle carbon-carbon specimens at high temperatures (>2310°C) and at high stress levels (>770 MPa). It was found that the creep was very strongly dependent on the filament-matrix interfacial bond. When the bond was good, the typical creep was 3.6% after 5.9 h with the primary creep a high percentage of the total deformation. When the bond was absent (dry bundle), rupture with strain was approximately 140%, and it occurred after only 0.39 h. The marked improvement in creep resistance is attributed to the ability of the matrix to distribute loads evenly and to produce a plastic flow inhibiting triaxial stress state among the filaments. [