According to the facial feedback hypothesis, people's affective responses can be influenced by their own facial expression (e.g., smiling, pouting), even when their expression did not result from their emotional experiences. For example, Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) instructed participants to rate the funniness of cartoons using a pen that they held in their mouth. In line with the facial feedback hypothesis, when participants held the pen with their teeth (inducing a "smile"), they rated the cartoons as funnier than when they held the pen with their lips (inducing a "pout"). This seminal study of the facial feedback hypothesis has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 17 independent direct replications of Study 1 from Strack et al. (1988), all of which followed the same vetted protocol. A meta-analysis of these studies examined the difference in funniness ratings between the "smile" and "pout" conditions. The original Strack et al. (1988) study reported a rating difference of 0.82 units on a 10-point Likert scale. Our meta-analysis revealed a rating difference of 0.03 units with a 95% confidence interval ranging from -0.11 to 0.16.

This paper examined, with a behavioral paradigm, to what extent people choose to view stimuli that portray death, violence or harm. Based on briefly presented visual cues, participants made choices between highly arousing, negative images and positive or negative alternatives. The negative images displayed social scenes that involved death, violence or harm (e.g., war scene), or decontextualized, close-ups of physical harm (e.g., mutilated face) or natural threat (e.g., attacking shark). The results demonstrated that social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, participants preferred social negative images over neutral images. Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral images, but were chosen in about thirty-five percent of the trials. These results were replicated across three different studies, including a study that presented verbal descriptions of images as pre-choice cues. Together, these results show that people deliberately subject themselves to negative images. With this, the present paper demonstrates a dynamic relationship between negative information and behavior and advances new insights into the phenomenon of morbid curiosity.

Scientists have traditionally assumed that different kinds of mental states (e.g., fear, disgust, love, memory, planning, concentration, etc.) correspond to different psychological faculties that have domain-specific correlates in the brain. Yet, growing evidence points to the constructionist hypothesis that mental states emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological processes that map to large-scale distributed brain networks. In this paper, we report a novel study testing a constructionist model of the mind in which participants generated three kinds of mental states (emotions, body feelings, or thoughts) while we measured activity within large-scale distributed brain networks using fMRI. We examined the similarity and differences in the pattern of network activity across these three classes of mental states. Consistent with a constructionist hypothesis, a combination of large-scale distributed networks contributed to emotions, thoughts, and body feelings, although these mental states differed in the relative contribution of those networks. Implications for a constructionist functional architecture of diverse mental states are discussed.

Embodiment theories predict that activating conceptual knowledge about emotions can be accompanied by reexperiencing bodily states, since simulations of sensory, motor, and introspective experiences form the foundation of conceptual representations of emotion. In the present study, we examine whether the activation of the specific emotion concepts of pride and disappointment are embodied in the sense that they are accompanied by changes in posture. Participants generated words associated with pride and disappointment while posture height was measured. Results show that during the generation of disappointment words participants decreased their posture height more than when participants generated pride words. This finding suggests that the activation of conceptual knowledge about disappointment can lead to a spontaneous expression of the associated body posture. In contrast to posture changes along the vertical axis, movement along the horizontal axis was not influenced by concept activation. In addition to bodily simulation the data also indicated introspective simulation, since feelings of disappointment increased after generating disappointment words. The current study provides the first evidence for the claim that the activation of conceptual knowledge about emotion can instantiate spontaneous simulations at a behavioral level.Human knowledge covers not only concrete objects and events, such as household objects, animals, birthday parties, or a bike ride, but also abstract concepts such as trust, anger, love, and hope. We know what it means to be angry, how we act when we are afraid, what we say when we are in love, and what events can lead to frustration and joy. Emotion knowledge is used when we talk to people, write emails or read a book, and it helps us making sense of our own emotions and the emotions of others. Consequently, an important and interesting question is how this knowledge is represented.Recently, it has been suggested that conceptual knowledge is represented by re-enacting experiences that occur in interaction with the objects that the knowledge refers to (Barsalou, 1999;Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). Conceptual knowledge about emotion seems to be a perfect test case for this idea, because emotional states (i.e., the ''objects'' of this knowledge) are accompanied by a broad range of bodily experiences, such as physiological reactions, facial expressions, motor reactions, and body postures. Thus, emotion concepts might not be mere symbolic representations (Fodor, 1975), disconnected from what we feel and do when we are experiencing an emotion. In contrast, emotional experiences and bodily reactions may form the foundation of conceptual representations of emotion (Niedenthal

Previous research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own feelings. Building on previous work that has shown that emotion differentiation is associated with individual differences in intrapersonal functions, the current study asks whether emotion differentiation is also related to interpersonal skills. Specifically, we examined whether individuals who are high in emotion differentiation would be more accurate in recognising others' emotional expressions. We report two studies in which we used an established paradigm tapping negative emotion differentiation and several emotion recognition tasks. In Study 1 (N = 363), we found that individuals high in emotion differentiation were more accurate in recognising others' emotional facial expressions. Study 2 (N = 217), replicated this finding using emotion recognition tasks with varying amounts of emotional information. These findings suggest that the knowledge we use to understand our own emotional experience also helps us understand the emotions of others. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Many scientific models of emotion assume that emotion categories are natural kinds that carve nature at its joints. These beliefs remain strong, despite the fact that the empirical record on the issue has remained equivocal for over a century. In this research, the authors examined one reason for this situation: People essentialize emotion categories by assuming that members of the same category (e.g., fear) have a shared metaphysical essence (i.e., a common causal mechanism). In Study 1, the authors found that lay people essentialize emotions by assuming that instances of the same emotion category have a shared essence that defines them, even when their surface features differ. Study 2 extended these findings, demonstrating that lay people tend to essentialize categories the more a category is of the body (vs. the mind). In Study 3, we examined the links between emotion essentialism and the complexity of actual emotional experiences. In particular, we predicted and found that individuals who hold essentialist beliefs about emotions describe themselves as experiencing highly differentiated emotional experiences but do not show evidence of stronger emotional differentiation in their momentary ratings of experience in everyday life. Implications for the science of emotion are discussed.

The media coverage sometimes given to crying women points to the importance of understanding whether gender affects interpretations of crying. This article reports two studies that examined whether observers infer different emotions or dispositions from crying men and women. Study 1 showed that, in the absence of information about the social context of crying, participants inferred gender‐stereotypical traits and emotions. Study 2's manipulation of the social context of crying (relationship versus employment) affected participants' interpretations of crying by men and women. In employment contexts, participants perceived crying men as more emotional and sad than crying women as well as less competent. The emotionality inferences mediated the judgments of differing male and female competence. In relationship contexts, interpretations of crying women and men did not differ. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.