Although excessive fear has been central to traditional conceptualisations of the anxiety disorders, recent research suggests that disgust may also play a role in the development of some anxiety disorders. While dysregulation of emotion may confer risk for the development of anxiety disorders, it remains unclear if there are differences in the extent to which fear and disgust can be effectively regulated. To fill this important gap in the literature, unselected participants (N = 95) experienced fear or disgust via video exposure, and they were instructed to employ either reappraisal or suppression to regulate their emotional experience while viewing the videos. For those exposed to fear-relevant content, change in emotional distress did not significantly differ between those that suppressed and those that reappraised. However, significantly less emotional distress was observed for those that reappraised compared to those that suppressed when exposed to disgust-relevant content. Although physiological arousal varied over time as a function of the emotional content of the videos, it did not vary as a function of emotion regulation strategy employed. These findings suggest that reappraisal may be especially effective in regulating verbal distress when exposed to disgusting cues in the environment. The implications of these findings for the treatment of anxiety disorders that are characterised by excessive disgust reactions will be discussed.
The self is not static. Our identities change considerably over development and across situations. Here, we propose one novel cause of self-change: simulating others. How could simply imagining others change the self? First, when simulating other people's mental states and traits, individuals access self-knowledge; they do so while concurrently considering information about the other person they are trying to understand. Second, episodic and semantic knowledge is malleable and susceptible to incorporating new, postevent information. If self-knowledge is similarly malleable, then simulation may change self-knowledge such that it incorporates information about the simulated person (i.e., "postevent information"). That is, simulation should render the self more similar to the simulated other. We test this hypothesis in 8 studies. In each study, participants (a) recalled personal information (e.g., traits and episodic memories), (b) simulated other people in similar contexts, and (c) re-recalled personal information. Results consistently demonstrated that simulating others changed self-knowledge, such that the self becomes more similar to the simulated other. This effect occurred for both traits and memories, spanned self-report and linguistic measures, and persisted 24 hr after simulation. The findings suggest that self-knowledge is susceptible to misinformation effects similar to those observed in other forms of semantic and episodic knowledge.
The sense of self is a hallmark of the human experience, but it is also unstable. Even simulating another person -thinking about their traits or experiences -can shift how one thinks about their own traits or experiences. Simulating a target shifts self-knowledge such that it becomes more similar to the target; in six studies, we explore how extensively these changes occur. In all studies, participants first rated or wrote about themselves in a specific context, then simulated another individual in the same context, and finally considered themselves again. We calculated how participants' self-knowledge changed by comparing similarity to the target before vs. after simulation. In Studies 1-2, participants' episodic memories shifted to be more similar to the simulated target; this change persisted at least 48 hours. Studies 3-4 shows that semantic selfknowledge changes after considering semantically related traits, while Study 5 shows that this effect extends to cross-language traits. Together, these results suggest that SIM causes durable, extensive changes in across both episodic and semantic self-knowledge.
Emotion dynamics vary considerably from individual to individual and from group to group. Successful social interactions require people to track this moving target in order to anticipate the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. In two studies, we test whether people track others' emotional idiosyncrasies to make accurate, target-specific social predictions. In both studies, participants predicted the emotion transitions of a specific target-either a close friend (Study 1) or a first year college roommate (Study 2)-as well as an average group member. Results demonstrate that people can make highly accurate predictions both for specific individuals and specific groups. Accurate predictions rely on target-specific knowledge; new community members were able to make accurate predictions at zero-acquaintance, but accuracy increased over time as individuals accrued specialized knowledge. Results also suggest that accurate social prediction is associated with social success in both individual and communal relationships, and that such a relation might emerge over time. Overall, our studies suggest that people accurately make individualized predictions of others' emotion transitions, and that doing so fulfills a meaningful function in the social world.
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