Cognitive Response to Erotic and Stressful Films

Emotions at the Service of Cultural Construction

“…From their review of the relevant literature, Stein and Levine (1990, p. 58) concluded that both positive and negative emotions have been shown to facilitate thinking, depending on the nature of the thinking considered. It is not extraneous to this context that event-related thoughts were consistently observed to be as frequent after positive emotions as after negative emotions (Horowitz & Becker, 1973;Rimé et al, 1991;Rimé et al, 1992). In the same way, a recent set of studies showed that both extremely painful and extremely pleasant events were rated as more meaningful than milder ones by those who experienced them (Murphy & Bastian, 2019).…”

“…In his view, every emotion is initially followed by a repetitive re-presentation of experiential elements to be integrated. Laboratory studies conducted on healthy participants fully supported this view: movie inductions of positive as well as of negative emotion were systematically followed by intrusive thoughts (Horowitz & Becker, 1971, 1973). Martin and Tesser (1989) showed that when a conflict arises between a current and a desired situation, as is the case when a goal is blocked, conditions conducive to ruminative thoughts are met.…”

A mind you can count on: validating breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness

“…Reducing such mind wandering would reduce the negative emotions it triggers ( Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010 ), improving mood. And with fewer negative emotions to fuel it ( Horowitz and Becker, 1973 ), mind wandering would reduce further. The same would apply to wanting, resulting in non-attachment.…”

Understanding the overlap between positive and negative involuntary cognitions using instrumental earworms.

“…In a typical lab experiment studying negative involuntary cognitions, participants view a negative/traumatic film and then monitor subsequent involuntary thoughts of that film inside and/or outside the lab (see James et al, 2016, for review). To our knowledge, only three published articles (Clark et al, 2013; Green, Strange, Lindsay, & Takarangi, 2016; Horowitz & Becker, 1973) have taken the same approach—that is, presented a positive film and measured subsequent involuntary thoughts of that film—to study positive involuntary cognitions, and only one (Green et al, 2016) has directly compared positive with negative involuntary cognitions. In this experiment, Green et al (2016) found positive and negative involuntary thoughts (measured in a thought-monitoring phase immediately after film viewing) were equally frequent.…”