Category: Emotion

Adolescents can spot the slightest sign of negative emotion in another person’s face.

People are at their most sensitive to angry faces and social threats when they are teenagers, research finds.

Adolescents can spot the slightest sign of negative emotion in another person’s face.

This partly helps to explain why the social world of adolescents feels so fraught with danger to them.

However, with age, people in general become less sensitive to anger and fear, while retaining their sensitivity to happiness.

Dr Laura Germine, study co-author, said:

“From studies and anecdotal evidence, we know that the everyday experiences of an adolescent is different from a middle aged or older person, but we wanted to understand how these experiences might be linked with differences in basic emotion understanding.”

For the study, 9,546 people took a test of emotional sensitivity.

The test measured how sensitive people are to facial cues of happiness, anger and fear.

Dr Lauren A. Rutter, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“We found that sensitivity to anger cues improves dramatically during early to mid-adolescence.

This is the exact age when young people are most attuned to forms of social threat, such as bullying.

The normal development of anger sensitivity can contribute to some of the challenges that arise during this phase of development.”

The study also found that women of all ages are more sensitive to anger and fear than men.

However, both young and old, men and women, are equally good at detecting happiness, the study found.

Dr Germine explained:

“It’s well established that there is an age-related decline in the ability to decode emotion cues, in general, but here we see very little decline in the ability to detect differences in happiness.

What’s remarkable is that we see declines in many visual perceptual abilities as we get older, but here we did not see such declines in the perception of happiness.

These findings fit well with other research showing that older adults tend to have more positive emotions and a positive outlook.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Rutter et al., 2019).

We all carry around an instrument that can make us happy, if we practice.

Getting lost in positive thoughts about past, present and future helps us escape from ourselves and boosts our well-being, just like a good novel.

Unfortunately, most people find it hard to enjoy their own thoughts.

One infamous example of this is the study that found that most people choose electric shocks over sitting quietly for 15 minutes and thinking.

The reason is that most people are not that good at it, explains Dr Erin Westgate, first author of a new study exploring how we can all improve our daydreaming.

The first problem is that pleasant daydreams are difficult, she says:

“This is part of our cognitive toolkit that’s underdeveloped, and it’s kind of sad.

You have to be the actor, director, screenwriter and audience of a mental performance.

Even though it looks like you’re doing nothing, it’s cognitively taxing.”

The second barrier is that people intuitively go about day dreaming in the wrong way.

When instructed to think meaningful thoughts, people do not enjoy it, which stymied Dr Westgate until she looked at what people were thinking about:

“We’re fairly clueless.

We don’t seem to know what to think about to have a positive experience.

I was so confused.

Then she took a look at the topics the participants reported thinking about.

It was heavy stuff.

It didn’t seem to occur to them that they could use the time to enjoy their own thoughts.”

4 steps to positive daydreaming

Instead, in another part of the research, people were prompted with subjects to daydream about.

They were given these examples:

• “A specific memory you would enjoy thinking about (e.g., your first kiss, a family event, an academic or athletic accomplishment).”
• “Something in the future you are looking forward to (e.g., an upcoming social occasion, date, meeting with a friend, or vacation).”
• “Imagining a future accomplishment (e.g., your graduation day, your wedding day, your first day at a great job).”

The key is to think thoughts that are both pleasant and meaningful.

The results showed that people enjoyed daydreaming 50 percent more when given specific subjects than when they thought about what they wanted.

So, the first key to positive daydreaming is to have topics ready, says Dr Westgate:

“This is something all of us can do once you have the concept.

We give 4- and 5-year-olds these instructions, and it makes sense to them.”

The second key is practice, she says:

“This is hard for everybody.

There’s no good evidence that some types of people are simply better thinkers.

I’m the world’s worst person at this: I would definitely rather have the electric shock.

But knowing why it can be hard and what makes it easier really makes a difference.

The encouraging part is we can all get better.”

The third is to avoid making plans while daydreaming, she says:

“People say they enjoy planning, but when we test it, they do not.”

The fourth is to choose the right time:

“The next time you’re walking, instead of pulling out your phone, try it.”

Thinking for pleasure is something that sets us apart, says Dr Westgate:

“It defines our humanity.

It allows us to imagine new realities.

But that kind of thinking requires practice.”

The study was published in the journal Emotion (Westgate et al., 2021).

Wise people are humble, recognise that the world is in flux and that people have different views that need to be integrated.

Using the emotions in a balanced way helps people to be wise, research finds.

People who were more wise also reported higher ’emodiversity’, a wider range of emotions.

People reasoned more wisely about their relationships, everyday challenges and even political conflicts when they drew on a wide range of emotions.

The finding contradicts the assumption that the emotions cloud judgement.

When used correctly, the emotions help us reason more effectively.

Wise people are humble, recognise that the world is in flux and that people have different views that need to be integrated.

The conclusions come from a series of studies involving 3,678 people whose reasoning was tested in all sorts of contexts.

The authors write that…

“…a wide range of emotions can contribute to wise reasoning about a given situation, because emodiversity—i.e., the breadth and relative abundance of different emotions—can provide valuable information about the features of the situation and allow for more informed predictions of future actions.”

The study’s authors contrast the characters ‘Spock’ and ‘Yoda’ from the fictional worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars, respectively.

They explain:

“Spock shows little emotional response in the face of adversity, having learned to down-regulate his emotions in line with his people’s historical decision to eschew emotions in favor of logic and rationality.

In contrast, Yoda embraces his emotions and aims to achieve a balance between them.”

The wise should forget about Spock’s emotionless approach, says Dr Igor Grossmann, the study’s first author:

“It seems that wise reasoning does not align with uniform emotional down-regulation, as portrayed by Dr. Spock.

Rather, wise reasoning accompanies one’s ability to recognize and balance a wide range of emotions, as portrayed by Yoda.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (Grossmann et al., 2019).