Category: Affect/Emotion

Media Mention in PsyPost

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Our article on Black identity, depressive symptomology, and marital satisfaction recently was talked about on pop-science news website PsyPost.

My co-author August really comes across clearly in describing the findings.  I wish they’d take it the step further to point out how strongly this argues a need for more research along these lines.  As I alluded to in the earlier post, and as we talk about in the paper, a lot of the analyses we ran are really exploratory–they’re first takes at trying to capture the complexity of the intersections of different forces.  The models exist to understand this more completely, but finding the data is a much taller order.

You can find it online: “New study highlights important links between depressive symptoms, Black identity and marital satisfaction in African-American couples” by Eric Dolan.

New Article: Capturing temporal dynamics of fear behaviors on a moment‐to‐moment basis

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Detail of fear seqeunces from several children

One early indicator of psychopathology risk for small children shows up in patterns of fear behaviors. In our new paper Capturing temporal dynamics of fear behaviors on a moment‐to‐moment basis, published in Infancy, we apply discrete sequence methods to data about children’s responses to a fearful situation.

One of the very cool things about this paper is that we identify a few different clusters of child behavior. We were hoping to find a way to identify a high fear group at risk to show dysregulated fear, which has psychopathology implications. We found them to some extent, but also identified some other groups that are interesting: a group of external regulators, who use a parent to help regulate their emotions; one low reactive group, who just aren’t that scared by things; and a cool group called fearful explorers who show fear, but don’t let it stop them from checking things out. This work provides some new data points to help understand the emergence of emotion regulation across child development.

New Article: Individualized Modeling to Distinguish Between High and Low Arousal States Using Physiological Data

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Two timestreams, warped to common timing

As Wear-IT begins to take shape in more detail, we’ve been looking at new ways to understand and model physiological data on an individual level. Recent work with Ame Osotsi, Zita Oravecz, and Joshua Smyth examines individual differences in physiological response in a paper called Individualized Modeling to Distinguish Between High and Low Arousal States Using Physiological Data, just published in the Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research.
In it, we illustrate the importance of individual modeling for physiological states, showing that high-arousal states have physiological signatures that can be detected by machine learners, but that those signatures differ enormously from person to person, and individualized modeling is really important.

Quantitative Methods Series at USC

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Dr. Brick took a trip this week to the University of Southern California to visit Dr. Chris Beam in the Psychology department, and Dr. John Prindle in the School of social work.

He also gave a presentation to kick off USC’s Quantitative Methods Series, discussing new models of day-to-day affect and emotion, and their expected relationships to emotion regulation.  Lots of interesting discussion about exciting data sets and interesting new approaches to measurement!

Emotion Over Time

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Core affect is a way of thinking about emotional mood state in terms of two measures: valence (from positive to negative) and arousal (from highly active to placid). So if you’re super ticked off about something, that’s negative valence and high arousal, where if you’re just blissfully chill, you’re low arousal and positive valence.   But people aren’t just in one state forever–much more interesting is the way that they change.

Zita Oravecz and I look at the dynamics of core affect change within an individual in a recent paper: Associations Between Slow- and Fast-Timescale Indicators of Emotional Functioning in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.  There, we characterize the changes in core affect within a person in terms of a person’s home base in each dimension, the state they drop back to when there’s no real input, how much they fluctuate around that home base, how strongly their system regulates itself back to base, and the correlations between the ways those characteristics show up in valence and arousal.  Importantly, these characteristics turn out to be predictive of other “trait-level” characteristics, like the strategies you use when you have to deal with negative emotion.