Christian E. Waugh

What Good Are Positive Emotions in Crises? A Prospective Study of Resilience and Emotions Following the Terrorist Attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001

Extrapolating from B. L. Fredricksons (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, the authors hypothesized that positive emotions are active ingredients within trait resilience. U.S. college students (18 men and 28 women) were tested in early 2001 and again in the weeks following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Mediational analyses showed that positive emotions experienced in the wake of the attacks--gratitude, interest, love, and so forth--fully accounted for the relations between (a) precrisis resilience and later development of depressive symptoms and (b) precrisis resilience and postcrisis growth in psychological resources. Findings suggest that positive emotions in the aftermath of crises buffer resilient people against depression and fuel thriving, consistent with the broaden-and-build theory. Discussion touches on implications for coping.

Nice to know you: Positive emotions, self–other overlap, and complex understanding in the formation of a new relationship

Based on Fredricksons ((1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2, 300–319.; (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218–226) broaden-and-build theory and Aron and Arons ((1986). Love as expansion of the self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. New York: Hemisphere) self-expansion theory, it was hypothesized that positive emotions broaden peoples feelings of self–other overlap in the beginning of a new relationship. In a prospective study of first-year college students, we found that, after 1 week in college, positive emotions predicted increased self–other overlap with new roommates, which in turn predicted a more complex understanding of the roommate. In addition, participants who experienced a high ratio of positive to negative emotions throughout the first month of college reported a greater increase in self–other overlap and complex understanding than participants with a low positivity ratio. Implications for the role of positive emotions in the formation of new relationships are discussed. At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. Its a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one. Joseph Campbell

The functional domain specificity of self-esteem and the differential prediction of aggression

On the basis of an evolutionary theory of self-esteem (SE), it was hypothesized that the SE-aggression relationship differs across functionally distinct domains of SE and across contexts. In 2 experiments, participants had the opportunity to aggress against the evaluator of an essay they had written. In Study 1, self-perceived superiority was positively related to aggression, whereas social inclusion was inversely related to aggression. In Study 2, in which the context was altered to simulate a mating competition, only a measure of self-perceived mate value emerged as a (positive) predictor of aggression. Global SE failed to contribute to the prediction of aggression in either experiment. Statistically controlling for narcissism did not eliminate either set of findings. Implications for the conceptualization and measurement of SE and narcissism are discussed.

Endogenous testosterone levels are associated with amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex responses to anger faces in men but not women

Testosterone moderates behavioral and physiological responses to the emotion anger. However, little is known about the effects of testosterone in the human brain in the context of the perception of anger. We used fMRI to measure BOLD responses to anger faces in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as a function of endogenous testosterone levels in 24 participants (10 men). In one task, participants passively viewed anger faces and neutral faces and in another task, participants engaged in an oddball task while viewing anger and neutral faces. Mens, but not womens, amygdala BOLD response to anger faces was negatively correlated with their endogenous testosterone levels in both tasks. Mens, but not womens, vmPFC BOLD response to anger faces was positively correlated with their endogenous testosterone levels in the passive-viewing task. In men, amygdala and vmPFC BOLD responses to anger faces were negatively associated. Our results extend past research by documenting associations between endogenous testosterone levels and BOLD responses to anger faces in the amygdala and vmPFC in men, and our results also support research that documents negative associations between amygdala and vmPFC activity.

Flexible Emotional Responsiveness in Trait Resilience

Field studies and laboratory experiments have documented that a key component of resilience is emotional flexibility--the ability to respond flexibly to changing emotional circumstances. In the present study we tested the hypotheses that resilient people exhibit emotional flexibility: (a) in response to frequently changing emotional stimuli and (b) across multiple modalities of emotional responding. As participants viewed a series of emotional pictures, we assessed their self-reported affect, facial muscle activity, and startle reflexes. Higher trait resilience predicted more divergent affective and facial responses (corrugator and zygomatic) to positive versus negative pictures. Thus, compared with their low-resilient counterparts, resilient people appear to be able to more flexibly match their emotional responses to the frequently changing emotional stimuli. Moreover, whereas high-trait-resilient participants exhibited divergent startle responses to positive versus negative pictures regardless of the valence of the preceding trial, low-trait-resilient participants did not exhibit divergent startle responses when the preceding picture was negative. High-trait-resilient individuals, therefore, appear to be better able than are their low-resilient counterparts to either switch or maintain their emotional responses depending on whether the emotional context changes. The present findings broaden our understanding of the mechanisms underlying resilience by demonstrating that resilient people are able to flexibly change their affective and physiological responses to match the demands of frequently changing environmental circumstances.

Neural and behavioral effects of interference resolution in depression and rumination

Individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) often ruminate about their depression and their life situations, impairing their concentration and performance on daily tasks. We examined whether rumination might be due to a deficit in the ability to expel negative information from short-term memory (STM), and fMRI was used to examine the neural structures involved in this ability. MDD and healthy control (HC) participants were tested using a directed-forgetting procedure in a short-term item recognition task. As predicted, MDD participants had more difficulty than did HCs in expelling negative, but not positive, words from STM. Overall, the neural networks involved in directed forgetting were similar for both groups, but the MDDs exhibited more spatial variability in activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (a region critical for inhibiting irrelevant information), which may contribute to their relative inability to inhibit negative information.

Modeling state-related fMRI activity using change-point theory.

The general linear model (GLM) approach has arguably become the dominant way to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. It tests whether activity in a brain region is systematically related to some known input function. However, the GLM becomes impractical when the precise timing and duration of psychological events cannot be specified a priori. In this work, we introduce a new analysis approach that allows the predicted signal to depend non-linearly on the input. The approach uses ideas from statistical control theory and change-point theory to model slowly varying processes for which the onset times and durations of underlying psychological activity are uncertain. Our approach is exploratory in nature, while retaining the inferential capabilities of the more rigid modeling approach. It is a multi-subject extension of the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) method used in change-point analysis. We extend existing EWMA models for individual subjects (a single time series) so that they are applicable to fMRI data, and develop a group analysis using a hierarchical model, which we term HEWMA (Hierarchical EWMA). The HEWMA method can be used to analyze fMRI data voxel-wise throughout the brain, data from regions of interest, or temporal components extracted using ICA or similar methods. We validate the false-positive rate control of the method and provide power estimates using simulations based on real fMRI data. We further apply this method to an fMRI study (n=24) of state anxiety. A toolbox implementing all functions in Matlab is freely available from the authors.

Exploring the motivational brain: effects of implicit power motivation on brain activation in response to facial expressions of emotion

This study tested the hypothesis that implicit power motivation (nPower), in interaction with power incentives, influences activation of brain systems mediating motivation. Twelve individuals low (lowest quartile) and 12 individuals high (highest quartile) in nPower, as assessed per content coding of picture stories, were selected from a larger initial participant pool and participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study during which they viewed high-dominance (angry faces), low-dominance (surprised faces) and control stimuli (neutral faces, gray squares) under oddball-task conditions. Consistent with hypotheses, high-power participants showed stronger activation in response to emotional faces in brain structures involved in emotion and motivation (insula, dorsal striatum, orbitofrontal cortex) than low-power participants.

COMT genotype affects prefrontal white matter pathways in children and adolescents

Diffusion tensor imaging is widely used to evaluate the development of white matter. Information about how alterations in major neurotransmitter systems, such as the dopamine (DA) system, influence this development in healthy children, however, is lacking. Catechol-O-metyltransferase (COMT) is the major enzyme responsible for DA degradation in prefrontal brain structures, for which there is a corresponding genetic polymorphism (val158met) that confers either a more or less efficient version of this enzyme. The result of this common genetic variation is that children may have more or less available synaptic DA in prefrontal brain regions. In the present study we examined the relation between diffusion properties of frontal white matter structures and the COMT val158met polymorphism in 40 children ages 9-15. We found that the val allele was associated with significantly elevated fractional anisotropy values and reduced axial and radial diffusivities. These results indicate that the development of white matter in healthy children is related to COMT genotype and that alterations in white matter may be related to the differential availability of prefrontal DA. This investigation paves the way for further studies of how common functional variants in the genome might influence the development of brain white matter.

Cardiovascular and affective recovery from anticipatory threat

Anticipating a stressor elicits robust cardiovascular and affective responses. Despite the possibility that recovery from these responses may have implications for physical and mental well-being, little research has examined this issue. In this study, participants either gave a public speech or anticipated giving a speech. Compared with speech-givers, participants who anticipated giving a speech, on average, exhibited similar cardiovascular recovery (decreased heart rate [HR] and increased respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]), and reported lower negative affect during recovery. Only in the anticipation condition, however, were cardiovascular recovery and affective recovery associated: poor affective recovery predicted incomplete HR recovery and decreased RSA. These are the first data to compare explicitly recovery from anticipation of a stressor with recovery from the stressor itself. These findings suggest that failing to recover from anticipation has unique physiological costs that, in turn, may contribute to mental and physical illness.