Advancing models and methods of emotional concordance

Social anxiety and concordance in emotional responses across levels of evaluative threat

“…However, it is still likely that there are important interdependent processes at play among the components despite them being weakly associated at any given single time point. For instance, the emotion components we assessed may operate on different timescales (e.g., skin conductance might quickly peak at the start of a social task and then decline whereas self-reported anxiety might remain high for the entirety of the task) or the rate of change of actual emotional processes may be faster than the rate at which we measured them and thus not accurately captured (Cacioppo et al, 2000;Lougheed et al, 2021;Mauss et al, 2005). Thus, when an emotion is elicited, components of the emotional response are likely changing at different rates and peaking at different times, resulting in different patterns of fluctuation over the course of an emotional episode.…”

“…Together, they argue that emotions like anxiety are comprised of a set of concordant (i.e., strongly associated) cognitions, behaviors, physiological responses, and subjective affective experiences that are synchronized to prompt action in response to situational demands. Intuitive as this conceptualization may seem, years of research have produced limited empirical support for concordance among components of emotional responses, both in the case of social anxiety and emotions more broadly (Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014;Lougheed et al, 2021). To better understand concordance (or the lack thereof) in social anxiety, the current study examines if and how theoretically important social anxiety responses are associated across different levels of experimentally manipulated social-evaluative threat.…”

“…Despite many theories of emotion and psychological disorders assuming concordance among the elements of an emotional response, the reality is that these components tend to be either loosely coupled (Bradley & Lang, 2000;Lang, 1968) or, in some cases, discordant (i.e., negatively associated or not significantly associated; Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014;Lougheed et al, 2021;Mauss & Robinson, 2009). For social anxiety in particular, findings have been mixed.…”

“…A number of contextual factors are hypothesized to influence whether or not concordance occurs, such as situational context (e.g., in-lab vs. natural environment; social vs. non-social), emotion elicitation procedure (e.g., imagery vs. in-vivo), intensity of emotional response, or level of threat present in the environment (Cacioppo et al, 2000;Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014;Lougheed et al, 2021). Taken further, constructionist theories of emotion (e.g., (Barrett, 2006;Lindquist, 2013;Russell, 2003) emphasize that concordance is neither central nor necessary to emotion experience, arguing that there is no single type of situation that specifically and consistently elicits fear nor a singular "fear response" comprised of the same synchronized components.…”

“…On the other hand, proponents of concordance have argued that an emotion must reach a certain level of intensity before concordance among the components of that emotion are observed (Davidson, 1992;Hodgson & Rachman, 1974), although this may differ depending on the emotion under study (e.g., amusement vs. sadness; Mauss et al, 2005). Intense emotions are presumed to be associated with concordance in part because they can overwhelm a person such that they struggle to regulate their emotional response (Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014;Lougheed et al, 2021). For socially anxious individuals, anxiety is theorized to be more intense in the presence of others (vs. alone) and in situations involving clear social evaluation given these situations raise opportunities for rejection and embarrassment (e.g., Moscovitch, 2009).…”