Dampening of positive affect and depression: A meta-analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships

The effect of universal school-based mindfulness on anhedonia and emotional distress and its underlying mechanisms: A cluster randomised controlled trial via experience sampling in secondary schools

“…Dampening is a response style towards positive emotions that reduces their intensity and duration through thoughts such as, “I do not deserve this positive feeling” or “This positive feeling will end soon” ( Felver et al, 2016 ). Across age, dampening has been found to be positively related to depressive symptoms and anhedonia, concurrently and prospectively ( Bean, Summers, & Ciesla, 2022 ). MT has the potential to unlock this challenging combination of response styles towards negative and positive emotions.…”

Construct validity and psychometric properties of the Responses to Positive Affect (RPA) questionnaire

“…Therefore, these results suggest that the RPA assesses a more adaptive regulation strategy (i.e., positive emotion-and person-focused rumination) and a less adaptive one (i.e., dampening); the former amplifies positive affect while the second attenuates positive affect and increases negative affect (Abasi et al, 2018;Kraiss et al, 2019;McEvoy et al, 2018McEvoy et al, , 2021Mennies et al, 2020;Voss et al, 2019). As a result, it is plausible to expect dampening to have a bidirectional relationship between depression symptoms and dampening (Bean et al, 2022).…”

“…Therefore, considering the fear of emotions experienced by people regarding both PA and NA (Puntons et al, 2011;Williams et al, 1997), our results have clinical relevance for programming the pleasant activities proposed in some psychological therapies, such as behavioral activation therapy (Martell et al, 2010). If depressed or anxious individuals make dampening assessments when they start to experience positive affect by taking part in a pleasant activity and experience fear of PA at the same time, this may lead the activity to reduce levels of PA and increase levels of negative affect (Bean et al, 2022). Therefore, an important objective in interventions aimed at improving emotion regulation, such as transdiagnostic or unified programs (Carlucci et al, 2021;Osma et al, 2015), would be to inform individuals about the counterproductive effects of dampening assessments and fear of emotions.…”

“…Unlike amplifying responses, dampening ones are not characterized by repetitiveness but rather on their focus on the negative aspects of a situation, thus attenuating positive affect (Mennies et al, 2020). In short, positive rumination is a more adaptive form of rumination that amplifies PA, while dampening is a less adaptive strategy that decreases PA (Gilbert et al, 2013; for a meta-analysis, see, e.g., Bean et al, 2022).…”

Measurement invariance of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Scale–Depression within and across six diverse intervention trials.

“…It is also aligned with other data that have led to calls for consideration of the depressive symptom construct on a continuum of severity rather than by symptom cluster (Vares et al, 2015). Although a dampening of positive affect is associated with depressive symptoms (Bean et al, 2022), the data on the link between depressive symptoms and the endorsement of the positive affect items vary across cultures (Jang et al, 2010), making its removal consistent with a measure that is appropriate across diverse populations. The unidimensional CES-D, after removal of positive affect items, demonstrates equivalent measurement properties across arms at baseline and end line, and over time, within six diverse partner–violence prevention trials.…”