Don't Dwell on it: The Impact of Rumination on Emotional Sensitivity

Abstract

The relationship between level of depressive symptoms, ruminative response style and sensitivity to facial expressions of emotion was investigated among female university students. Participants were able to distinguish between facial expressions (of happiness and sadness) that were and were not associated with experience of a corresponding affective state. for sadness, there was a negative relationship between rumination and emotion sensitivity, and a positive relationship between rumination and bias. results are discussed in terms of the influence of individual differences on sensitivity to the emotional state of interaction partners.

Children can discriminate the authenticity of happy but not sad or fearful facial expressions, and use an immature intensity-only strategy

“…It was also theoretically important to establish whether authenticity discrimination was above chance (0.5). Using one-sample t -tests we found that, consistent with previous studies using similar stimuli (e.g., McLellan et al, 2010 , 2012 ; Johnston et al, 2011 ; Douglas et al, 2012 ; McLellan and McKinley, 2013 ), adults were able to successfully discriminate the authenticity of happy, t (56) = 12.08, p < 0.001, and sad expressions, t (56) = 4.09, p < 0.001. For fearful expressions, authenticity discrimination was slightly below chance but not significantly so, t (56) = 2.22, p = 0.061.…”

“…For instance, sometimes when people smile it does not necessarily mean that they are actually feeling happy.” ( McLellan et al, 2010 , p. 1283). Participants were then asked to give a yes/no response to the question “Are the following people feeling [emotion]?” For happiness and sadness, all five studies ( McLellan et al, 2010 , 2012 ; Johnston et al, 2011 ; Douglas et al, 2012 ; McLellan and McKinley, 2013 ) found that adults were significantly above chance at authenticity discrimination on this task (i.e., more “yes” responses for genuine expressions than for pretend expressions as indicated by A’, a non-parametric signal detection score that combines hits and false alarms). For fear, of the two studies that tested this emotion, the initial study found significant if weak discrimination ( McLellan et al, 2010 ), although this was not replicated in a later study (which found no discrimination; Douglas et al, 2012 ).…”

“…For the present study, we wished to select stimuli, and emotions, for which previous studies have found adult authenticity discrimination performance was above chance (thus allowing the examination of developmental trends). For adults, five published studies using stimuli from McLellan have tested whether observers can distinguish genuine from pretend expressions ( McLellan et al, 2010 , 2012 ; Johnston et al, 2011 ; Douglas et al, 2012 ; McLellan and McKinley, 2013 ; note that all of these studies did not use exactly the same stimulus items). Participants were instructed, “Your job is to decide… whether or not they are [the person shown is] feeling each emotion.…”

Perceived emotion genuineness: normative ratings for popular facial expression stimuli and the development of perceived-as-genuine and perceived-as-fake sets

“…9 Overall, then, in the McLellan set of stimuli, observers were commonly unable to pick out the actual underlying emotional state of the displayer. 9 Note that these results for the relative difference in perceived genuineness between the event-elicited and posed versions are consistent with previous findings for the McLellan stimuli, in which participants performed above chance in genuineness discrimination (BAre the following people feeling happiness/sadness?^task with yes/no response and A' as the discrimination measure) for the happy and sad emotions, but with varied results for fear, one failure in a test for disgust, and no previous tests of the angry faces (Dawel et al, 2015;Douglas et al, 2012;Johnston et al, 2011;McLellan et al, 2010McLellan et al, , 2012McLellan & McKinley, 2013). Fig.…”

“…The resulting images were retained by McLellan only if the displayer then verified by self-report they had indeed been feeling the emotion intended by the context (e.g., they actually felt sad when thinking about a sad event), and if a posed version of that expression was available from the same displayer (see bottom half of table). Note: The McLellan event-elicited stimuli are referred to as "genuine" in publications from McLellan's group (Douglas et al, 2012;Johnston et al, 2011;McLellan et al, 2010McLellan et al, , 2012McLellan & McKinley, 2013). News (from Fairfax Syndication, www.fairfaxsyndication.com/ C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=FXJO50_1)…”