Papers by Christian Waugh
Anxiety, Stress, & Coping
Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2018
Despite accruing evidence showing that positive emotions facilitate stress recovery, the neural b... more Despite accruing evidence showing that positive emotions facilitate stress recovery, the neural basis for this effect remains unclear. To identify the underlying mechanism, we compared stress recovery for people reflecting on a stressor while in a positive emotional context with that for people in a neutral context. While blood-oxygen-level dependent data were being collected, participants (N = 43) performed a stressful anagram task, which was followed by a recovery period during which they reflected on the stressor while watching a positive or neutral video. Participants also reported positive and negative emotions throughout the task as well as retrospective thoughts about the task. Although there was no effect of experimental context on emotional recovery, we found that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activation during the stressor predicted more positive emotions during recovery, which in turn predicted less negative emotions during recovery. In addition, the relationship...
Emotion (Washington, D.C.), Jan 22, 2018
Determining how people maintain positive and negative emotional states is critical to understandi... more Determining how people maintain positive and negative emotional states is critical to understanding emotional dynamics, individual differences in emotion, and the instrumental value of emotions. There has been a surge in interest in tasks assessing affective working memory that can examine how people maintain stimulus-independent positive and negative emotional states. In these tasks, people are asked to maintain their emotional state that was induced by an initial stimulus in order to compare that state with the state induced by a subsequent stimulus. It is unclear, however, whether measures of accuracy in this task actually reflect the success of maintaining the initial emotional state. In a series of studies, we introduce an idiographic metric of accuracy that reflects the success of emotional maintenance and use that metric to examine whether people are better at maintaining positive or negative emotional states. We demonstrate that people are generally better at maintaining pos...
Emotion, 2011
Field studies and laboratory experiments have documented that a key component of resilience is em... more 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.
Biological Psychology, 2014
The occurrence of concordance among different response components during an emotional episode is ... more The occurrence of concordance among different response components during an emotional episode is a key feature of several contemporary accounts and definitions of emotion. Yet, capturing such response concordance in empirical data has proven to be elusive, in large part because of a lack of appropriate statistical tools that are tailored to measure the intricacies of response concordance in the context of data on emotional responding. In this article, we present a tool we developed to detect two different forms of response concordance-response patterning and synchronization-in multivariate time series data of emotional responding, and apply this tool to data concerning physiological responding to emotional stimuli. While the findings provide partial evidence for both response patterning and synchronization, they also show that the presence and nature of such patterning and synchronization is strongly person-dependent.
Psychology and aging, 2016
Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decision... more Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decisions-are critical to understand yet relatively unexplored. Age-related emotional shifts toward positivity would be expected to differentially impact the affective responses of older and younger adults to framed messages. In this study, we measured the subjective and physiological affective responses of older and younger adults to gain- and loss-framed exercise promotion messages. Relative to older adults, younger adults exhibited greater negative reactivity to loss-framed health messages. These results suggest that health message framing does matter, but it depends on the age of the message recipient. (PsycINFO Database Record
Rivista Sperimentale Di Freniatria, 2005
... Barbara L. Fredrickson°, Michele M. Tugade°°,Christian E. Waugh°°°, Gregory R. Larkin°°° (Tra... more ... Barbara L. Fredrickson°, Michele M. Tugade°°,Christian E. Waugh°°°, Gregory R. Larkin°°° (Traduzione di Stefano Crosato) ... situazione stressante più importanti (…) sperimentati da martedì 11 settembre 2001 (…) che fosse in qualche modo legata agli at-tacchi terroristici contro ...
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Aug 15, 2011
Anhedonia, the lack of interest or pleasure in response to hedonic stimuli or experiences, is a c... more Anhedonia, the lack of interest or pleasure in response to hedonic stimuli or experiences, is a cardinal symptom of depression. This deficit in hedonic processing has been posited to influence depressed individuals' motivation to engage in potentially rewarding experiences. Accumulating evidence indicates that hedonic processing is not a unitary construct but rather consists of an anticipatory and a consummatory phase. We examined how these components of hedonic processing influence motivation to obtain reward in participants diagnosed with major depression and in never-disordered controls. Thirty-eight currently depressed and 30 never-disordered control participants rated their liking of humorous and nonhumorous cartoons and then made a series of choices between viewing a cartoon from either group. Each choice was associated with a specified amount of effort participants would have to exert before viewing the chosen cartoon. Although depressed and control participants did not differ in their consummatory liking of the rewards, levels of reward liking predicted motivation to expend effort for the rewards only in the control participants; in the depressed participants, liking and motivation were dissociated. In the depressed group, levels of anticipatory anhedonia predicted motivation to exert effort for the rewards. These findings support the formulation that anhedonia is not a unitary construct and suggest that, for depressed individuals, deficits in motivation for reward are driven primarily by low anticipatory pleasure and not by decreased consummatory liking.
Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, 2009
Riassunto: sulla base della teoria dell' amplificazione e costruzione formulata da Fredrickson ([... more Riassunto: sulla base della teoria dell' amplificazione e costruzione formulata da Fredrickson ([1],[2]) (broaden-and-build theory) * , gli autori ipotizzano che le emozioni positive siano componenti attivi della resilienza di tratto. Alcuni studenti americani di college (18 maschi e 28 femmine) sono stati esaminati nei primi mesi del 2001 e nelle settimane successive agli attacchi terroristici dell'11 settembre. Le analisi delle mediazioni hanno dimostrato che le emozioni positive sperimentate in seguito agli attacchi -gratitudine, interesse, affetto e così via -rendono conto del tutto delle relazioni tra (a) resilienza precritica e successivo sviluppo di sintomi depressivi e (b) resilienza precritica e crescita postcritica delle risorse psicologiche. I risultati suggeriscono che le emozioni positive nel seguito delle situazioni critiche proteggono le persone resilienti dalla depressione e ne alimentano lo sviluppo, in accordo con la teoria dell'amplificazione e costruzione. La discussione verte sulle implicazioni per il coping. Parole chiave: emozioni positive, resilienza, coping, terrorismo, 11 settembre. A cosa servono le emozioni positive nelle situazioni critiche? Studio prospettico su resilienza ed emozioni dopo gli attacchi terroristici agli USA dell'11 settembre 2001 Nota Editoriale: Il presente contributo è la traduzione in italiano dell'articolo originale * Fredrickson ha proposto un nuovo stimolante modello sulla funzione delle emozioni positive. Secondo il modello di amplificazione e costruzione (broaden-and-build model) le emozioni positive amplificano (broaden) i repertori temporanei di azione-pensiero delle persone e costruiscono (build) le loro risorse fisiche, sociali, intellettuali (Nota del Traduttore). Abstract: extrapolating from B. L. Fredrickson's ([1],[2]) 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 broadenand-build theory. Discussion touches on implications for coping.
Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2015
Interpreting ambiguous stimuli in a negative manner is a core bias associated with depression. In... more Interpreting ambiguous stimuli in a negative manner is a core bias associated with depression. Investigators have used cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I) to demonstrate that it is possible to experimentally induce and modify these biases. This study extends previous research by examining whether CBM-I affects not only interpretation, but also memory and physiological stress response in individuals diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). We found that CBM-I was effective in inducing an interpretive bias. Participants also exhibited memory biases that corresponded to their training condition and demonstrated differential physiological responding in a stress task. These results suggest that interpretation biases in depression can be modified, and that this training can lead to corresponding changes in memory and to decreases in stress reactivity. Findings from this study highlight the importance of examining the relations among different cognitive biases in ...
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Papers by Christian Waugh