It’s an old canard that “a picture is worth a thousand words.”  Recent research presented at SPSP’s 16th Annual Convention in Long Beach suggested that when it comes to understanding emotional experience, though, a momentary “snapshot” of the influences on emotion at a particular moment in time only tells a small part of the story.  Just as time lapse videos have grown in popularity because they communicate more about a complex scene that unfolded over time than a still photograph can, new research finds that emotion may be best understood in terms of interconnected processes that ebb, flow, and interact over time. In particular, several presenters suggested that how we think about a situation has important effects on emotion duration, not just intensity.
 
Past research has shown that cognitive appraisals, the subjective evaluation of a situation, shape the nature of emotional experience.  For instance, whether a driver blames his own driving or the rainy conditions for a car accident may affect whether he experiences regret or disappointment about the accident.
 
In the “Mental Simulation” preconference, I presented work from our lab examining the role of perceptions of goal attainability in the experience of regret.  Past studies have found that these opportunity perceptions both increase and decrease regret. In our study, we asked women who had just learned the outcome of sorority “rush” about their goals for attempting to join a sorority, and whether they could still attain those goals.  We then tracked their regret immediately after learning whether they’d gotten into a sorority and across the following 3 months.  Opportunity played opposite roles in the initial levels of regret and in how regret changed over time: whereas seeing one’s goals as attainable decreased initial levels of regret, it led to regret persisting over time (that is, decreasing less).  How one thinks about a regrettable situation influences both how strong feelings of regret will be and how long these feelings will last.
 
In the session “Temporal dynamics of emotion and emotion regulation,” Christian Waugh highlighted that emotion duration may also be a key in distinguishing healthy versus maladaptive emotional responses.  He and his colleagues used a procedure described in a 2010 Neuroimage paper to compare responses of healthy and depressed participants to emotionally stressful stimuli.  They found that although depressed and healthy participants showed the same initial responses, depressed patients showed a rebound in later activation, consistent with research linking rumination to depression.  Depressed versus healthy brains may thus have a key difference in whether they have recurring emotional reactions to the same distressing events.
 
Given the importance of cognitive appraisals in emotion duration, it’s not surprising that reappraisal, in which individuals change their thoughts about the situation, is a key emotion regulation strategy.  Focusing on the fact that no one was hurt in a car accident may soften the blow of expensive damage to the vehicle, for example. Research presented at the SPSP conference highlighted that these cognitions are also key to understanding how emotions change over time.
 
In the session “Temporal dynamics of emotion and emotion regulation,” Kateri McRae reviewed a new modeling technique that makes it possible to look at the intensity and duration of neural activity separately during an fMRI study. Recent work from her lab has used this technique to examine the process of positive reappraisal, in which individuals are asked to think about emotionally distressing stimuli (like a patient in a hospital bed) in a way that casts them in a less distressing light (such as thinking about the fact that the person is being cared for and thus may start to get better). Examining reappraisal using this new modeling approach reveals that positive reappraisal has different effects on the amygdala, a region associated with emotional response, and regions of the prefrontal cortex associated with emotion regulation.  In particular, McRae and her colleagues find that positive reappraisal shifts both the intensity and the duration of the prefrontal cortex response, indicating that emotion regulation processes are both stronger and longer-lasting as a result of positive reappraisal.  Importantly, the researchers also found that positive reappraisal impacts only the duration of the amygdala response, but not the magnitude.  Reappraisal thus appears not to change the strength of the emotional response, but does shorten this experience.  “Looking on the bright side” may shorten negative emotions, even if it doesn’t lessen their intensity while they last.
 
In the same session, Philippe Verduyn presented research that initial appraisals of a situation as incongruent with ones goals predicted the duration of negative emotion.  Moreover, changes in appraisals at later time points predicted changes in emotion, with reappraisals shortening the duration of both positive and negative emotions. Again, changing one’s view of a situation can change how long an emotional experience lasts.
 
Taken together, these studies suggest that what matters in emotion is not just what people feel but how long they feel it.  Initial appraisals can shape the duration of emotional experience, but changes in these evaluations due to reappraisal will also change the duration of emotional responses.  Emotional experience is not a photograph frozen in time, but instead ever changing.