A Short Note On Anxiety And Happiness : Precursors Towards The Unconscious Processing Of Emotionally

Happiness is a positive mental or emotional state stemming from biology as well as outside circumstances. Often, people believe that by achieving certain levels of success and wealth, their happiness levels will rise, but that is not the case. Since many factors influencing one’s happiness lie in biology, it is largely predetermined. Happiness is just as influenced by biology as it is by external factors.

A component of the alexithymia construct, emotion differentiation is the ability to identify and label emotional experiences into discrete categories (Boden et al., 2013). (Note: Emotion differentiation has also been referred to as emotion granularity; Barrett, 2006; Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004). Individuals high in emotion differentiation can make subtle distinctions between their emotions; for example, they can distinguish between feelings of anger, frustration, or annoyance. Individuals with low emotion differentiation, however, may interpret all emotions in a broad, more general manner, such as simply claiming they feel “upset” or “bad” (Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001; Boden et al., 2013). Although it may only represent a portion of

This project deals with the impact of state and trait anxiety on emotional interpretation. To define the different types of anxiety, state anxiety is temporary while trait anxiety tends to be longer lasting (Meijer, 2001). Next, according to Mathews and Mackintosh (2000), emotional interpretation is generally how a person interprets emotional information. I became interested in emotional interpretation after participating in a research study with Gilbert (2016) which found that lower sleep quantity was associated with attributing more emotion to a piece of neutral text. Finding one variable that affects emotional interpretation makes me want to continue this type of research and examine the relationships that other variables have with emotional interpretation, which is needed.

Attentional bias can be defined as increased absorption of and enhanced sensitivity to certain environmental cues (Williams, Muller, Reas, & Thaw, 1999). One way to study attentional biases is with lexical decision tasks (Hill & Kemp-Wheeler, 1989). In a typical lexical decision task, subjects are asked to determine as quickly and accurately as possible if a string of letters displayed on a screen is a word or nonword; both accuracy and speed are predicted to improve with more salient words. For example, if a firefighter read the word fire on the screen, he or she would be expected to respond faster and more accurate than if he or she read the word sock.

Fayard, J. V., Roberts, B. W., Robins, R. W., & Watson, D. (2012). Uncovering the Affective

This study was preformed to discuss the relationship between emotions and humans, specifically if emotions and their physiological counterparts have evolved in everyone to show a generalized response under similar situations of stress and to show how negative emotions are more apparent to people then positive and that women detect emotions better than men. The study was performed on 14 Brain and Behavior students at Brock University through a test involving listening to scenarios of relationships and then recording how you would emotionally feel and physically feel, as well as a test involving describing the emotion the person is conveying with just their eyes. The results were that the tests described humans to be more

Focus has been thought to be attained automatically from stimuli with negative valence, allowing quick recognition of possible threats (Itkes & Mashal, 2015). The concept of disruption of performance on roles involving negative words has been heavily researched (Itkes & Mashal, 2015), whereas minimal research has been conducted on the timing of semantic processing where negative valence applies its influence on performance.

Anxiety is a type of emotional disorder that affects over 40 million adults in the United States, making it the leading mental illness in the US (www.adaa.org, 2014). Emotional disorders, including anxiety, affected roughly 405,293 school ages individuals during the 2009-2010 school year (Heward, 2013). Anxiety can come in many forms, including generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorders, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. They can lead to eating disorders, selective mutism, depression, sleep disorders, and irritable bowel syndrome. Anxiety disorder is defined as a “maladaptive emotional state or behaviors caused by excessive and often irrational fears and worries” (Heward,

The Emotional Stroop task is one of the most common experiments used in psychology to investigate emotions, where the participants of the study need to recognize the colors in which provided words are printed. During the time spent reading provided those words, participants of the study might focus on the word itself not to the color they need to detect. This is not valid test for the experiment itself, because if unconsciously focusing on the word instead of the color may trigger some processes which are not specifically connected to the color (Williams, Mathews, MacLeod 1996).

The Emotional Working Memory Task (EWMT) was a validated modified Sternberg item recognition task that was used to measure distractibility by emotional social cues. The present version (Krause-Utz et al., 2012) consisted of 120 trials, each starting with a set of 3 uppercase letters (memoranda, 1000 ms), followed by a delay interval (1500 ms) and a probe (3 uppercase letters, 2000 ms). In half of the trials, 1 of the 3 memoranda was present in the probe. Participants pressed a ‘yes’ button to indicate that they had recognize a target letter, or ‘no’ button to indicate that they a target letter was not present (Krause-Utz et al., 2014a). During the delay interval, either neutral or angry or fearful female faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional

They approach the question by considering the relative accessibility of different constructs that could be used to characterize the stimulus information. Constructs can be categorical, information regarding a class of objects, events, social groups, traits and behaviors, or proper, which is information regarding a specific individuals, places, and events. Using Bruner’s previous work there were two guidelines as to what influences construct accessibility. The first is expectations, the subjective probability estimates of the likelihood of a given event. And the second motivation, search requirements imposed by one’s needs, task goals, etc. Higgins et al. found that trait terms viewed in priming task increased the accessibility of the constructs designated by these terms in the reading comprehension task and that the more frequently a construct is activated, the more accessible it became. These two cognitive processes are called Recency Activation and Frequency Activation. These processes are present in our daily interactions in that the label given to a person often affects the judgment of that person. An example given in the paper is about a therapist evaluating a target; According to Higgins’ theory and research a therapist will evaluate an individual as more disturbed if the target is a “patient” versus “job applicant.”

In the next paragraphs I will consider some theories, factors and evidence on cognitive controlling of emotion in terms of

It is vital to understand the relevance of the word frequency and superiority effects before contemplating their role in the models of lexical access.

The parameters for assessing one’s own emotional intelligence are mainly pegged on the ability to accurately interpret other people’s emotions and being able to design suitable responses. More importantly, emotional intelligence hinges on our ability to read

A tachistoscopic presentation to subject of one list was followed two weeks later by a presentation of second list. It was found that six of twelve subjects showed higher and two subjects lower threshold to emotional words on both occasions. Correlation between two test in terms of individual performance was highly significant ( Singer, 1956)