People are better at maintaining positive than negative emotional states.

ABSTRACT: 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 em

SUBMITTER: Waugh CE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6151172 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature