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Individuals exhibit a systematic valence bias—a specific form of interpretation bias—in response to emo- tional ambiguity. Accumulating evidence suggests most people initially respond to emotional ambiguity negatively and differ only in subsequent responses. We hypothesized that trait-level cognitive reap- praisal—an emotion regulation strategy involving the reinterpretation of affective meaning of stimuli— might explain individual differences in valence bias. To answer this question, we conducted a random- effects meta-analysis of 14 effect sizes from 13 prior studies (n = 2,086), identified via Google Scholar searches. We excluded studies (a) in languages other than English, (b) from non-peer-reviewed sources, or (c) nonempirical sources. We included studies with (a) the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, (b) a puta- tive measure of valence bias prior to any study-specific manipulations, and (c) adult human participants (i.e., 17+). Supporting our prediction, we found individuals with higher trait reappraisal exhibited a less negative bias (r = −.18, z = −4.04, p , .001), whereas there was a smaller, opposite effect for trait expressive sup- pression (r = .10, z = 2.14, p = .03). The effects did, however, vary across tasks with stronger effects observed among studies using the scrambled sentences task compared to the valence bias task. Although trait reappraisal accounted for only a small amount of variance, reappraisal may be one mechanism contrib- uting to variability in response to ambiguity.
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Spring Break or Heart Break? Extending Valence Bias to Emotional Words
Ambiguous stimuli are useful for assessing emotional bias. For example, surprised faces could convey a positive or negative meaning, and the degree to which an individual interprets these expressions as positive or negative represents their “valence bias.” Currently, the most well-validated ambiguous stimuli for assessing valence bias include nonverbal signals (faces and scenes), overlooking an inherent ambiguity in verbal signals. This study identified 32 words with dual-valence ambiguity (i.e., relatively high intersubject variability in valence ratings and relatively slow response times) and length-matched clearly valenced words (16 positive, 16 negative). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that the words-based valence bias correlated with the bias for faces, r s (213) = .27, p < .001, and scenes, r s (204) = .46, p < .001. That is, the same people who interpret ambiguous faces/scenes as positive also interpret ambiguous words as positive. These findings provide a novel tool for measuring valence bias and greater generalizability, resulting in a more robust measure of this bias.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1752848
- PAR ID:
- 10219594
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social Psychological and Personality Science
- ISSN:
- 1948-5506
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 194855062097229
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620972296
