This study examined how writing about anger experiences affected anger and health. Based on Pennebaker & Beall (1986), participants in the three experimental groups wrote about their anger experiences in one of the following three ways, writing both their emotions and the facts about the experiences, writing focusing on their emotions, and focusing on the facts. Control group, participants wrote trivial topics unrelated to anger experiences. Eighty-five undergraduates wrote about either personally anger experiences or trivial topics on three consecutive days. Before and after the writing, participants responded to questionnaires asking about their angers as well as negative and positive moods. At one and two weeks after, and a month after the writing, they responded to a questionnaire about health, angers, and moods. The results indicated that writing both emotions and facts about experiences amplified anger and hostility in the short term, but that it reduced anger and improved health in the long term.

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This study examined the effect of expressive suppression and expressive exaggeration on the subjective experience of emotion using a film eliciting positive or negative emotions. The film was presented to 96 Japanese participants, and the participants were instructed to suppress or exaggerate their emotional expressions in the event of the elicitation of some emotion while viewing the film. After watching the film, they were asked to rate their emotional experiences. It was observed that while the suppression of negative emotions did not decrease the participants' negative emotional experiences, their exaggeration increased them. In contrast, while the suppression of positive emotions decreased positive emotional experiences, their exaggeration did not increase them. These results suggest that expressive suppression and expressive exaggeration have different effects on the subjective experience of emotion, and the effects would reflect the frequency and motivation of positive- or negative-emotion regulation in our daily life.

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Two types of focusing strategies on body information have been proposed. One is maladaptive focusing, involving suppressing one's own body sensations and evaluating one's own performance, and the other is adaptive, involving focusing on one's own body sensations without suppressing or evaluating them. The present study revealed that the maladaptive focusing strategy decreased parasympathetic activity and enhanced following negative emotion. Additionally, we investigated the influence of a serotonin transporter gene polymorphism on the two types of emotion regulation. As a result, participants with SS alleles of the serotonin transporter gene showed more negative emotions in the maladaptive than in the adaptive focusing manipulation associated with reducing parasympathetic activity. In contrast, although participants with L alleles showed reduced parasympathetic activity in the maladaptive condition, no such differences were observed in subjective emotions between the conditions. These results are consistent with the evidence of greater emotion regulation ability in individuals with L alleles compared to those with S alleles.

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In this study, the effects of a cognitive task on the following unpleasant emotions were examined. For indices of the unpleasant emotions, we asked participants subjective reports of their emotions and measured physiological responses such as heart rate (HR) and skin conductance level (SCL). The participants were randomly divided into a mental arithmetic group and a control group. The former group pursued the mental arithmetic task and the latter group stayed calm before two trials of an emotional task, in which the participants were asked to view and evaluate affectively unpleasant and neutral pictures. As results, the physiological responses during the emotional task were inhibited and the subjective negative affect was lower in the mental arithmetic group, compared to the control group. Moreover, these effects were observed through the second emotional task, which was done for checking the rebound effects. The inhibition effect of the physiological responses was maintained until the recovery session. In conclusion, it was suggested that the cognitive activity such as mental arithmetic affects the following emotional reactivity, including subjective unpleasantness and the physiological responses (HR and SCL). We discussed the roles of cognitive task in regulation of unpleasant emotion, especially focused on the duration of its effect.

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The purpose of our study was to examine the validity of using a voice-quality scale for emotion evaluation (Ikemoto & Suzuki, 2008). We tried to determine the criteria for discriminating between ten emotions (surprise, excitement, joy, contentment, relaxedness, drowsiness, sadness, cold-anger, hot-anger, and fear) and using this subscale we calculated the hit-rate for the ten emotions. The participants (n=72) produced vocal expressions for each of the ten emotions from which we evaluated the scale. The result of canonical discriminant analysis revealed three significant discriminant functions (activation, valence, and tenseness). The average hit-rate for all emotions was 56.90 percent. Hence we conclude that the scale is valid.

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The relationship between the frequency of using strategies for reducing cognitive failure and depressive/anxious moods, as well as the perceived costs and benefits of such strategies were investigated. Undergraduates (N=230) completed a questionnaire on strategies for reducing cognitive failures and their depressive/anxious moods. Factor analysis of the frequency of using these strategies identified five factors: “Adversaria and Calendar,” “Mnemonics,” “Alarm,” “Visuo-spatial control,” and “Confirmation.” Results indicated that for the “Adversaria and Calendar” and “Alarm”, depressive mood had a negative effect on the benefits, which in turn had a positive effect on the frequency, whereas anxious mood had a positive effect on the cost , which in turn had a negative effect on the frequency. In case of the “Mnemonics”, in addition to the identical effects as those of depressive mood on “Adversaria and Calendar” and “Alarm”, depressive mood also had a direct negative effect on the frequency, whereas anxious mood had a direct positive effect on the frequency. Moreover, for the “Visuo-spatial control”, depressive mood had a negative effect on the benefits, but had no effect on the frequency, whereas anxious mood had the same effect as on “Mnemonics.” These results are discussed with regard to deficits in initiative.

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Mood-congruent memory refers to the phenomenon of facilitated encoding for material that is congruent with a person's mood. Results of several studies have shown that an autobiographical recall task that participants recall episodes corresponding to a stimulus facilitates mood-congruent encoding. However, the possibility exists that episodes recalled from the stimulus differ among participants. For the present study, which used emotional episodes to preclude that possibility, 45 participants were assigned randomly to one of three induced mood groups (positive, negative, or neutral). They listened to music, which induced moods for positive and negative mood groups. Participants in each condition were presented with 10 pleasant and 10 unpleasant episodes at 6-s intervals. Mood-congruent memory was observed in both positive and negative moods.

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