ネガティブ感情の機能的側面に関する検討

Examination of the functional aspects of negative emotions

Shimada Keishi

Shirai Mariko

Nakao Takashi

広島大学心理学研究

Hiroshima Psychological Research

[PISSN] 1347-1619

[EISSN] 2759-0968

[NCID] AA11616129

Negative emotions are beneficial in several domains, including cognition, judgment, motivation, and interpersonal behavior, because they enable individuals’ focus on detailed information about the external world. Nevertheless, most experiments examining the functional aspects of negative emotions have dealt with emotions of sadness, causing their relevance to analytic information processing to be limited to sadness. In the present study, we examine whether the functions of negative emotions are specific to sadness or common to other negative emotions. A total of 109 participants were induced to evoke in them either happiness, sadness, anger, or disgust from their past autobiographical memories. Subsequently, they performed a point distribution task consisting of eight trials; the number of distribution points to the fictitious recipients and reaction time were compared between each emotion. The results showed that the anger group distributed significantly fewer points than the happiness group on the first trial. Although the results were interpretable in terms of the possible functions of each emotion, it was unclear whether the analytic information processing style was indicated as a function specific to sadness or another negative emotion. Further studies are needed to clarify the functionality of emotions, by considering individual differences such as emotional granularity (emotion differentiation) and the nature of the task.

negative emotion

consideration for others

interpersonal allocations

dictator game

jpn

広島大学大学院人間社会科学研究科心理学講座

Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University