ネガティブ感情の機能的側面に関する検討

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.