Individual differences in bottom-up and top-down emotion generation

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Affective Science

Background:

• Emotions arise from environmental stimuli (bottom-up) or cognitive appraisals (top-down).
• Distinct neural and psychological processes underlie these two emotion generation pathways.
• Individual differences in emotion generation and their relation to other constructs remain underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• Develop and validate a novel self-report questionnaire to assess individual differences in bottom-up and top-down emotion generation.
• Evaluate the psychometric properties and factor structure of the new measure.
• Examine associations between emotion generation styles and psychopathology, emotion processing, and emotion regulation.

Main Methods:

• Three independent studies (N=149, 230, 238) were conducted.
• A novel self-report questionnaire was developed and administered.
• Psychometric properties, factor structure, and correlations with established measures and an experimental task were analyzed.

Main Results:

• Factor analyses consistently supported a two-factor structure for the questionnaire.
• The measure demonstrated adequate reliability.
• Both bottom-up and top-down emotion generation were positively associated with internalizing symptoms and emotion processing measures.

Conclusions:

• The developed questionnaire reliably measures individual differences in bottom-up and top-down emotion generation.
• This measure differentiates the use of cognition in generating emotion versus controlling emotion.
• Findings suggest potential applications in affective and clinical science for understanding treatment targets.