Linda Levine

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Psychological Science

Political polarisation in the United States offers opportunities to explore how beliefs about candidates - that they could save or destroy American society - impact people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Participants forecast their future emotional responses to the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election, and reported their actual response...

When people learn that an event has occurred, they often report that they expected it all along. The present study explored this “hindsight bias” for the outcome of a national referendum on abortion. Participants rated the probability of the referendum passing one week before polling day, and then recalled their original estimates one week and one...

If an individual demonstrates accurate autobiographical memory in one task, will they also demonstrate accurate autobiographical memory in related tasks? Over 18 months, 213 participants completed 13 episodic memory tasks related to the same national referendum. Tasks included false memories for fake news, flashbulb memories, factual memories, memo...

Forecasts about future emotion are often inaccurate, so why do people rely on them to make decisions? People may forecast some features of their emotional experience better than others, and they may report relying on forecasts that are more accurate to make decisions. To test this, four studies assessed the features of emotion people reported forec...

During a contentious primary campaign, people may argue passionately against a candidate they later support during the general election. How do people reconcile such potentially conflicting attitudes? This study followed 602 United States citizens, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, at three points throughout the 2016 presidential election inve...

Relying on feelings to guide thoughts and plans may be functional from the perspective of the individual but threaten the cohesion of social groups. Thus, liberals, who prioritize caring and fairness for individuals, may view emotion as more functional than do conservatives, who prioritize preserving social groups, hierarchies, and institutions. To...

In the medical residency match process, applicants’ ranking decisions are influenced by multiple factors related to training, geography, and lifestyle expectations. Ranking decisions directly impact match results, with implications for emotional outcomes such as happiness and stress. The present study explored the decision factors considered most i...

When people learn that an event has occurred, they often report that they expected it all along—a phenomenon called “hindsight bias.” The present study explored hindsight bias for the outcome of a national referendum on abortion. Participants rated the probability of the referendum passing one week before polling day, and then recalled their origin...

Studies comparing the effects of positive and negative affect on psychological outcomes are limited by differences in the situations that evoke these states and in the resulting levels of arousal. In the present research, we adapted the speech portion of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to create conditions with similar situational features that...

People who are religious report more effective coping with negative events and greater satisfaction with life. These emotion judgments may reflect how religious people actually feel in the wake of negative events, or they may be aspirational and self-enhancing, reflecting how religious people hope or expect to feel as a member of their faith. To te...

Amid rising political polarisation, inaccurate memory for facts and exaggerated memories of grievances can drive individuals and groups further apart. We assessed whether people with more accurate memories of the facts concerning political events were less susceptible to bias when remembering how events made them feel. Study 1 assessed participants...

The present investigation examined the potential benefits and costs of optimistic expectations about future events through the lens of error management theory (EMT). Decades of evidence have shown that optimism about the likelihood of future events is pervasive and difficult to correct. From an EMT perspective, this perpetuation of inaccurate belie...

This investigation examined the relation between two sources of bias when people remember how they felt about political events: their current appraisals of the past political event and their current feelings about it. We assessed participants’ memories for their emotional response to a major political event: the 2016 United Kingdom referendum on Eu...

When making decisions about their health and well‐being, people often try to anticipate how happy or unhappy a potential outcome will make them. The greater the predicted emotional impact, the more effort and resources people devote to attaining a positive outcome or avoiding a negative one. Thus, predicting emotion, known as “affective forecasting...

The current research investigated the role that a person's race, gender, and emotional expressions play in workplace evaluations of their competence and status. Previous research demonstrates that women who express anger in the workplace are penalized, whereas men are not, and may even be rewarded. Workplace sanctions against angry women are often...

General Audience Summary In the wake of significant political events like presidential elections or national referendums, it is common to wonder how the winning side won voters over. Media outlets run features where they ask groups of voters (e.g., Trump supporters in the US presidential election or Leave voters in the Brexit referendum) why they v...

Deception is often necessary in false memory studies, especially when the study aims to explore the effect of misinformation on memory. At the end of the study, participants are debriefed, but does this eliminate the influence of misinformation? In the current study, we followed up 630 participants six months after they participated in a study in w...

This investigation examined how people’s beliefs about the functionality of emotion shape their emotional response and regulatory strategies when encountering distressing events. In Study 1, we present data supporting the reliability and validity of an 8-item instrument, the Help and Hinder Theories about Emotion Measure (HHTEM), designed to assess...

People rely on predicted and remembered emotion to guide important decisions. But how much can they trust their mental representations of emotion to be accurate, and how much do they trust them? In this investigation, participants (N = 957) reported their predicted, experienced, and remembered emotional response to the outcome of the 2016 U.S. pres...

The current study examined false memories in the week preceding the 2018 Irish abortion referendum. Participants ( N = 3,140) viewed six news stories concerning campaign events—two fabricated and four authentic. Almost half of the sample reported a false memory for at least one fabricated event, with more than one third of participants reporting a...

People try to make decisions that will improve their lives and make them happy, and to do so, they rely on affective forecasts–predictions about how future outcomes will make them feel. Decades of research suggest that people are poor at predicting how they will feel and that they commonly overestimate the impact that future events will have on the...

Reports of emotions experienced over the past week can be influenced by memory bias, which is more pronounced for people with depression. No studies, however, have examined memory bias for specific emotion clusters (e.g., sadness, anxiety, and anger) experienced on a day-to-day basis among people with depression or a history of depression. Particip...

Supplemental analyses of chronic depression history and memory bias. (DOCX)

Emotions guide action in ways that are frequently adaptive. Fear, disgust, and anger motivate people to act to avoid danger, shun contamination, and overcome obstacles to their goals. But what good does feeling sad do? This seemingly passive state is often characterized by behavioral withdrawal and rumination. This chapter reviews theory and resear...

This investigation examined predictors of changes over time in subjective well-being (SWB) after the 2016 United States presidential election. Two indicators of SWB—general happiness and life satisfaction—were assessed three weeks before the election, the week of the election, three weeks later, and six months later. Partisanship predicted both ind...

Predicting and remembering emotion both rely on the episodic memory system which is constructive and subject to bias. In keeping with the common cognitive processes underlying prospection and retrospection, people show similar strengths and weaknesses when they predict how they will feel in the future and remember how they felt in the past. Recent...

Although child maltreatment places youth at substantial risk for difficulties with emotion regulation and aggression, not all maltreated youth show these adverse effects, raising important questions about characteristics that discriminate those who do versus do not evidence long-term negative outcomes. The present investigation examined whether imp...

Social sharing of positive life experiences has been linked to increased intensity of positive emotion. Less is known about the relations among sharing, the perceived response of the listener, and the duration of positive emotion. We hypothesised that sharing an experience would sustain positive emotion when listeners responded in a manner that hig...

Child maltreatment leads to deleterious effects in virtually every developmental domain, including cognitive, psychological, and behavioral functioning. Although difficulties with coping have been identified as contributing to these effects, less attention has been paid to the precise nature of maltreated children's coping difficulties, particularl...

The android Data from Star Trek admired human emotion whereas Spock viewed emotion as irrational and maladaptive. The theory that emotions fulfil adaptive functions is widely accepted in academic psychology but little is known about laypeople’s theories. The present study assessed the extent to which laypeople share Data’s view of emotion as helpfu...

Purpose: Increasing physical activity among adolescents is a public health priority. Because people are motivated to engage in activities that make them feel good, this study examined predictors of adolescents' feelings during exercise. Method: During the 1st semester of the school year, we assessed 6th-grade students' (N = 136) cognitive apprai...

Elaborating on misleading information concerning emotional events can lead people to form false memories. The present experiment compared participants' susceptibility to false memories when they elaborated on information associated with positive versus negative emotion and pregoal versus postgoal emotion. Pregoal emotion reflects appraisals that go...

Memory for feelings is subject to fading and bias over time. In two studies, we examined whether the magnitude and direction of bias depend on the type of feeling being recalled: emotion or mood. A few days after the U.S. Presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, participants reported how they felt about the election outcome (emotion) and how they f...

Memory for feelings is subject to fading and bias over time. In 2 studies, the authors examined whether the magnitude and direction of bias depend on the type of feeling being recalled: emotion or mood. A few days after the U.S. Presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, participants reported how they felt about the election outcome (emotion) and how...

Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people’s susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions—those experienced before goal attainment or failu...

Anxiety sensitivity, a trait characterised by fear of anxiety-related body sensations, has been linked to heightened attention to pain, appraising body sensations as threatening, and remembering threat-related information. We assessed whether individuals with greater anxiety sensitivity overestimate in remembering pain. We also assessed whether emo...

In the present study, we examined the relation between memory for a consequential and emotional event and memory for the circumstances in which people learned about that event, known as flashbulb memory. We hypothesized that these two types of memory have different determinants and that event memory is not necessarily a direct causal determinant of...

In their comment on our article on affective forecasting (Levine, Lench, Kaplan, & Safer, 2012), Wilson and Gilbert (2013) criticized the meta-analysis, proposed alternative explanations for the empirical studies, and concluded that the impact bias is alive and well. Our reply demonstrates that, irrespective of the exclusion of effects and selectiv...

Reports an error in "Accuracy and artifact: Reexamining the intensity bias in affective forecasting" by Linda J. Levine, Heather C. Lench, Robin L. Kaplan and Martin A. Safer (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012[Oct], Vol 103[4], 584-605). The effect size in Table 4 for Sevdalis, Harvey, & Bell (2009) Study 1 should be 0.32 and the e...

People often show enhanced memory for information that is central to emotional events and impaired memory for peripheral details. The intensity of arousal elicited by an emotional event is commonly held to be the mechanism underlying memory narrowing, with the implication that all sources of emotional arousal should have comparable effects. Discret...

The link between emotion regulation and academic achievement is well documented. Less is known about specific emotion regulation strategies that promote learning. Six- to 13-year-olds (N = 126) viewed a sad film and were instructed to reappraise the importance, reappraise the outcome, or ruminate about the sad events; another group received no regu...

Research on affective forecasting shows that people have a robust tendency to overestimate the intensity of future emotion. We hypothesized that (a) people can accurately predict the intensity of their feelings about events and (b) a procedural artifact contributes to people's tendency to overestimate the intensity of their feelings in general. Peo...

Reappraisal and distraction, unlike suppression, are known to decrease the intensity of negative emotion in the short term. Little is known about long-term characteristics associated with emotion regulation strategies, however. In a longitudinal study, we examined the relation between the strategies people reported using to regulate emotions during...

Research on affective forecasting shows that people have a robust tendency to overestimate the intensity of future emotion. We hypothesized that (a) people can accurately predict the intensity of their feelings about events and (b) a procedural artifact contributes to people's tendency to overestimate the intensity of their feelings in general. Peo...

Objective: Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a commonly diagnosed childhood disorder associated with parent—child conflict and parental stress. This investigation explored whether parents’ interpretation of symptomatic behavior predicted negative interactions with and perceptions of their child. Method: We recruited parents of 7-12...

People typically exaggerate the emotional impact of future events. This occurs because of focalism, the tendency to focus on one event and neglect to consider how emotion will be mitigated by the surrounding context. Neglecting context, however, should lead people to underestimate future emotion when context focuses attention on the event. In Study...

Psychological characteristics associated with interpreting situations as stressful can impact people's physical health. The present investigation focused on trait anxiety and achievement goals as two such characteristics that may predict health outcomes in dancers, a group prone to chronic stress and injury. Students enrolled in a university dance...

This research assessed the stability of memory for emotions over time, and the relationship between current appraisals and memory for emotions. A week after the televised announcement of the verdict in the criminal trial of Mr Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson, participants were asked to describe their emotional reactions and their appraisals when they...

Vignette and autobiographical recall studies have often been used to test models of the appraisals associated with specific emotions. Recently, critiques of both methodologies have called into question the applicability of appraisal theory to naturally-occurring emotional responses. This study examined supporter's responses to Ross Perot's withdraw...

Metacognitive emotion regulation strategies involve deliberately changing thoughts or goals to alleviate negative emotions. Adults commonly engage in this type of emotion regulation, but little is known about the developmental roots of this ability. Two studies were designed to assess whether 5- and 6-year-old children can generate such strategies...

This research examined how individuals' motivations and goals were related to their memory for past emotional experiences. In two studies, participants rated how happy and anxious they felt while completing a challenging anagram task and later recalled their emotions. Bias in memory for emotions was predicted by the combination of participants' gen...

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The present work aims to investigate the relation between appraisals, emotions, and emotion regulation strategies by creating a structural equation model which integrates these three aspects of the emotion process. To reach this aim, Italian students (N = 610) confronted with their high school diploma examination completed a questionnaire 3 weeks b...

This study examined developmental differences in, and cognitive bases of, coping flexibility in children with and without ADHD. Younger (age 7 to 8) and older (age 10 to 11) children with and without ADHD (N = 80) responded to hypothetical vignettes about problematic interactions with peers that shifted from controllable to uncontrollable over time...

This study investigated the relations among appraisals, emotions and coping strategies when adolescents were confronted with a stressful event: the High School Diploma examination. Italian students (N = 610) completed a questionnaire three weeks before the beginning of the exam. Data were reduced by means of principal component analyses and then mu...

Memory for the emotions evoked by past events guides people's ongoing behaviour and future plans. Evidence indicates that emotions are represented in at least two forms in memory with different properties. Explicit memories of emotion can be retrieved deliberately, in a flexible manner, across situations. Implicit memories of emotion Lire brought t...

People typically show excellent memory for information that is central to an emotional event but poorer memory for peripheral details. Not all studies demonstrate memory narrowing as a result of emotion, however. Critically important emotional information is sometimes forgotten; seemingly peripheral details are sometimes preserved. To make sense of...

The ability to disengage from hopeless situations is critical to goal attainment and effective self-regulation. Two experiments investigated the effects of striving to attain success (approach goals) versus striving to avoid failure (avoidance goals) on persistence. Participants completed anagrams designed so that less persistence during an initial...

Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child comple...

This chapter examines how discrete emotions affect children's memory of stressful experiences. It argues for the need to look beyond "distress" as a unitary construct and evaluate children's understanding or appraisals of those events that elicit distress, along with children's discrete emotional experiences and emotion regulation techniques. With...

Recently, considerable progress has been made toward understanding whether and how emotion enhances memory, but much of the research on this issue has been limited by its treatment of emotion as merely "arousal." Drawing on appraisal theories of emotion, we argue that a more complete understanding of the effects of emotion on memory will depend on...

Children regulate negative emotions in a variety of ways. Emotion education programs typically discourage emotional disengagement and encourage emotional engagement or "working through" negative emotions. The authors examined the effects of emotional disengagement and engagement on children's memory for educational material. Children averaging 7 or...

Investigating memory for emotions is of practical, as well as theoretical, importance. Remembering past emotions helps people make decisions about the future. We typically seek to repeat circumstances and activities that we remember as resulting in positive emotions, and we try to avoid or change circumstances that we remember as resulting in negat...

Health promotion messages that evoke fear are often used to decrease unrealistic optimism regarding risks, convince people to control their behaviour, and make risks memorable. The relations among emotions, risk and control judgements, and memory are not well understood, however. In the current study, participants (N = 94) were assigned to fearful,...

In this article, the authors review basic research on adolescent development in neuroscience, psychology, and marketing. The findings indicate that adolescents are more impulsive and self-conscious than adults. In addition, the adolescent brain's plasticity makes it more vulnerable to harm. Thus, there is emerging justification for restricting adol...

This study investigated changes over time in adolescents’and parents’memories for how they felt when they learned of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Adolescents recalled having felt less negative emotion than parents did both 3 months and 8 months after the attacks. Moreover, the intensity of negative emotion recalled decreased over ti...

IntroductionA Model of Emotional Experience and UnderstandingThe Emergence of Emotional UnderstandingThe Emergence of Verbal Emotional UnderstandingWhat Happened?How Were My Goals Affected?What Do I Want to Do about It?Conclusions AcknowledgementsReferences

A great deal of research on emotion and memory has focused on the question of whether emotion enhances memory. Based on this research, investigators have variously claimed that emotional memories are indelible; that emotion has no special effects on memory at all; and that emotion leads to enhanced memory for either congruent or central information...

Individuals often feel that they remember positive events better than negative ones, but do they? To investigate the relation between emotional valence and the malleability of memory for real‐world events, we assessed participants' emotions and memories concerning the televised announcement of the verdict in the murder trial of O. J. Simpson. Memor...

This study examined the perceived impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on adolescents distant from the disaster sites and compared these perceptions with changes in everyday moods. A survey of reactions to September 11 was completed 2-5 months after the events by 171 adolescents participating in a longitudinal study of stress and health. Ele...

Research on the emotional impact of recalling past events has shown that negative emotion fades faster than positive emotion. There is ambiguity, however, concerning what drives this effect: emotional valence or changing appraisals of events. The current study examined a single event that elicited happiness in some people and anger and sadness in o...

Undergraduates (N = 189) rated their test anxiety and emotions immediately before a midterm examination and recalled those feelings 1 week later. Students who learned they had done well on the exam underestimated, and those who learned they had done poorly overestimated, pre-exam test anxiety. Personality traits and emotional states together predic...

How accurately can people remember how they felt in the past? Although some investigators hold that emotional memories are resistant to change, we review evidence that current emotions, appraisals, and coping efforts, as well as personality traits, are all associated with bias in recalling past emotions. Bias occurs as memories of emotional states...

Effects of endogenous opioid peptide blockade by naltrexone on salivary Cortisol levels were examined in healthy men (n= 8) and women (n= 6). Participants received naltrexone (100 mg) during one laboratory session and a placebo pill during another session. Drug order was counterbalanced across participants. Saliva samples were collected 24 hr after...

This study examined age differences in autobiographical memory and extended findings concerning hypermnesia in laboratory tasks to a real world event, the announcement of the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Older and younger adults repeatedly recalled the event in a single session. Interviews were coded for amount and type of accurate in...

Parents were asked to recall recent events that had evoked happiness, sadness, anger, and fear in their children. Children (N = 77, 2.3-6.6 years) indicated whether they remembered each event, and if so, they described the event and how it had made them feel. Agreement between parent and child concerning how the child felt varied as a function of e...

Research on the psychological outcomes of reminiscence techniques has led to equivocal findings. The goal of this paper is to advance current theory guiding research on reminiscence by examining the implications of viewing reminiscence as a type of autobiographical memory. Butler's classic paper on reminiscence as ‘life review’ (1963) is examin...

Research on the psychological outcomes of reminiscence techniques has led to equivocal findings. The goal of this paper is to advance current theory guiding research on reminiscence by examining the implications of viewing reminiscence as a type of autobiographical memory. Butler's classic paper on reminiscence as 'life review' (1963) is examined,...

After Ross Perot's abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race in July of 1992, supporters (n = 227) rated their initial emotional reactions and described their coping strategies. After the elections in November of 1992, supporters (n = 147) recalled their initial emotional reactions. In contrast to claims that subjective emotional intensity decre...

This research examined the effects of happiness, anger, and sadness on participants' memory for different types of information in a narrative. Happiness and negative emotions were evoked in undergraduates (N= 263) by randomly assigning grades of "A" or "D" on a surprise quiz. Immediately afterwards, subjects participated in what they believed to be...

After Ross Perot's abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race in July of 1992, supporters (n = 227) rated their initial emotional reactions and described their coping strategies. After the elections in November of 1992, supporters (n = 147) recalled their initial emotional reactions. In contrast to claims that subjective emotional intensity decre...

This research assessed the stability of peoples' memory for their past emotions over time and the role of changing appraisals in accounting for biases in emotion recall. Following Ross Perot's abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race in July 1992, supporters ( N = 227) rated their initial emotional reactions and described their interpretations...

Predictions from a structured cortical model led us to test the hypothesis that music training enhances young children's spatial-temporal reasoning. Seventy-eight preschool children participated in this study. Thirty-four children received private piano keyboard lessons, 20 children received private computer lessons, and 24 children provided other...