Sylvia D Kreibig

• PhD
• Sr. Research Scientist at Stanford University

The replicability of emotion-related physiological changes constitutes a fundamental issue in affective science. We undertook a direct replication of the physiological differentiation of amusement, disgust, and a mixed emotional state as previously reported (Kreibig, Samson, & Gross, 2013). In the current study, 48 women watched 54 amusing, disgust...

Objective: To determine why lower social integration predicts higher mortality in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Methods: The association between social integration and mortality was examined prospectively in 1019 outpatients with stable CHD from the Heart and Soul Study. Baseline social integration was assessed with the Berkman Soc...

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is viewed as a major component of the emotion response in many recent theories of emotion. Positions on the degree of specificity of ANS activation in emotion, however, greatly diverge, ranging from undifferentiated arousal, over acknowledgment of strong response idiosyncrasies, to highly specific predictions...

Emotion regulation (ER) is a multifaceted process that unfolds over time. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of ER on negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA). We examined whether NA and PA changes occur sequentially or concurrently. After participants had been exposed to unpleasant pictures for 8000 ms, they received instructions t...

Introduction Emotion regulation (ER) is a complex process that manifests gradually over time. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of ER in modifying positive emotions in terms of both negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA) dimensions. Methods After participants had been exposed to pleasant pictures for 8,000 ms, they received inst...

Emotion regulation (ER) involves both a goal (e.g., to feel less emotion) and a strategy (e.g., reappraisal). To clarify the impact of ER goals on emotional responding, we conducted a within-participant study (N = 156) in which we held the strategy constant (reappraisal) to isolate the impact of regulation goals. We compared the impact of a quantit...

Background Dissociation is a ubiquitous clinical phenomenon. Dissociative disorders (DD) are primarily characterized by dissociation, and dissociative states are also a criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociative reactions (e.g., depersonalization/derealizat...

BACKGROUND Sleep bruxism (SB) is an oral behavior that is characterized by high levels of repetitive jaw muscle activity and may develop into a disorder. The etiology of SB is not well understood, and there is currently no curative treatment for SB. Several studies have suggested associations between SB and maladaptive emotion regulation (ER). OBJ...

Background Sleep bruxism (SB) is an oral behavior characterized by high levels of repetitive jaw muscle activity during sleep, leading to teeth grinding and clenching, and may develop into a disorder. Despite its prevalence and negative outcomes on oral health and quality of life, there is currently no cure for SB. The etiology of SB remains poorly...

It has long been thought that links between affect and sleep are bidirectional. However, few studies have directly assessed the relationships between: (1) pre-sleep affect and sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) activity; and (2) sleep EEG activity and post-sleep affect. This study aims to systematically explore the correlations between pre-/post-slee...

Background Dissociation is a ubiquitous clinical phenomenon. Dissociative disorders (DD) are primarily characterized by dissociation, and dissociative states are also a criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociative reactions across diagnostic categories are be...

Introduction: Dissociation is a ubiquitous clinical phenomenon. Dissociative disorders (DD) are primarily characterized by dissociation, and dissociative states are also a criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociative reactions such as depersonalization/dereal...

Background: Neuroscience research has generally studied emotions each taken in isolation. However, mixed emotional states (e.g., the co-occurrence of amusement and disgust, or sadness and pleasure) are common in everyday life. Psychophysiological and behavioral evidence suggests that mixed emotions may have response profiles that are distinguishab...

Pre-sleep affect is thought to influence sleep, but associations with both sleep architecture and the electroencephalographic (EEG) power spectrum are mixed. In this pre-registered study, we assessed negative valence and arousal 1 h pre-sleep in 52 adults drawn from the community, then recorded one night of polysomnography (PSG) in participants’ ow...

When evaluating the effects of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) on the stress response, several aspects should be considered, such as 1) effects on various response systems, 2) temporal dynamics of the stress response, and 3) differences between programs. This study assesses the stress-attenuating effects of a standard mindfulness-based stres...

Introduction Decreased rapid eye movement (REM) frontal theta spectral activity during sleep has been identified following intense negative experiences in both naturalistic and experimental settings. It is unknown, however, whether this spectral marker a) also appears following lower intensity naturalistic negative affective experiences, and b) whe...

We examined whether positive and negative emotion regulation (ER) goals while cognitively reappraising amusing stimuli differentially engage positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) systems. Forty-eight women watched 20–30s amusing film clips. They were instructed to either respond naturally (no ER goal) or emphasize the film clips' positive (positiv...

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is a fundamental component of emotional responding. It is not clear, however, whether positive emotional states are associated with differential ANS reactivity. To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analytic review of 120 articles (686 effect sizes, total N = 6,546), measuring ANS activity during 11 elic...

Do people who have low-quality sleep tend to have more negative affect? This question is of great public interest, and many would assume the answer is “yes.” However, previous findings have been mixed, possibly due to differing measures of sleep and affect, or to a failure to separately examine negative affect reactivity and regulation. Across two...

Introduction Disrupted sleep has been shown to alter next-day affective functioning by decreasing positive mood, increase negative reactivity, and impairing people’s ability to regulate their affect. However, few studies have examined how particular aspects of sleep timing and architecture influence typical daytime affect. Based on clinical and lab...

Sex differences in emotional reactivity have been studied primarily for negative but less so for positive stimuli; likewise, sex differences in the psychophysiological response-patterning during such stimuli are poorly understood. Thus, the present study examined sex differences in response to negative/positive and high/low arousing films (classifi...

The emerging field of the psychophysiology of motivation bears many new findings, but little replication. Using my own data (Kreibig, Gendolla, & Scherer, 2012), I test the reproducibility of this specific study, provide the necessary materials to make the study reproducible, and instantiate proper reproducibility practices that other researchers c...

In this review, we examine the paradigms and measures available for experimentally studying mixed emotions in the laboratory. For eliciting mixed emotions, we describe a mixed emotions film library that allows for the repeated elicitation of a specific homogeneous mixed emotional state and appropriately matched pure positive, pure negative, and neu...

We describe the creation of a film library designed for researchers interested in positive (amusing), negative (repulsive), mixed (amusing and repulsive), and neutral emotional states. Three hundred 20-33 second film clips videotaped by amateurs were selected from video-hosting websites and screened in laboratory studies by 75 female participants o...

Using an appraisal framework, the present experiment tested the hypothesis that goal relevance and goal conduciveness have an interactive effect on emotional responding. We expected that elicitation of positive or negative emotions in response to events that are conducive or obstructive to attainment of one's goals depends on the level of goal rele...

In this study, we tested whether the visual complexity (VC) of webpages influences viewer's affective reactions. In a laboratory experiment, 48 students viewed 36 webpages varying in VC while subjective feelings, behavioral, and cardiovascular responses were recorded. Less complex webpages were associated with more positive affect, decreased eye mo...

The hypothesis of physiological emotion specificity has been tested using pattern classification analysis (PCA). To address limitations of prior research using PCA, we studied effects of feature selection (sequential forward selection, sequential backward selection), classifier type (linear and quadratic discriminant analysis, neural networks, k-ne...

It has been suggested that high arousal negative affective states, but not low arousal negative affective states, potentiate the startle response. Because sadness has generally been studied as a low arousal emotion, it remains unclear whether high arousal sadness would produce startle potentiation to a similar degree as high arousal fear. To addres...

The paper is a brief introduction to the special issue, written by the guest editors. As such, and following the model of previous similar papers for other special issues in this journal, we have not, included an abstract. We would be happy to do so in revision, if this is appropriate.

Effects of positive performance feedback on self-reported emotion and associated physiological responding and their relation to motivational engagement were investigated in an achievement context. To create a situation of self-relevant goal striving and goal attainment, appraisals of goal relevance and goal conduciveness were manipulated by present...

Responses to fear- and sadness-inducing films were assessed using a broad range of cardiovascular (heart rate, T-wave amplitude, low- and high-frequency heart rate variability, stroke volume, preejection period, left-ventricular ejection time, Heather index, blood pressure, pulse amplitude and transit time, and finger temperature), electrodermal (l...