Evidence
Evidence ledger
Published 2026-09-14 · 135 Claims · 203 Sources
The evidence ledger lists every substantive claim this site makes, from landing-page findings to advice and the artwork, together with the sources it rests on. Each source is appraised by design and graded from A to E; a claim can never be graded stronger than its best source. Confidence is a separate judgement of how well the claim, as worded, is supported. Every claim carries a review date, and a claim past that date fails the build until it is re-examined.
Why a ledger
A site that argues that relief is not resolution has to hold its own statements to the same standard. It is easy to write “research shows” and much harder to say which research, of what design, with which limits, and when someone last checked. The ledger answers those questions in one place.
Every substantive public claim on the site has an entry: the four findings on the landing page, the answers to frequently asked questions, the key points of each research note, the recommendation in each advice entry, the statements made by the artwork and the technical statements about the site itself. Each entry records the claim’s wording, its type, its evidence level, a confidence judgement, its sources, its scope, its most important caveat, the pages where it appears and the dates of its last and next review.
Bibliographic facts and judgement are kept apart. The reference registry holds titles, authors and DOIs checked against Crossref. The ledger holds the appraisal of each source, including its design, population and main limitation, and that appraisal is dated because judgement can go out of date even when a citation does not.
How a claim is graded
Grading happens in two steps.
First, each source is graded by design. A meta-analysis of randomised trials is level A; a single controlled experiment is level B; a longitudinal or uncontrolled pre-post study is level C; correlational, qualitative, narrative-review and theoretical work is level D; classical texts, project records and artistic material are level E. A meta-analysis that pools correlational studies is graded by what it pools, not by the word “meta-analysis” in its title.
Second, each claim receives an evidence level no stronger than its strongest source, and a separate confidence rating. The two answer different questions. The level describes the kind of study behind the claim. Confidence describes how well the claim, as worded, is supported. A meta-analysis with heterogeneous results can support a level A claim held at moderate confidence. A well-replicated correlation can be level D and still justify high confidence, provided the claim speaks of association and not of cause.
When a source’s abstract could not be retrieved, the ledger says so, states no sample sizes for it and lowers confidence in claims that rely on it. When wording on a page went further than its sources, the ledger records the stricter version and the changelog notes the revision.
Relief, resolution and the limits of evidence
Most of the research cited here measures short-term outcomes in specific samples: anger minutes after a provocation, closeness after a dance, mood after a film. That evidence is suited to questions about relief. It is much less suited to questions about resolution, which unfold over months in circumstances no laboratory reproduces. Where the ledger says there is insufficient evidence, that is a finding about the literature, not a verdict on the experience.
Art and evidence on the same site
The site is both an artwork and a library, and the two use different kinds of statements. The ledger marks them explicitly. A claim labelled ARTISTIC belongs to the artwork: the telemetry values, the status line and the field problem_solved: false express a thesis and are never measurements of anyone. A claim labelled EMPIRICAL reports what studies observed, with sources and limits. Theoretical, historical, technical and clinical-boundary claims sit between them and are labelled as well.
Keeping the labels visible protects both sides. The artwork can use the language of dashboards without its numbers being quoted as data, and the research notes can be read without the artwork’s rhetoric lending them false authority.
How to report a problem
If a claim seems outdated, overstated or wrongly sourced, use the report link on this page. A useful report names the claim, explains what is wrong and, where possible, cites a newer or better source. Reports are checked against the original publications. Confirmed problems lead to a revised, downgraded or retracted claim, and the change is recorded in the evidence changelog with its date and reason.
The content of this site is general education, not medical advice. If distress persists, disrupts daily life or includes thoughts of harming yourself, contact a qualified professional or local emergency services.
Evidence levels
- Level A Systematic synthesis
- A meta-analysis or systematic review of controlled studies. Syntheses of correlational studies are graded by the design of the studies they pool.
- Level B Controlled experiment
- One or more randomised or controlled experiments, usually with short-term outcomes and specific samples.
- Level C Longitudinal or quasi-experimental
- Prospective, longitudinal or quasi-experimental studies, including uncontrolled pre-post comparisons.
- Level D Correlational, qualitative or theoretical
- Cross-sectional, correlational or qualitative studies, narrative reviews and theoretical work.
- Level E Classical, expert or record
- Classical and historical texts, expert opinion, project records, policy statements and artistic material.
Confidence
- Confidence HIGH
- The claim, as worded, is well supported and further research is unlikely to reverse it.
- Confidence MODERATE
- The claim is supported, but results are limited, heterogeneous, disputed or not fully re-verified.
- Confidence LOW
- The claim rests mainly on theory or indirect evidence and could change with new research.
- Confidence UNKNOWN
- The available evidence is insufficient to judge the claim.
Claim types
- Empirical Empirical
- A statement about what studies observed. Reviewed at least every 365 days.
- Theoretical Theoretical
- A definition, framework or argument that organises findings without being a single finding. Reviewed every 730 days.
- Historical Historical
- A statement about the history of an idea or practice. Reviewed every 730 days.
- Clinical boundary Clinical boundary
- A statement about the limits of self-help and when professional help is needed. Reviewed every 180 days.
- Technical Technical
- A statement about how the site or a measurement method works, backed by records or methods literature. Reviewed every 730 days.
- Artistic Artistic
- A statement belonging to the artwork. It expresses a thesis and is not a finding. Reviewed every 730 days.
Claims
No claim matches these filters. Clear a filter to see more. 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reviewed · Review due · prolonged-grief-clinical-boundary Last reviewed · Review due · grief-when-to-seek-help Last reviewed · Review due · hrv-careful-interpretation Last reviewed · Review due · no-analytics-trackers-cookies Last reviewed · Review due · build-timeline-from-records Last reviewed · Review due · measuring-self-report-scale-properties Last reviewed · Review due · measuring-field-recordings-confounded Last reviewed · Review due · models-outputs-illustrative Last reviewed · Review due · telemetry-is-artistic Last reviewed · Review due · problem-solved-false-thesisEmpirical 80
Writing about both the facts and the feelings of a distressing experience has been associated with later health benefits, and these benefits appear linked to building a coherent account rather than to discharge alone.
In laboratory experiments, hitting a punching bag while thinking about a provocation produced more anger and aggression than sitting quietly, and belief in catharsis increased the wish to vent without reducing later aggression.
A meta-analysis of 154 studies found that arousal-increasing anger-management activities, such as hitting a bag or running, did not reduce anger and aggression overall (g = -0.02, 95% CI -0.13 to 0.09).
The same meta-analysis found that arousal-decreasing activities, such as slow breathing, relaxation and mindfulness, reduced anger and aggression (g = -0.63, 95% CI -0.82 to -0.43), with robust effects across populations and delivery formats.
Instructed cognitive change such as reappraisal had a small-to-medium effect on emotional outcomes, whereas attempts to suppress the experience of emotion were not effective; habitual reappraisal is associated with more positive and less negative emotion than habitual suppression.
Reappraisal is associated with activity in prefrontal and cingulate control regions that modulate emotion-generating regions, and a neuroimaging meta-analysis suggests that reappraisal and acceptance share some regions while differing in others.
Reflecting on an anger-eliciting experience from a self-distanced perspective reduced negative affect compared with immersed recall, in two experiments.
Whether people report crying as cathartic is associated with its context: social support, a resolution and new understanding make reported benefit more likely, and shame or suppression less likely.
Participants who talked about a negative emotional experience rated the conversation as helpful, but the emotional impact of the memory was not reduced compared with control conditions.
People share most of their emotional experiences with others, and sharing has interpersonal functions such as eliciting attention, empathy and support.
Labelling the emotion in a facial image was associated with reduced amygdala response and increased right ventrolateral prefrontal activity, consistent with affect labelling acting as implicit regulation.
Moving or tapping in synchrony with others increased liking for a partner and later cooperation, including cooperation that required personal sacrifice.
In a group-dance experiment, synchrony and exertion each raised pain thresholds, an indirect proxy for endorphin activity, and each increased in-group bonding.
Peak emotional responses to self-selected music were accompanied by striatal dopamine release, with the caudate more involved in anticipation and the nucleus accumbens in the peak experience.
Across 50 samples, collective effervescence during gatherings and demonstrations was associated with self-transcendent emotions, group identity, social integration, wellbeing and collective efficacy.
The cited synchrony and music studies measured liking, cooperation, pain thresholds, closeness and reward responses during or shortly after the activity, and provide insufficient evidence that collective rhythm reduces the difficulties people bring into it.
Meta-analyses of 104 randomised controlled trials found that music interventions reduced physiological and psychological stress-related outcomes, with a larger average effect on psychological outcomes.
People across adolescence and adulthood describe using music to regulate emotion, and self-reported use is associated with preferences for energetic, rhythmic music and with higher neuroticism.
Discharge, releasing anger or sadness through music that matches or expresses it, is described as one of several distinct music-based regulation strategies, alongside diversion, solace and working through feelings.
There is insufficient evidence on whether everyday, self-directed music listening regulates emotion effectively, because most research on it is qualitative or correlational and its concepts are used inconsistently.
Single sessions of aerobic exercise are associated with a short-term increase in positive activated affect, such as feeling energetic.
Retrospective evaluations of experiences are dominated by their most intense and final moments while duration is largely neglected; most participants chose to repeat a longer cold-water trial that ended less painfully.
Rumination shows the largest association with symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating and substance-related disorders among the regulation strategies studied, and it predicts the onset of depression.
Repetitive thought is not uniformly harmful: abstract, evaluative forms tend to be unconstructive, while concrete, process-focused forms can support problem solving and recovery.
Stress mediators such as cortisol and catecholamines are protective in the short term but contribute to allostatic load when chronically activated or poorly terminated.
Perceived availability of support that matches the needs created by a stressor is associated with protection against its adverse effects, while social integration has a general association with well-being.
Mindfulness-based therapy was associated with moderate pre-to-post reductions in anxiety and mood symptoms, with larger effects in people with anxiety and mood disorders.
Facial movements are not reliable, specific indicators of emotional states across people, situations and cultures: typical configurations co-occur with emotions more than chance, but weakly and inconsistently.
A meta-analysis of 202 studies found that autonomic nervous system responses did not clearly distinguish one emotion category from another and varied substantially within categories; an earlier review of 134 publications, a partial counterpoint, reported considerable specificity when emotion subtypes are considered.
There is no gold-standard measure of emotion: experiential, physiological and behavioural measures converge only modestly and cannot be treated as interchangeable.
A meta-analysis found that six classic basic emotions did not reliably co-occur with their predicted facial expressions: average co-occurrence effect sizes were .13 for full expressions coded with FACS and .23 including partial expressions, and reported and expressed intensity correlated on average at .30.
Emotional responses are only partly coherent across systems: during a film inducing amusement and sadness, experience and facial behaviour were highly associated but physiology only modestly, and experiential, physiological and behavioural measures carry unique variance.
A meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies found little evidence that discrete emotion categories are consistently and specifically localised to distinct brain regions; interacting regions also involved in non-emotional operations were active across a range of emotion categories.
In physiologically triggered experience sampling, the number and nature of recurring physiological patterns varied within individuals, as did the affect ratings and emotion labels associated with each pattern, although some broad patterns recurred across individuals.
Posttraumatic stress symptoms are associated with rumination (r = .52), experiential avoidance (r = .48) and thought suppression (r = .29) across 75 studies.
Over 21 days of monitoring, experiential avoidance was associated with fewer positive and more negative daily experiences and was more predictive of everyday experience than cognitive reappraisal.
In three studies of meals, remembered liking showed consistent duration neglect but no peak, primacy or recency effects, so the peak-end pattern does not hold for every kind of experience.
Across 148 studies with 308,849 participants, stronger social relationships were associated with a 50% increased likelihood of survival, consistently across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death and follow-up period.
Receiving support has not been reliably associated with adjustment to stress; in a daily diary study of couples, support transactions the recipient did not notice promoted adjustment to a major stressor, and a review of 100 support interventions found some support for their usefulness but not which work best for what.
Training people to think more concretely reduced depressive symptoms and rumination in a randomised trial in dysphoria, and in a Phase II trial in major depression it improved symptoms when added to usual care but not more than relaxation training, while reducing rumination more.
Relative to reappraisal, ruminating on an anger-provoking event led to greater anger experience, more cognitive perseveration and greater sympathetic activation, and angry rumination is described as a risk factor for aggression that temporarily reduces self-control.
A meta-analysis of 60 experiments found a medium effect of interpersonal synchrony on prosocial attitudes and behaviour, moderated by experimenter effects and intentionality.
A meta-analysis of 41 controlled intervention studies found a medium overall effect of dance movement therapy and dance on health-related psychological outcomes (d = 0.60), with high heterogeneity and larger effects from observational measures that may indicate bias.
Labelling emotions lowered self-reported distress about as much as reappraisal and distraction, although participants expected it to increase distress, and it also dampened pleasure; after exposure therapy with labelling, skin conductance responses were lower but self-reported fear was not.
Reappraisal is not adaptive everywhere: higher reappraisal ability was associated with lower depression under uncontrollable stress but greater depression under controllable stress, people are often unable to reappraise successfully, and reappraising to feel better is not always functional.
Across 230 effects, a distant perspective attenuated emotional experience (g = 0.52), less for self-conscious than for basic emotions, and non-first-person self-talk enhanced self-distancing and went with less distress under social stress.
The anger curves in the venting model follow the direction of the evidence: lowering arousal reduced anger and aggression in a meta-analysis (g = -0.63), raising arousal did not reduce them overall (g = -0.02), and hitting a punching bag while ruminating increased anger compared with doing nothing.
Adding a milder but still unpleasant ending to an aversive episode led most participants to choose the longer episode for repetition, and retrospective evaluations of film clips were little affected by their duration.
In three experiments, reflecting on past rituals or completing a novel ritual after a loss was followed by lower self-reported grief, mediated by increased feelings of control, including in people who did not believe in rituals.
Bereaved adults rated funerals and grief rituals as helpful, but neither their evaluation of the funeral nor their use of rituals was significantly associated with grief reactions six months and three years after the loss.
Bereavement is associated with excess health risks, yet most bereaved people adjust without professional psychological intervention, and in a prospective study of spousal loss resilience was the most frequent trajectory.
Psychological interventions for grief show small average benefits, with little lasting benefit for unselected bereaved people and larger effects in trials that enrolled people with marked or high grief symptoms and in trials of people at least six months after the loss, which are separate study-level moderators.
In everyday settings, physical activity consistently predicted higher positive affect over the next few hours, while evidence that it reduces negative affect over the same period was inconsistent.
Pleasure during exercise declines mainly above the ventilatory or lactate threshold, most people experience pleasant changes below it with large individual differences near it, and self-selected intensity appears to foster tolerance of higher intensity.
Randomised trials pooled in several meta-analyses associate regular physical activity with reductions in depressive and anxiety symptoms, in non-clinical adults and in people with depression, although the certainty of specific effect estimates is often low.
Physical activity can lift positive affect while leaving anger unchanged: arousal-increasing anger-management activities, including running, did not reduce anger and aggression on average, and exertion while ruminating on a provocation produced the most anger.
Experimental sleep loss in healthy people reduces positive affect and increases anxiety symptoms, while effects on negative affect, emotional reactivity and depressive symptoms are mixed and depend on the type of sleep loss.
After one night of total sleep deprivation, healthy adults reported more stress, anxiety and anger than rested controls in response to a mild stressor but not a severe one, consistent with a lowered threshold for perceiving stress.
In a meta-analysis, sleep restriction had a small negative effect on adaptive emotion regulation (g = -0.32) and no significant effect on maladaptive emotion regulation, in studies conducted only with young people.
A narrative review of the field observed that research on sleep and emotion has focused more on emotions generated after inadequate sleep than on the regulatory processes that may alter them, with constructs often poorly delineated.
In longitudinal epidemiological studies, insomnia in people without depression was associated with about twice the odds of developing depression later.
Across randomised trials of interventions that improved sleep, better sleep led to medium improvements in composite mental health, depression, anxiety and rumination, with a dose-response relationship.
Sleep hygiene education has been ineffective as a clinical treatment, and although individual recommendations are associated with better sleep, their direct effects in the general population remain largely untested.
Across 146 randomised studies, experimental disclosure had a positive and significant but small average effect (r = .075), with several moderators; an earlier synthesis found benefits across reported physical health, well-being and functioning but not health behaviours.
Expressive writing tends to increase immediate distress, and in a research synthesis that increase was unrelated to later health outcomes.
Brief self-directed expressive writing had no significant long-term effect on depressive symptoms in healthy adults under stress, with larger effects for more sessions and specific topics, and had a small positive overall effect in adolescents.
A meta-analysis of change within expressive writing conditions found small effects on posttraumatic stress and negligible to small effects on growth and quality of life; without control comparisons it cannot show that writing treats posttraumatic stress disorder.
In experiments, dysphoric participants induced to ruminate made more negative interpretations and generated less effective solutions than those induced to distract, and in depressed patients concrete rather than abstract self-focus improved social problem solving.
In experience sampling, momentary rumination and negative affect predicted each other at the next occasion, and brooding but not reflective pondering was associated with higher negative affect.
In a preliminary randomised study of people with high trait worry, two weeks of a daily 30-minute time- and place-restricted worry period reduced worry, anxiety, negative affect and insomnia more than a control condition, but not depression or positive affect.
Adding rumination-focused cognitive-behavioural therapy to usual treatment improved residual depressive symptoms and remission in a small randomised trial, with effects mediated by change in rumination.
When catharsis is operationalised as venting anger or engaging in arousing activity, controlled studies do not support the prediction that expression reduces anger or aggression; arousal-decreasing activities show better support.
Strategy families differ in effect: in a meta-analysis of experiments, cognitive change had a small-to-medium effect, distraction was effective, concentrating on feelings was not, and suppressing emotional experience was ineffective; in laboratory choice studies people relatively preferred reappraisal at low and distraction at high negative intensity.
Meta-analyses found little evidence that discrete emotion categories map consistently and specifically onto distinct brain regions or autonomic response patterns; an earlier review, a partial counterpoint, reported considerable autonomic specificity when emotion subtypes are considered.
In one large self-report study, experiences elicited by 2,185 short videos were best described by 27 categories whose boundaries were fuzzy and linked by smooth gradients.
In a laboratory experiment, emotional recovery after an aversive film occurred only when the listener stimulated cognitive work, while empathic responses produced social integration and a sense of feeling better; in experience-sampling studies sharing was associated with shorter emotion episodes but not with lower residual intensity three days later.
Studies using multisystem allostatic load indices have reported prediction of morbidity and mortality beyond traditional clinical measures.
Stress research has often measured reactivity without reporting recovery, and worry and rumination are associated with prolonged cardiovascular, endocrine and immune activation beyond the stressor itself.
Studies of marches and demonstrations found participation associated with stronger collective identity, social integration, efficacy and positive affect, mediated by perceived emotional synchrony, consistent with Durkheim's prediction of collective effervescence.
In a field study of 38 people at a fire-walking ritual, heart-rate dynamics showed fine-grained commonalities between fire-walkers and related spectators but not unrelated spectators.
Theoretical 37
On this site, catharsis means a subjectively felt release of emotional tension after expression, exertion or immersion; whether the cause of the tension changes is treated as a separate empirical question.
Catharsis as a felt release and venting as the expression of anger at a target are distinct; evidence that venting fails to reduce anger does not by itself test dance, music or collective release.
Reappraisal is better described as a family of tactics, changing how a situation is construed or which goals are used to evaluate it, than as a single technique.
A behaviour that removes an aversive state is negatively reinforced whether or not it addresses the source, and experiential avoidance has been proposed as a process common to many psychological difficulties.
Relief changes how a state feels and resolution changes the conditions that produce it; relief has value of its own but, taken together with reinforcement, acute mood effects and memory biases, it can be repeated without the underlying difficulty changing.
A short next-day review of what changed after a relieving experience (feeling, understanding, decision, action) is recommended on theoretical grounds and has not been tested as a routine.
Emotional processing theory holds that lasting change in fear requires activation of the fear memory together with information incompatible with it; activation alone is not sufficient.
Self-reports of current feelings draw on episodic experience, whereas reports of past or hypothetical feelings draw increasingly on beliefs about emotion, so the two can diverge.
Emotions fluctuate over time in patterned ways, so a single measurement cannot describe an emotional episode and repeated measurement is needed to study change.
Affective computing, framed as a research field in 1997, builds systems on contested models of emotion and proxy data, and these choices shape the ethical and social implications of emotion-AI systems.
The Rescorla–Wagner model describes learning as an error-correcting update: each trial changes associative strength in proportion to the gap between what the outcome can support and what has already been learned, so gains shrink as learning approaches its limit.
If relief reinforces a behaviour on every episode while the cause of distress persists, a learning account predicts a growing tendency to repeat the behaviour alongside unchanged distress before each episode.
In the Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators with natural frequencies drawn from a distribution, coupling above a threshold produces a transition in which some oscillators spontaneously synchronize while others remain incoherent.
Synchronization of coupled oscillators is used on this site only as an analogy for moving in time with others; the findings linking human synchrony with cooperation and bonding come from experiments with people and do not test the oscillator model.
Allostatic load has been described as the cumulative cost of stress responses that are activated too often or not terminated efficiently, which implies that load can build up when challenges recur faster than recovery.
Contemporary bereavement theory describes adaptive coping as oscillation between confronting the loss and attending to restoration, including respite from grieving, and treats continuing bonds with the deceased as common, with their adaptiveness still unresolved; rituals have been proposed to regulate emotion, goals and social connection.
A model proposes that sleep, including REM sleep, modulates next-day emotional reactivity and reprocesses recent emotional memories; it remains a hypothesis under test.
This site reads the dissociation between immediate distress and later health outcomes as meaning that relief or discomfort at the end of a writing session is weak evidence of benefit; the inference is the site's interpretation and was not tested.
Why written disclosure helps, and for whom, remains unclear; the features associated with benefit, such as writing about facts and feelings, specific topics and changes in causal and insight language, are more consistent with sense-making than with discharge.
Unconstructive repetitive thought is easily mistaken for processing because it concerns the problem, uses abstract questions that feel deep, and has been modelled as a habit triggered by unresolved goals; processing tends to yield new information, a decision or an action, whereas rumination usually does not.
Where expressing or sharing an emotion has been followed by measurable benefit, the evidence suggests the benefit is tied to cognitive processing of the experience rather than to discharge alone.
The process model of emotion regulation groups strategies into situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change and response modulation according to the point in emotion generation at which they act; the extended process model adds identification, selection and implementation stages.
Read through the process model, venting combines response modulation (acting on expression once an emotion is under way) with attentional deployment towards the cause and the feeling, whereas reappraisal is cognitive change; this placement is an interpretation by this site.
Whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished depends on one's theory of emotion, and the distinction is contested between modal and constructionist perspectives.
Appraisal theories share the premise that emotions are elicited and differentiated by evaluations of what an event means for a person's well-being and concerns, and they form a family of related theories rather than one model.
The component process model describes emotion as a dynamic process in which a sequence of appraisal checks drives changes in motivation, physiology and expression, with feeling and verbal labelling as later components.
Reappraisal is defined as changing the appraisal of a situation or of one's goals, and instructed cognitive change reliably shifts emotional outcomes; whether its effects run specifically through changed appraisals is less directly tested.
Critics, including constructionist theorists, contest whether appraisals cause emotions or are part of how emotional episodes are described and categorised, and this question remains open.
Basic emotion theory holds that a set of emotions evolved as distinct families with characteristic signals, physiology and antecedent events; recent versions describe more than 20 emotions expressed in multimodal, dynamic patterns and acknowledge contextual influence.
The theory of constructed emotion proposes that emotion categories are not triggered programmes but are constructed, in the moment, from predictions based on interoception, past experience and concepts; it builds on the idea of core affect.
Rimé's account proposes that sharing an emotion reactivates emotional arousal in speaker and listener, strengthens social bonds and propagates through secondary sharing, contributing to collective emotional climates.
Two-factor and later theories of avoidance learning propose that avoidance is acquired through fear learning and maintained because it ends or prevents an aversive state, which also prevents the learning that the feared outcome would not have occurred.
Experiential avoidance, the unwillingness to stay in contact with painful thoughts and feelings, has been associated with various forms of psychopathology, but the construct lacks theoretical integration and consistent measurement.
Inhibitory learning accounts propose that exposure works by building new learning that competes with fear, recommend reducing safety signals, and note that many people do not benefit or experience a return of fear; other authors argue that avoidance can be adaptive depending on its function.
Allostasis, a term introduced by Sterling and Eyer, describes physiological regulation that anticipates demands and changes set points rather than holding them constant; allostatic load names the cumulative cost of repeated or chronic activation.
The concepts of allostasis and allostatic load have been criticised as adding little to an accurate understanding of homeostasis and as blurring the definition of stress.
Sociological and psychological theories propose that rituals generate shared emotional energy and group symbols and regulate emotions, performance states and social connection through their physical form and their meaning.
Historical 3
Aristotle's Poetics describes tragedy as achieving, through pity and fear, the katharsis of such emotions, and commentators still debate whether he meant purgation, purification or clarification.
Breuer and Freud's cathartic method sought symptom relief through the discharge of emotion (abreaction), and Freud later abandoned it, partly because relief was often temporary.
The cathartic method rested on a discharge model in which affect attached to a memory maintained symptoms until it was expressed; this model is a historical theory, not an empirically established mechanism.
Clinical boundary 7
A Cochrane systematic review found no evidence that single-session individual psychological debriefing prevents PTSD or reduces distress, found some evidence of increased PTSD risk at one year in one trial, and advised that compulsory debriefing should cease.
The research notes and advice on this site are general education based on published research; they are not medical advice, cannot assess an individual situation and do not replace assessment or treatment by a qualified professional.
Distress that persists, disrupts daily life, or includes thoughts of harming oneself warrants contact with a qualified professional, and immediate danger warrants contacting local emergency services.
Early multiple-session interventions showed no clinically important benefit over usual care for trauma-exposed people not screened for symptoms, whereas trauma-focused CBT, cognitive therapy without exposure and EMDR showed clinically important benefits for people with traumatic stress symptoms; for chronic PTSD, trauma-focused CBT and EMDR reduced clinician-assessed symptoms more than waitlist or usual care.
A meta-analysis of 23 controlled studies in adults with anger established by standardised measures found medium to large treatment effects, supporting cognitive therapies for driving anger, anger suppression and trait anger and relaxation for state anger.
A minority of bereaved adults develop prolonged grief disorder, characterised by intense yearning and other symptoms persisting for months after a death with functional impairment (at least six months in the 2009 proposal and in ICD-11; at least 12 months for adults in DSM-5-TR); a meta-analysis of non-violent bereavement estimated a pooled prevalence of 9.8%. The criteria describe a clinical boundary for professionals, not a self-test.
Grief that remains intense and disabling for many months, persistent inability to function, or thoughts of ending one's life warrant contact with a qualified professional, and immediate danger warrants contacting local emergency services; seeking help does not mean grief has gone wrong.
Technical 6
Heart rate variability can index cardiac vagal tone, but its findings are easily misconstrued without careful experimental design, analysis and reporting, and electrodermal activity likewise requires methodological care.
The site contains no analytics scripts, trackers or cookies, and its public source code allows this to be checked.
The build timeline in the method note, including 51 min 36 s from repository creation to the first verified release, is taken from Git, GitHub, pipeline and Majordomus records, and no speed-up factor is claimed because there was no control condition.
Brief self-report instruments can measure consistently: the two 10-item PANAS scales were highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated and stable over two months, and the three-judgement Self-Assessment Manikin correlated highly with an 18-rating semantic differential for pleasure and arousal.
Ambulatory assessment reduces retrospective bias and gains ecological validity, but physiological signs of emotion in daily life can be masked by social engagement, mental and physical workload, food intake and circadian and metabolic variation, and such monitoring raises acceptability, compliance, privacy and ethical issues.
The interactive models compute their outputs in the browser from invented inputs and stated rules; the numbers are illustrative, not measurements, fitted estimates or predictions about any person.
Artistic 2
Every metric, status value and chart in the artwork, and the relief figures on the site, are artistic or conceptual values chosen to express a relationship; none is a measurement of anyone.
The artwork's field problem_solved: false is an artistic statement of the project's thesis that relief is not resolution: a transaction can succeed completely while the request stays unresolved.
Appraised sources
| Sources | Design | Level | Last reviewed | Review due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review doi Supports the claim that rumination shows the largest association with symptoms, with avoidance and suppression also associated. It pools correlational studies, so it is graded D and cannot establish causation. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (c. 335 BCE). Poetics Supports historical claims about where the term katharsis entered aesthetics. It makes no empirical claim, and its meaning is contested by commentators. | Classical text | Level E | ||
| (1994). The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale—I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure doi Cited for the existence and three-factor structure of the TAS-20 as a self-report measure of alexithymia. Sample details were not re-verified from an abstract and are not stated on the site. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2011). Insomnia as a predictor of depression: A meta-analytic evaluation of longitudinal epidemiological studies doi Supports the claim that insomnia at baseline was associated with about twice the odds of later depression (random-effects OR 2.60; fixed-effects OR 2.10 after removing outliers). Observational cohorts that did not always adjust for intervening variables. | Meta-analysis | Level C | ||
| (2016). Toward a better understanding and conceptualization of affect self-regulation through music: A critical, integrative literature review doi Supports the claim that research on affect regulation through music is conceptually inconsistent and can be organised into goals, strategies, tactics and mechanisms. A conceptual review, not a synthesis of controlled effects. | Systematic review | Level D | ||
| (1986). The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations doi Cited for the conceptual distinction between moderators and mediators. Its stepwise procedure for testing mediation has since been widely criticised, so it is not cited for how mediation should be tested. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation doi Supports the claim that negative emotion differentiation was positively related to the frequency of negative emotion regulation, particularly at higher emotional intensity. Correlational; it cannot show that differentiation causes more regulation. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2016). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization doi Supports the claim that the theory of constructed emotion proposes a computational, predictive account in which emotions are constructed through interoception and categorisation rather than triggered as fixed programmes. A theoretical proposal whose central predictions are still being tested. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements doi Supports the claim that facial configurations are not reliable, specific indicators of emotional states across cultures, situations and people, although they co-occur above chance. A narrative review by authors associated with one theoretical position; critics dispute parts of it. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2011). Social baseline theory: The role of social proximity in emotion and economy of action doi Supports the description of social baseline theory: social proximity as the expected baseline that conserves regulatory resources. Theory by its originators; the supporting evidence is heterogeneous. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2013). Psychological therapies for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults doi Supports the claim that individual trauma-focused CBT and EMDR reduced clinician-assessed PTSD symptoms more than waitlist or usual care. The authors rated the evidence for every comparison as very low quality, reported more drop-out in active treatments and limited follow-up data, so claims citing it are held at moderate confidence. | Systematic review | Level A | ||
| (2000). Invisible support and adjustment to stress doi Supports the claims that many support transactions reported by supporters were not reported by recipients and that these invisible transactions promoted adjustment to a major stressor. A single diary study with one kind of stressor. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2002). Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss doi Supports the claims that five trajectories were identified, that resilience was the most frequent pattern and common grief relatively infrequent, and that chronic grief was associated with preloss dependency. One cohort of spousal loss in later life. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2012). Electrodermal activity doi Supports technical statements about how electrodermal activity is recorded and what it indexes. Expert synthesis, not a test of any single claim. | Book | Level E | ||
| (1994). Measuring emotion: The Self-Assessment Manikin and the semantic differential doi Supports the claim that the three-judgement Self-Assessment Manikin correlated highly with an 18-rating semantic differential for pleasure and arousal. A comparison of rating methods: agreement between instruments, not validity against another channel. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2013). The relation between social sharing and the duration of emotional experience doi Supports the claims that sharing was associated with shorter emotion episodes, especially socio-affective sharing, and that sharing was not related to residual emotional intensity three days after onset. Observational; sharing was not manipulated. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (1895). Studien über Hysterie [Studies on hysteria] Supports historical claims about the cathartic method and abreaction. Uncontrolled case reports cannot show whether the method was effective. | Book | Level E | ||
| (2006). The perseverative cognition hypothesis: A review of worry, prolonged stress-related physiological activation, and health doi Supports the claim that worry, rumination and anticipatory stress are associated with enhanced cardiovascular, endocrine, immune and neurovisceral activity, which the authors describe as preliminary support for the perseverative cognition hypothesis. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: A meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies doi Supports the claim that reappraisal consistently engaged cognitive control regions and lateral temporal cortex and was accompanied by modulation of bilateral amygdala activity. Group-level activation in instructed laboratory tasks; it does not show how regulation unfolds for an individual in daily life. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding doi Supports the claim that hitting a punching bag while ruminating produced more anger and aggression than doing nothing. A single laboratory experiment with a noise-blast aggression measure. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (1999). Catharsis, aggression, and persuasive influence: Self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies? doi Supports the claim that belief in catharsis increased the wish to vent and that venting was followed by more laboratory aggression. Brief provocations and laboratory aggression measures limit generalisation. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2013). Emotional coregulation in close relationships doi Supports the definition of coregulation as bidirectional, oscillating emotional linkage between partners that contributes to stability. A proposal to sharpen terminology, not a test of its effects on well-being. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2013). Power failure: Why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience doi Cited for the claims that low power reduces the chance of detecting true effects, lowers the probability that significant results reflect true effects and inflates estimated effect sizes. Figures from the analysis were not re-verified from an abstract and are not stated on the site. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2008). When is crying cathartic? An international study doi Supports the claim that social support, resolution and new understanding were associated with reports of cathartic crying, and shame and suppression with fewer. Retrospective self-report in student samples. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2007). Experiential avoidance as a functional dimensional approach to psychopathology: An empirical review doi Supports the claims that experiential avoidance may be implicated in various forms of psychopathology and that the construct lacks theoretical integration and clear operationalisation. The reviewed studies are mostly correlational. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat doi Supports the claim that spousal hand-holding was associated with attenuated threat-related activation, more than a stranger's hand, and more so in higher-quality marriages. A small, homogeneous sample and a within-subject design; replication in larger samples is limited. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis doi Supports the claim that perceived availability of support buffers stress, while social integration has a main effect. Based largely on observational studies. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2004). Interaction ritual chains doi Supports the claim that Collins proposed that successful interaction rituals create symbols of membership and emotional energy while failed rituals drain it. Theory built on microsociological observation, not a quantitative test. | Book | Level E | ||
| (2019). Music as an emotion regulation strategy: An examination of genres of music and their roles in emotion regulation doi Supports the claim that preference for energetic and rhythmic music is associated with using music to regulate emotion. Cross-sectional self-report; it does not test whether any music regulates emotion effectively. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2017). Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients doi Supports the claim that reports of experience elicited by the videos were organised into 27 categories with fuzzy boundaries and smooth gradients between them. It concerns the structure of self-report, not of physiology, and the category count depends on the stimuli and methods. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach doi Supports the claims that an inhibitory learning model of extinction has been proposed to optimise exposure, including expectancy violation and removal of safety signals, and that many people do not benefit or experience a return of fear. Recommendations are derived from theory and experiments, not tested here as a package. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2016). How effective are cognitive behavior therapies for major depression and anxiety disorders? A meta-analytic update of the evidence doi Supports the claims that CBT effects were large against control conditions (g = 0.75 to 0.88), smaller after adjustment for publication bias, and small to moderate against care as usual or pill placebo. Only 17.4% of trials were rated high quality, and most anxiety trials used waiting-list controls. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2019). The role of common factors in psychotherapy outcomes doi Supports the claim that no common or specific factor yet meets the criteria for an empirically validated working mechanism, because mechanism research has been correlational. Narrative review; it does not question that psychotherapies are effective. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2014). The new statistics: Why and how doi Supports recommendations to report effect sizes with confidence intervals rather than rely on null-hypothesis significance testing. A position shared by many methodologists but not universally; it is guidance, not a test. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2011). The disaggregation of within-person and between-person effects in longitudinal models of change doi Supports the distinction between within-person and between-person effects and the use of multilevel models to separate them. Methods guidance, not evidence about any substantive effect. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons: A comprehensive quantitative review doi Supports the claims that interventions had a small effect at post-treatment and no significant benefit at follow-up overall, that interventions for people with marked difficulties had more favourable outcomes, and that untreated controls tended to improve over time. Older literature with mixed quality. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2005). Defining stress as a prelude to mapping its neurocircuitry: No help from allostasis doi Supports the claim that the concepts of allostasis and allostatic load have been criticised as adding little to an accurate reading of homeostasis. One critical position, cited as a counterpoint. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2020). Effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes: A systematic review and two meta-analyses doi Supports the claim that music interventions reduced physiological (d = .380) and psychological (d = .545) stress-related outcomes. Interventions and settings are varied, and stress reduction is not the same as resolving a stressor. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2004). Effectiveness of anger treatments for specific anger problems: A meta-analytic review doi Supports the claims that anger treatments showed medium to large effects and that analyses by anger type supported cognitive therapies for driving anger, anger suppression and trait anger and relaxation for state anger. Treatment studies with control groups; the authors call for research with treatment-seeking and clinical populations. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2013). The multiple systems model of angry rumination doi Supports the claims that angry rumination is a risk factor for aggression and temporarily reduces self-control, which can increase aggression. A theoretical synthesis; the individual findings are not appraised here. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2004). Acute stressors and cortisol responses: A theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research doi Supports the claims that psychological stressors raised cortisol on average, with wide variation, and that uncontrollable tasks with social-evaluative threat produced the largest responses and longest recovery. Pooled effects are largely pre-to-post changes within laboratory tasks rather than randomised comparisons, so it is graded C. | Meta-analysis | Level C | ||
| (2012). Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold doi Supports the claim that pain thresholds were higher after social laughter than in control conditions. Pain threshold is used as a proxy for endorphin release, which was not measured directly. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2021). Do emotions result in their predicted facial expressions? A meta-analysis of studies on the co-occurrence of expression and emotion doi Supports the claim that the six classic basic emotions did not reliably co-occur with their predicted facial signal: average co-occurrence effect sizes of .13 for full FACS-coded expressions and .23 including partial expressions, and an average intensity correlation of .30. It pools observational co-occurrence studies, so it is graded D; heterogeneity between samples was found. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (1912). Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [The elementary forms of religious life] Supports historical claims that Durkheim described collective religious ritual as producing heightened shared emotion and renewed attachment to the group. It makes no measured claim, and its ethnographic sources are dated. | Classical text | Level E | ||
| (1997). Bias in meta-analysis detected by a simple, graphical test doi Supports the claims that funnel-plot asymmetry was associated with meta-analyses later contradicted by large trials and was present in a sizeable minority of published meta-analyses. Asymmetry is consistent with publication bias but has other possible causes, and the medical sample may not represent psychology. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2011). The pleasure and displeasure people feel when they exercise at different intensities doi Supports the claims that pleasure declines mainly above the ventilatory or lactate threshold, that sub-threshold intensities produce pleasant changes for most people with large individual variability near the threshold, and that self-selected intensity fosters tolerance of higher intensities. Narrative review of experimental studies. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1992). An argument for basic emotions doi Supports the claim that basic emotion theory treats emotions as evolved responses, each with distinctive signal, physiology and antecedent events and sharing features such as rapid onset and brief duration. A theoretical argument. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2011). What is meant by calling emotions basic doi Supports the claim that basic emotion theory describes emotions as families of related states sharing characteristics that are preprogrammed but shaped by experience. A restatement of the theory, not a test. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2008). Flow, performance and moderators of challenge-skill balance doi Cited for the claim that the relation between challenge–skill balance and flow depends on moderators. Samples and effect sizes were not re-verified from an abstract and are not stated on the site. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (1986). Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information doi Supports the claim that emotional processing theory requires activation of the fear structure plus corrective information. Theory; the efficacy of exposure therapies rests on later trials not cited here. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2019). Reappraisal reconsidered: A closer look at the costs of an acclaimed emotion-regulation strategy doi Supports the claims that people are often unable to use reappraisal successfully and that successful reappraisal used to feel better is not always functional. A conceptual review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis doi Supports the claims that experimental disclosure had a positive and significant but small average effect (r = .075) in random-effects analysis and that a number of moderators were identified. The abstract does not list the moderators, so they are not itemised on the site. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes doi Supports the claim of duration neglect: retrospective evaluations were little affected by duration. Film clips in the laboratory, not real-life episodes. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2015). Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness doi Supports the claim that interoceptive accuracy, sensibility and awareness were distinct and dissociable dimensions. A single modest sample; the heartbeat tasks used have known measurement limitations. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2007). An evaluation of crisis hotline outcomes. Part 2: Suicidal callers doi Supports the claims that seriously suicidal people contacted crisis lines and that suicidality decreased during calls, with further decreases in hopelessness and psychological pain afterwards. No comparison group and a 35% follow-up rate, so changes cannot be attributed to the calls alone. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2014). Is crying a self-soothing behavior? doi Supports the claim that findings on mood after crying appear discrepant and that self-soothing and social-soothing mechanisms have been proposed. Proposes mechanisms rather than establishing them. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review doi Supports definitions and the five-point process model used across the library. A conceptual framework, not a test of which strategies work. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects doi Supports the conceptual claims that the process model groups strategies by the point at which they act and that the extended process model adds identification, selection and implementation stages. It selects evidence to illustrate the model rather than testing it. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2011). Emotion generation and emotion regulation: One or two depends on your point of view doi Supports the claim that whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be distinguished depends on one's theoretical perspective on emotion. A conceptual argument, not an empirical test. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being doi Supports the claim that habitual reappraisal is associated with more positive and less negative emotion and better well-being than habitual suppression. Correlational data cannot show that the strategy causes these outcomes. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (1996). Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment doi Supports the claim that experiential avoidance was proposed as a process common to many psychological difficulties. A theoretical argument drawing on diverse research, not a direct test. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2004). A structural approach to selection bias doi Supports the structural distinction between selection bias, which results from conditioning on a common effect, and confounding, which results from a common cause. Conceptual and methodological; examples come from epidemiology. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2002). Quantifying heterogeneity in a meta-analysis doi Supports the definition of I² as the proportion of total variation in study estimates due to heterogeneity, independent of the number of studies and the effect metric. Methods guidance, not evidence about any emotional outcome. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework doi Supports the conceptual claim that rituals have been proposed to regulate emotions, performance goal states and social connection through bottom-up and top-down processes. A framework that generates predictions, not a test of them. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2020). Context-aware experience sampling reveals the scale of variation in affective experience doi Supports the claim that recurring physiological patterns varied in number and nature within individuals, as did the affect ratings and emotion labels attached to them, while some broad patterns recurred across individuals. Exploratory unsupervised clustering in repeated sampling, so it is graded D; an erratum was published in 2021 and was not reviewed here. | Longitudinal study | Level D | ||
| (2010). The effect of mindfulness-based therapy on anxiety and depression: A meta-analytic review doi Supports the claim of moderate pre-to-post reductions in anxiety and mood symptoms, larger in anxiety and mood disorders. Effect sizes are pre-post rather than against controls, so it is graded C. | Meta-analysis | Level C | ||
| (2018). Rethinking avoidance: Toward a balanced approach to avoidance in treating anxiety disorders doi Supports the claim that avoidance maintains anxiety disorders in standard accounts but can, depending on its function, serve as a coping strategy that enhances perceived control. A theoretical argument. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2002). Social support interventions: Do they work? doi Supports the claim that the review found some support for the overall usefulness of social support interventions but not enough evidence to conclude which work best for which problems. A narrative review; Crossref and PubMed list slightly different page ranges. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review doi Supports the claim that stronger social relationships were associated with a 50% increased likelihood of survival (OR 1.50), consistent across age, sex, initial health, cause of death and follow-up, strongest for complex measures of integration. It pools studies with follow-up of survival, not experiments, so it is graded C and supports association, not cause. | Meta-analysis | Level C | ||
| (2009). It's all in the timing: Interpersonal synchrony increases affiliation doi Supports the claim that the degree of interpersonal synchrony predicted affiliation ratings. A minimal laboratory task far removed from dance or crowds. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2015). The role of sleep hygiene in promoting public health: A review of empirical evidence doi Supports the claims that sleep hygiene education has been ineffective as a clinical treatment and that, although individual recommendations are associated with nocturnal sleep, their direct effects remain largely untested in the general population. Narrative review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2012). Sensorimotor coupling in music and the psychology of the groove doi Supports the claim that experienced groove is linked to the quality of sensorimotor coupling with music. Says nothing about emotional recovery or social outcomes. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2019). Psychological interventions for grief in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials doi Supports the claim that psychological interventions reduced grief symptoms (g = 0.41 post-intervention, 0.31 after adjustment for publication bias, 0.45 at follow-up), with larger effects in people at least six months post-loss and with high baseline symptoms. Heterogeneous trials of varying quality. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2010). Allostatic load biomarkers of chronic stress and impact on health and cognition doi Supports the claim that studies using multisystem allostatic load indices reported prediction of morbidity and mortality beyond traditional clinical measures. Narrative review; index composition varies between studies. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1993). When more pain is preferred to less: Adding a better end doi Supports the claim that a majority chose to repeat the longer trial that ended less painfully, consistent with peak and end effects. A single paradigm of mild physical discomfort. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2015). Placebo effects in medicine doi Supports the description of placebo effects as genuine biopsychosocial phenomena beyond spontaneous remission or symptom fluctuation. A short expert perspective; it does not quantify placebo effects for emotional outcomes. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2006). Experiential avoidance as a generalized psychological vulnerability: Comparisons with coping and emotion regulation strategies doi Supports the claim that experiential avoidance was associated with fewer positive and more negative daily experiences and was more predictive of everyday experience than cognitive reappraisal. The analyses are correlational mediation models, so the source is graded D rather than C. | Longitudinal study | Level D | ||
| (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity doi Supports the claim that greater emotional granularity during distress is associated with less use of maladaptive strategies such as binge drinking and aggression. A brief review by researchers in the area; most cited findings are correlational. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2019). Emotional expression: Advances in basic emotion theory doi Supports the claim that proponents of basic emotion theory now describe upwards of 20 emotions signalled in multimodal, dynamic patterns and acknowledge contextual influences on recognition. Review by proponents; it does not settle the dispute with constructionist accounts. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion doi Supports the definition of awe by perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, with further appraisals shaping its tone. A conceptual proposal, not an empirical test. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy doi Supports the claims that, one week after exposure, the affect-labelling group showed a lower skin conductance response than the other groups but did not differ in self-reported fear, and that greater use of anxiety and fear words was associated with greater reductions in fear responding. A brief exposure course in a specific fear. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2024). A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage? doi Supports the claims that arousal-decreasing activities reduced anger and aggression and that arousal-increasing activities were ineffective overall. The arousal-increasing studies were heterogeneous, so conclusions about specific activities such as running are less certain. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2019). Effects of dance movement therapy and dance on health-related psychological outcomes: A meta-analysis update doi Supports the claim of a medium overall effect on health-related psychological outcomes (d = 0.60) with high heterogeneity, larger effects from observational measures possibly indicating bias, and methodological shortcomings that limit the results. Held at moderate confidence because of heterogeneity and possible bias. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2011). Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual doi Supports the claim that heart-rate dynamics showed fine-grained commonalities between fire-walkers and related spectators but not unrelated spectators. A single field study; it measured shared arousal, not wellbeing or later outcomes. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks doi Supports the claim that reducing emotional expressions in the feed was followed by corresponding changes in the emotional language of users' own posts. Effects were very small, the outcome was word use rather than felt emotion, and the study was criticised for lacking informed consent. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2010). Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review doi Reports considerable autonomic response specificity when emotion subtypes are considered. It is never cited as evidence against autonomic fingerprints; it is cited only as a partial counterpoint to Siegel et al. (2018), and claims citing both must say so. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters doi Supports the claims that non-first-person self-talk enhanced self-distancing and, under social stress, went with better rated performance, less distress and less maladaptive post-event processing, not moderated by trait social anxiety. Social-stress tasks in the laboratory. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2011). Making meaning out of negative experiences by self-distancing doi Supports the claim that self-distancing is associated with adaptive self-reflection across several levels of analysis. A brief review by the authors of much of the primary research. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2005). When asking "why" does not hurt: Distinguishing rumination from reflective processing of negative emotions doi Supports the claim that a self-distanced 'why' focus reduced negative affect on recall compared with immersed recall, replicated in a second study. Laboratory recall tasks, short-term outcomes. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2015). Avoidance learning: A review of theoretical models and recent developments doi Supports claims about past and contemporary theories of how adaptive and maladaptive avoidance is acquired and maintained and their clinical implications. Narrative review; the underlying experiments are largely laboratory fear-conditioning studies. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2017). Emotion dynamics doi Supports the claim that emotions fluctuate over time in patterned ways that require repeated measurement to study. A brief opinion-style review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1984). Chemical oscillations, waves, and turbulence doi Supports attributing the coupled-oscillator model of synchronization to Kuramoto. It is mathematical and makes no claim about people, emotion or groups; its contents were not re-read for this appraisal, and the model's properties are cited from the 2000 review. | Book | Level E | ||
| (2017). Heart rate variability and cardiac vagal tone in psychophysiological research: Recommendations for experiment planning, data analysis, and data reporting doi Supports the claims that HRV indexes cardiac vagal tone and that its findings are easily misconstrued without careful design, analysis and reporting. Methods guidance, not evidence about emotion categories. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2013). Calculating and reporting effect sizes to facilitate cumulative science: A practical primer for t-tests and ANOVAs doi Supports technical statements about Cohen's d, Hedges' g and the different formulas required for within- and between-subject designs. Methods guidance. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1991). Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion doi Supports the claim that Lazarus proposed a cognitive-motivational-relational theory in which appraisal patterns and core relational themes explain specific emotions such as anger, anxiety, sadness and pride. Theory illustrated with examples, not a test. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping Supports historical claims about the transactional model of stress, with its distinction between primary and secondary appraisal and between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. No abstract is available; the book is cited only for these widely documented concepts. | Book | Level E | ||
| (2020). Psychological therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder in adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis doi Supports the claim of robust evidence for clinically important effects of trauma-focused CBT and EMDR, with cognitive processing therapy, cognitive therapy and prolonged exposure having the strongest evidence. Trial populations and comparators vary, and effects are for adults with diagnosed PTSD. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2015). The acute relationships between affect, physical feeling states, and physical activity in daily life: A review of current evidence doi Supports the claims that physical activity consistently predicted higher positive affect over the next few hours and that evidence for reduced negative affect was inconsistent. Intensive longitudinal observational studies, so direction and confounding remain open. | Systematic review | Level C | ||
| (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli doi Supports the claim that affect labelling was associated with reduced amygdala response and increased right ventrolateral prefrontal activity. Standardised images, not personal events, and no measure of later recovery. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2011). Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction doi Supports the claims that affect labelling lowered self-reported distress about as much as reappraisal and distraction, that participants nonetheless predicted it would increase distress, and that it diminished self-reported pleasure for positive pictures. Laboratory tasks with standardised pictures. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (1997). Physiological stress reactivity and recovery: Conceptual siblings separated at birth? doi Supports the claim that of 105 reactivity studies, 63% collected recovery data but only 23% reported it, and that recovery protocols revealed findings not apparent from reactivity alone. A methodological review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2012). The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review doi Supports the claim that there was little evidence for consistent and specific localisation of discrete emotion categories to distinct brain regions, and that interacting regions also involved in non-emotional operations were active across categories. Imaging findings are correlational with respect to emotion categories, so it is graded D; it was published with open peer commentaries, which were not reviewed here. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (2017). Prevalence of prolonged grief disorder in adult bereavement: A systematic review and meta-analysis doi Supports the claim that the pooled prevalence of prolonged grief disorder was 9.8% (95% CI 6.8 to 14.0) and higher with higher mean age. Pools observational prevalence studies with heterogeneous methods and high risk of external validity bias, so it is graded D. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (1995). Effects of self-focused rumination on negative thinking and interpersonal problem solving doi Supports the claims that dysphoric participants induced to ruminate endorsed more negative interpretations, were more pessimistic and generated less effective interpersonal solutions, whereas dysphoric participants who were distracted performed like nondysphoric participants. Brief laboratory inductions. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2026). Majordomus: A lightweight supervisory control layer for AI-assisted work (version 0.6.0) Supports technical statements about what the tool records and enforces in this repository. Primary records produced by the tool itself, with no independent evaluation of its effect. | Software | Level E | ||
| (2005). The tie that binds? Coherence among emotion experience, behavior, and physiology doi Supports the claim that experience and behaviour were highly associated while physiology was only modestly associated with both, and that amusement intensity, but not sadness intensity, went with greater behaviour–physiology coherence. A laboratory induction whose coherence estimates are correlational and have no comparison condition, so it is graded D rather than B. | Experiment | Level D | ||
| (2009). Measures of emotion: A review doi Supports the claims that measures tend to reflect dimensions rather than discrete states, converge only modestly, and that there is no gold-standard measure of emotion. Narrative review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators doi Supports the claim that stress mediators protect acutely and contribute to damage when chronically activated or poorly terminated. An influential conceptual review; the allostatic load construct remains debated in measurement. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease doi Supports the claim that allostatic load was defined as the cost of chronic exposure to fluctuating or heightened neural or neuroendocrine responses. A conceptual review, not a systematic synthesis. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2013). A preliminary investigation of stimulus control training for worry doi Supports the claim that a daily 30-minute time- and place-restricted worry period reduced worry, anxiety, negative affect and insomnia more than the control condition, but not depression or positive affect. Preliminary trial, small sample, short follow-up, worry rather than rumination. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2023). Posttraumatic stress symptoms and its association with rumination, thought suppression and experiential avoidance: A systematic review and meta-analysis doi Supports the claim that posttraumatic stress symptoms were associated with rumination (r = .52), experiential avoidance (r = .48) and thought suppression (r = .29). It pools correlational studies, so it is graded D; the few longitudinal studies suggested somewhat smaller associations. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (2012). Sleep deprivation and stressors: Evidence for elevated negative affect in response to mild stressors when sleep deprived doi Supports the claim that sleep-deprived participants reported more stress, anxiety and anger than rested controls after a low-stress task but not after a high-stress task, consistent with a lowered threshold for perceiving stress. Small samples and one night of total deprivation. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2020). Neuroticism and emotion regulation through music listening: A meta-analysis doi Supports the claim that neuroticism correlates positively with emotion regulation through music listening (r = .22). Pools correlational studies, so it is graded D and does not address effectiveness. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (2021). Facilitating grief: An exploration of the function of funerals and rituals in relation to grief reactions doi Supports the claim that funerals and grief rituals were rated as helpful but that neither the evaluation of the funeral nor the use of rituals was significantly associated with grief reactions. One country, self-selected questionnaire sample, attrition between waves. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2008). Ruminative self-focus and negative affect: An experience sampling study doi Supports the claims that momentary ruminative self-focus and negative affect predicted each other at the next occasion, and that brooding but not reflective pondering was associated with higher negative affect. Experience sampling; reciprocal association, not causation. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2023). Comparing reappraisal and acceptance strategies to understand the neural architecture of emotion regulation: A meta-analytic approach doi Supports the claim that reappraisal and acceptance share activity in left inferior frontal gyrus and insula but differ in other regions. Neural activation patterns do not show which strategy is more effective for a person. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2013). Appraisal theories of emotion: State of the art and future development doi Supports the claims that appraisal theories share the premise that emotions reflect evaluations of events' significance for well-being, that the family includes several variants, and that critical objections remain. An overview, not a test. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2022). Emotion regulation by psychological distance and level of abstraction: Two meta-analyses doi Supports the claims that a distant perspective attenuated emotional experience (g = 0.52), less for high-level such as self-conscious emotions (g = 0.29) than for low-level emotions (g = 0.64), and that abstraction attenuated only low-level emotions. Mostly short-term experimental outcomes. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (1951). Two-factor learning theory: Summary and comment doi Supports the historical claim that Mowrer set out two-factor learning theory. No abstract is available; substantive statements about the theory rest on Krypotos et al. (2015). | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2012). Beyond the myth of venting: Social sharing modes determine the benefits of emotional disclosure doi Supports the claim that emotional recovery two days later occurred only when the listener stimulated cognitive work, whereas socio-affective responses produced social integration and an impression of feeling better. A single laboratory study with a film stimulus; the abstract does not report the sample size. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2024). Effect of exercise for depression: Systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials doi Supports the claim that walking or jogging, yoga and strength training were associated with moderate reductions in depression compared with active controls, with effects proportional to prescribed intensity. Only one study met criteria for low risk of bias, and confidence in the estimates was rated low to very low. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2008). Rethinking rumination doi Supports the claims that rumination predicts the onset of depression and is associated with several psychopathologies, and that positive distraction relieves depressed mood experimentally. Narrative synthesis of mixed designs. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2014). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries doi Supports the claim that recalling past rituals or completing novel rituals after a loss was followed by lower self-reported grief, mediated by feelings of control, including in people who did not believe in rituals. Short-term self-report after mostly minor or recalled losses; it does not test outcomes over months after bereavement. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2018). The preregistration revolution doi Supports the definition of preregistration and the argument that it distinguishes prediction from postdiction. Advocacy by proponents of the practice; it does not measure the effect of preregistration on research quality. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2005). The cognitive control of emotion doi Supports the claim that reappraisal and attentional control involve interactions between prefrontal and cingulate control systems and emotion-generative regions. Narrative review of early imaging work. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1962). On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: With particular reference to demand characteristics and their implications doi Supports the definition of demand characteristics and the recommendation of post-experimental inquiry. A historical, conceptual source; the size of demand effects varies across paradigms. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science doi Supports the claims that replication effects were about half the size of the original effects and that 36% of replications were statistically significant versus 97% of originals. Graded D because it mixes experimental and correlational replications and describes research practice in a sample of journals, not an intervention; what counts as a successful replication is itself debated. | Experiment | Level D | ||
| (2015). Psychosocial effects of perceived emotional synchrony in collective gatherings doi Supports the claim that participation was associated with stronger collective identity, social integration, efficacy and positive affect, mediated by perceived emotional synchrony. Graded C because most outcomes come from correlational and semi-longitudinal designs; the abstract does not describe the experimental manipulation. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2024). Sleep loss and emotion: A systematic review and meta-analysis of over 50 years of experimental research doi Supports the claims that all forms of experimental sleep loss reduced positive affect, increased anxiety symptoms and blunted arousal in response to emotional stimuli, while findings for negative affect and depressive symptoms were mixed. Preregistered; acute laboratory sleep loss in healthy samples. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2017). Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review doi Supports the claims that sleep-emotion research has often poorly delineated constructs, focusing on emotions generated after poor sleep rather than regulatory processes, and that maladaptive changes appear at multiple stages of emotion generation and regulation. Narrative review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2019). A meta-analysis of expressive writing on posttraumatic stress, posttraumatic growth, and quality of life doi Supports the claim that change within writing conditions was small for posttraumatic stress and negligible to small for growth and quality of life, and larger in studies requiring a PTSD diagnosis. Pools only the experimental arms, without control comparisons, so it is graded D and cannot separate writing effects from natural change. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process doi Supports the claim that changes in cognitive and linguistic processes during writing predict better health more than reduced inhibition alone. A review by the paradigm's originator; later meta-analyses report variable effects. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease doi Cited for the historical origin of the expressive-writing paradigm and later health benefits of writing about facts and feelings. Sample size and outcomes were not re-verified from an abstract and are not stated on the site. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2010). The ecology of entrainment: Foundations of coordinated rhythmic movement doi Supports the definition of entrainment and of social entrainment as coordination with a rhythm produced by another individual. Theory; it does not test emotional or social outcomes. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (1997). Affective computing Supports the historical claim that affective computing was framed as a research field in 1997. It is not evidence that emotion can be validly inferred from signals. | Book | Level E | ||
| (2022). Emotional processes, collective behavior, and social movements: A meta-analytic review of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations doi Supports the claim that collective effervescence is associated with self-transcendent emotions, group identity, social integration, wellbeing and collective efficacy. The pooled studies are mainly correlational, so associations are not evidence that gatherings cause these outcomes. | Meta-analysis | Level D | ||
| (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? doi Supports the argument that inferring a mental state from observed activity is weak unless that activity is selective; the site applies the argument to bodily signals by analogy. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2019). Regulating emotion through distancing: A taxonomy, neurocognitive model, and supporting meta-analysis doi Supports the claim that the neurocognitive mechanisms of distancing are unclear and that inconsistent terminology and methods make the literature difficult to synthesise. Its neurocognitive model is a proposal and is not cited as a finding. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2009). Prolonged grief disorder: Psychometric validation of criteria proposed for DSM-V and ICD-11 doi Supports the claim that proposed criteria for prolonged grief disorder centre on yearning plus further symptoms persisting at least six months after the death with functional impairment. Prolonged grief disorder has since entered ICD-11; the 2009 paper is cited for the logic of the boundary, not for current thresholds. | Longitudinal study | Level C | ||
| (2009). Habituation revisited: An updated and revised description of the behavioral characteristics of habituation doi Supports the definition of habituation and its behavioural characteristics. Expert consensus on basic learning; it does not address emotional processing. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2008). All in the mind's eye? Anger rumination and reappraisal doi Supports the claim that, relative to reappraisal, rumination led to greater anger experience, more cognitive perseveration and greater sympathetic activation. Short-term laboratory outcomes. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2015). A meta-meta-analysis of the effect of physical activity on depression and anxiety in non-clinical adult populations doi Supports the claim that physical activity reduced depression by a medium effect (SMD = -0.50) and anxiety by a small effect (SMD = -0.38) in non-clinical adults. Aggregates meta-analyses, so overlap between included studies is possible. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2006). The effect of acute aerobic exercise on positive activated affect: A meta-analysis doi Cited for the claim that acute aerobic exercise increases positive activated affect in the short term. The number and designs of included studies were not re-verified from an abstract, so claims relying on it are held at moderate confidence. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2018). Effects of expressive writing on depressive symptoms: A meta-analysis doi Supports the claims that expressive writing did not yield significant long-term effects on depressive symptoms, and that effects were larger with more sessions and more specific writing topics. Depressive symptoms only. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2016). Prosocial consequences of interpersonal synchrony: A meta-analysis doi Supports the claim that interpersonal synchrony had a medium effect on prosocial attitudes and behaviour, moderated by experimenter effects and intentionality. Laboratory experiments with short-term outcomes. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2026). catharsis-as-a-service: repository, Pages workflow runs and release history Supports technical statements about the site's build timeline and the absence of analytics code. Records of one project; they cannot support comparative claims such as a speed-up. | Project record | Level E | ||
| (1972). A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement Supports the statement that the model describes learning as an error-correcting update, in which each trial changes associative strength in proportion to the difference between what the outcome can support and what has already been learned. It concerns Pavlovian conditioning; applying its form to instrumental relief-seeking is an analogy. No abstract is available for this book chapter, so the appraisal rests on the standard description of the model. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (1998). Social sharing of emotion: New evidence and new questions doi Supports the claims that most emotional experiences are shared soon after they occur and that findings were generally not consistent with the view that sharing alleviates the emotional memory. Narrative review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2007). The social sharing of emotion as an interface between individual and collective processes in the construction of emotional climates doi Supports the claims that sharing reactivates emotional arousal in speaker and listener, strengthens social bonds and propagates through secondary sharing, and that this was proposed as a route to collective emotional climates. The collective predictions are theoretical. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review doi Supports the claims that emotional experiences commonly elicit social sharing and that sharing has interpersonal functions. Narrative review largely of the author's own research programme. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2019). Early psychological intervention following recent trauma: A systematic review and meta-analysis doi Supports the claims that no intervention showed a clinically important difference from usual care for people not screened for traumatic stress symptoms, and that trauma-focused CBT, cognitive therapy without exposure and EMDR showed clinically important benefits for people with symptoms, greatest for acute stress disorder and PTSD. Findings were rated with GRADE; the abstract does not give the ratings. | Systematic review | Level A | ||
| (2002). Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report doi Supports the claim that reports of current feelings and reports of past or hypothetical feelings draw on different information, episodic experience versus beliefs about emotion. A theoretical organising model. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2007). Experienced and remembered pleasure for meals: Duration neglect but minimal peak, end (recency) or primacy effects doi Supports the claim that memories of meals showed consistent duration neglect but no peak, primacy or recency effects. It qualifies the peak-end rule for one domain of pleasant experience and does not test painful or emotional experiences. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2018). Thinking clearly about correlations and causation: Graphical causal models for observational data doi Supports statements that correlation does not establish causation, that statistical control depends on assumptions, and that controlling for colliders or mediators can bias estimates. Methods guidance. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2002). Psychological debriefing for preventing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) doi Supports the claim that single-session individual debriefing did not reduce distress or prevent PTSD, with one trial showing increased risk at one year. Trial quality was generally poor, and the review concerns one specific format. | Systematic review | Level A | ||
| (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion doi Supports the claim that core affect was proposed as a basic pleasant-unpleasant and activated-deactivated state that becomes an emotional episode when attributed to a cause. A theoretical framework. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2011). Music as emotional self-regulation throughout adulthood doi Supports the claim that music-related emotional self-regulation goals and strategies remain broadly similar across adulthood, with some age- and event-related changes. Qualitative and small; no effect measures. | Qualitative study | Level D | ||
| (2007). The role of music in adolescents' mood regulation doi Supports the claim that adolescents describe distinct music-based mood-regulation strategies, including discharge. A very small qualitative sample that describes strategies rather than measuring effects. | Qualitative study | Level D | ||
| (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music doi Supports the claim that peak emotional responses to music were accompanied by striatal dopamine release, with caudate and nucleus accumbens linked to anticipation and experience. Small imaging sample of self-selected music; not about dance music or crowds. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2009). The dynamic architecture of emotion: Evidence for the component process model doi Supports the claim that the component process model treats emotion as a dynamic process driven by a sequence of appraisal checks and the synchronisation of response components. The evidence is reviewed by the model's author and is not a systematic synthesis. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2019). The emotion process: Event appraisal and component differentiation doi Supports the claim that the componential view describes a process from appraisal through action tendencies, physiology and expression to feeling and verbal categorisation. Narrative review by proponents of the view. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2016). Exercise as a treatment for depression: A meta-analysis adjusting for publication bias doi Supports the claim that exercise had a large effect on depressive symptoms compared with control conditions, with larger effects for aerobic, moderate-to-vigorous and supervised exercise. A clinical population; not evidence about everyday mood regulation in healthy adults. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward doi Supports the description of dopamine neuron firing as consistent with a reward prediction error signal. Based on animal recordings; it says nothing directly about human subjective pleasure. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2021). Improving sleep quality leads to better mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials doi Supports the claims that improving sleep led to medium effects on composite mental health (g+ = -0.53), depression, anxiety and rumination, with a dose-response relation. Selects trials in which sleep improved; the abstract does not break down intervention types, so it is evidence for improved sleep, not for particular everyday habits. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2011). Emotion-regulation choice doi Supports the claim that participants relatively preferred reappraisal in low-intensity and distraction in high-intensity negative situations. It measures choice, not the long-term consequences of those choices. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2008). Ecological momentary assessment doi Supports describing repeated in-the-moment self-report as reducing retrospective recall bias. As a methods review it does not establish the validity of any particular measure. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2018). Emotion fingerprints or emotion populations? A meta-analytic investigation of autonomic features of emotion categories doi Supports the claim that autonomic effect-size patterns did not clearly distinguish one emotion category from another and varied substantially within categories. Laboratory inductions; the interpretation favours one theory of emotion. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant doi Supports the claim that undisclosed flexibility in data collection, analysis and reporting can raise false-positive rates far above the nominal level. The experiments were deliberate demonstrations; the paper does not estimate how common such practices are. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2023). Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: An overview of systematic reviews doi Supports the claim that physical activity had medium effects on depression, anxiety and psychological distress compared with usual care across populations, with higher intensity associated with greater improvement. Most included reviews had critically low quality ratings. | Systematic review | Level A | ||
| (2004). Taking pen to hand: Evaluating theories underlying the written disclosure paradigm doi Supports the claim that it remained unclear why written disclosure is effective and for whom it is best suited, although it may benefit some individuals. Narrative review. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1998). Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables doi Supports the claims that writing was followed by improved reported physical health, psychological well-being, physiological and general functioning but not health behaviours, that it increased immediate distress unrelated to health outcomes, and that several moderators were identified. Fixed-effects synthesis, later criticised as limiting generalisability. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2016). Assessment of the cortisol awakening response: Expert consensus guidelines doi Supports technical statements about the cortisol awakening response and the dependence of its measurement on accurate, verified sampling times. Expert consensus, not a test of what the response indicates. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2021). The ethics of emotion in artificial intelligence systems doi Supports the claim that emotion-AI systems depend on contested models of emotion and proxy data, which shapes their ethical implications. A conceptual argument, not an empirical audit of any product. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2017). Self-transcendent emotions and their social functions: Compassion, gratitude, and awe bind us to others through prosociality doi Supports the description of self-transcendent emotions as a proposed category linked to prosociality and group coordination. Narrative review with evolutionary proposals that remain to be tested. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2012). Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation doi Supports the claim that allostasis was proposed as predictive regulation, anticipating needs rather than correcting errors by feedback. A theoretical argument whose contrast with homeostasis is disputed. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (1988). Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology Supports the historical claim that the term allostasis was introduced in this chapter. No abstract or DOI is available; the chapter is cited only for the origin of the term. | Book | Level E | ||
| (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description doi Supports the claim that the model describes oscillation between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping, including respite from grieving, as adaptive, and that it was proposed in response to criticism of the grief work hypothesis. A model with discussed but not pooled empirical support. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2010). Continuing bonds in adaptation to bereavement: Toward theoretical integration doi Supports the claim that whether continuing or relinquishing bonds is adaptive remained unclear in the literature and that an attachment-based model was proposed to predict when bonds help. Theory, not a test. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2007). Health outcomes of bereavement doi Supports the claims that grief is not a disease, that most people adjust without professional intervention, that bereavement is associated with excess mortality risk especially early after a loss, and that intervention should target people at high risk or with complicated grief. Narrative synthesis. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2000). From Kuramoto to Crawford: Exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators doi Supports the claim that, in the Kuramoto model, oscillators with natural frequencies drawn from a distribution undergo a transition when coupling exceeds a threshold, with some synchronizing and others remaining incoherent. A mathematical review; it offers no evidence about human synchrony or social bonding. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2012). When group membership gets personal: A theory of identity fusion doi Supports the definition of identity fusion, the local–extended distinction, and the report that fusion measures predict endorsement of extreme pro-group behaviour. A review by the theory's proponents; outcomes are often hypothetical self-reports. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2015). Synchrony and exertion during dance independently raise pain threshold and encourage social bonding doi Supports the claim that synchrony and exertion each raised pain thresholds and in-group bonding. Pain threshold is a proxy for endorphin activity, which was not measured directly. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2000). A model of neurovisceral integration in emotion regulation and dysregulation doi Cited for the proposal that vagally mediated heart rate variability is associated with flexible emotion regulation through a network linking prefrontal and autonomic function. A theoretical model; supporting studies are largely correlational. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2021). The effect of sleep deprivation and restriction on mood, emotion, and emotion regulation: Three meta-analyses in one doi Supports the claims that sleep loss increased negative mood (g = 0.45), decreased positive mood (g = -0.94) and had a small negative effect on adaptive emotion regulation (g = -0.32), with no significant effect on maladaptive regulation. The regulation findings came from youth samples only. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation doi Supports the claims that putting feelings into words can attenuate emotional experience and may not feel like regulation as it occurs. A narrative review by researchers who produced much of the primary evidence. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2015). How effective are expressive writing interventions for adolescents? A meta-analytic review doi Supports the claims that expressive writing had a small positive overall effect in adolescents (g = 0.127), that few moderators were significant, and that higher-dosage protocols were associated with larger effects on somatic complaints. The authors judge the evidence promising but not decisive. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2013). A person-by-situation approach to emotion regulation: Cognitive reappraisal can either help or hurt, depending on the context doi Supports the claim that higher reappraisal ability was associated with lower depression under uncontrollable stress and with greater depression under controllable stress. Correlational; PubMed lists a 2016 erratum, which was not reviewed here. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2013). Ambulatory assessment doi Supports the claims that ambulatory assessment collects self-report, observational and physiological data in natural environments, minimises retrospective bias with ecologically valid data, and raises acceptability, compliance, privacy and ethical issues. Methods review, not evidence about any emotion category. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2023). Reappraising reappraisal: An expanded view doi Supports the conceptual claim that reappraisal is a family of tactics (reconstrual and repurposing, object- and meta-level, decommitment and commitment). It proposes a map; it does not test the tactics' effectiveness. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing doi Supports the claim that a model has been proposed in which sleep, including REM sleep, modulates next-day emotional reactivity and reprocesses recent emotional memories. A hypothesis-generating review; the model is contested and not established. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2016). The ASA statement on p-values: Context, process, and purpose doi Cited for the principles that a p-value does not measure the probability that a hypothesis is true or the size of an effect, and that conclusions should not rest only on crossing a threshold. An expert consensus statement, not an empirical study. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought doi Supports the claim that the consequences of repetitive thought depend on valence, context and level of construal, with abstract processing tending to be unconstructive. Narrative review; the advice built on it has not been trialled as such. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2009). Concreteness training reduces dysphoria: Proof-of-principle for repeated cognitive bias modification in depression doi Supports the claim that concreteness training reduced depressive symptoms more than both controls and rumination more than the waiting list. A small proof-of-principle trial in a non-clinical dysphoric sample. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2011). Rumination-focused cognitive–behavioural therapy for residual depression: Phase II randomised controlled trial doi Supports the claim that adding rumination-focused CBT improved residual symptoms and remission, mediated by change in rumination. Phase II trial without an attentional control, so specific and non-specific effects cannot be separated. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2012). Guided self-help concreteness training as an intervention for major depression in primary care: A Phase II randomized controlled trial doi Supports the claims that adding concreteness training improved depressive symptoms at post-treatment and 3- and 6-month follow-ups, that it did not reduce symptoms more than relaxation training, and that it reduced rumination and overgeneralisation more than relaxation. A Phase II trial described by its authors as preliminary evidence. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2005). Distinct modes of ruminative self-focus: Impact of abstract versus concrete rumination on problem solving in depression doi Supports the claim that concrete rather than abstract symptom-focused self-focus improved social problem solving in depressed patients, so the mode of rumination rather than its topic determined its effect on problem solving. Small sample, single session. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2020). Reflecting on rumination: Consequences, causes, mechanisms and treatment of rumination doi Supports the claims that rumination has been linked to prolonged negative mood, impaired problem solving and multiple disorders, and that rumination has been modelled as a learnt habit involving abstract processing of unresolved goals (the H-EX-A-GO-N model). Proposes rather than establishes the model; treatment trials described as preliminary. | Review | Level D | ||
| (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales doi Supports the claim that the PANAS scales were highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated and stable over a two-month period. Psychometric evidence about the scales, not about the accuracy of any individual report. | Cross-sectional study | Level D | ||
| (2012). Dealing with feeling: A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation doi Supports the claims that cognitive change had a small-to-medium effect, distraction was effective, concentration on feelings was not, and suppressing the experience of emotion was ineffective. Effects come from short laboratory inductions and vary with moderators. | Meta-analysis | Level A | ||
| (2010). Emotions beyond the laboratory: Theoretical fundaments, study design, and analytic strategies for advanced ambulatory assessment doi Supports the claim that emotional effects in daily-life physiological data can be masked by social engagement, mental and physical workload, food intake and circadian and quasi-random metabolic variation, so interpretation needs detailed context. It describes what must be controlled, not how large each confound is. | Review | Level D | ||
| (2009). Synchrony and cooperation doi Supports the claim that synchronous activity increased later cooperation, including under personal cost. Short laboratory tasks; long-term effects were not studied. | Experiment | Level B | ||
| (2013). Interpersonal emotion regulation doi Supports the distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic, and response-dependent and response-independent, interpersonal regulation. An organising framework; it does not test which processes are effective. | Theory | Level D | ||
| (2005). Is talking about an emotional experience helpful? Effects on emotional recovery and perceived benefits doi Supports the claim that talking about emotions produced perceived benefits without reducing emotional impact compared with control conditions. The role of cognitive work in sharing is discussed rather than directly tested here. | Experiment | Level B |
Evidence changelog
· Revised
Two claims graded A were split so that each grade matches its evidence. The sleep claim now separates the meta-analytic effect of sleep restriction on adaptive emotion regulation (g = -0.32, youth samples, level A) from the narrative review's observation that regulatory processes have been studied less than generated emotions (level D). The expressive-writing claim now separates the measured dissociation between immediate distress and later health outcomes (level A) from the site's interpretation that how a session feels at its end is weak evidence of benefit (level D). Wording was corrected against the source abstracts in the same pass: the two Johannsen moderators are reported as separate study characteristics rather than one combined subgroup, and the duration threshold for prolonged grief disorder now names ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR separately.
· Added
Nine advice entries were expanded with 23 newly appraised references and 14 claims, including findings that qualify the advice: early trauma interventions without symptom screening, the limits of the peak-end pattern, invisible support, concreteness training versus relaxation, context-dependent reappraisal, and distancing effects by emotion type. Every added statement was checked against the abstract of its source in PubMed or OpenAlex; two candidate meta-analyses without a retrievable abstract were not used.
- advice-early-trauma-help-for-symptoms
- advice-ptss-rumination-avoidance-association
- advice-experiential-avoidance-daily-life
- advice-peak-end-not-universal
- advice-relationships-survival-association
- advice-invisible-support
- advice-concreteness-training
- advice-anger-rumination-versus-reappraisal
- advice-anger-treatments-by-type
- advice-synchrony-prosocial-meta-analysis
- advice-dance-interventions-meta-analysis
- advice-affect-labeling-beyond-imaging
- advice-reappraisal-depends-on-context
- advice-distancing-meta-analysis
· Added
Theory section added: eight essays on catharsis theories, the process model of emotion regulation, appraisal, basic and constructed emotion, social sharing, avoidance learning, allostasis and collective ritual, with 26 claims and 35 newly appraised references. Mechanism and position statements are typed theoretical; the claims that report findings are empirical and graded by their best source. Contested positions are recorded as contested.
· Added
Grief and mourning rituals, and exercise and mood, added with 11 claims and 17 appraised references. Ritual effects rest on one set of experiments and are contrasted with a field study that found no association with grief reactions; prolonged grief is recorded as a clinical boundary with a 180-day review. Exercise claims separate acute positive affect, symptom trials of low certainty and the null effect of exertion on anger. The acute exercise meta-analysis (Reed & Ones, 2006) remains unverified and carries no numbers.
- mourning-rituals-lower-grief-short-term
- funeral-rituals-valued-not-associated-with-grief
- most-bereaved-adapt-without-intervention
- grief-oscillation-and-continuing-bonds
- prolonged-grief-clinical-boundary
- grief-interventions-work-best-when-targeted
- grief-when-to-seek-help
- activity-raises-positive-affect-for-hours
- exercise-intensity-and-pleasure
- regular-activity-reduces-depression-anxiety
- exertion-lifts-mood-but-does-not-discharge-anger
· Added
Sleep and emotion regulation, expressive writing and rumination added with 17 claims and 20 appraised references. Expressive writing is graded by its largest meta-analysis (small average effect) and by later null or uncontrolled syntheses; the analysis without control arms is graded D. The account of why rumination feels like processing is typed theoretical at low confidence because the cited sources did not measure it.
- sleep-loss-reduces-positive-affect
- sleep-loss-lowers-stress-threshold
- sleep-restriction-lowers-adaptive-regulation
- sleep-regulation-processes-understudied
- overnight-emotional-processing-hypothesis
- insomnia-associated-with-later-depression
- improving-sleep-improves-mental-health
- sleep-hygiene-evidence-limited
- expressive-writing-small-average-effect
- writing-distress-unrelated-to-health-outcomes
- session-end-feeling-weak-evidence-of-benefit
- expressive-writing-limited-for-depression-and-youth
- expressive-writing-ptsd-evidence-uncontrolled
- expressive-writing-mechanism-unclear
- induced-rumination-impairs-problem-solving
- rumination-and-negative-affect-reciprocal
- rumination-feels-like-processing
- bounded-worry-period-reduces-worry
- rumination-focused-therapy-trial
· Added
Claims added for the new interactive models page: the illustrative status of model outputs, the Rescorla–Wagner learning rule and the relief loop, the direction of venting findings, the peak–end finding, the Kuramoto synchronization threshold and its use only as an analogy, and allostatic load as accumulation. Three references added (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972; Kuramoto, 1984; Strogatz, 2000); the 1972 chapter has no DOI or abstract and its appraisal says so.
· Added
The measuring-emotion note was expanded with six claims and eight newly appraised references: facial expression co-occurrence, self-report instruments, coherence across response systems, neuroimaging, ambulatory assessment and physiologically triggered experience sampling. Every added statement was checked against the PubMed abstract of its source, and no sample size is stated where the abstract gives none. Candidate sources whose abstract or text could not be retrieved were not used.
· Added
Ledger created with 50 claims and an appraisal of all 56 references. Designs were checked against published abstracts; two sources without a retrievable abstract (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Reed & Ones, 2006) are marked unverified and no numbers are stated for them. Syntheses of correlational studies are graded by the design of the studies they pool.
· Revised
Venting evidence revised to include the 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies: arousal-decreasing activities reduced anger and aggression, arousal-increasing activities were ineffective overall. The landing-page wording 'venting increases aggression' is scoped in the ledger to rumination while venting in laboratory experiments (level B), and the arousal-increasing finding is held at moderate confidence because of heterogeneity.
· Added
Music and emotion regulation claims added for the new research note, separating the randomised evidence on structured music interventions from the qualitative and correlational evidence on everyday music use, whose effectiveness remains insufficiently studied.
· Added
Measurement claims added for the methods page: no consistent autonomic fingerprint for emotion categories (with the dissenting 2010 review acknowledged), limits of facial movements and self-report, emotion dynamics, heart rate variability methods and the ethics of emotion AI.
· Added
Clinical-boundary claims given a 180-day review interval: the debriefing finding, the statement that the content is education rather than individual treatment, and when to seek professional or emergency help.