This paper examines the experience and role of negative emotions in facilitating university students’ learning in world music courses. Based on a review of literature in music psychology and music education, we posit that negative emotions can engender a meaningful learning context. In this project conducted in an Australian university, we created a condition in which students were engaged in repeated listening to recordings of music from cultures different from their own, which they reported as sounding “unpleasant.” We then analysed how they overcame emotional responses through a listening exercise. The findings suggest that the students developed enhanced motivation and cognitive reflection by facing their own negative emotions through repeated listening. The article finishes with a discussion about the positive side of negative emotions and the negative side of positive emotions as they relate to music education.

Research on identity threat has predominantly focused on the consequences of threat to some ascribed or involuntary identities, while overlooking individuals' responses to occupational identity threat. Integrating identity theory with identity threat literature, we argue that encountering occupational identity threat promotes negative emotion and feedback-seeking behavior, and negative emotion further mediates the relationship between occupational identity threat and feedback-seeking behavior. Moreover, individuals' performance self-esteem strengthens both the direct effect of occupational identity threat on negative emotion, and the indirect effect of occupational identity threat on feedback-seeking behavior through negative emotion. The results from two experimental studies and one field study provide support for these predictions. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

The present study explored the relationships between metacognition, perceived stress and negative emotion. A sample consisted of 150 high school teacher completed the following questionnaires: metacognitions questionnaire 30 (MCQ-30), perceived stress scale (PSS), and negative affect (PANAS). The data were analyzed applying hierarchical regression analysis. Metacognition was found to be significantly related with both perceived stress and negative emotion. hierarchical regression analysis showed that metacognition moderates the relationship between perceived stress and negative emotion. The results supported this hypothesis. These preliminary results would seem to suggest that individual differences in metacognition are relevant to understanding the link between perceived stress and negative emotion.

Many individuals who sustain moderate–severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are poor at recognizing emotional expressions, with a greater impairment in recognizing negative (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness, and anger) than positive emotions (e.g., happiness and surprise). It has been questioned whether this “valence effect” might be an artifact of the wide use of static facial emotion stimuli (usually full-blown expressions) which differ in difficulty rather than a real consequence of brain impairment. This study aimed to investigate the valence effect in TBI, while examining emotion recognition across different intensities (low, medium, and high).

Method: Twenty-seven individuals with TBI and 28 matched control participants were tested on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). The TBI group was more impaired in overall emotion recognition, and less accurate recognizing negative emotions. However, examining the performance across the different intensities indicated that this difference was driven by some emotions (e.g., happiness) being much easier to recognize than others (e.g., fear and surprise). Our findings indicate that individuals with TBI have an overall deficit in facial emotion recognition, and that both people with TBI and control participants found some emotions more difficult than others. These results suggest that conventional measures of facial affect recognition that do not examine variance in the difficulty of emotions may produce erroneous conclusions about differential impairment. They also cast doubt on the notion that dissociable neural pathways underlie the recognition of positive and negative emotions, which are differentially affected by TBI and potentially other neurological or psychiatric disorders. (JINS, 2014, 20, 1–10)

This study investigated the role of metacognitions in high-dependency smokers, low-dependency smokers and non-smokers. A sample of high-dependency smokers (n = 27), low-dependency smokers (n = 33), and non-smokers (n = 43) completed self-report measures of negative emotion, metacognitions and smoking dependence. Results indicated that high-dependency smokers scored higher than non-smokers on Positive Beliefs about Worry. Furthermore on Beliefs about the Need to Control Thoughts high and low-dependency smokers scored higher than non-smokers. A logistic regression analysis indicated that Beliefs about the Need to Control Thoughts were the only predictor of classification as a dependent smoker when controlling for negative emotion. These results are consistent with a metacognitive conceptualization of smoking dependence.