Living large: affect amplification in visual perception predicts emotional reactivity to events in daily life.

It was hypothesised that affect-amplifying individuals would be more reactive to affective events in daily life. Affect amplification was quantified in terms of overestimating the font size of positive and negative, relative to neutral, words in a basic perception task. Subsequently, the same (N=70) individuals completed a daily diary protocol in which they reported on levels of daily stressors, provocations, and social support as well as six emotion-related outcomes for 14 consecutive days. Individual differences in affect amplification moderated reactivity to daily affective events in all such analyses. For example, daily stressor levels predicted cognitive failures at high, but not low, levels of affect amplification. Affect amplification, then, appears to have widespread utility in understanding individual differences in emotional reactivity.