Motivation and Emotion最新文献

Cognitive conflict is typically experienced as negative, which has been argued to drive adaptive behavior following a conflict. We tried to change the negative value of conflict using evaluative conditioning, and measured changes in conflict adaptation in a subsequent Stroop task (N = 416 Prolific participants, English native speakers from different countries). We did not find evidence for decreased conflict adaptation following positive evaluative conditioning of conflict. However, we also did not find evidence for the change of conflict evaluation measured with the affect misattribution procedure in the follow-up experiment (N = 70). Interestingly, the exploratory follow-up analysis showed that people with low goal motivation (as measured through BAS Drive) did show the expected effect. A memory test for the evaluative conditioning pairings and the follow-up experiment suggest that, although the affective value of conflict was difficult to change, people with low goal motivation experienced less difficulty remembering the association between conflict stimuli and positive pictures. Our findings show additional evidence that conflicts are inherently negative, however, there is no clear support for, or against, the affective signaling hypothesis, that is the idea that conflict negativity drives control adaptations.

Typically, men prefer violent video games more than women do. However, little is known about the motivational factors driving this greater preference for violent games in men. The integrative motivational model of violent video games (IMT-VVG) suggests that the pull of violent video games should be strongest in men because men have faced stronger evolutionary pressures to physically compete within an explicit hierarchy relative to women. In two experiments, individuals were led to believe they were competing (Experiment 1; N = 122) or cooperating (Experiment 2; N = 121) with an ostensible same-gender partner to complete a physical strength program. The partner was presented as either high or low in physical formidability. Participants then selected a violent or non-violent video game to play for up to 15 min. In Experiment 1, men showed a stronger preference for violent video games than women when they anticipated facing a stronger opponent in an impending physical strength competition. In Experiment 2, for the physical cooperation task, men also chose the violent game over the non-violent game, but did so independent of the formidability of their cooperation partner. In sum, these data suggest that men may be attracted to violent video games when faced with a competitive task that requires physical strength, but not necessarily a cooperative task. In support of this hypothesis, participants who played the violent games reported greater subjective toughness after game play. These results provide evidence for a new integrative motivational theory of violent video game play.

The prospect of a reward can enhance cognitive performance. For younger men financial gains, and for older adults and women prosocial rewards, seem particularly motivating. We therefore investigated whether adding a prosocial component to a financial reward enhanced cognitive performance and, if so, whether this depended on age or sex. We randomly assigned 571 participants to one of three reward types (financial reward, prosocial reward, or a combination of both) in a monetary incentive delay task. We used linear effects modelling to examine effects of age, sex, or reward type on trial accuracy, response time, and total performance. The prospect of a combined financial and prosocial reward increased performance in all participants with the increase of response speed particularly pronounced in younger adults. Only in men, a sole financial reward increased performance. Our study highlights the importance of choosing rewards wisely when designing studies that examine their influence on cognitive performance.

Adaptive emotion regulation is characterized by the ability to flexibly select and switch between different strategies, depending on individual and contextual factors. Previous studies have shown that people prefer disengagement strategies to regulate more intense emotions, while they prefer engagement strategies to regulate less intense emotions. In this study, we investigated whether – in addition to the intensity of emotions – the discrete emotion type (disgust versus fear) also affects emotion regulation strategy preferences. A total of 401 students from three different universities completed an emotion regulation choice task in which they could choose between distraction and reappraisal to regulate their emotions in response to viewing high versus low intensity disgust- and fear-evoking pictures. We found that strategy choices did indeed depend on the nature of specific emotions, with distraction being preferred for regulating disgust, and reappraisal being preferred for regulating fear. Crucially, the nature of the emotion also qualified the previously reported effect of emotion intensity on strategy choice: Only for disgust- but not for fear-evoking pictures did participants show an increased preference for distraction over reappraisal with increased emotion intensity. Our results thus show that the effects of emotional intensity on emotion regulation strategy choice are emotion-specific and indicate that factors affecting emotion regulation strategy choice interact with each other.

Anxiety prepares us to deal with unpredictable threats, such as the approaching of an unknown person. Studies have shown our innate tendency to see approaching motion in ambiguous walkers in what was termed facing-the-viewer (FTV) bias. Here we investigated if anxiety states further contributed to this bias, hypothesizing that such states would increase overall FTV biases. Throughout three Experiments, we asked participants to judge the motion direction of ambiguous point-light walkers and measured their respective FTV biases under safe and anxiety-related conditions induced via imagery (Experiment 1), screaming sounds (Experiment 2), and threat of shock (Experiment 3). Across all experiments, we showed that anxiety does not affect our tendency to perceive an approaching behavior in ambiguous walkers. Based on our findings, and the discrepancies found in the literature, we emphasize the need for future studies to paint a clearer picture on the nature and aspects capable of affecting this bias.

Negative emotional stimuli are typically recognized more accurately and with a more liberal response bias than neutral stimuli. We assessed whether those effects on recognition memory are present at similar magnitudes for specific negative emotions by contrasting emotions that theoretically vary across different emotional dimensions. Although anger, fear, and disgust are all highly-arousing and negative emotions, they differ in motivational tendencies and/or appraisal properties such as (un)certainty about the source or the consequence of emotion: Fear and disgust trigger avoidance motivation, whereas anger triggers approach motivation (Carver, C. S., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2009). Anger is an approach-related affect: evidence and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 183–204.). Also, anger and disgust are associated with high certainty, but fear is associated with low certainty (Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgment and choice. Cognition & Emotion, 14(4), 473–493.). In two experiments, participants studied lists of negative (anger-, fear-, or disgust-related) and neutral words and then completed a delayed recognition memory test. In both experiments, fear-related words showed no recognition memory advantage compared to neutral words, while anger-related words were recognized less well than neutral words. Disgust-related words were better recognized than their neutral counterparts, but only when within-subject design was employed in Experiment 2. Therefore, neither effect could solely be attributed to the motivational or certainty-related properties of emotions. Across all of the specific emotions, negative words led to large liberal bias shifts in both experiments. Notably, this liberal bias was more pronounced for disgust-related words in Experiment 2. Overall, although motivational/appraisal differences across specific negative emotions affected recognition memory, these effects could not be exclusively attributed to a particular emotion dimension. Instead, these effects might be best understood through unique adaptive properties inherent to each specific emotion.

Research highlights the importance of expectancy-value interactions in predicting secondary-school students’ academic achievement. But as students transition to higher education, their expectancies and values undergo significant changes – highlighting the need to broaden the application of expectancy-value interactions to this context. To address this, we investigate the interactions between higher education students’ expectancies and their values in relation to students’ dropout intention. Data of N = 1140 students were analysed using latent moderated structural equation modelling. Similar to prior research, we find that expectancy-value interactions are related to students’ dropout intention. But rather than the synergistic interactions commonly found in the secondary-school context, we find that higher education students exhibit compensatory interactions: High study values and low costs could, to a certain degree, compensate for low expectancies. Furthermore, special attention should be paid to students who see little value in their studies and have a low success expectation, as they showed dropout intentions that far exceed effects indicated in prior research.

Research examining initiation and outcomes of ER has primarily examined when people regulate their own emotions. In the present study, we investigated what predicts the initiation and outcomes of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). We also examined whether the associations varied by major depressive disorder (MDD), which is characterized by several emotion regulation challenges, including in IER. Adults with and without MDD (N = 215) completed a 14-day EMA protocol, reporting on their emotional experience, recent events, and recent IER interactions. For IER initiation, we examined two features of subjective emotional experiences: participants’ affect (negative affect, positive affect) and emotional awareness (attention to emotion, emotional clarity), and two situational characteristics: event unpleasantness and goal interruption. For IER outcomes, we focused on sharing partners’ characteristics. Analyses utilized multilevel modeling. We focus on reporting within-person findings. Participants were more likely to initiate IER when the situation was more unpleasant and when goals were interrupted. Regarding IER outcomes, the extent to which participants experienced improved feelings about the problem and relational closeness varied depending on who was the sharing partner. Additionally, perceived warmth of sharing partner was associated with better IER outcomes. Initiating IER did not differ by MDD status, whereas associations between perceived warmth and IER outcomes did. Findings elucidate factors relevant to the IER process and serve to provide important insight into the contexts in which individuals might seek others to support their regulation and when the sharing partner were the most helpful in IER.

The purpose of this research was to test if the ways sport fans felt while supporting their favourite teams – both in terms of typical feelings and changes in feelings over time – were associated with different combinations of harmonious passion (HP) and obsessive passion (OP) for being a sports fan. We conducted two studies in which fans reported how they typically felt while watching their favourite teams (Study 1, N = 430), and how they were feeling at three time points throughout an 8-month season (Study 2, N = 418). The results showed that the most adaptive fan outcomes (i.e., low negative feelings, high positive feelings and enjoyment) were associated with high HP combined with low OP. In contrast, the least adaptive fan outcomes (i.e., high negative feelings, low positive feelings and enjoyment) were associated with low HP combined with high OP. These results help us understand more about how the feelings of sports fans are shaped by combinations of HP and OP.

Previous studies have found that individuals with high empathy tend to describe ambiguous faces as negative expressions that convey helplessness. However, the cognitive mechanism behind this processing pattern (i.e. whether it is due to interpretation bias or perceptual sensitivity) and whether the pattern is specific to emotions implying helplessness or applicable to all negative emotions are still unclear. The present study aimed to fill these gaps. Fifty-four undergraduates with high empathy and fifty-four with low empathy completed an emotion recognition paradigm. In this paradigm, they were presented with sad–happy and angry–happy expression continua and then were asked to indicate which emotion the presented facial images most resembled. For the sad–happy continuum, the high-empathy group showed higher shift points compared to the low-empathy group, but with comparable slopes. No significant differences were found when using the angry–happy continuum. The findings indicate that the negative facial recognition of high empathizers is attributed to interpretation bias rather than perceptual sensitivity, and this pattern is specific to faces conveying helplessness. This may help to understand the distress in high empathizers and lay the groundwork for alleviating mental and interpersonal problems of high-empathy individuals through interpretation bias intervention.