Cognition & Emotion最新文献

People's knowledge of the world is limited, and both being intolerant of uncertainty and experiencing uncertainty may be related to impaired focus on a current task. Across two pre-registered studies (Total N = 435) we found that intolerance of uncertainty was related to self-reported trait mind-wandering (Study 1) and probe-caught mind-wandering (Study 2). We also tested the exploratory hypothesis that uncertainty would be positively related to mind wandering, and found that both trait (Study 1) and state (Study 2) uncertainty were related to mind-wandering. Both spontaneous and deliberate mind-wandering were positively related to intolerance of uncertainty and uncertainty. In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to write about a time when they were either uncertain or certain. Exploratory analyses indicated that participants assigned to the uncertain condition reported greater intolerance of uncertainty, than participants in the certain condition. There was an indirect effect of condition through intolerance of uncertainty on deliberate mind-wandering, but not spontaneous mind-wandering. Both studies found that intolerance of uncertainty and uncertainty were strongly related. These results indicate that concerns about the unknown are associated with decreased focus on the task at hand.

The recent Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars have contributed to heightened post-traumatic symptoms among Israeli civilians forced to evacuate their homes. In a proof-of-concept experiment involving 195 Israeli Jewish evacuees, we examined whether nostalgia could serve as a psychological resource for alleviating post-traumatic stress symptoms. Participants in the experimental group were asked to reflect on a nostalgic event in their life that occurred before October 7th, 2023, the onset of the war, while those in the control group reflected on an ordinary life event. The results showed that nostalgia led to a decrease in post-traumatic stress symptoms and negative affect, while increasing optimism. Additionally, the reduction in post-traumatic symptoms due to nostalgia induction was partially mediated by negative affect and fully mediated by optimism. These findings suggest that nostalgia may offer potential as an intervention to buffer against trauma's psychological impact.

Trigger warnings (TWs) aim to alert individuals to potentially distressing content. Most studies found no beneficial effects; some have even reported adverse effects. However, due to their increasing use, there is a large heterogeneity in wording and design across contexts. Inspired by expectation research, this study examined the impact of different TW formulations on negative affect, expectations, symptom experiences (i.e. intrusions), and perceived respect and autonomy. Using the trauma film paradigm, N = 143 healthy participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) TW with content and emotional reaction details, (2) TW without details, or (3) no TW. There were no group differences in negative affect. Between the TW conditions, participants who received the less specific TW reported lower coping expectations, more intrusions, and greater distress over three days. The wording of a TW seems to have differential effects. Providing both content information and expected emotional reactions appears to be more beneficial.

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) can cause cognitive impairments and disrupt the ability to perceive others' emotions. We examined whether cognitive impairments in semantic knowledge and executive function are related to two aspects of emotion perception. Individuals with FTD and healthy controls (N = 110; 33 behavioral variant FTD, 23 non-fluent variant FTD, 30 semantic variant FTD, and 24 controls) completed neuropsychological tests of semantic word knowledge (Peabody Picture Vocabulary, Boston Naming Tests) and executive function (Digit Span Backwards, Trail-Making, Stroop, Design Fluency). They also completed two behavioral tests of emotion perception (1) an emotion labeling task that measured the ability to identify specific emotions (e.g. sad, happy) of characters in films and (2) an emotion tracking task that measures the ability to continuously track the emotional valence (i.e. negative, neutral, positive) of a character in a film. Lower semantic word knowledge was associated with less accurate emotion labeling (but was not associated with emotion tracking). In contrast, lower executive function was associated with lower accuracy in both labeling and tracking. Effects were robust even after accounting for diagnosis, age, sex, global cognition, and dementia severity. Findings reveal how distinct cognitive processes are linked with different aspects of emotion perception in FTD.

Individuals might vary in their ability to accurately monitor their ongoing conscious experiences of mind wandering. Such findings have serious implications for understanding the accuracy of participants' ability to report their ongoing thoughts. We extend these previous findings to ask if individuals vary in the ability to accurately monitor and report on the emotional valence of their task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Participants completed a sustained attention task with periodic thought probes asking about emotional valence of their TUTs. Following these thought reports, they provided a confidence judgement. Participants were less confident in their TUTs compared to on-task reports. Among emotionally valenced TUTs, participants were more confident when reporting negatively valenced TUTs but less (and similarly) confident when reporting neutral and positive TUTs. Confidence moderated the within-subject relationship between positive TUTs and no-go accuracy. There was no moderating effect of confidence on more covert measures of mind wandering including mean response time or response time variability. We discuss the implications of these findings by suggesting that while people might vary in their ability to monitor and report on different aspects of their mind wandering, it is also possible that performance-induced confounds are introduced that could muddy the reliability of these reports.

Emotions are expressed via many features including facial displays, vocal intonation, and touch, and perceivers can often interpret emotional displays across the different modalities with high accuracy. Here, we examine how emotion perception from faces and voices relates to one another, probing individual differences in emotion recognition abilities across visual and auditory modalities. We developed a novel emotion sorting task, in which participants were tasked with freely grouping different stimuli into perceived emotional categories, without requiring pre-defined emotion labels. Participants completed two emotion sorting tasks, one using silent videos of facial expressions, the other with audio recordings of vocal expressions. We furthermore manipulated the emotional intensity, contrasting more subtle, lower intensity vs higher intensity emotion portrayals. We find that participants' performance on the emotion sorting task was similar for face and voice stimuli. As expected, performance was lower when stimuli were of low emotional intensity. Consistent with previous reports, we find that task performance was positively correlated across the two modalities. Our findings show that emotion perception in the visual and auditory modalities may be underpinned by similar and/or shared processes, highlighting that emotion sorting tasks are powerful paradigms to investigate emotion recognition from voices, cross-modal and multimodal emotion recognition.

During COVID, much of the world wore masks covering their lower faces to prevent the spread of disease. These masks cover lower facial features, but how vital are these lower facial features to the recognition of facial expressions of emotion? Going beyond the Ekman 6 emotions, in Study 1 (N = 372), we used a multilevel logistic regression to examine how artificially rendered masks influence emotion recognition from static photos of facial muscle configurations for many commonly experienced positive and negative emotions. On average, masks reduced emotion recognition accuracy by 17% percent for negative emotions and 23% for positive emotions. In Study 2 (N = 338), we asked whether these results generalised to multimodal full-body expressions of emotions, accompanied by vocal expressions. Participants viewed videos from a previously validated set, where the lower facial features were blurred from the nose down. Here, though the decreases in emotion recognition were noticeably less pronounced, highlighting the power of multimodal information, we did see important decreases for certain specific emotions and for positive emotions overall. Results are discussed in the context of the social and emotional consequences of compromised emotion recognition, as well as the unique facial features which accompany certain emotions.

Blended facial expressions with a smiling mouth but non-happy eyes (neutral, sad, etc.) are often (incorrectly) judged as "happy". We investigated the time course of this phenomenon, both forward and backward. To do this, we varied the order of presentation of a prime stimulus (upper half of a face) and a probe (lower half of a face) stimulus, and their display durations. The forward and the backward influence of the smile was assessed when the mouth was seen before or after the eyes. Participants categorised the eye expression when the mouth and the eyes were congruent or incongruent. Results showed that, as a forward prime, a smiling mouth biased the recognition of incongruent (non-happy) eyes as if they were happy. The effect started as early as 100 ms and dissipated by 1000 ms. As a backward prime, the smile also biased recognition of non-happy eye expressions as happy for at least the first 300 ms. These results suggest, respectively, that the presence of a smiling mouth impairs the accurate encoding and memory for non-happy eyes. Angry eyes are the least susceptible to this effect, probably due to their distinctiveness. An alternative response (rather than sensitivity) bias was partially ruled out.

We were concerned with the link between nostalgia and comfort in food experiences. In Studies 1 and 2, participants visualised 12 foods (Study 1) or consumed 12 flavour samples (Study 2). Following each respective food experience, they rated each food's capacity to evoke nostalgia and comfort. In preregistered Studies 3 and 4, participants first visualised and wrote about eating either a personally nostalgic food or a regularly consumed food, and then indicated the extent to which the food experience increased nostalgia, social connectedness, and comfort. In cross-sectional Studies 1 and 2, nostalgia associated with food experiences was linked to more comfort, but this relation exhibited greater complexity in experimental Studies 3 and 4. In the latter two studies, nostalgia for food experiences elevated comfort by strengthening social connectedness.

This research used the progressive demasking paradigm to investigate whether perceptual word identification is facilitated by semantic information. Experiment 1 revealed faster identification for taboo than neutral words. Experiment 2 revealed faster identification for taboo than emotionally-comparable non-taboo words, whereas the difference with respect to neutral words was possibly mitigated by list-wise factors related to list composition. Moreover, the facilitation for taboo words was impervious to habituation. The taboo connotation advantage seemingly originates from the attentional capture triggered by tabooness, a socio-culturally determined semantic feature that, under appropriate contextual conditions, modulates perceptual word identification. Our results suggest that (a) semantic processing is a pervasive component of any task involving word processing, and (b) when semantic information does not hinder the main task, it may influence even the earliest stages of word perceptual identification.