Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Empathy plays a fundamental role in successful social interactions. However, most tasks currently available for measuring empathy have limited ecological validity and therefore may not elicit true emotional responses in observers. To address this gap, we developed the Empathic Measure of True Emotion (EMOTE), the first emotion stimuli set to include footage of genuine positive and negative emotions unfolding in naturalistic contexts. We validated the EMOTE in a sample of 216 participants. The EMOTE demonstrated acceptable internal consistency, construct validity, and alternate forms reliability for both cognitive and affective empathy. We also found that, relative to conventional empathy measures, the EMOTE elicited stronger affective empathy ratings in observers, and the stimuli were rated higher in both genuineness and emotional intensity. Together, these findings demonstrate that the EMOTE is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive and affective empathy with enhanced ecological validity, providing a valuable new tool for measuring empathy in both clinical and research settings.

Emotional states are believed to broaden or to narrow the focus of attention. However, numerous inconsistent findings call for renewed efforts to understand the conditions under which such effects occur. We conducted a pair of high-powered web experiments. Emotional states were manipulated across valence categories and appraisal dimensions using autobiographical recall (Experiment 1) and emotional images (Experiment 2). Breadth of attention was assessed using the Navon task coupled with induction sensitivity and mouse tracking analyses. We did not find robust evidence for emotional effects on breadth of attention. Negative images led surprisingly to slightly broader attention in Experiment 2, but this may reflect the slow release of cognitive resources from preceding negative stimuli amplifying the global precedence effect. Breadth of attention also had very small positive relationships with goal-congruence appraisal in the first and control appraisal in the second experiment. We also found no evidence for moderation by mood or personality. Taken together, our findings add to the growing list of failures to observe emotional modulation of breadth of attention and call for continued efforts to chart the boundary conditions of these effects.

We are continuously exposed to what others think and feel about content online. How do others' evaluations shared in this medium influence our own beliefs and emotional responses? In two pre-registered studies, we investigated the social transmission of threat and safety evaluations in a paradigm that mimicked online social media platforms. In Study 1 (N = 103), participants viewed images and indicated how distressed they made them feel. Participants then categorised these images as threatening or safe for others to see, while seeing how "previous participants" ostensibly categorised them (these values were actually manipulated across images). We found that participants incorporated both peers' categorisations of the images and their own distress ratings when categorizing images as threatening or safe. Study 2 (N = 115) replicated these findings and further demonstrated that peers' categorisations shifted how distressed these images made them feel. Taken together, our results indicate that people integrate their own and others' experiences when exposed to emotional content and that social information can influence both our perceptions of things as threatening or safe, as well as our own emotional responses to them. Our findings provide replicable experimental evidence that social information is a powerful conduit for the transmission of affective evaluations and experiences.

Three studies were designed to explore a major criticism of sacrificial dilemmas, namely that their potential humorous aspects may distort moral decision-making. We collected moral responses (i.e. moral judgment and choice of action) but also asked participants to rate the funniness of moral dilemmas, in order to combine humour assessment and moral responses. In addition, the emotional responses to moral dilemmas were recorded for both men and women (including emotions related to humour), and the potential effect of individuals' need for humour was also considered. Overall, three main results were reported. Firstly, the dilemmas used in our studies were not rated as funny at all. Secondly, reading moral dilemmas increased negative emotions (i.e. sadness, disgust, guilt) and decreased positive emotions associated with humour (i.e. joy, amusement, and mirth), with gender effects since women experienced stronger negative emotions than men. Thirdly, funniness ratings of sacrificial dilemmas did not vary according to gender and need for humour. This series of studies does not report empirical evidence to support the humorous aspects of trolley-type dilemmas, but invites a more systematic examination of how sacrificial dilemmas are perceived by participants who have to produce moral responses.

Individuals high in depressive symptom severity show probability bias: they believe negative events are relatively probable, and positive events relatively improbable, compared to those with less severe symptoms. However, this has only ever been demonstrated using self-report measures, in which participants explicitly estimate events' probabilities: this leaves open the risk that "probability bias" is merely an artefact of response bias. We tested the veracity of probability bias using an indirect behavioural measure, based on a sentence-reading task. Study 1 tested 112 Turkish students; Study 2 tested 117 international users of online groups for people with depressive and anxiety disorders. As predicted, participants with higher depressive symptom scores responded relatively quickly to sentences stating negative events might occur, and relatively slowly to sentences stating positive events might occur, compared to those with lower scores. This effect was only marginal in Study 1, but reached significance in Study 2. However, contrary to predictions, this effect was not moderated by the probability level stated in the sentence. This makes our findings difficult to interpret, and we must present these studies as a failure to convincingly demonstrate depression-related probability bias. We hope this stimulates more work on the nature and veracity of probability bias.

The approach-avoidance task (AAT) probes tendencies contributing to unwanted behaviours, like excessive snacking, by measuring RT differences between approach and avoidance responses to different stimuli. It retrains such tendencies using repeated avoidance of appetitive stimuli and approach of healthy alternatives. The most common paradigm, the irrelevant-feature AAT, conceals these stimulus-response contingencies by requiring approach or avoidance based on features irrelevant to the tendencies (e.g. frame colour). Unfortunately, it is an unreliable measure and not always successful as a training, likely because the stimuli can be ignored. In the novel dual-feature AAT, the combination of stimulus and irrelevant feature determines responses: participants approach foods and avoid objects surrounded by frame A, and vice versa given frame B. We trained 219 online participants to approach fruit and avoid chocolate using active (7:1 stimulus-to-frame contingency) and sham (1:1 stimulus-to-frame contingency) versions of these two trainings. Compared to sham, active irrelevant-feature training was associated with more selection and desire to eat fruit, and active dual-feature training increased approach bias for fruit. Participants' perceived rate of approaching fruit versus chocolate correlated with many outcome measures, suggesting contingency awareness plays a major role in AAT training effectiveness, challenging implicit accounts. While the dual-feature paradigm shows potential, its high error rates, RTs, and difficulty mandate improvement.

Extracting regularities and probabilities from the environment is a fundamental and critical ability in an ever-changing surrounding. Previous findings showed that people are highly efficient in learning these regularities and that emotional stimuli are better learned than neutral ones. Yet, the generality and the underlying mechanism of this benefit are poorly understood. Here, participants viewed a stream of images with negative and neutral valence. Unbeknownst, the items recurred in regularity as triplets. Then, to assess learning, a surprised familiarity test was conducted. The results of Experiment 1, using two sets of stimuli, found better statistical learning for negative triplets than for neutral triplets. Experiment 2 revealed similar benefits even when only a single negative item was in the triplet at the second or third position, suggesting the advantage is not cumulative. We speculated that the predictability of the negative items is driving the effect. Consequently, Experiment 3 confirmed that the memory for neutral items preceding negative items was better than for neutral items preceding neutral items. Together, these findings provide novel insights into the mechanism of how the learning of incidental temporal associations is influenced by negative stimuli and the role of predictability in the negative valence benefit.

Many experience sampling (ESM) studies suggested that high resilience is reflected by quickly recovering one's emotional baseline. However, former studies relied on coarse data and did not look into differential recovery from emotional ups and downs. This preregistered proof-of-concept study therefore used high-resolution data collected in 2022 to compute emotional recovery after high levels of positive versus negative emotions. Adults (N = 68) participated in a three-week ESM study with eight assessments per day, complemented by short-spaced burst assessments. Resilience was assessed at baseline (trait-level; TR) and daily (day-level; DR). Multilevel survival analyses showed that high DR predicted faster returns from negative emotions, but also delayed returns following positive emotions (exp(β) = 1.32, p = 0.006). Instead, TR did not relate to emotional recovery (exp(β) = 0.85, p = 0.067). These findings were generally robust across different sensitivity analyses. This illustrates how innovative ESM designs combined with time-to-event analyses may further our insight in emotional recovery and the timescale at which it unfolds.

When recalling autobiographical events, people not only retrieve event details but also the feelings they experienced. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of past feelings associated with two consequential and negatively valenced events, i.e. the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing experienced and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we discovered that people systematically recall a higher intensity of negative feelings than initially reported - overestimating the intensity of past negative emotional experiences. The COVID-19 dataset also revealed that individuals who experienced greater improvement in emotional well-being displayed smaller biases in recalling their feelings. Across both datasets, the intensity of remembered feelings was correlated with initial feelings and current feelings, but the impact of the current feelings was stronger in the COVID-19 dataset than in the 9/11 dataset. Our results demonstrate that when recalling negative autobiographical events, people tend to overestimate the intensity of prior negative emotional experiences with their degree of bias influenced by current feelings and well-being.

People high in depressive or anxious symptom severity show repetitive negative thinking, including worry and rumination. They also show various cognitive phenomena, including probability, cost, and interpretation biases. Since there is conceptual overlap between these cognitive biases and repetitive negative thinking - all involve thinking about potential threats and misfortunes - we wondered whether repetitive negative thinking could account for (mediate) these cognitive biases' associations with depressive and anxious symptom severity. In three studies, conducted in two languages and cultures, cost bias and (in two studies) interpretation bias only predicted symptom severity via worry and repetitive negative thinking; this suggests these biases are actually associated with repetitive negative thinking, rather than with symptoms. In contrast, probability bias showed direct relationships with depressive (all studies) and anxious (two studies) symptom severity, suggesting its relationships with symptoms are partly independent of repetitive negative thinking. These results show the value of studying relationships among the various cognitive features of psychopathology. Furthermore, new interventions which target cognitive biases in depression or anxiety must show that they can improve upon cognitive behavioural therapy, which is already widely available, targets both repetitive negative thinking and probability bias, and is highly effective.