Cognition & Emotion最新文献

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.

Moral dilemmas arise when individuals must navigate conflicts between competing moral principles. Sacrificial dilemmas are widely used to examine factors influencing decision-making (DM). This study explored how proximity affects moral DM using computer-based interactive videos depicting variations of the Footbridge Dilemma, aiming to clarify how contextual factors shape moral evaluations. In Study 1, scenarios required varying levels of physical proximity between the decision-maker and the victim, mirroring real-world behavioural patterns. Participants' choices (utilitarian vs. deontological), response times (RTs), and emotional responses (factual and counterfactual) were analysed. Study 2 controlled for action type while manipulating only the visual representation of distance, allowing for an isolated examination of perceived proximity's impact. The findings suggest that significant differences in physical perceived distance influence moral choices, whereas minor variations do not meaningfully affect decisions. Counterfactual emotions emerged as key drivers of moral judgment, shaping participants' responses to dilemmas. Future research should extend these findings to non-hypothetical contexts. The implications span clinical practice, legal systems, and artificial intelligence, offering insights for both theoretical advancements and practical applications.

Liking of a previously neutral stimulus can change based on co-occurrences with positive or negative stimuli, a phenomenon denoted evaluative conditioning (EC). Prior research suggests that EC depends on information about previous stimulus pairings that is remembered when the neutral stimulus is evaluated. According to recent findings from contingency learning, the temporal distance to the last occurrence of a given stimulus determines which information about its previous occurrences is retrieved, favouring recent information after short temporal delays and frequent information after longer delays. In this research, we tested whether EC follows the same retrieval principles. Across three online experiments, we found that EC reflected the valence of the most recently paired valence, but not of the most frequently paired valence, when measured shortly after a pairing. Conversely, when measured after a longer temporal interval, EC reflected the most frequently paired valence, but not the most recently paired valence. These results support a role of episodic memory and retrieval in EC. Our research highlights parallels to contingency learning and suggests that episodic memory processes govern various types of learning resulting from stimulus contingencies.

Decision-making involves rational and affective pathways, with high-stress potentially altering decision - making and affective states, alongside affecting behavioural variables. This study aims to analyze decision-making, affective states, and variables related to behaviour in a real-life high-stress scenario (bungee - jumping).Using a within-subject crossover-design, 19 participants (47% female, aged 23.0 ± 2.1 years) completed a 192 m bungee-jump and a 1 m control jump. Decision-making tests, affective states, and behavioural variables were assessed. Condition-by-time fully repeated measures analyses of variance were employed.Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) revealed significantly higher values pre - and post-bungee-jump compared to the control jump. Accuracy and average reaction time on the Go/No-Go task remained consistent across conditions and time points. Pre-action self-efficacy was significantly higher after the bungee - jump compared to the control jump. Affective valence demonstrated a significant condition-by-time interaction, presenting low values immediately before the bungee-jump.A high-stress situation impacted risk-taking but not inhibition in decision-making, associated with heightened arousal and affective valence. Anticipatory effects emerged significantly in decision-making and affective states. Furthermore, participants exhibited increased confidence in approaching subsequent tasks post - bungee - jump. Therefore, high-stress situations may enhance pre-action self-efficacy, although potential implications for riskier decision-making should be acknowledged.

The functional neuro-anatomical model of attachment (NAMA) proposes that the balance between affective evaluation and cognitive control systems can be modulated by adult attachment styles and attachment priming. However, little is known about the characteristics of emotional conflict control that are modulated by attachment patterns. Accordingly, the present study adopted two experiments to investigate the associations between attachment styles, attachment (in)security priming, and emotional conflict control. Experiment 1 (N = 225) examined the association between attachment styles and emotional interference, demonstrating that individuals high on attachment anxiety (AX) relied more on affective evaluation to hinder conflict control. Furthermore, Experiment 2 (N = 185) explored the effect of attachment priming on emotional conflict control. Moderated mediation models indicated that high sense of attachment security mediated the relationship between security priming and increased emotional interference when it interacted with high AX. Additionally, high sense of insecurity partially mediated the association between threat priming and reduced emotional interference only for individuals with high AX, while low AX strengthened the effect of threat priming on decreased emotional interference. Together, these findings provide supporting evidence for the NAMA that the emotional-cognitive balance in emotional conflict control is modulated by both attachment styles and attachment priming.

Adaptive regulation of intense negative emotions appears crucial for reconciliation, as negative emotions often impede the resolution of intractable intergroup conflicts. Integrative emotion regulation (IER; actively taking an interest in one's own negative emotions) appears promising in this context, given previous findings of its links to empathy and support for conciliatory policies in the context of the Middle East conflict. However, prior work did not test whether these links hold when negative emotions related to the conflict (e.g. anger and fear) are elicited. We conducted two studies with Jewish-Israelis to test these links, focusing on participants' reactions to innocent Palestinians. In both studies, we measured IER, empathy (sympathy, perspective-taking), and support for conciliatory policies (humanitarian aid) and compared a negative emotion condition (Study 1: fear, N = 240; Study 2: anger, N = 293) to a neutral control condition. Our findings replicated the positive relations between IER, empathy, and support for conciliatory policies even when negative emotions were elicited. These findings are discussed in relation to prior research on emotion regulation in group contexts, including applications to conflict resolution.

Individuals attribute a higher truth value to repeated compared to novel information, the well-known truth effect. Also, information that contradicts what we have heard earlier is considered falser than both repeated and completely new information, known as the contradiction effect. These two effects are a challenge to the correction of misinformation because one cannot easily correct earlier misleading claims. In the present paper, we show a new and important factor that enhances the effectiveness of corrections, the syntactic placement of the contradiction. We argue that because the subject of a sentence has a stronger psychological importance than the object, a contradiction of the subject (compared to the object) is felt as a stronger contrast to the earlier information and thus experienced as more false. Experiments 1 and 2 provided null results, possibly due to confounding material and task. Crucially, Experiments 3-5 (total N = 628) reliably showed that contradictions of the subject were perceived to be falser than contradictions of the object.

Although various features of visual stimuli have been shown to affect access to awareness, it is still unclear whether and to what extent emotional stimuli have privileged access to visual awareness. We conducted three online experiments, using a breaking Repeated Masked Suppression (bRMS) paradigm, to assess whether positively and negatively valenced/high-arousal photographs would emerge from masking (break out of forward/backward masking by image-unique masks) faster than would neutral/low-arousal photographs. Experiment 1 found that positively-valenced high-arousal pictures were faster to break out of repeated masked suppression. Experiment 2 showed that this was not because such pictures were substantially more memorable. Experiment 3 used a verbal rather than pictorial method to check for accuracy of breakout, and found similar results to Experiment 1. We also found that various pictorial qualities had either no effect, or only a minor effect, on our results. Importantly, images of people and animals consistently showed the shortest breakout times, indicating that such stimuli might be especially available to conscious access. However, a difference in the distribution of images of people (fastest) and scenes (slowest) images across the valence categories may have also contributed to the overall shorter breakout times of positively-valenced images.

Socioemotional competencies (SEC) such as prosocial behaviour and emotion regulation are important for successful social interactions and develop early in life. A high moral self-concept (MSC), that is, children's view of themselves as moral actors, can support the development and application of SEC. The transition from kindergarten to school represents a critical period requiring well-adjusted SEC and MSC, yet research on this phase remains limited. This longitudinal study assessed data of 500 German children (M_{age_t1} = 60.97 months) and their teachers to examine the relation and stability of SEC and MSC over two years. After imputing data via multivariate imputation by chained equations due to missing ratings in teacher surveys, cross-lagged relations indicate that a stronger MSC in the last year of kindergarten can lead to greater SEC, which in turn can predict later MSC at the end of Grade 1. Both constructs showed stability over time, with significant correlations between SEC and MSC emerging only in primary school. Gender and socioeconomic differences for SEC and MSC were also observed. These findings enhance our understanding of the interplay between SEC and MSC and their development during the school transition.

When viewing racial ingroup versus outgroup faces, different visual processing strategies are used, resulting in better identification and memory of ingroup faces (Other Race Effect). Similarly, emotion recognition tends to be more accurate from ingroup facial expressions (Ingroup Advantage Effect). This study examines whether differential visual processing strategies for ingroup and outgroup faces extend to emotion perception and how they relate to emotion recognition accuracy. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with Dutch participants (N = 99) making perceptual emotion judgments of Dutch (ingroup) and Chinese (outgroup) facial expressions. We hypothesised that ingroup and outgroup faces would be visually processed differently and that these differences would relate to emotion recognition accuracy. As expected, we observed different viewing patterns: participants looked longer at the eyes and nose of ingroup faces and at the mouth of outgroup faces. However, differences in visual processing were minimally linked to emotion recognition accuracy, suggesting that accurate emotion decoding involves perceptual processes at different levels and that various looking patterns can lead to correct emotion recognition. These findings extend the Other Race Effect by demonstrating that differential looking patterns occur also during emotion perception, contributing to the understanding of face and emotion perception across racial groups.