Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Can aversion from a political ideology lead to rapid, automatic rejection of said ideology? We tested this question in the Israeli political context using a spatial Stroop task to examine whether politically charged left-wing terms would elicit slower verbal latencies. In Study 1 (n = 85), participants were presented with left- and right-wing political terms presented either in a congruent or incongruent spatial location and were asked to verbally indicate only the location of the word. Study 2 (n = 128), replicated this procedure with the Hebrew words for "left" and "right" and examined whether political awareness primes would amplify the effect. Results indicated a slowdown for left-wing related terms above and beyond a congruency effect that was exacerbated under political priming. The slowdown was particularly pronounced among centre-right-wing participants in Study 1, but significant across political orientations in Study 2. Two auxiliary studies rule out the possibility that phonemic features of the words, or spatial preferences could explain these effects. Overall, results support a taboo effect (i.e., implicit aversion) for left-wing political terms.

There is a speed-accuracy trade-off in perception. The ability to quickly extract sensory information is critical for survival, while extended processing can improve our accuracy. It has been suggested that emotions can change our style of processing, but their influence on processing speed is not yet clear. In three experiments, combining online and laboratory studies with different emotion induction procedures, we investigated the influence of both affective states, manipulated with music, and individual traits in sensory-processing sensitivity on the ability to rapidly segregate two visual flashes. Across studies, the musical manipulations pushed participants towards either rapid or slow processing. Individual variations in sensory-processing sensitivity modulated these effects. Our findings demonstrate that affective states, influenced by music, can shift the balance between fast and slow visual processing, altering our perceptual experience. These results also emphasise the interaction of individual traits in sensory processing and affective states.

Associations between screen time and mental health may be driven by increased use in young people with heightened symptoms as a means of modifying negative mood. However, the direct effect of technology use on mood remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the effect of active and passive social media use on an induced sad or neutral mood by randomising young people (16-24 years; N = 116) to a sad or neutral mood induction task and assessing mood after being instructed to engage in active or passive social media use. We found both active and passive social media use alleviated sad mood but had no effect on neutral mood. Active social media use was associated with functional emotion regulation strategies relative to passive social media use. These findings suggest a possible beneficial effect of social media use on sad mood, however, longer-term effects on mental health are yet to be determined.

Rumination is a key feature of depression and contributes to its onset, maintenance, and recurrence. Researchers have proposed that biases in the attentional processing of emotional information may underlie rumination, and particularly, the brooding component. This investigation evaluated associations between attentional biases for emotional images and rumination, including both brooding and reflection, in currently and never depressed participants. In two separate studies, participants viewed sets of four emotional images (happy, sad, threatening, and neutral) for 8 s in a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm. In both studies, currently depressed individuals attended to happy face images and happy naturalistic images significantly less than never depressed individuals. In Study 2, currently depressed individuals attended to sad naturalistic images significantly more than never depressed individuals. There were no statistically significant associations between attentional biases and any of the forms of rumination, independent of their shared relationship with depression symptoms. These findings call into question the robustness of the link between attentional biases and rumination.

McCullough et al. [McCullough, M. E., Worthington, E. L., & Rachal, K. C. (1997). Interpersonal Forgiving in Close Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(2), 321-336.] demonstrated that in situations of feeling hurt by an offender, empathy towards the offender is positively associated with forgiving the offender, which in turn is positively associated with conciliatory behaviour and negatively associated with avoidance behaviour. In a Replication Registered Report with a Prolific US online sample (N = 794), we conducted a replication of Study 1 from McCullough et al. (1997) with extensions manipulating empathy to determine causality and measuring revenge motivation adopted from McCullough et al. [McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. C., Sandage, S. J., Worthington, E. L., Brown, S. W., & Hight, T. L. (1998). Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships: II. Theoretical Elaboration and Measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(6), 1586-1603]. We found that empathy was positively associated with perceived apology (r = 0.45[0.35,0.55]) and forgiveness toward the offender (r = 0.64[0.56,0.70]), and forgiveness was positively associated with conciliatory motivation (r = 0.51[0.41,0.59]) and negatively associated with avoidance motivation (r = -0.51[-0.59,-0.42]) and revenge motivation (r = -0.43[-0.52,-0.33]). Manipulating empathy, we found that participants who recalled situations in which they felt strong empathy towards the offender rated higher forgiveness compared to participants recalling situations with low empathy or compared to control (d = 0.60-0.62). Overall, this was a successful replication of the findings by McCullough et al. (1997; 1998) with the empathy model of forgiveness receiving strong empirical support. Materials, data and code are available on: https://osf.io/fmuv2/. This Registered Report has been endorsed by Peer Community in Registered Reports: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100444.

The development of emotion regulation (ER) in early childhood is shaped by the development of cognitive skills, particularly executive functions (EF). However, it remains unclear whether specific types of EFs differentially predict ER strategies across various emotional contexts. The current study aimed to explore the association between children's EFs (e.g. attentional control, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility) and children's cognitive vs. behavioural ER strategies preference for sad, fear, and anger contexts. Participants were 78 8- to 12-year-old Latine or part-Latine children (50% female, low- to middle-SES category) recruited in Southern California. Across sadness, fear, and anger contexts, greater reports of cognitive ER strategies were predicted by higher attentional control and being female. However, no significant association was found between children's EFs and their reports of behavioural ER strategies. Specifically, in events triggering sadness (as opposed to fear or anger), higher attentional control predicted a greater report of cognitive ER strategies, whereas lower attentional control predicted a greater report of behavioural ER strategies. Our findings offer valuable additional insights into the existing literature, highlighting the link between children's increased EF skills, their higher preferences for cognitive ER strategies, and their reduced reliance on behavioural ER strategies.

Research suggests that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have life-long consequences on emotional functioning. However, it is unclear how ACEs shape the dynamic features of everyday emotions. In the current preregistered study with two adult ecological momentary assessment samples (Ns = 122 and 121), we examined the linear and curvilinear associations of ACEs with daily emotion dynamic features. We expected ACEs to show linear associations with a higher baseline level, variability, and inertia of negative emotions, as well as a lower baseline level of positive emotions. Moreover, we expected ACEs to show U-shaped curvilinear associations with the variability of negative and positive emotions. The results did not support our hypotheses. Instead, ACEs showed an inverted U-shaped association with the baseline level and variability of negative emotions. Furthermore, ACEs also showed a U-shaped association with the baseline level of positive emotions and a linear association with higher variability of positive emotions. However, all associations were present in only one of the two samples. Our study underscores the critical need to incorporate a broad spectrum of ACEs in research samples to adequately capture their developmental consequences and the role of ACEs in contributing to the baseline level and variability of daily emotions.

Shame, theory of mind (ToM) and self-consciousness were examined in a group of early adolescents aged 10-12 years. The aim was to assess whether the relationship between early adolescents' dispositional shame and ToM is mediated by their private and public self-consciousness. One hundred adolescents (M = 11;1 years; months, 51 girls) were administered measures assessing dispositional shame and self-consciousness and a ToM test. Results support an essential distinction between the private and public aspects of self-consciousness and show that ToM's relationship to dispositional shame is mediated by public but not private self-consciousness. The significance of these findings and their potential implications for theoretical models of shame development is discussed.

People often think about how things could have been better or worse. People make these upward and downward comparisons in different situations and with differing emotional consequences. We investigated whether the direction of counterfactual comparisons affects people's judgements of counterfactual closeness. In four preregistered experiments (N = 2,142), participants saw vignettes where agents lost or won a luck-based game. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, participants judged counterfactual closeness in two ways: if a counterfactual outcome almost happened, and if it easily could have happened. These judgments were affected by different factors, but did not substantially differ based on the direction of comparison. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants predicted agents' emotions - whether losers would be sad, winners would be happy, and whether both would be surprised by the outcome. Emotion predictions showed similar patterns regardless of whether agents lost or won. Participants predicted stronger emotional reactions when the prior probability of the counterfactual outcome was high rather than low, though this effect was somewhat stronger when agents lost. Together, these findings join recent work in suggesting that Almost and Easily judgments tap into distinct forms of counterfactual closeness, and also suggest this distinction is robust to the direction of counterfactual reasoning.