Cognition & Emotion最新文献

We examined, through retrospective reports, the affect and emotion changes over time (from event occurrence to event recall) that characterise nostalgic events, and how those changes differ from the affect and emotion changes that characterise ordinary (Experiment 1) or neutral (Experiment 2) control events. In both experiments, nostalgic (but not control) events were characterised by a combined fading of positive affect and intensification of negative affect over time. Yet, nostalgic events were associated with more positive affect than control events, particularly at occurrence, but also at recall. In Experiment 1, this positivity of nostalgic (compared to control) events was a plausible statistical mediator of nostalgia's psychological benefits. In Experiment 2, the fading of positive affect and intensification of negative affect associated with nostalgic events were plausibly mediated by, respectively, increases in the discrete emotions of regret and loneliness from event occurrence to event recall.

The present study investigated the link between personality and emotional response modulation during an interview. Ninety participants were filmed responding to different processes of communication: they were asked to respond to questions that required them to answer with either facts or opinions. Emotionally-tinged and complicit exchanges were proposed and directive ways of communicating were offered so as to get them into action or to appeal to their imagination. Their skin conductance responses were recorded at the same time. Personality traits were assessed through process communication model (PCM) questionnaire. The results suggested that everybody could receive each process, nevertheless, emotional responses varied according to PCM Base Type. Although only Persister Base participants showed significant differences from all other Base Types, we observed that participants' emotional responses were modulated according to the different processes sent: offering a connection through opinions generated a high emotional response, as did create intimacy, while participants had a low emotional response when asked to visualise a situation by projecting themselves. These results reinforce the idea that adapting one's communication to one's interlocutor personality enables easier exchanges in dual communication situations. What's more, respecting inter-individual differences fosters greater tolerance, while increasing everyone's relational agility.

Understanding what features influence the believability of expressions in computer-generated (CG) faces is key to predicting how humans will respond to them. In human faces, eye-gaze has been shown to influence the interpretation of expressions. The present study advances understanding by testing whether eye-gaze affects the believability of CG people's expressions - how much they appear to come from genuinely-felt emotion. First, participant (N = 70) ratings of believability and emotion clarity were used to identify a set of angry, fearful, happy and sad facial expressions for use in Study 1. Study 1 (N = 150) then measured believability for these CG expressions paired with one of six increasingly sideways (anger, fear) or downcast (happy, sad) gaze aversions. Happiness and anger were most believable with direct rather than averted gaze, while sadness became increasingly believable as gaze turned downward. Fear showed no effect of gaze. Study 2 (N = 64) replicated the increased believability of sadness with downcast gaze but showed decreased believability with sideways aversion. Overall, our results highlight the theoretical importance of alignment between the signalled meaning of co-occurring facial cues in driving perceptions of believability and provide practical guidance on how gaze can optimise the believability of CG facial expressions.

Visual search is facilitated when targets appear within repeated distractor layouts - a phenomenon referred to as contextual cueing (CC). Emotional (negative) background images enhance CC even when these images are later removed from the search displays. Such an enhancement of CC could arise for at least two reasons. First, emotional arousal may facilitate learning of repeated displays, though the learning representation would be independent of the emotional stimuli. Second, repeated search displays may become conditioned stimuli due to their consistent pairing with emotional events. Emotional modulation of CC may occur during retrieval, as repeated layouts reactivate emotional responses from the initial learning phase. To test these accounts, we recorded emotional arousal via electrodermal activity (EDA) and respiration in 25 participants performing a two-phase CC task with emotional and neutral IAPS images shown in Phase 1 and removed in Phase 2. We found enhanced contextual learning for emotion displays, while neutral displays showed no reliable CC effect. Critically, the physiological activations elicited by emotionally paired displays in Phase 1 continued in Phase 2. These results support a retrieval-based account of the emotional facilitation of contextual learning. Our findings reveal how emotional events impact visual search through associative learning of context-emotion relationships.

Positive feelings may diminish. It is unclear whether this decrease stems from people feeling less positive, more negative, more neutral, or some combination. Using an evaluative conditioning (EC) paradigm, we investigated how pre-existing affective evaluations to positive stimuli might be modified. In three experiments (N = 635), participants saw positive scenic images, the conditioned stimuli (CSs), repeatedly paired with either positive, negative, neutral, or no faces, the unconditioned stimuli (USs). Some CSs did not undergo EC (control condition in Experiment 3). Respondents rated how positive, negative, neutral, and aroused (Experiment 2) they felt about the CSs before and after conditioning. The negative US pairings increased negativity, decreased positivity, and further decreased neutrality. Neutral US pairings increased neutrality, decreased positivity, and did not alter negativity relative to the control condition. Positive US pairings sustained or increased positivity, had no effect on negativity, and decreased neutrality which might help solidify positive reactions. No US pairings operated akin to the control condition, and arousal did not explain the results. Thus, positivity diminishes via multiple pathways. Both negative and neutral USs decrease it, but the negative USs promote more negativity and less neutrality; whereas neutral USs promote more neutrality and not negativity.

Alexithymia is a trait characterized by compromised emotion processing. It represents a key risk factor for various psychopathologies, yet its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. According to the attention-appraisal model, one mechanism is experiential avoidance, a tendency to avoid aversive emotional experiences. To investigate this proposed relationship, participants (N = 444) completed questionnaires assessing alexithymia, experiential avoidance, and various psychopathology symptoms. Results showed a strong correlation between alexithymia and experiential avoidance (r = .55, p < .001), with experiential avoidance accounting for 25.4% of the variance in alexithymia. A latent profile analysis identified three distinct subgroups across participants: one with high alexithymia and high experiential avoidance, one with average levels in both, and one with low scores in both. We compared these profiles for their psychopathology levels, showing that the profile highest in both alexithymia and experiential avoidance had the highest symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, posttraumatic stress disorder, and dissociation. These findings support the attention-appraisal model, suggesting that experiential avoidance may play an important role in alexithymia. When high alexithymia is present, people are generally also engaging in high levels of experiential avoidance. Addressing experiential avoidance may therefore be a useful target in interventions for alexithymia and associated emotional problems.

This research investigated whether sequence effects, or facilitation from two consecutive trials that share incongruency, reduce taboo interference during speech production. Participants named pictures accompanied by distractor words that were congruent with (i.e. identical to) or incongruent with (different from) the name of the picture. Incongruent distractors also varied in emotion (taboo or neutral). Similar to pictures with incongruent-neutral distractors, pictures with incongruent-taboo distractors were named faster when preceded by a trial with an incongruent-neutral distractor relative to a congruent-neutral distractor. These results demonstrate that robust taboo interference can be reduced through adjustments to attentional control. However, naming on incongruent-taboo trials did not differ as a function of whether the preceding incongruent trial's emotion was taboo or neutral, suggesting limitations in attentional mechanisms beyond those employed to control incongruency. Implications of these findings for attentional control accounts of sequence effects are discussed.

While a lot of research has investigated the cognitive mechanisms for lying, its associated affect is often overlooked. Here, we show that honesty and dishonesty cause short-lived, transient affect: honesty triggers relatively more positive affect than dishonesty. To investigate this, participants first performed several specific activities. After that, they answered questions regarding these (and other) activities in an affective priming paradigm. This required participants to first respond honestly or dishonestly to simple yes/no Prime questions, and afterwards to categorise positive or negative Probe words. Results show that participants were slower and more error prone when lying compared to responding honestly in the Prime task, replicating previous findings that it is cognitively more demanding to lie than to tell the truth. Most importantly, we found that telling the truth sensitises for subsequent positive stimuli, and it does more so than lying. Further, emotional habituation seems to take place, lessening the overall affective evaluation of self-produced actions over time. We discuss the functional role that affect may play in the generation and production of dishonesty-based behaviour in the framework of action control.

Affect labelling is an implicit emotion regulation strategy, but its effectiveness across stimuli with different emotional valences and for different groups of individuals remains unclear. This study examined the impact of affect labelling on the processing of (1) general negative and positive stimuli in groups with high/low anxiety and depression, and (2) spider stimuli in groups with high/low spider fear. Participants viewed emotion pictures and were asked to select emotion words (affect labelling) or emotion images (affect matching) that best fit their emotional response. In a subsequent test, an odd/even number judgment task was presented on top of previously labelled, matched, or new stimuli. We hypothesised that affect labelling compared to matching would reduce emotional interference from the background stimuli (faster RT, higher accuracy). The results showed no advantages for labelling compared to matching. Rather, the reverse (negative pictures in experiment 1) or differences with new pictures were found, which could be explained by familiarity. Accuracy differences were only found for neutral pictures. The absence of a sustained effect of affect labelling contributes to other studies showing immediate rather than lasting benefits. An alternative explanation for the null effects is limited sensitivity of interference measures for assessing implicit emotion regulation.

In line with the feelings-as-information theory, a body of research demonstrates more positive (negative) judgments in positive (negative) affective states. Similarly, it has been shown that people who experience positive (negative) affect also tend to judge incoming information as more likely being true (false). Following the argumentation of affect-congruent judgments, we assume that judging information as being true itself possesses a positive affective component. In a truth effect study, we implemented two judgment phases (10 min and 1 week after first exposure) in which 75 participants judged the truth of in total 120 (new and repeated) statements. Addressing the present research question, we assessed spontaneous facial reactions via electromyography after participants provided their truth judgments in each trial. Results reveal corrugator relaxations after judging information as true (vs. false), indicating increased positive affect. Importantly, this finding was unaffected by the repetition status and subjective confidence regarding judgments.