Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Joint attention (i.e. looking where others look) can implicitly elicit positive social behaviour: people trust more and are more altruistic toward individuals who are helpful in cueing relevant objects than toward unhelpful individuals. Does this effect extend to intergroup contexts? White and Black participants (Studies 1 and 3) and Male and Female participants (Study 2) completed a joint attention task in which outgroup faces would provide helpful cues to the response target, and ingroup faces would be unhelpful. Then, participants completed an economic ultimatum game in which they could make altruistic offers to the same faces and finally rated the faces' trustworthiness. Studies 1 and 2 showed a reliable intergroup joint attention effect and a relationship between trustworthiness perception and altruism. Study 3 showed the independent contribution of gaze-induced trust learning and intergroup trustworthiness perception, and that the link between social learning and altruism is the most evident when intergroup salience is limited. Overall, these data indicate that gaze-mediated social learning increases intergroup altruism by affecting perception of trustworthiness.

Previous studies demonstrate that individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) exhibit difficulties responding accurately on trials directly after committing an error (Elliot et al., 1996; 1997; Pizzagalli et al., 2006). The current presumption is that heightened negative affect (NA) in response to errors leads to impaired performance monitoring and improvement. However, this pathway has yet to be tested. The current study sought to address this gap, in a nonclinical sample, by examining whether NA and rumination predicted post-error performance. Participants (N = 124) completed a measure of dispositional rumination, repeated state NA measurements, and three Eriksen flanker runs (N_{blocks/trials}= 27/486). Results indicated that rumination did not significantly predict performance, but rather, elevated state NA predicted worse post-error performance and the likelihood of consecutive errors across the protocol. Critically, these results held even controlling for reaction time, meaning that this post-error difficulty was not solely attributable to post-error slowing or speed-accuracy trade-off. This study provides a novel examination of a pathway through which trial-by-trial deficits may occur and is the first to provide support for the role of NA in post-error difficulties. We suggest that these findings hold implications for cognitive control and support the fundamental role of mood in disrupted cognition.

The attachment and emotion socialisation (ES) literatures both emphasise that how parents respond to and teach about emotions shapes children's emotion regulation (ER). Most studies, however, investigated these research traditions separately, focused on mothers' ES, and evaluated children's regulation of negative emotions. We evaluated whether, in mother-child and father-child relationships, attachment security and parental ES strategies of savouring or dampening children's positive emotions (PEs) differentially and uniquely relate to children's savouring or dampening strategies of regulating PEs, and the indirect effects of attachment security. Early adolescents (N = 112, boys = 55) completed an attachment interview, rated their ER of PEs (savouring and dampening), and rated their parents' ES of PEs (savouring and dampening). Children who were more securely attached to their mothers and fathers used more savouring and less dampening of their PEs. Mothers' and fathers' savouring or dampening of PEs was associated with children's greater use of the corresponding strategy. Parents' ES strategies showed unique effects more consistently than attachment security did, and there was limited evidence for indirect effects. Overall, results suggest that early adolescents may internalise specific ways of construing positive events and underscore the importance of jointly considering multiple parent-child factors in relation to early adolescents' regulation of PEs.

Trypophobia is the phenomenon in which individuals report a range of aversive responses when seeing clusters of small holes. Since the phenomenon was first described in the peer-reviewed literature in 2013, approximately 60 papers have appeared directly concerned with the condition. There have also been hundreds of news articles in both online and print media. In the present review of the literature, we examine why trypophobia is likely to occur. Four explanations have been posited in the past decade. These state that the stimuli (1) induce cortical hyperexcitability via the image statistics they possess, (2) signal the presence of a dangerous/poisonous animal, (3) cue the observer to the presence of disease and (4) are aversive due to a form of social learning. We argue that the available evidence points to the disease avoidance hypothesis as the most likely account of the phenomenon.

False memories are often studied using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. This paradigm demonstrates how semantically related word lists can induce erroneous recall or recognition of non-presented critical lures. Emotional DRM lists typically elicit higher false recognition than neutral lists but paradoxically reduce false recall. To examine why, this study examined the retrieval dynamics of false recall for emotional (negative) versus neutral lists using an externalised free recall task. Here, participants list all words that come to mind (inclusion output) before indicating which they believe were studied (recall output). Emotional lists produced fewer critical lures during inclusion, but no difference in the proportion of those lures later labelled as recalled. These results help us to more fully understand the role of retrieval in emotional false memory development and the importance of lure accessibility and error correction as a crucial feature in theoretical explanations of false memories. Implications for theoretical models and differences in recall and recognition dynamics are discussed.

This study investigated the influence of emotional prosody on memory within a dual-process recognition framework. While emotional events are generally better remembered, it remains unclear if emotional prosody specifically enhances memory during recognition. In Experiment 1, a modified Remember/Know paradigm assessed the emotional enhancement of memory effect of emotional prosody and its role in dual-process recognition. Experiment 2 utilised a divided attention task paradigm to explore whether this memory enhancement stems from regulation of attentional resources. Results from Experiment 1 and single-task conditions of Experiment 2 revealed an emotional enhancement of memory for happy and sad prosodies. Specifically, emotional prosodies (i.e. happy and sad tones paired with neutral words) led to recollection, but not familiarity. However, under divided attention task conditions in Experiment 2, the memory enhancement effect of happy and sad prosodies disappeared, suggesting that this effect is dependent on the attentional resources available at encoding. This study confirms emotional enhancement of memory effect of emotional prosody during recollection retrieval and reveals this effect originates from increased attentional resources allocation to emotional stimuli during encoding.

There is a longstanding belief in the hedonic contrast hypothesis; namely the pleasantness of objects like art, food, and faces seem more pleasant when compared to unpleasant (vs. pleasant) standards. Our review of the literature shows that while many findings are consistent with this hypothesis, many are inconsistent. Hedonic judgments often assimilate. The current research tests the attribute-hedonic model as an alternative. The attribute-hedonic model proposes that hedonic judgments (e.g. how do you feel about winning $100) operate differently from underlying attribute judgments (e.g. how much money is $100). Whereas attribute judgments exhibit a strong contrast effect, hedonic judgments exhibit a weaker assimilation effect. Since these effects are confounded, they can create the misleading appearance of a hedonic contrast. In two studies, using paintings and faces, we replicate the traditional contrast effect on the surface, but use mediation to show that hedonic judgments actually assimilate. A third study, using financial outcomes, clarifies the two paths: hedonic judgments assimilate whereas attribute judgments contrast. We further elaborate how the attribute-hedonic model can provide a more parsimonious account of existing literature. By reinterpreting the evidence, we suggest a new path for understanding comparative judgments.

Intuitive decision-making relies on feelings, particularly in contexts characterised by uncertainty, complexity, or incomplete information. In such contexts, decisions made in the absence of deliberative reasoning are often described as being guided by gut feelings. While gut feelings refer to a broad range of affective experiences in decision-making, they can be further specified to include epistemic feelings. These are affective experiences related to the quality, accuracy, or reliability of one's own cognitive processes and play a central role in validating decisions and evaluating outcomes. This paper proposes a formal framework and categorizes epistemic feelings according to their functional roles and temporal positions within decision-making processes. It introduces a systematic distinction between prospect-based epistemic feelings, which arise during the selection of alternatives, and confirmatory epistemic feelings, which occur in response to decision outcomes. The proposed taxonomy offers a conceptual foundation for the operationalization and empirical investigation of these two classes of epistemic feelings, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between knowing and feeling in intuitive decision-making.

Our episodic memories often integrate emotional experiences and exhibit distorted temporal accuracy, prompting the question of how emotion influences the encoding and retrieval of temporal information. Across two experiments, we used a fine-grained timeline estimation task to test how negative emotion and its spillover influence absolute temporal position memory while minimising primacy/recency and response-interference confounds. In Experiment 1, negative pictures were remembered as occurring earlier than they did relative to neutral pictures (earlier-shift bias), despite preserved mapping between estimated and actual positions in both conditions. In Experiment 2, viewing negative videos prior to neutral pictures produced a comparable earlier-shift for those neutral items, indicating affective spillover. Physiological indices were consistent with carryover of arousal from induction into encoding (elevated skin conductance; cardiac deceleration). Mixed-effects modeling favored condition-level (state) predictors over item-level valence, indicating a state-based modulation of temporal placement. The pattern aligns with encoding-centred accounts in which arousal-biased competition prioritises goal-relevant sequence structure and with temporal-context frameworks positing emotion-induced context shifts/boundaries; reconstructive retrieval likely compounds the absolute-position bias. We conclude that negative emotion does not uniformly degrade temporal memory but can systematically bias absolute placement while leaving ordinal mapping largely intact.

Feelings of emptiness represent a common experience among individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) that are not well understood. Theoretical literature suggests that emptiness functions to downregulate intense emotional experiences in BPD, but this has not been tested. This study examines whether (1) emptiness at baseline and emptiness in response to stressors (i.e. emptiness reactivity) is elevated in BPD relative to clinical and healthy controls (HCs), and whether (2) emptiness reactivity predicts emotion reactivity across self-report, skin conductance response (SCR), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) indices of emotion. Participants (N = 120) with BPD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), or HCs provided measurements of emptiness, self-reported emotion, SCR, and RSA at baseline and following a rejection-themed stressor. Results revealed that baseline emptiness was highest in the BPD group compared to the HC group and the GAD group. There were no significant group differences for emptiness reactivity. Overall, increases in emptiness predicted increases and decreases in emotional reactivity via self-report and RSA, respectively. These results suggest that higher baseline emptiness rather than emptiness reactivity is characteristic of BPD. Future research using longitudinal and ecological momentary assessment designs is needed to examine the causes of emptiness and how it can be effectively reduced.