Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Affective inertia - the degree to which affect persists over time - has, for example, been linked with neuroticism, depressive symptoms, and increased distress. The typical statistical approaches modelling affective inertia as autoregression largely ignore that assessment periods covering several days also include overnight intervals which may bias affective inertia. In this study, we thus aimed to test (1) whether affective inertia differs within-day and overnight and (2) whether within-day and overnight inertia are differentially associated with psychological functioning (e.g. personality, perseverative thoughts, stress). We operationalised within-day inertia as the autoregression of affect from one timepoint to the next during the same day and overnight inertia as the autoregression of affect from the previous night to the next morning. We used data from the ESCAPE project including 254 ethnically and economically diverse participants (25-65 years) who participated in up to three 14-day measurement bursts with five daily beeps. We found significant within-day and overnight affective inertia in positive and negative affect. Overnight inertia substantially exceeded within-day inertia that would be expected for the longer overnight interval, indicating affective inertia differs within-day and overnight. This research highlights the importance to disentangle within-day and overnight intervals when studying affective inertia.

Sleep loss is associated with myriad decrements in cognitive function and is a ubiquitous risk factor for mood disorders. Nevertheless, little is known about the relations between sleep loss and its recovery and interference control of affective material. Delineating the association between interference control and sleep changes can provide insight into the link between sleep and the maintenance of mood disorders. Thus, the current study examined whether stimulus valence and time of day moderated the association between recovery sleep and cognitive inhibition following partial sleep deprivation. Healthy adults (N = 24) participated in a laboratory-based sleep study with baseline, sleep restriction, and recovery phases. Participants completed the modified Sternberg Task in the morning and afternoon on the final day of each phase. The association between recovery sleep and cognitive inhibition depended on time of day. Additionally, interference control improved from the baseline to the recovery phase, but not the sleep restriction phase, indicating that sleep deprivation may be associated with worse performance. The current study provides additional insight into factors (sleep and time of day) that are associated with interference control of affective information, which might have important implications for cognitive and emotional functioning.

Disgust-eliciting stimuli have been shown to both capture attention, even when task-irrelevant, and to be visually avoided when alternative stimuli are available. This study investigated these effects across two experiments conducted from June to December 2024. In the first experiment, disgust-eliciting images served as distractors, while in the second, the same images were designated as targets. Additionally, four categories of disgust-eliciting stimuli representing different threats - disgusting animals and spoiled food (ancestral/core disgust), diseases and pollution (modern/contamination disgust) - were compared to assess the generality of the observed effects. Using a sample of over 100 participants, we replicated the distracting effect of disgust-eliciting stimuli across all categories except spoiled food. However, no differences in involuntary visual attention were observed between disgust-eliciting and neutral stimuli, suggesting that the distraction effect comes from cognitive processing rather than automatic visual capture. In the aimed viewing experiment, participants thoroughly scanned disgusting stimuli rather than avoiding them, with distinct scanning patterns emerging for each stimulus category. These patterns are discussed in relation to their functional significance. Finally, we highlight a pronounced difference in intentional versus unintentional gazing patterns for pollution stimuli, offering insights that may be of interest to environmental psychologists.

Math anxiety is an emotional reaction that leads highly math-anxious (HMA) individuals to perform worse in math tasks than their low math-anxious (LMA) peers. The aim of the present study was to examine whether HMA individuals may have poor general attentional control, specifically impaired focusing and shifting capacities, and, if so, to what extent this might explain HMA individuals' suboptimal performance in arithmetic tasks. Forty-six HMA and 46 LMA individuals were asked to perform an addition verification task. The HMA group was slower and more error prone than their less anxious counterparts. The former also reported worse general attentional control than the latter. Moreover, attentional control was positively associated with arithmetic performance and negatively associated with math anxiety. Importantly, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that math anxiety explained a significant amount of variance in the performance of the arithmetic task, even after accounting for the variance explained by attentional focusing and shifting. In conclusion, the present study shows that although math anxiety is associated with less efficient self-reported attentional control, this impairment in general focusing and shifting functions is not enough to explain HMA individuals' difficulties during mathematical tasks.

So far, there is little evidence of a negativity bias in evaluative conditioning. In evaluative conditioning, neutral stimuli (conditioned stimuli; CSs) are paired with stimuli of either positive or negative valence; as a result, the initially neutral stimuli change their valence in the direction of the paired valent stimuli. We investigated if a negativity bias occurs when a CS is paired with both negative and positive stimuli, in sequence, in an evaluative counter-conditioning procedure. In three experiments (N = 100, N = 362, N = 120), conditioned stimuli (CSs) were paired with either positive or negative stimuli in an evaluative conditioning phase; then in an evaluative counter-conditioning phase, the same CSs were paired with stimuli of the opposite valence. We tested whether counter-conditioning is more effective when positively conditioned CSs are negatively counter-conditioned than when negatively conditioned CSs are positively counter-conditioned. We found this to be the case. There was no evidence that this negativity bias was driven by differences in memory. Furthermore, we found no evidence that a negativity bias (nor a positivity bias) occurs in a typical (initial) evaluative conditioning procedure. We discuss implications for understanding evaluative conditioning and negativity biases.

The relationship between attention and memory biases under varying perceptual loads in depressive tendencies remains unclear. Based on perceptual load theory and the cognitive-emotional interaction model, this study examined these biases. Forty-one individuals with depressive tendencies and 43 healthy controls completed an alphabet search task and an unexpected recognition task. Results showed: (1) The depressive group demonstrated attention and memory biases toward negative faces across loads, and these biases were significantly correlated; (2) Intergroup differences in attention bias were modulated by perceptual load: it was significantly greater in the depressive group under high load, but showed no difference under low load; (3) The memory bias effect size showed no intergroup difference and was not modulated by load. This indicates "cross-phase consistency" in negative processing. Depressive individuals, due to attention control deficits, are more susceptible to negative interference under high load, whereas memory bias reflects an automatic mood-congruent effect. These findings offer theoretical and practical insights for early risk identification and stage-specific intervention.

Humans have a strong desire for information. Recent theories claimed, however, that this is different for "bad news". This exploratory study tested whether participants actively seek information about the intensity of biologically relevant, unavoidable heat pain stimuli. Participants played a series of coin-flip lotteries. Each side of a virtual coin was associated with one of two pain intensities. The range of pain intensities included no pain, low pain, medium pain, and high pain. In each trial, participants could bid small amounts of money to learn the outcome before delivery, serving as a measure of the subjective value of the information. Two thirds of the sample regularly made bids. Bid amounts increased with higher average pain expectations and higher range between possible intensities. Some participants who were willing to pay for information experienced decreased pain sensation when knowing the intensity in advance. Bid amounts were further correlated with the use of suppression as an emotion regulation strategy. These results challenge the idea that "bad news" are preferably ignored. For unavoidable pain, a higher salience and greater uncertainty about the event were associated with more information-seeking. One possibility is that this knowledge decreased subjective pain experience by reducing its emotional impact.

Subthreshold depression (StD), a subclinical depression state, exhibits high prevalence and elevates the risk of developing major depressive disorder. Previous studies have found that individuals with StD were impaired in facial emotional expression recognition, and yet these studies primarily used static rather than dynamical facial emotional expressions with relatively highly ecological validity. It remains unclear whether StD could be associated with impaired recognition of dynamic facial emotional expressions and whether the abnormalities could be stable over time. Forty-six individuals with StD and forty-five non-depressed individuals performed a dynamic and a static facial emotional expression recognition task, and they also performed a follow-up assessment with the same tasks as the initial assessment after a 4-month interval. In the dynamic task, StD individuals showed lower recognition thresholds only for the angry emotional expression at both the initial and follow-up assessments, compared to the non-depressed individuals. In the static task, the StD group demonstrated significantly higher accuracy only for angry expressions at the initial assessment but did not at the follow-up assessment. These results indicate that the dynamic facial expression recognition task, recruiting higher ecological validity relative to the static task, may be a potential tool as an auxiliary objective marker for depression.

It is often argued that increased "attentional bias to threat" in anxiety is due to delayed attentional disengagement from threat stimuli, rather than increased attentional orienting towards such signals. In 2013, [Clarke, P. J. F., Macleod, C., & Guastella, A. J. (2013). Assessing the role of spatial engagement and disengagement of attention in anxiety-linked attentional bias: A critique of current paradigms and suggestions for future research directions. Anxiety, Stress and Coping: An International Journal, 26(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2011.638054] critiqued this literature, pointing out that most studies used paradigms that could not isolate attentional disengagement from attentional orienting. Since this critique, over fifty studies claiming to measure attentional disengagement from threat in anxiety have been published, many using suboptimal methods. In this (preregistered) systematic review and meta-analysis, we outline why many of these paradigms fail to provide a valid measure of attentional disengagement from stimuli with different emotional content. We also highlight studies where the paradigms and task parameters allowed for the valid measurement of attentional disengagement and include a meta-analysis (759 participants) of this subset. Some evidence was observed for slowed disengagement from threat images (relative to neutral) in high-anxious individuals, but heterogeneity across studies was high, and the effect disappeared when restricting the analysis to paradigms that could rule out behavioural freezing as an alternative explanation. Overall, these findings highlight the need for better-quality research in this area and suggest best practices for the field moving forward.

Failed replication attempts have raised concerns over the prevalence of publication bias and false positive results in the psychological literature. Using a sample of 65,970 test statistics from Cognition & Emotion and Emotion, this article assesses the credibility of results in emotional research. All test statistics were converted to z-scores and analysed with Z-curve. A Z-curve analysis provides information about the amount of selection bias, the expected replication rate and the false positive risk. Lastly, Z-curve is used to determine an alpha level that lessens the false positive risk without unnecessary loss of power. The results show evidence of selection bias in emotional research, but trend analyses showed a decrease over time. Based on the z-curve estimates, we predict a 15% and 70% success rate in replication studies. Therefore, replication studies should increase sample sizes to avoid type-II errors. The risk of false positives with the traditional alpha level of 5% is between 5% and 33%. Lowering alpha to 1% is sufficient to reduce the false positive risk to less than 5%. In sum, our findings may alleviate concerns about high false positive rates among emotional researchers. However, selection bias and low power remain challenges to be addressed.