Cognition & Emotion最新文献

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.

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.