Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Socioemotional competencies (SEC) such as prosocial behaviour and emotion regulation are important for successful social interactions and develop early in life. A high moral self-concept (MSC), that is, children's view of themselves as moral actors, can support the development and application of SEC. The transition from kindergarten to school represents a critical period requiring well-adjusted SEC and MSC, yet research on this phase remains limited. This longitudinal study assessed data of 500 German children (M_{age_t1} = 60.97 months) and their teachers to examine the relation and stability of SEC and MSC over two years. After imputing data via multivariate imputation by chained equations due to missing ratings in teacher surveys, cross-lagged relations indicate that a stronger MSC in the last year of kindergarten can lead to greater SEC, which in turn can predict later MSC at the end of Grade 1. Both constructs showed stability over time, with significant correlations between SEC and MSC emerging only in primary school. Gender and socioeconomic differences for SEC and MSC were also observed. These findings enhance our understanding of the interplay between SEC and MSC and their development during the school transition.

When viewing racial ingroup versus outgroup faces, different visual processing strategies are used, resulting in better identification and memory of ingroup faces (Other Race Effect). Similarly, emotion recognition tends to be more accurate from ingroup facial expressions (Ingroup Advantage Effect). This study examines whether differential visual processing strategies for ingroup and outgroup faces extend to emotion perception and how they relate to emotion recognition accuracy. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with Dutch participants (N = 99) making perceptual emotion judgments of Dutch (ingroup) and Chinese (outgroup) facial expressions. We hypothesised that ingroup and outgroup faces would be visually processed differently and that these differences would relate to emotion recognition accuracy. As expected, we observed different viewing patterns: participants looked longer at the eyes and nose of ingroup faces and at the mouth of outgroup faces. However, differences in visual processing were minimally linked to emotion recognition accuracy, suggesting that accurate emotion decoding involves perceptual processes at different levels and that various looking patterns can lead to correct emotion recognition. These findings extend the Other Race Effect by demonstrating that differential looking patterns occur also during emotion perception, contributing to the understanding of face and emotion perception across racial groups.

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.