Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Attentional capture by emotionally salient stimuli is adaptive, permitting identification of possible threats; however, an excessive bias towards emotional stimuli can interrupt goal-directed behaviour. This is especially relevant in psychiatric disease, where severe emotional distress can interfere with daily function. As such, understanding the mechanisms by which emotional stimuli compete for attentional resources is a critical area of investigation. Previous studies using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigms observe that emotional distractors disrupt the detection of subsequent stimuli, referred to as emotion-induced blindness (EIB). Our study expands upon this work, characterising how temporal and perceptual factors shape the emergence and intensity of EIB. Contrary to previous assumptions regarding temporal dynamics of EIB, we found that effects of emotional distractors persisted across prolonged image presentation durations. Further, we investigated the extent to which the depth of distractor processing influences EIB using a distractor recall task. While recall was predictive of EIB magnitude, a significant effect of emotional distractors on target detection was nonetheless present even without conscious recall of the distractor. These findings demonstrate the robustness of the EIB effect in RSVP in the context of temporal and perceptual manipulations.

The human brain optimises cognitive resource allocation to enhance the processing speed and efficiency of vital information for better survival and adaptation in response to threat signals. Previous studies found that fearful expressions, as visual cues signalling threats, can not only have advantages in entering and remaining in awareness, but also enhance subsequent perceptual processing of low-spatial-frequency (LSF) information. However, it remains unknown whether the enhanced perceptual processing of LSF induced by fearful expressions also grants LSF information a competitive advantage in awareness. To this end, we employed a binocular rivalry paradigm to measure awareness of Gabor patches with low or high spatial frequencies following the rapid priming of fearful versus neutral expressions. The results revealed that the relative dominance of LSF over high-spatial-frequency (HSF) Gabor patches was markedly heightened following brief exposure to fearful compared with neutral expressions. This effect was found for both upright and inverted expressions, indicating it is independent of face configuration. Our study thus suggests a feature-based perceptual optimisation mechanism with evolutionary significance, potentially optimising cognitive resource allocation in threatening situations.

This study investigated the effect of top-down interventions on a bottom-up attentional phenomenon: emotion-induced blindness (EIB). A previous study found that the distraction from an emotional image can be reduced by providing a warning about the distractor category. We tested the benefits of image-specific or categorical warnings. Participants performed an RSVP task with erotic or neutral distractor images, with or without warnings. Three pre-registered experiments tested different warnings: a preview of the upcoming distractor image (Experiment 1, N = 48), a different image from the same distractor category (Experiment 2, N = 48), or a text warning identifying the distractor category (Experiment 3, N = 48). In all experiments, warnings decreased the distraction caused by erotic images. Previewing the distractor image provided much more benefit (77.6% reduction) than presenting a same-category image (34.3% reduction) or text warning (34.9% reduction). We suggest that the preview images either primed the processing of distractor images or inhibited processing of distractors by providing a negative template. The benefits from other warnings demonstrate that knowing the distractor category is sufficient for some reduction in the EIB effect. Our results show that the EIB effect can be reduced by both image-specific and categorical foreknowledge.

In the valence contingency learning (VCL) task, participants evaluate target words which are preceded by nonwords, which are predictive for positive/negative evaluation responses. This produces robust contingency learning (CL) effects, reflected in faster and more accurate performance for highly contingent nonword-valence pairings. Previous findings indicate that controlling for episodic retrieval of transient stimulus-response episodes reduces CL effects but does not eliminate them, as a residual CL effect remains. These residual CL effects are best explained by propositional learning. To substantiate this, the present study manipulated participants beliefs about contingencies in the VCL task. Participants received either true, false or no instructions regarding the actual nonword-valence contingencies. Effects of contingency learning and evaluative conditioning (EC) for nonwords were assessed. Contingency beliefs modulated contingency learning, as true instructions boosted residual CL effects; false instructions reduced residual CL effects, relative to the no instruction condition. Exploratory analyses revealed a modulatory influence of contingency beliefs on EC effects, which varied solely as a function of (remembered) contingency instruction and were unaffected by experienced contingencies. The present study conceptually replicates findings from colour-word contingency learning in the realm of evaluative learning. Implications for theories on processes underlying contingency learning and evaluative conditioning are discussed.

The study tested how the use of positive- (e.g. beautiful) and negative-valenced (e.g. horrible) words in natural language and its change in time affects the severity of depression and anxiety symptoms among depressed and non-depressed individuals. This longitudinal mixed methods study (N = 40 participants, n = 1440 narratives) with three measurements within a year showed that at the between-person level the use of negative-valenced words was strongly associated with the increase in anxiety and depression symptoms over time while the use of positive-valenced words was slightly associated with the decrease in anxiety and depression symptom. These effects were not supported for within-person level (i.e. changes in word usage). No significant differences were observed in the effects between depressed and non-depressed groups. Summing up, the overall use of positive- and negative-valenced words (particularly negative-valenced words) had a stronger effect on the severity of psychopathological symptoms than their change over time. The results were discussed in the context of natural language processing and its application in diagnosing depression and anxiety symptoms.

ABSTRACTEmploying a constructionist framework of emotion, this study examines whether parental language during emotion belief discussions predicts parents' self-reported beliefs about emotion and child emotion regulation (ER). 102 parents of children ages 8 through 12 participated in focus groups about emotion beliefs, and nine months later, completed questionnaires on their emotion beliefs and child ER. Focus group content was analyzed for positive and negative emotion talk, cognitive process talk, and an established linguistic marker of psychological distancing. Parents' positive emotion talk and parental linguistic distancing when discussing their child's (but not their own) emotion experiences positively predicted beliefs about children's emotional capabilities. Finally, negative emotion talk negatively predicted parental beliefs about children's capacity to control their own emotions and the value of anger expression as well as child ER. Current findings contribute to our understanding of how parental communication patterns about emotions may influence emotion beliefs and child emotion development.

Exploring the dynamic interface of environmental psychology and psycholinguistics, this investigation delves into how simulated weather conditions - sunny versus rainy - affect emotional perceptions of linguistic stimuli within a Virtual Reality (VR) framework. Participants assessed words' emotional valence being exposed to these distinct environmental simulations. Contrary to expectations, we found that while rainy conditions modestly prolonged response times, they did not significantly alter the emotional valence attributed to words. Our study shows that weather can affect emotional cognition, but intrinsic emotional word properties are resilient to environmental influences. This highlights the complex interplay between environmental factors and linguistic processing and reaffirms the importance of environmental contexts in cognitive and emotional evaluations, especially in the face of climate change. By integrating VR technology with environmental psychology and linguistics, our research offers novel insights into the subtle yet significant ways in which virtual and real-world environments converge to shape human emotional and cognitive responses.

Digital communication has generated forms of written speech that may deviate from standard ones, such as Greeklish (a Latin-alphabet-based script) vs. Greek. The question of interest is how different orthographic representations of the same referent (e.g. petaloyda, "butterfly", in Greeklish vs. πϵταλούδα "butterfly" in Greek) may influence word processing, particularly visual word recognition and access to affective connotations. 120 Greek native speakers were tested on a lexical decision task, in which script (Greeklish vs. Greek) and valence (positive vs. negative vs. neutral) were manipulated within participants. Words were matched for word class, frequency, concreteness, length, number of syllables and orthographic neighbourhood. Emotional words differed from neutral ones in valence and arousal. Results yielded faster response times for words written in the standard script (Greek) than the non-standard script (Greeklish). Moreover, regardless of script, response times were negatively correlated with the words' valence, with slowest responses for negative words and fastest for positive ones, suggesting that positive content accelerates lexical access, whereas negative content slows it down. To sum up, although script type was found to affect word recognition, activation of and access to emotional content seemed to resist non-standard characteristics of visual word processing.

Words whose consonantal articulation places move from the front of the mouth to the back (e.g. BADAKA; inward) receive more positive evaluations than words whose consonantal articulation places move from the back of the mouth to the front (e.g. KADABA; outward). This in-out effect has a variety of affective, cognitive, and even behavioural consequences, but its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Most recently, a linguistic explanation has been proposed applying the linguistic easy-first account and the so-called labial-coronal effect from developmental speech research and phonology to the in-out effect: Labials (front) are easier to process than coronals (middle); and people prefer easy followed by harder motor components. Disentangling consonantal articulation direction and articulation place, the present three preregistered experiments (total N = 1012) found in-out effects for coronal-dorsal (back), and labial-dorsal articulation places. Critically, no in-out effect emerged for labial-coronal articulation places. Thus, the in-out effect is unlikely an instantiation of easy first.

In this study, we analyzed the relationship between the amodal (semantic) development of words and two popular emotional norms (emotional valence and arousal) in English and Spanish languages. To do so, we combined the strengths of semantics from vector space models (vector length, semantic diversity, and word maturity measures), and feature-based models of emotions. First, we generated a common vector space representing the meaning of words at different developmental stages (five and four developmental stages for English and Spanish, respectively) using the Word Maturity methodology to align different vector spaces. Second, we analyzed the amodal development of words through mixed-effects models with crossed random effects for words and variables using a continuous time metric. Third, the emotional norms were included as covariates in the statistical models. We evaluated more than 23,000 words, whose emotional norms were available for more than 10,000 words, in each language separately. Results showed a curve of amodal development with an increasing linear effect and a small quadratic deceleration. A relevant influence on the amodal development of words was found only for emotional valence (not for arousal), suggesting that positive words have an earlier amodal development and a less pronounced semantic change across early lifespan.