Cognition & Emotion最新文献

Some people are more prone to experience and value nostalgia - an emotion that often reminds us of important relationships - than others. In this research, we propose that this propensity may not only influence how we remember our social ties, but also directly affect the structure of our social network. Across three studies involving undergraduate students, online panel participants, and a population-based longitudinal sample (N = 1,467), we found that trait-like nostalgia was associated with increased motivation to maintain social networks, which in turn predicted the number of close social ties. In other words, those who value nostalgia and experience it more frequently are more motivated to strengthen important relationships, which helps mitigate the loss of these bonds over the life span. These findings contribute to our understanding of the social nature of nostalgia and highlight its role in regulating our social networks.

Emotional inertia (i.e. the tendency for emotions to persist over time) is robustly associated with lower wellbeing. Yet, we know little about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Good quality sleep and frequent use of adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies reduce the persistence of negative affect (NA) over time. However, whether sleep and adaptive CER strategy use work in concert to reduce NA inertia is unclear. In the current study, participants (N = 245) watched a series of film clips and rated how each clip made them feel on negative and positive affective states. Emotion ratings were collected again after a short rest period to determine the persistence of clip-induced affect. Standardised questionnaires were used to index participants' sleep quality and tendency to engage in adaptive CER strategies. Autoregressive models demonstrated that better sleep quality was associated with lower NA inertia (d = 0.25). This association also held when controlling for mean and variability of NA. Interestingly, the association between adaptive CER strategy use and NA inertia was observed irrespective of whether sleep quality was good, average, or poor (d = 0.13). These findings suggest that sleep and adaptive CER strategies hold independent rather than interdependent roles in maintaining emotional wellbeing.

There is a speed-accuracy trade-off in perception. The ability to quickly extract sensory information is critical for survival, while extended processing can improve our accuracy. It has been suggested that emotions can change our style of processing, but their influence on processing speed is not yet clear. In three experiments, combining online and laboratory studies with different emotion induction procedures, we investigated the influence of both affective states, manipulated with music, and individual traits in sensory-processing sensitivity on the ability to rapidly segregate two visual flashes. Across studies, the musical manipulations pushed participants towards either rapid or slow processing. Individual variations in sensory-processing sensitivity modulated these effects. Our findings demonstrate that affective states, influenced by music, can shift the balance between fast and slow visual processing, altering our perceptual experience. These results also emphasise the interaction of individual traits in sensory processing and affective states.

Decision confidence is a prototypical metacognitive representation that is thought to approximate the probability that a decision is correct. The perception of being correct has also been associated with affective valence such that being correct feels more positive and being mistaken more negative. This suggests that, similarly to confidence, affective valence reflects the probability that a decision is correct. However, both fields of research have seen very little interaction. Here, we test if affect, similarly to confidence reflects probability that a decision is correct in two perceptual decision-making experiments where we compare the relationships of theoretically relevant variables (e.g. evidence, accuracy, and expectancy) with both confidence and affect ratings. The findings indicate that confidence and affect ratings are similarly sensitive to changes in accuracy, evidence, and expectancy, indicating that both track the subjective probability that a decision is correct. We identify various mechanisms that can explain these results. We also envision future research for clarifying the role of cognitive and affective aspects of metacognition relying on deeper integration of the respective research fields.

The jumping to conclusions bias (JTC) refers to making a decision before collecting a sufficient amount of information to warrant doing so. Very little research has been conducted on the ways in which mood influences JTC in schizophrenia and healthy individuals along the continuum of risk for psychosis. It was hypothesized that elevations in schizotypal traits will be associated with greater JTC, and that negative affect will moderate the relationship between schizotypal traits and JTC. 100 undergraduate students enrolled at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) were recruited for this study. The study employed an experience-sampling approach. Positive affect demonstrated a small positive relationship to JTC, meaning that as an individual's positive affect increased so too did their JTC tendency, regardless of their elevations on schizotypal traits. While a significant negative relationship was found between schizotypal traits and JTC, the effect size was negligible, which may highlight the need for effort testing in undergraduate populations and evaluating the sensitivity of experimental tasks to increase data quality. Overall, identifying the influence of mood on metacognition is critical in determining how JTC functions within the illness.

Extinction learning although initially successful in blocking fear responses, can result in relapse in some individuals over time. This deficit demands a strategy that could reinforce the extinction of fear. The current study aimed to investigate the top-down regulatory processes like cognitive reappraisal and the nature of reappraisal on augmentation of fear extinction and retention. We used a screaming lady fear conditioning paradigm with 63 participants (M = 43, F = 20; Mean (SD) age = 20.6 (1.40) years) and subjective fear, valence, expectancy ratings and skin conductance response (SCR) as outcome measures. The participants were randomly assigned into three groups: creative reappraisal, ordinary reappraisal and standard extinction groups and completed acquisition (day 1), extinction (day 2) and extinction-retest (day 3) phases. Our results indicate that cognitive reappraisal aimed at reducing the aversiveness of the UCS does not disrupt prediction error during extinction. Our results did not indicate any enhanced effect of cognitive reappraisal on subjective and physiological measures of conditioned fear responses during extinction. Our findings highlight the gap between the implementation of cognitive reappraisal and successful affective outcomes. Effective cognitive reappraisal requires careful consideration of factors like cognitive effort, situation intensity, reappraisal affordance, implementation cost and appraisals associated with fear. Interventions aimed at enhancing extinction through cognitive reappraisal should consider these factors for the effective implementation of cognitive reappraisal.

Recent research on relational evaluative conditioning (relational EC) suggests that stimulus co-occurrence can have a direct effect on evaluations over and above the particular relation between the co-occurring stimuli. This research is based on a process dissociation approach where co-occurrence effects are demonstrated via attenuated evaluative learning for co-occurring stimuli that are connected by contrastive in comparison to assimilative relations. Instead of attributing such attenuations to an orthogonal influence of stimulus co-occurrence, we investigated whether (a) contrastive relations tend to produce weaker evaluations than their assimilative counterparts and (b) such evaluative differences can inflate evidence for co-occurrence effects on continuous as well as on categorical evaluation measures. A pilot study (N = 85) confirmed notion (a), while a first experiment (N = 42) produced preliminary evidence for notion (b) in the context of multinomial processing tree (MPT) modelling. In a second, high-powered experiment (N = 229), sub-sample MPT analyses (including only CSs with correct memory for the CS-US proposition) demonstrated that evidence for co-occurrence effects can be inflated by evaluative differences between assimilative vs. contrastive relations. The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.

The present study investigated the influence of emotional stimuli in the flanker task. In six experiments, separate influences of anticipating and reacting to valence-laden stimuli (affective pictures or facial expressions) on the flanker effect and its sequential modulation (also known as conflict adaptation) were examined. The results showed that there was little evidence that emotional stimuli influenced cognitive control when positive and negative stimuli appeared randomly during the flanker task. When positive and negative stimuli were separated between different participant groups in order to exclude a possible contamination from the effect of one valence to that of another, the sequential modulation was reduced when valence-laden stimuli were anticipated or had been presented on a preceding trial, regardless of the valence of the stimuli. A similar pattern was also obtained with facial expressions but only for response accuracy and only after valence-laden stimuli were presented on a preceding trial. The influences of anticipating and reacting to emotional stimuli were only partially replicated in the final two experiments where the arousal and valence of affective pictures were manipulated orthogonally. The lack of consistent influences of emotional stimuli on the flanker effect challenges the existing theories that implicate affective contributions to cognitive control.

Humour is regarded as an adaptive coping strategy which could effectively reduce negative emotions. To fundamentally evaluate the function of humour reappraisal, our study aimed to explore the emotion-regulatory advantage effect of humour reappraisal from the perspective of memory mechanisms. Using a learning-testing paradigm, we examined the memory effects of humour reappraisal: first presented humour (or non-humour) reappraisal interpretations of the negative pictures during the learning phase and tested the memory performance from three aspects: free recall, recognition, and implicit memory in the test phase. The results found a superior effect of humorous reappraisal in free recall performance but reduced memory performance for negative stimuli in the recognition and implicit tests. This may be due to the refined processing of humour reappraisal during encoding, the memory content being updated and transformed after cognitive reconstruction, and the original negative pictures no longer being familiar during recognition. The dissociable result in free recall and implicit/recognition of humorous reappraisal suggested that humour reappraisal was an optimal strategy for coping with negative stimuli by fundamentally regulating negative emotions through "cognitive restructuring" rather than "forgetting." This provided advantageous evidence for the humour reappraisal as an adaptive emotion regulation strategy from a memory perspective.

The relationships between perceived fatigue and changes in sustained attention performance during early stages of working on cognitively demanding tasks remain poorly understood. In addition, concerns have been raised that self-ratings of fatigue may be biased by socially desirable response tendencies, potentially confounding the relationship between perceived fatigue and attention performance. In this study, we assessed perceived fatigue briefly before tracking changes in concentration performance, processing speed, and error rates among N = 110 tenth graders, while they completed the d2-R test of sustained attention. By statistically controlling for social desirability, we examined relationships between perceived fatigue and the initial levels and slopes of three latent growth-curves capturing changes in the d2-R test's performance measures. Individuals with higher fatigue exhibited lower concentration performance, a weaker decline in processing speed, and a higher error rate over the course of testing. Post hoc power analyses supported the robustness of our results. Implications for mental fatigue research are discussed.