Cognition & Emotion最新文献

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.

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.