New issue: Emotion

Potentially dangerous stimuli are important contenders for the capture of visual-spatial attention, and it has been suggested that an evolved fear module is preferentially activated by stimuli that are fear relevant in a phylogenetic sense (e.g., snakes, spiders, angry faces). In this study, a visual search task was used to test this hypothesis by directly contrasting phylogenetically (snakes) and ontogenetically (guns) fear-relevant stimuli. Results showed that the modern threat was detected as efficiently as the more ancient threat. Thus, both guns and snakes attracted attention more effectively than neutral stimuli (flowers, mushrooms, and toasters). These results support a threat superiority effect but not one that is preferentially accessed by threat-related stimuli of phylogenetic origin. The results are consistent with the view that faster detection of threat in visual search tasks may be more accurately characterized as relevance superiority effects rather than as threat superiority effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Emotional and neutral sounds rated for valence and arousal were used to investigate the influence of emotions on timing in reproduction and verbal estimation tasks with durations from 2 s to 6 s. Results revealed an effect of emotion on temporal judgment, with emotional stimuli judged to be longer than neutral ones for a similar arousal level. Within scalar expectancy theory (J. Gibbon, R. Church, & W. Meck, 1984), this suggests that emotion-induced activation generates an increase in pacemaker rate, leading to a longer perceived duration. A further exploration of self-assessed emotional dimensions showed an effect of valence and arousal. Negative sounds were judged to be longer than positive ones, indicating that negative stimuli generate a greater increase of activation. High-arousing stimuli were perceived to be shorter than low-arousing ones. Consistent with attentional models of timing, this seems to reflect a decrease of attention devoted to time, leading to a shorter perceived duration. These effects, robust across the 2 tasks, are limited to short intervals and overall suggest that both activation and attentional processes modulate the timing of emotional events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults’ selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults’ information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults’ tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults’ limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

The present research examined whether and how loading working memory can attenuate negative mood. In three experiments, participants were exposed to neutral, weakly negative, or strongly negative pictures followed by a task and a mood scale. Working memory demands were varied by manipulating task presence (Study 1), complexity (Study 2), and predictability (Study 3). Participants in all three experiments reported less negative moods in negative trials with high compared to low working memory demand. Working memory demands did not affect mood in the neutral trials. When working memory demands were high, participants no longer reported more negative moods in response to strongly negative pictures than to weakly negative pictures. These findings suggest that loading working memory prevents mood-congruent processing, and thereby promotes distraction from negative moods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Facial autonomic responses may contribute to emotional communication and reveal individual affective style. In this study, the authors examined how observed pupillary size modulates processing of facial expression, extending the finding that incidentally perceived pupils influence ratings of sadness but not those of happy, angry, or neutral facial expressions. Healthy subjects rated the valence and arousal of photographs depicting facial muscular expressions of sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust. Pupil sizes within the stimuli were experimentally manipulated. Subjects themselves were scored with an empathy questionnaire. Diminishing pupil size linearly enhanced intensity and valence judgments of sad expressions (but not fear, surprise, or disgust). At debriefing, subjects were unaware of differences in pupil size across stimuli. These observations complement an earlier study showing that pupil size directly influences processing of sadness but not other basic emotional facial expressions. Furthermore, across subjects, the degree to which pupil size influenced sadness processing correlated with individual differences in empathy score. Together, these data demonstrate a central role of sadness processing in empathetic emotion and highlight the salience of implicit autonomic signals in affective communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Detecting cooperative partners in situations that have financial stakes is crucial to successful social exchange. The authors tested whether humans are sensitive to subtle facial dynamics of counterparts when deciding whether to trust and cooperate. Participants played a 2-person trust game before which the facial dynamics of the other player were manipulated using brief (<6 s) but highly realistic facial animations. Results showed that facial dynamics significantly influenced participants’ (a) choice of with whom to play the game and (b) decisions to cooperate. It was also found that inferences about the other player’s trustworthiness mediated these effects of facial dynamics on cooperative behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Reports an error in “What is in a word? No versus Yes differentially engage the lateral orbitofrontal cortex” by Nelly Alia-Klein, Rita Z. Goldstein, Dardo Tomasi, Lei Zhang, Stephanie Fagin-Jones, Frank Telang, Gene-Jack Wang, Joanna S. Fowler and Nora D. Volkow (Emotion, 2007[Aug], Vol 7[3], 649-659). The supplemental materials link should appear as follows: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.3.649.supp. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2007-11660-018.) The words “No” and “Yes” are involved in conditioning to prohibit or encourage behavior, respectively. The authors, therefore, hypothesized that these words would be attributed to endogenous valence, activating neuronal circuits involved with valence and emotional control. Functional MRI (fMRI) at 4 Tesla was used to record regional brain activity while participants were exposed to emphatic vocalizations of the words. Results showed that No and Yes were associated with opposite brain-behavior responses; while No was negatively valenced, produced slower response times, and evoked a negative signal in the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), Yes was positively valenced, produced faster response times, and evoked a positive signal in a contiguous region of the OFC. Attribution of negative valence to No and trait anger control were associated with increased responsivity of the OFC to No. Inasmuch as sensitivity to the prohibitive command No develops during childhood through interaction with primary caregivers as the first social objects, our findings may implicate the lateral OFC in the neurobiology of emotion regulation and subsequent social development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

The claim that specific discrete emotions can be universally recognized from human facial expressions is based mainly on the study of expressions that were posed. The current study (N=50) examined recognition of emotion from 20 spontaneous expressions from Papua New Guinea photographed, coded, and labeled by P. Ekman (1980). For the 16 faces with a single predicted label, endorsement of that label ranged from 4.2% to 45.8% (mean 24.2%). For 4 faces with 2 predicted labels (blends), endorsement of one or the other ranged from 6.3% to 66.6% (mean 38.8%). Of the 24 labels Ekman predicted, 11 were endorsed at an above-chance level, and 13 were not. Spontaneous expressions do not achieve the level of recognition achieved by posed expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Although neuroimaging techniques have proven powerful in assessing neural responses, little is known about whether scanner-based neural activity relates to real-world psychological experience. A joint functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)/experience-sampling study investigated whether individual differences in neurocognitive reactivity to scanner-based social rejection related to: (a) moment-to-moment feelings of social rejection during real-world social interactions (“momentary social distress”) and (b) the extent to which these momentary feelings corresponded with end-of-day global assessments of social disconnection (“end-of-day social disconnection”). Individuals who showed greater activity in regions associated with affective and pain processing (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, periaqueductal gray) during scanner-based social rejection reported feeling greater momentary social distress during their daily social interactions. In contrast, individuals who showed greater activity in regions associated with memory and self-referential memory encoding (hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex) showed a stronger correspondence between momentary social distress and end-of-day social disconnection, such that greater momentary social distress was associated with greater end-of-day social disconnection. These findings complement previous work showing a dissociation between momentary and retrospective reports of affect and suggest that these processes rely on dissociable neural systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

The role of conscious cognitive processes in human affective conditioning remains controversial, with several theories arguing that such conditioning can occur without awareness of the conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingency. One specific type of affective conditioning in which unaware conditioning is said to occur is “evaluative conditioning.” The present experiment tested the role of contingency awareness by embedding an evaluative conditioning paradigm in a distracting masking task while obtaining, in addition to subjective ratings of affect, both psychophysiological (skin conductance and startle eyeblink) and indirect behavioral (affective priming) measures of conditioning, along with a trial-by-trial measure of awareness from 55 college student participants. Aware participants showed conditioning with all of the measures; unaware participants failed to show conditioning with all measures. The behavioral, neurophysiological, and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Event-related functional MRI (fMRI) was used to assess brain activity during encoding of fearful and neutral faces in 12 women and 12 men. In a subsequent memory analysis, the authors separated successful from unsuccessful encoding of both types of faces, based on whether they were remembered or forgotten in a later recognition memory test. Overall, women and men recruited overlapping neural circuitries. Both sexes activated right-sided medial-temporal regions during successful encoding of fearful faces. Successful encoding of neutral faces was associated with left-sided lateral prefrontal and right-sided superior frontal activation in both sexes. In women, relatively greater encoding related activity for neutral faces was seen in the superior parietal and parahippocampal cortices. By contrast, men activated the left and right superior/middle frontal cortex more than women during successful encoding of the same neutral faces. These findings suggest that women and men use similar neural networks to encode facial information, with only subtle sex differences observed for neutral faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Most people are able to identify basic emotions expressed in music and experience affective reactions to music. But does music generally induce emotion? Does it elicit subjective feelings, physiological arousal, and motor reactions reliably in different individuals? In this interdisciplinary study, measurement of skin conductance, facial muscle activity, and self-monitoring were synchronized with musical stimuli. A group of 38 participants listened to classical, rock, and pop music and reported their feelings in a two-dimensional emotion space during listening. The first entrance of a solo voice or choir and the beginning of new sections were found to elicit interindividual changes in subjective feelings and physiological arousal. Quincy Jones’ “Bossa Nova” motivated movement and laughing in more than half of the participants. Bodily reactions such as “goose bumps” and “shivers” could be stimulated by the “Tuba Mirum” from Mozart’s Requiem in 7 of 38 participants. In addition, the authors repeated the experiment seven times with one participant to examine intraindividual stability of effects. This exploratory combination of approaches throws a new light on the astonishing complexity of affective music listening. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

This research provides a systematic analysis of the nonverbal expression of pride. Study 1 manipulated behavioral movements relevant to pride (e.g., expanded posture and head tilt) to identify the most prototypical pride expression and determine the specific components that are necessary and sufficient for reliable recognition. Studies 2 and 3 tested whether the 2 conceptually and empirically distinct facets of pride (“authentic” and “hubristic”; J. L. Tracy & R. W. Robins, 2007a) are associated with distinct nonverbal expressions. Results showed that neither the prototypical pride expression nor several recognizable variants were differentially associated with either facet, suggesting that for the most part, authentic and hubristic pride share the same signal. Together these studies indicate that pride can be reliably assessed from nonverbal behaviors. In the Appendix, the authors provide guidelines for a pride behavioral coding scheme, akin to the Emotion Facial Action Coding System (EMFACS; P. Ekman & E. Rosenberg, 1997) for assessing “basic” emotions from observable nonverbal behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Neuroimaging has identified an overlapping network of brain regions whose activity is modulated by mood and cognition. Studies of depressed individuals have shown changes in perception, attention, memory, and executive functions. This suggests that mood has a pervasive effect on cognition. Direct evidence of the effect of sad mood on cognition is surprisingly limited, however. Published studies have generally addressed a single cognitive ability per study because the fleeting nature of laboratory-induced mood precludes extended testing, and robust findings are limited to mood effects on memory for emotional stimuli. In this study, sad mood was induced and prolonged, enabling the effects of mood to be assessed for an array of abilities, including those that share neural substrates with sad mood and those affected by depression. Sad mood affected memory for emotional words and facial emotion recognition, but not the other processes measured, with a significant nonuniformity of effect over tasks. These results are consistent with circumscribed effects of sad mood on certain emotion-related cognitive processes, but not on cognition more generally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Children regulate negative emotions in a variety of ways. Emotion education programs typically discourage emotional disengagement and encourage emotional engagement or “working through” negative emotions. The authors examined the effects of emotional disengagement and engagement on children’s memory for educational material. Children averaging 7 or 10 years of age (N=200) watched either a sad or an emotionally neutral film and were then instructed to emotionally disengage, instructed to engage in problem solving concerning their emotion, or received no emotion regulation instructions. All children then watched and were asked to recall the details of an emotionally neutral educational film. Children instructed to disengage remembered the educational film better than children instructed to work through their feelings or children who received no emotion regulation instructions. Although past research has indicated that specific forms of emotional disengagement can impair memory for emotionally relevant events, the current findings suggest that disengagement is a useful short-term strategy for regulating mild negative emotion in educational settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Positive emotions promote adjustment to aversive life events. However, evolutionary theory and empirical research on trauma disclosure suggest that in the context of stigmatized events, expressing positive emotions might incur social costs. To test this thesis, the authors coded genuine (Duchenne) smiling and laughter and also non-Duchenne smiling from videotapes of late-adolescent and young adult women, approximately half with documented histories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), as they described the most distressing event of their lives. Consistent with previous studies, genuine positive emotional expression was generally associated with better social adjustment two years later. However, as anticipated, CSA survivors who expressed positive emotion in the context of describing a past CSA experience had poorer long-term social adjustment, whereas CSA survivors who expressed positive emotion while describing a nonabuse experience had improved social adjustment. These findings suggest that the benefits of positive emotional expression may often be context specific. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs) examined the extent to which early traumatic experiences affect children’s ability to regulate voluntary and involuntary attention to threat. The authors presented physically abused and nonabused comparison children with conflicting auditory and visual emotion cues, posed by children’s mothers or a stranger, to examine the effect of emotion, modality, and poser familiarity on attention regulation. Relative to controls, abused children overattended to task-relevant visual and auditory anger cues. They also attended more to task-irrelevant auditory anger cues. Furthermore, the degree of attention allocated to threat statistically mediated the relationship between physical abuse and child-reported anxiety. These findings indicate that extreme emotional experiences may promote vulnerability for anxiety by influencing the development of attention regulation abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Three experiments investigated the relationship between the presumption of harm in harmfree violations of creatural norms (taboos) and the moral emotions of anger and disgust. In Experiment 1, participants made a presumption of harm to others from taboo violations, even in conditions described as harmless and not involving other people; this presumption was predicted by anger and not disgust. Experiment 2 manipulated taboo violation and included a cognitive load task to clarify the post hoc nature of presumption of harm. Experiment 3 was similar but more accurately measured presumed harm. In Experiments 2 and 3, only without load was symbolic harm presumed, indicating its post hoc function to justify moral anger, which was not affected by load. In general, manipulations of harmfulness to others predicted moral anger better than moral disgust, whereas manipulations of taboo predicted disgust better. The presumption of harm was found on measures of symbolic rather than actual harm when a choice existed. These studies clarify understanding of the relationship between emotions and their justification when people consider victimless, offensive acts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

The present research examined the relationship between adherence to honor norms and emotional reactions after an insult. Participants were 42 Dutch male train travelers, half of whom were insulted by a confederate who bumped into the participant and made a degrading remark. Compared with insulted participants with a weak adherence to honor norms, insulted participants with a strong adherence to honor norms were (a) more angry, (b) less joyful, (c) less fearful, and (d) less resigned. Moreover, insulted participants with a strong adherence to honor norms perceived more anger in subsequent stimuli than not-insulted participants with a strong adherence to these norms. The present findings support a direct relationship among insult, adherence to honor norms, and emotional reactions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Recent dual-process models of decision making have suggested that emotion plays an important role in decision making; however, the impact of incidental moods (i.e., emotions unrelated to the immediate situation) on decisions remains poorly explored. This question was investigated by inducing 2 basic emotional states (amusement or sadness) that were compared with a neutral-emotion control group. Decision making was assessed with a well-studied social task, the Ultimatum Game. In this task, participants had to make decisions to either accept or reject monetary offers from other players, offers that varied in their degree of unfairness. Emotion was induced with short movie clips. Induced sadness interacted with offer fairness, with higher sadness resulting in lower acceptance rates of unfair offers. Induced amusement was not associated with any significant biases in decision making. These results demonstrate that even subtle incidental moods can play an important role in biasing decision making. Implications of these results in regards to the emotion, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical literatures are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Rapid evaluation of ecologically relevant stimuli may lead to their preferential access to awareness. Continuous flash suppression allows assessment of affective processing under conditions in which stimuli have been rendered invisible due to the strongly suppressive nature of dynamic noise relative to static images. The authors investigated whether fearful expressions emerge from suppression into awareness more quickly than images of neutral or happy expressions. Fearful faces were consistently detected faster than neutral or happy faces. Responses to inverted faces were slower than those to upright faces but showed the same effect of emotional expression, suggesting that some key feature or features in the inverted faces remained salient. When using stimuli solely representing the eyes, a similar bias for detecting fear emerged, implicating the importance of information from the eyes in the preconscious processing of fear expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Reports an error in “Facial expressions of emotion influence memory for facial identity in an automatic way” by Arnaud D’Argembeau and Martial Van der Linden (Emotion, 2007[Aug], Vol 7[3], 507-515). The image printed for Figure 3 was incorrect. The correct image is provided in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2007-11660-005.) Previous studies indicate that the encoding of new facial identities in memory is influenced by the type of expression displayed by the faces. In the current study, the authors investigated whether or not this influence requires attention to be explicitly directed toward the affective meaning of facial expressions. In a first experiment, the authors found that facial identity was better recognized when the faces were initially encountered with a happy rather than an angry expression, even when attention was oriented toward facial features other than expression. Using the Remember/Know/Guess paradigm in a second experiment, the authors found that the influence of facial expressions on the conscious recollection of facial identity was even more pronounced when participants’ attention was not directed toward expressions. It is suggested that the affective meaning of facial expressions automatically modulates the encoding of facial identity in memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)

Reports an error in “Awareness of Subtle Emotional Feelings: A Comparison of Long-Term Meditators and Nonmeditators” by Lisbeth Nielsen and Alfred W. Kaszniak (Emotion, 2006[Aug], Vol 6[3], 392-405). The copyright attribution is incorrect. The article is in the public domain. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2006-10747-005.) The authors explored whether meditation training to enhance emotional awareness improves discrimination of subtle emotional feelings hypothesized to guide decision-making. Long-term meditators and nonmeditators were compared on measures of self-reported valence and arousal, skin conductance response (SCR), and facial electromyography (EMG) to masked and nonmasked emotional pictures, and on measures of heartbeat detection and self-reported emotional awareness. Groups responded similarly to nonmasked pictures. In the masked condition, only controls showed discrimination in valence self-reports. However, meditators reported greater emotional clarity than controls, and meditators with higher clarity had reduced arousal and improved valence discrimination in the masked condition. These findings provide qualified support for the somatic marker hypothesis and suggest that meditation may influence how emotionally ambiguous information is processed, regulated, and represented in conscious awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)