Reflecting on the action or its outcome: Behavior representation level modulates high level outcome priming effects on self-agency experiences

Recent research suggests that one can have the feeling of being the cause of an action’s outcome, even in the absence of a prior intention to act. That is, experienced self-agency over behavior increases when outcome representations are primed outside of awareness, prior to executing the action and observing the resulting outcome. Based on the notion that behavior can be represented at different levels, we propose that priming outcome representations is more likely to augment self-agency experiences when the primed representation corresponds with a person’s behavior representation level. Three experiments, using different priming and self-agency tasks, both measuring and manipulating the level of behavior representation, confirmed this idea. Priming high level outcome representations enhanced experienced self-agency over behavior more strongly when behavior was represented at a higher level, rather than a lower level. Thus, priming effects on self-agency experiences critically depend on behavior representation level.     

Prime and probability: causal knowledge affects inferential and predictive effects on self-agency experiences

Experiences of having caused a certain outcome may arise from motor predictions based on action–outcome probabilities and causal inferences based on pre-activated outcome representations. However, when and how both indicators combine to affect such self-agency experiences is still unclear. Based on previous research on prediction and inference effects on self-agency, we propose that their (combined) contribution crucially depends on whether people have knowledge about the causal relation between actions and outcomes that is relevant to subsequent self-agency experiences. Therefore, we manipulated causal knowledge that was either relevant or irrelevant by varying the probability of co-occurrence (50% or 80%) of specific actions and outcomes. Afterwards, we measured self-agency experiences in an action–outcome task where outcomes were primed or not. Results showed that motor prediction only affected self-agency when relevant actions and outcomes were learned to be causally related. Interestingly, however, inference effects also occurred when no relevant causal knowledge was acquired.     

Sex differences in judgement of facial affect: a multivariate analysis of recognition errors

The present paper investigated recognition errors in affective judgement of facial emotional expressions. Twenty-eight females and sixteen males participated in the study. The results showed that in both males and females emotional displays could be correctly classified, but females had a higher rate of correct classification; males were more likely to have difficulty distinguishing one emotion from another. Females rated emotions identically regardless of whether the emotion was displayed by a male or female face. Furthermore, the two-factor structure of emotion, based on a valence and an arousal dimension, was only present for female subjects. These results further extend our knowledge about gender differences in affective information processing.     

儿童对他人情绪与过去经验的关系的认知

用设置故事情景的方法对儿童对他人情绪与过去经验的关系的认知进行了实验研究。研究表明,4～7岁儿童能够认知他人情绪与过去经验的关系,认知能力随年龄的增长不断提高。情绪效价和情绪情景的匹配性影响儿童对他人情绪与过去经验关系的认知。4、5岁儿童更能认识到正性情绪情景条件下体验到负性情绪的他人情绪与过去经验的关系,其得分显著高于其它情绪情景故事和行为故事。     

Perceiving arousal and valence in facial expressions: Differences between children and adults

Arousal and valence have long been studied as the two primary dimensions for the perception of emotional stimuli such as facial expressions. Prior correlational studies that tested emotion perception along these dimensions found broad similarities between adults and children. However, few studies looked for direct differences between children and adults in these dimensions beyond correlation. We tested 9-year-old children and adults on rating positive and negative facial stimuli based on emotional arousal and valence. Despite high significant correlations between children’s and adults’ ratings, our findings also showed significant differences between children and adults in terms of rating values: Children rated all expressions as significantly more positive than adults in valence. Children also rated positive emotions as more arousing than adults. Our results show that although perception of facial emotions along arousal and valence follows similar patterns in children and adults, some differences in ratings persist, and vary by emotion type.     

Editorial: Studies of the Development of Emotion-Cognition Relations

Abstract

This issue of Cognition and Emotion is devoted to studies of the development of emotion-cognition relations. children's knowledge of the causes of emotions, and the relations of that knowledge to expectations or anticipations of emotion experiences. The studies show that infants of seven months display different expressive behaviours to confirmed and disconfirmed expectations; that the first words of 13-month-olds are not coordinated with expressions of joy or negative emotions and 19-month-olds vocabulary spurts contain very few emotion labels; that 3- to 7-year-olds can label their emotions and understand relations among beliefs, desires, and emotion experiences; and that understandings of relations among causal attributions and emotion experiences are stable over the life span. These findings suggest interesting possibilities for research on developmental processes that integrate emotion, cognition, and action.     

I know how you feel: Task-irrelevant facial expressions are spontaneously processed at a semantic level

Previous studies have demonstrated that emotions are automatically processed. Even with subliminal presentations, subjects involuntarily mimic specific facial expressions, are influenced by the valence of a preceding emotion during judgments, and exhibit slowed responses to personally meaningful emotions; these effects are due to reflexive mimicry, unconscious carryover of valence, and attentional capture, respectively. However, perception-action effects indicate that rapid processing should involve deep, semantic-level representations of emotion (e.g., “fear”), even in the absence of a clinical emotion disorder. To test this hypothesis, we developed an emotional Stroop task (Emostroop) in which subjects responded nonverbally to emotion words superimposed over task-irrelevant images of faces displaying congruent or incongruent emotional expressions. Subjects reliably responded more slowly to incongruent than to congruent stimuli, and this interference was related to trait measures of emotionality. Rapid processing of facial emotions spontaneously activates semantic, content-rich representations at the level of the specific emotion.     

Affective expressions in groups and inferences about members' relational well-being: The effects of socially engaging and disengaging emotions

Our findings draw attention to the interpersonal communication function of a relatively unexplored dimension of emotions—the level of social engagement versus disengagement. In four experiments, regardless of valence and target group gender, observers infer greater relational well-being (more cohesiveness and less conflict) between group members from socially engaging (sadness and appreciation) versus disengaging (anger and pride) emotion expressions. Supporting our argument that social (dis)engagement is a critical dimension communicated by these emotions, we demonstrate (1) that inferences about group members' self-interest mediate the effect of socially engaging emotions on cohesiveness and (2) that the influence of socially disengaging emotion expressions on inferences of conflict is attenuated when groups have collectivistic norms (i.e., members value a high level of social engagement). Furthermore, we show an important downstream consequence of these inferences of relational well-being: Groups that seem less cohesive because of their members' proud (versus appreciative) expressions are also expected to have worse task performance.     

Feeling of doing in obsessive–compulsive checking

Research on self-agency emphasizes the importance of a comparing mechanism, which scans for a match between anticipated and actual outcomes, in the subjective experience of doing.This study explored the “feeling of doing” in individuals with checking symptoms by examining the mechanism involved in the experienced agency for outcomes that matched expectations. This mechanism was explored using a task in which the subliminal priming of potential action-effects (emulating outcome anticipation) generally enhances people’s feeling of causing these effects when they occur, due to the unconscious perception of a match between primed and observed outcomes. The main result revealed a negative relationship between checking and self-agency for observed outcomes that were primed prior to actions. This suggests that checking individuals fail to grasp the correspondence between actual outcomes of their actions and expected ones. We discuss the possible role of undermined self-agency in checking phenomena and its relationship with cognitive dysfunction.     

Angry Versus Furious: A Comparison Between Valence and Arousal in Dimensional Models of Emotions

The present study compared the roles of valence and arousal, proposed by the dimensional models of emotions, in recognizing emotional expressions. It was hypothesized that the dimension of valence, due to its functional significance, would be more salient in the recognition of emotional expressions than the dimension of arousal would be. The results of the current study supported this hypothesis. The participants in all age groups were more accurate and quicker in recognizing an emotion when the expression was paired up with another emotional expression that was different in the polarity of the valence dimension than with this similar polarity difference in the arousal dimension. The insignificant difference in recognizing the positive and negative emotional expressions in the group of elders also rejected the Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory.     

Interoceptive sensitivity predicts sensitivity to the emotions of others

Some theories of emotion emphasise a close relationship between interoception and subjective experiences of emotion. In this study, we used facial expressions to examine whether interoceptive sensibility modulated emotional experience in a social context. Interoceptive sensibility was measured using the heartbeat detection task. To estimate individual emotional sensitivity, we made morphed photos that ranged between a neutral and an emotional facial expression (i.e., anger, sadness, disgust and happy). Recognition rates of particular emotions from these photos were calculated and considered as emotional sensitivity thresholds. Our results indicate that participants with accurate interoceptive awareness are sensitive to the emotions of others, especially for expressions of sadness and happy. We also found that false responses to sad faces were closely related with an individual's degree of social anxiety. These results suggest that interoceptive awareness modulates the intensity of the subjective experience of emotion and affects individual traits related to emotion processing.     

Perceiving expressions of emotion: What evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states?

What evidence could bear on questions about whether humans ever perceptually experience any of another’s mental states, and how might those questions be made precise enough to test experimentally? This paper focusses on emotions and their expression. It is proposed that research on perceptual experiences of physical properties provides one model for thinking about what evidence concerning expressions of emotion might reveal about perceptual experiences of others’ mental states. This proposal motivates consideration of the hypothesis that categorical perception of expressions of emotion occurs, can be facilitated by information about agents’ emotions, and gives rise to phenomenal expectations. It is argued that the truth of this hypothesis would support a modest version of the claim that humans sometimes perceptually experience some of another’s mental states. Much available evidence is consistent with, but insufficient to establish, the truth of the hypothesis. We are probably not yet in a position to know whether humans ever perceptually experience others’ mental states.     

情绪加工的脑机制研究及其现状

本文从情绪的效价载荷及其脑功能成像研究、面部表情的识别及其脑功能成像研究以及情绪的诱发及其脑功能成像研究等三方面介绍了情绪加工的脑机制及其研究现状。从现有的研究成果来看,大脑皮层在加工不同效价载荷的情绪时具有很大的重叠性;有关面部表情识别的研究表明,不同的神经环路负责调节对不同面部表情的反应;有关诱发的情绪的研究表明,前扣带回皮层在表征实验诱发的情绪时扮演着一个非常重要的角色。文章最后指出了情绪研究目前面临的一些问题,并指出在我国开展情绪的脑机制研究的重要意义。     

The world of emotions is not two-dimensional

For more than half a century, emotion researchers have attempted to establish the dimensional space that most economically accounts for similarities and differences in emotional experience. Today, many researchers focus exclusively on two-dimensional models involving valence and arousal. Adopting a theoretically based approach, we show for three languages that four dimensions are needed to satisfactorily represent similarities and differences in the meaning of emotion words. In order of importance, these dimensions are evaluation-pleasantness, potency-control, activation-arousal, and unpredictability. They were identified on the basis of the applicability of 144 features representing the six components of emotions: (a) appraisals of events, (b) psychophysiological changes, (c) motor expressions, (d) action tendencies, (e) subjective experiences, and (f) emotion regulation.     

Proud Americans and lucky Japanese: cultural differences in appraisal and corresponding emotion

Appraisal theories of emotion propose that the emotions people experience correspond to their appraisals of their situation. In other words, individual differences in emotional experiences reflect differing interpretations of the situation. We hypothesized that in similar situations, people in individualist and collectivist cultures experience different emotions because of culturally divergent causal attributions for success and failure (i.e., agency appraisals). In a test of this hypothesis, American and Japanese participants recalled a personal experience (Study 1) or imagined themselves to be in a situation (Study 2) in which they succeeded or failed, and then reported their agency appraisals and emotions. Supporting our hypothesis, cultural differences in emotions corresponded to differences in attributions. For example, in success situations, Americans reported stronger self-agency emotions (e.g., proud) than did Japanese, whereas Japanese reported a stronger situation-agency emotion (lucky). Also, cultural differences in attribution and emotion were largely explained by differences in self-enhancing motivation. When Japanese and Americans were induced to make the same attribution (Study 2), cultural differences in emotions became either nonsignificant or were markedly reduced.     

Seeing yourself helps you see others

It has been proposed that self-face representations are involved in interpreting facial emotions of others. We experimentally primed participants' self-face representations. In Study 1, we assessed eye tracking patterns and performance on a facial emotion discrimination task, and in Study 2, we assessed emotion ratings between self and nonself groups. Results show that experimental priming of self-face representations increases visual exploration of faces, facilitates the speed of facial expression processing, and increases the emotional distance between expressions. These findings suggest that the ability to interpret facial expressions of others is intimately associated with the representations we have of our own faces.     

Eliciting emotion ratings for a set of film clips: A preliminary archive for research in emotion

ABSTRACT

Film clips are commonly used to elicit subjectively experienced emotional states for many research purposes, but film clips currently available in databases are out of date, include a limited set of emotions, and/or pertain to only one conceptualization of emotion. This work reports validation data from two studies aimed to elicit basic and complex emotions (amusement, anger, anxiety, compassion, contentment, disgust, fear, happiness/joy, irritation, neutrality, pride, relief, sadness, surprise), equally distributed according to valence (positive, negative) and intensity (high, low). Participants rated film clips according to the degree of experienced emotion, and for valence and arousal. Our findings initiate an iterative archive of film clips shown here to discretely elicit 11 different emotions. Although further validation of these film clips is needed, ratings provided here should assist researchers in selecting potential film clips to meet the aims of their work.