Mood regulation in depression: Differential effects of distraction and recall of happy memories on sad mood

Recent research suggests that the recall of positive memories plays an important role in mood regulation. In this study, the authors examined the ability of currently depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants to regulate sad mood through the recall of positive memories or through distraction. Although improvement in mood was found for all participants in response to distraction, under instructions to recall positive memories, never-depressed participants' moods improved, whereas formerly depressed participants' sad moods remained unchanged. It is important to note that depressed participants exhibited a worsening of their sad moods after recalling positive memories. These results suggest both that depression is associated with an impaired ability to use positive recall to regulate a sad mood and that this impairment continues to be evident following recovery.     

Identity recognition and happy and sad facial expression recall: influence of depressive symptoms

Relatively few studies have examined memory bias for social stimuli in depression or dysphoria. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of depressive symptoms on memory for facial information. A total of 234 participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory II and a task examining memory for facial identity and expression of happy and sad faces. For both facial identity and expression, the recollective experience was measured with the Remember/Know/Guess procedure (Gardiner & Richardson-Klavehn, 2000). The results show no major association between depressive symptoms and memory for identities. However, dysphoric individuals consciously recalled (Remember responses) more sad facial expressions than non-dysphoric individuals. These findings suggest that sad facial expressions led to more elaborate encoding, and thereby better recollection, in dysphoric individuals.     

Infants' discrimination of happy and sad music

Infants can detect information specifying affect in infant- and adult-directed speech, familiar and unfamiliar facial expressions, and in point-light displays of facial expressions. We examined 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds' discrimination of musical excerpts judged by adults and preschoolers as happy and sad. In Experiment 1, using an infant-controlled habituation procedure, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds heard three musical excerpts that were rated as either happy or sad. Following habituation, infants were presented with two new musical excerpts from the other affect group. Nine-month-olds discriminated the musical excerpts rated as affectively different. Five- and seven-month-olds discriminated the happy and sad excerpts when they were habituated to sad excerpts but not when they were habituated to happy excerpts. Three-month-olds showed no evidence of discriminating the sad and happy excerpts. In Experiment 2, 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds were presented with two new musical excerpts from the same affective group as the habituation excerpts. At no age did infants discriminate these novel, yet affectively similar, musical excerpts. In Experiment 3, we examined 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds' discrimination of individual excerpts rated as affectively similar. Only the 9-month-olds discriminated the affectively similar individual excerpts. Results are discussed in terms of infants' ability to discriminate affect across a variety of events and its relevance for later social-communicative development.     

Influence of intensity on children’s sensitivity to happy, sad, and fearful facial expressions

Most previous studies investigating children’s ability to recognize facial expressions used only intense exemplars. Here we compared the sensitivity of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds with that of adults (n = 24 per age group) for less intense expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear. The developmental patterns differed across expressions. For happiness, by 5 years of age, children were as sensitive as adults even to low intensities. For sadness, by 5 years of age, children were as accurate as adults in judging that the face was expressive (i.e., not neutral), but even at 10 years of age, children were more likely to misjudge it as fearful. For fear, children’s thresholds were not adult-like until 10 years of age, and children often confused it with sadness at 5 years of age. For all expressions, including even happy expressions, 5- and 7-year-olds were less accurate than adults in judging which of two expressions was more intense. Together, the results indicate that there is slow development of accurate decoding of subtle facial expressions.     

Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how laughter influenced the perceived intensity of the happy, neutral, and sad expressions. For a single face, laughter increased the perceived intensity of a happy expression. Surprisingly, for a crowd of faces, laughter produced an opposite effect, increasing the perceived intensity of a sad expression in a crowd. A follow-up experiment revealed that this contrast effect may have occurred because laughter made the neutral distractor faces appear slightly happy, thereby making the deviant sad expression stand out in contrast. A control experiment ruled out semantic mediation of the laughter effects. Our demonstration of the strong context dependence of laughter effects on facial expression perception encourages a reexamination of the previously demonstrated effects of prosody, speech content, and mood on face perception, as they may be similarly context dependent.     

交叉分类及其对刻板印象的影响

社会分类(分类)是群体认知和印象评价的依据, 交叉分类作为一种认知过程, 是指在知觉或评价他人时, 同时在两个或多个类别维度上进行社会分类, 形成在多个类别维度上内外群体身份的交叉。研究发现交叉分类既可以降低刻板印象, 也可以增强刻板印象。对此, 类别化视角的解释强调群体身份的作用, 而个体化视角的解释强调多重类别背景下去类别化的作用。现有的研究在如何理解并考察这一影响的不同方向上仍存在分歧, 同时, 也未能认识到刻板印象对于个体认知与认同的意义, 存在明显不足。今后的研究应重点探讨类别化视角的动机与认知过程, 个体化视角的优势类别与加工方式, 以及以自我归类为基础的整合。     

When sad is better than happy: Negative affect can improve the quality and effectiveness of persuasive messages and social influence strategies

Based on recent affect-cognition theories and research on social influence strategies, four experiments predicted and found that people in negative mood produced higher quality and more effective interpersonal persuasive messages than did people in positive mood. This effect was obtained for messages advocating both popular and unpopular positions (Experiments 1 and 2), and arguments produced in negative mood actually induced greater attitude change in naïve recipients (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 replicated these effects in an interactive situation, and mediational analyses showed that mood influenced processing style, resulting in the production of more concrete and thus more effective messages when in a negative mood. The role of negative affect in information processing and the production of interpersonal influence strategies in particular is discussed, and the implications of these findings for everyday interaction strategies, and for contemporary affect—cognition theorizing are considered.     

Mood and the self-reference bias in recall

Hypotheses linking a negative recall bias (or negative self-schema) with vulnerability to depression were tested using an experimental mood-induction task. Extent of bias in student subjects was found to be unstable over a 4-month period, but different measures of memory bias within one session were highly correlated. Marginally significant correlations in the expected direction were found between estimates of recall bias and mood state, whether measured at the same or at different times. Change in mood following induction did not relate to change in bias, suggesting that the observed differences in recall are not a simple function of transient mood state alone. Equally, the initial recall bias did not predict the extent of mood shift following induction, as would be expected if a negative self-schema determined ease of mood shift in a negative direction. However, significant correlations were found between negative recall bias and self-reported frequency and severity of depression, lending equivocal support to the negative self-schema model.     

Identity recognition and happy and sad facial expression recall: Influence of depressive symptoms

Relatively few studies have examined memory bias for social stimuli in depression or dysphoria. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of depressive symptoms on memory for facial information. A total of 234 participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory II and a task examining memory for facial identity and expression of happy and sad faces. For both facial identity and expression, the recollective experience was measured with the Remember/Know/Guess procedure (Gardiner & Richardson-Klavehn, 2000). The results show no major association between depressive symptoms and memory for identities. However, dysphoric individuals consciously recalled (Remember responses) more sad facial expressions than non-dysphoric individuals. These findings suggest that sad facial expressions led to more elaborate encoding, and thereby better recollection, in dysphoric individuals.     

Recalling happy memories in remitted depression: A neuroimaging investigation of the repair of sad mood

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a recurrent mood disorder. The high rate of recurrence of MDD suggests the presence of stable vulnerability factors that place individuals with a history of major depression at an increased risk for the onset of another episode. Previous research has linked the remitted state, and therefore increased vulnerability for depressive relapse, with difficulties in the use of pleasant autobiographical memories to repair sad mood. In the present study, we examined the neural correlates of these difficulties. Groups of 16 currently euthymic, remitted depressed individuals and 16 healthy (control) women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during sad mood induction and during recovery from a sad mood state through recall of mood-incongruent positive autobiographical memories. Sad mood was induced in participants by using film clips; participants then recalled positive autobiographical memories, a procedure previously shown to repair negative affect. During both the sad mood induction and automatic mood regulation, control participants exhibited activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) and cuneus; in contrast, remitted participants exhibited a decrease in activation in these regions. Furthermore, exploratory analyses revealed that reduced activation levels during mood regulation predicted a worsening of depressive symptoms at a 20-month follow-up assessment. These findings highlight a dynamic role of the vlPFC and cuneus in the experience and modulation of emotional states and suggest that functional anomalies of these brain regions are associated with a history of, and vulnerability to, depression.     

On being happy and gullible: Mood effects on skepticism and the detection of deception

Are we more likely to believe or disbelieve another person depending on our mood state? Based on past research on interpersonal communication and recent work on affect and social cognition, we predicted and found that negative mood increased and positive mood decreased people’s skepticism and their ability to detect deception, consistent with the more externally focused, accommodative processing style promoted by negative affect. After a mood induction using positive, neutral or negative films, participants viewed deceptive or truthful interviews with individuals who denied committing a theft. Judgments of the targets’ guilt and their truthfulness were collected. As predicted, negative mood increased judges’ skepticism towards the targets, and improved their accuracy in detecting deceptive communications, while judges in a positive mood were more trusting and gullible. The relevance of these findings for everyday judgments of trust and the detection of deception are considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed.     

Feeling happy and sad,but only seeing the positive: Poignancy and the positivity effect in attention

Poignancy is a mixed emotional experience that occurs in the face of meaningful endings (Ersner-Hershfield et al. J Pers Soc Psychol 94(1):158–167, 2008). Despite documentation of the phenomenological component of poignancy, no study to date has examined the relationship between such a state and information processing. We therefore examined the link between poignancy and attentional patterns using an eyetracking paradigm. To induce poignancy, experimental condition participants imagined being in a personally chosen meaningful location for a final time; control participants also imagined being in a meaningful location but with no ending. After, both groups were shown emotional images. Experimental condition participants looked more at positive images relative to negative images, whereas participants in the control condition did not display such a preference. Findings suggest that despite being a mixed emotional experience, poignancy may produce a subsequent positivity effect in information processing.     

Mood and sex of participant in perception of happy faces

The influences of mood-state and sex of subject were examined for ratings of the emotional intensity of videotaped facial expressions of happiness. 102 subjects who were classified by sex and their scores on the Beck Depression Inventory provided ratings of the faces. A significant sex by mood-state interaction indicated that ratings of intensity by men and women were influenced differently by mood-state, and these findings are interpreted within the framework of the Affect Infusion Model. The results support our hypothesis that men and women tend to rely preferentially on low and high affect infusion strategies, respectively. The findings further suggest that the cognitive effect of affect infusion on the magnitude of perceived intensity of facial affect could be influenced by mood-state via differences in cognitive effort subjects employ when in a dysphoric or nondysphoric mood.     

Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.     

Mental state decoding in past major depression: Effect of sad versus happy mood induction

Individuals with mild depression show an enhanced ability to read or “decode” others' mental states. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether this pattern of performance is related specifically to the pathology of depression or whether it is simply a feature of the transient dysphoric state. Forty-one undergraduates with a previous episode of major depression and 52 undergraduates with no depression history participated in a mental state decoding task following a sad versus happy mood induction. Previously depressed participants were significantly more accurate in their mental state judgements than were the never-depressed participants, suggesting that enhanced mental state decoding may be a specific feature of depression in remission. Furthermore, previously depressed participants whose positive mood increased in response to the happy mood induction showed a poorer level of performance on the task, similar to that observed in the never-depressed group. Thus, a happy mood may have induced a somewhat less accurate, but perhaps more adaptive, approach to processing social information. These findings were robust after controlling for current level of depression and anxiety symptoms, intensity of response to the mood induction, response times, and performance on a control task.     

The influence of sad mood on cognition

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.     

Gender stereotyping and decision processes: extending and reversing the gender bias in fame judgments

M. R. Banaji and A. G. Greenwald (1995) demonstrated a gender bias in fame judgments--that is, an increase in judged fame due to prior processing that was larger for male than for female names. They suggested that participants shift criteria between judging men and women, using the more liberal criterion for judging men. This "criterion-shift" account appeared problematic for a number of reasons. In this article, 3 experiments are reported that were designed to evaluate the criterion-shift account of the gender bias in the false-fame effect against a distribution-shift account. The results were consistent with the criterion-shift account, and they helped to define more precisely the situations in which people may be ready to shift their response criterion on an item-by-item basis. In addition, the results were incompatible with an interpretation of the criterion shift as an artifact of the experimental situation in the experiments reported by M. R. Banaji and A. G. Greenwald.     

Stereotypic explanatory bias: Implicit stereotyping as a predictor of discrimination

Two experiments examined whether a measure of implicit stereotyping based on the tendency to explain Black stereotype-incongruent events more often than Black stereotype-congruent events (Stereotypic Explanatory Bias or SEB) is predictive of behavior toward a partner in an interracial interaction. In Experiment 1 SEB predicted White males’ choice to ask stereotypic questions of a Black female (but not a White male or White female) in an interview. In Experiment 2 the type of explanation (internal or external attribution) made for stereotype-inconsistency was examined. Results showed that White participants who made internal attributions for Black stereotype-incongruent behavior were rated more positively and those who made external attributions were rated more negatively by a Black male confederate. These results point to the potential of implicit stereotyping as an important predictor of behavior in an interracial interaction.     

Hindsight bias: how knowledge and heuristics affect our reconstruction of the past

Once people know the outcome of an event, they tend to overestimate what could have been anticipated in foresight. Although typically considered to be a robust phenomenon, this hindsight bias is subject to moderating circumstances. In their meta-analysis, Christensen-Szalanski and Willham (1991) observed that the more experience people have with the task under consideration, the smaller is the resulting hindsight bias. This observation is one benchmark against which the explanatory power of process models of hindsight bias can be measured. Therefore, we used it to put the recently proposed RAFT model (Hoffrage, Hertwig, & Gigerenzer, 2000) to another test. Our findings were consistent with the "expertise effect." Specifically, we observed-using computer simulations of the RAFT model-that the more comprehensive people's knowledge is in foresight, the smaller is their hindsight bias. In addition, we made two counterintuitive observations: First, the relation between foresight knowledge and hindsight bias appears to be independent of how knowledge is processed. Second, even if foresight knowledge is false, it can reduce hindsight bias. We conclude with a discussion of the functional value of hindsight bias.