Traces of the artist: Sensitivity to the role of the artist in children's pictorial reasoning

In three studies we investigated the question of whether children consider the attributes of the artist (sentience, age level, affective style, emotion) when making judgments about the traces (drawings) made by that artist. In Study 1, 2–5‐year‐old children were asked to find pictures drawn by a machine, an adult, an older and a younger child. Results indicated that children younger than 4 years do not consider the artists' attributes when making judgments, but 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds do. Furthermore, whereas the oldest children were adept at both machine‐person (sentience) and person‐person (age) contrasts, 4‐year‐olds succeeded only with person‐person contrasts. In Study 2, videotaped artists displayed differences in degree of agitation (affective style) while drawing, and this attribute was manipulated in the drawing by varying line density, asymmetry, line overlap and line gap, or all four features, across stimuli. Three‐ and five‐year‐old children judged whether a calm or agitated person drew the stimuli. Findings showed that five‐year‐old, but not 3‐year‐old, children easily completed the task. In Study 3, 3‐, 5‐ and 7‐year‐old children judged whether happy or sad artists made paintings of matching emotional tone. Performance on this picture judgment task was contrasted with performance on three theory of mind tasks (false belief, emotion and interpretative). The results indicated that 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds successfully judged the impact of artists' emotions on paintings, but 3‐year‐olds did not. Performance on the picture task was related to that on the false belief task, but not to the emotion or interpretive tasks. Taken together, the results suggest that children's view of visual symbols includes a consideration of the qualities of the artist beginning around 5 years, and there appears to be a common link between judgments of the mind behind the visual symbol in the picture task and judgments of mental state reasoning in the false belief task.     

The specificity of age-related decline in interpretation of emotion cues from prosody

Older adults are not as good as younger adults at decoding prosodic emotions. We sought to determine the specificity of this finding. Performance of older and younger adults was compared on a prosodic emotion task, a "pure" prosodic emotion task, a linguistic prosody task, and a "pure" linguistic prosody task. Older adults were less accurate at interpreting prosodic emotion cues and nonemotional contours, concurrent semantic processing worsened interpretation, and performance was further degraded when identifying negative emotions and questions. Older adults display a pervasive problem interpreting prosodic cues, but further study is required to clarify the stage at which performance declines.     

Impression‐formation advantage in memory for faces: When eyewitnesses are interested in targets' likeability,rather than their identity

The advantage in person memory of impression formation over memory task instructions is shown to extend to the eyewitness identification paradigm. Instructions to form an impression of target persons led to more accurate identifications in subsequent photo line‐ups than explicit instructions to memorize the targets (Experiment 1). Prior knowledge that a crime was going on did not affect performance. Two confounded components of the successful instruction condition were decomposed in Experiment 2, showing that the enhanced performance is due to the impression task proper, rather than the absence of explicit memory instructions. Analyses of hits and false alarms revealed that the positive influence of impression formation on discrimination performance was due to a genuine enhancement in discrimination ability rather than merely a shift toward a stricter response criterion. Experiment 3 provided some evidence to suggest that eyewitness performance can even be influenced by recontextualization efforts and impression judgments at the time of retrieval. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reactive effects of concurrent verbalization in person perception tasks

The reactive effects of concurrent verbalization (CV) on task performance in impression formation research have not been investigated, despite increasing use of this process tracing method. Since many person perception tasks involve multiple trials, assessment of reactivity should focus on carry-over and reactive-practice effects, as well as changes in task performance concurrent with thinking aloud. An experimental method for assessing these three forms of reactivity was demonstrated in an information-request impression formation task. Concurrent reactive effects were found for both continuous and intermittent CV. For the former, task processing was mildly slowed but altered in a manner suggestive of more efficient learning of, and memory for cues requested early in task performance. The substantial slowing of task processing during trial 1 intermittent CV largely disappeared by trial 2, indicating that subjects may require more practice for this method to be used effectively. The results for continuous CV are in line with recent findings which are inconsistent with certain predictions from the predominant theory of verbal protocol generation (Ericsson and Simon, 1984). Investigators using CV are urged to incorporate empirical checks for reactivity into their experimental designs.     

背景表情对目标表情知觉的影响：中美跨文化比较

随机选取中美大学生各30名,探讨在中西方文化背景下,背景表情对个体知觉目标表情是否会产生影响。结果:（1）当有背景表情时,中国被试对目标表情强度评定的时间比无背景表情时的评定时间长;且背景表情与目标表情一致时,中国被试判断目标表情的强度最强;不一致时,则最弱;而美国被试对目标表情强度的评分及反应时不受背景表情的影响。（2）当背景表情发生变化时,中国被试对于图片的再认正确率显著高于美国被试。结论：美国被试会将注意力放在目标表情上,不易受背景表情的影响,而中国被试对目标表情的判断会受到背景表情的影响。     

Emotional influences on perception and working memory

Although there has been steady progress elucidating the influence of emotion on cognition, it remains unclear precisely when and why emotion impairs or facilitates cognition. The present study investigated the mechanisms involved in the influence of emotion on perception and working memory (WM), using modified 0-back and 2-back tasks, respectively. First, results showed that attentional focus modulated the impact of emotion on perception. Specifically, emotion facilitated perceptual task performance when it was relevant to the task, but it impaired performance when it was irrelevant to the task. The differential behavioural effect of emotion on perception as a function of attentional focus diminished under high WM load. Second, attentional focus did not directly modulate the impact of emotion on WM, but rather its influence depended on the dynamic relationship between internal representations. Specifically, WM performance was worse when the material already being held online and the new input were of matching emotions (e.g. both were negative), compared to when they were not. We propose that the competition between “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing for limited cognitive resources explains the nature of the influence of emotion on both perception and WM.     

Metacognition of emotional face recognition

While humans are adept at recognizing emotional states conveyed by facial expressions, the current literature suggests that they lack accurate metacognitions about their performance in this domain. This finding comes from global trait-based questionnaires that assess the extent to which an individual perceives him or herself as empathic, as compared to other people. Those who rate themselves as empathically accurate are no better than others at recognizing emotions. Metacognition of emotion recognition can also be assessed using relative measures that evaluate how well a person thinks s/he has understood the emotion in a particular facial display as compared to other displays. While this is the most common method of metacognitive assessment of people's judgments of learning or their feelings of knowing, this kind of metacognition--"relative meta-accuracy"--has not been studied within the domain of emotion. As well as asking for global metacognitive judgments, we asked people to provide relative, trial-by-trial prospective and retrospective judgments concerning whether they would be right or wrong in recognizing the expressions conveyed in particular facial displays. Our question was: Do people know when they will be correct in knowing what expression is conveyed, and do they know when they do not know? Although we, like others, found that global meta-accuracy was unpredictive of performance, relative meta-accuracy, given by the correlation between participants' trial-by-trial metacognitive judgments and performance on each item, were highly accurate both on the Mind in the Eyes task (Experiment 1) and on the Ekman Emotional Expression Multimorph task (in Experiment 2).     

The Heart on the Sleeve and the Secret Self: Estimations of Hidden Emotion in Self and Acquaintances

ABSTRACT This research investigated how estimations of subjectively experienced emotion and estimations of displayed emotion varied with the familiarity of the target person Subjects imagined themselves, a close friend, a moderate friend, or a casual acquaintance in a series of brief affect-eliciting situations, and then estimated the degree to which the designated person would both feel and display specific emotions Subjects consistently estimated that people, including themselves, would feel more emotion than they displayed This discrepancy between experienced feeling and displayed feeling increased as a linear function of familiarity with the person The amount of undisplayed affect–the estimated “secret self”–was generally smallest for a casual acquaintance, greater for a moderate friend, still greater for a close friend, and greatest of all for the self The magnitude of this familiarity effect, however, varied with the social desirability of the emotion If an emotion was socially desirable, subjects estimated that familiar persons would both feel the emotion more and display it more than less familiar others would If an emotion was socially undesirable, subjects also estimated that familiar others would feel it more than unfamiliar others would However, they estimated that familiar and less familiar others would display socially undesirable emotions to about the same degree, and estimated that they themselves would display these emotions significantly less than others Consequently, although subjects always perceived     

Maternal Emotion Socialization and the Development of Inhibitory Control in an Emotional Condition

Although several studies have implicated parental socialization in children's development of multiple executive functions, little is known about how parenting may predict inhibitory control when emotion is involved. In this study, 42 children completed two tasks with their mothers at 3.5 years. Maternal emotion language was coded during a storybook task, and maternal scaffolding was coded during a puzzle task. At 3.5 and 4 years, children's inhibitory control was assessed with Day–Night and Happy–Sad card games, Stroop‐like tasks that differ in that the latter contains emotion content. Accuracy and latency on Happy–Sad were predicted by maternal emotion language but not scaffolding. In contrast, latency on Day–Night was predicted by scaffolding but not emotion language. This shows context‐specificity in the links between parenting and cognitive control, such that emotion socialization predicted children's performance in an emotional context only, while more general scaffolding behaviours predicted inhibitory control in the non‐emotional condition. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characterization of facial emotion recognition in bipolar disorder: Focus on emotion mislabelling and neutral expressions

Increasing evidence suggests that facial emotion recognition is impaired in bipolar disorder (BD). However, patient–control differences are small owing to ceiling effects on the tasks used to assess them. The extant literature is also limited by a relative absence of attention towards identifying patterns of emotion misattribution or understanding whether neutral faces are mislabelled in the same way as ones displaying emotion. We addressed these limitations by comparing facial emotion recognition performance in BD patients and healthy controls on a novel and challenging task. Thirty-four outpatients with BD I and 32 demographically matched healthy controls completed a facial emotion recognition task requiring the labelling of neutral and emotive faces displayed at low emotional intensities. Results indicated that BD patients were significantly less accurate at labelling faces than healthy controls, particularly if they displayed fear or neutral expressions. There were no between-group differences in response times or patterns of emotion mislabelling, with both groups confusing sad and neutral faces, although BD patients also mislabelled sad faces as angry. Task performance did not significantly correlate with mood symptom severity in the BD group. These findings suggest that facial emotion recognition impairments in BD extend to neutral face recognition. Emotion misattribution occurs in a similar, albeit exaggerated manner in patients with BD compared to healthy controls. Future behavioural and neuroimaging research should reconsider the use of neutral faces as baseline stimuli in their task designs.     

Neural processing of vocal emotion and identity

The voice is a marker of a person's identity which allows individual recognition even if the person is not in sight. Listening to a voice also affords inferences about the speaker's emotional state. Both these types of personal information are encoded in characteristic acoustic feature patterns analyzed within the auditory cortex. In the present study 16 volunteers listened to pairs of non-verbal voice stimuli with happy or sad valence in two different task conditions while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. In an emotion matching task, participants indicated whether the expressed emotion of a target voice was congruent or incongruent with that of a (preceding) prime voice. In an identity matching task, participants indicated whether or not the prime and target voice belonged to the same person. Effects based on emotion expressed occurred earlier than those based on voice identity. Specifically, P2 (approximately 200 ms)-amplitudes were reduced for happy voices when primed by happy voices. Identity match effects, by contrast, did not start until around 300 ms. These results show an early task-specific emotion-based influence on the early stages of auditory sensory processing.     

Facial expressions can inhibit the activation of gender stereotypes

ABSTRACT

Using faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants to make emotion, gender, or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime faces intentionally.     

Gender differences in implicit prejudice

In three experiments (n=131), we examined gender differences in implicit (and explicit) racial prejudice employing priming of immigrant and Swedish facial photographs without attention or without awareness. Implicit prejudice was defined as the degree of negativity expressed toward a person described in a subsequent ambiguous story in an impression formation task. We found, contrary to our hypothesis, that women displayed systematically higher implicit prejudice than men in all three experiments, although men scored higher on explicit prejudice than women. The results are discussed against the background of related prejudice research, the dissociation of implicit and explicit prejudice, and gender differences in cognitive functioning, especially in the processing of pictorial stimuli.     

State Self-Esteem as a Moderator of Negative Mood Effects on Person Impression

Participants in a negative or a neutral mood performed an impression formation task in Experiment 1, a word fragment completion task in Experiment 2, and both tasks in Experiment 3. A self-referent versus other-referent sentence completion task was used to induce a negative mood. As a result, participants exhibited fewer mood-congruent effects on impression rating in the self-referent than in the other-referent mood induction condition, even though relevant traits had been equally activated across the two conditions. It was also shown that the self-referent induction procedure was accompanied by degrading of self-esteem, whereas the other-referent one was not. Taken together, the results suggest that the state self-esteem might be relevant to moderating of the negative mood effects on person impression.     

Interpersonal reactions toward depression and anger

Two studies examined the effect of interpersonal attitude on reactions toward others' expression of anger or depression, Participants read a story in which their schoolmate experienced a negative event and expressed anger or depression, and reported their perceptions, affective reactions, and behavioural intentions such as support or rejection. The results indicated that an expression of anger elicited more negative reactions than an expression of depression only when a person whom participants disliked expressed the emotion. Furthermore, structural equation modelling indicated that the effect of interpersonal attitude on sympathy, blame, and support intention was mediated by the perception of the distressfulness of the event. The discussion considered the processes through which the expression of negative emotions evokes positive or negative interpersonal reactions.     

Psychiatric labeling and social perception

The present study explores the effects of three types of psychiatric labeling on attribution of causality and impression formation. It was found that observers tended to be more person-oriented in their attributions when explaining an accident of a person being labeled formerly mentally ill and formerly psychiatrically hospitalized, as compared to a non-psychiatric control label. However, no such tendency towards person-orientation in causal attribution was found for a problems-of-living label. These effects were found to be independent of variation in amount of neutral context information about the person being labeled. The effect of labeling on impression formation was found to be inconclusive, and reasons for this are discussed. Context information was found to affect impression formation in that the person was evaluated more positively. No sex differences in attribution of causality and impression formation was found.     

测量内隐态度的情感错误归因程序

情感错误归因程序（AMP）是一种新近发展出来的以投射为基本原理的内隐社会认知研究方法。AMP的内部处理机制可分为情绪的激发、归因以及猜测三个过程,每种过程都有其发生概率。AMP具有良好的信度和效度,最突出的特点是其对警告的抗拒性。此外虽作为一种相对性的内隐测量工具,但AMP也能很好地研究单一的态度对象。还介绍了几种新近出现的AMP改进范式。     

The Zeigarnik effect and intrinsic motivation: Are they the same?

The present study focused on delineating the parameters under which intrinsic motivation leads an individual to reengage an activity from those that result in the Zeigarnik effect. In a posttask free-choice period, participants not completing the experimental task displayed more reengagement behavior than participants completing the task (the Zeigarnik effect). When participants were also provided self-efficacious performance feedback via a prearranged competitive outcome manipulation, there was no evidence of the Zeigarnik effect, while there was support for intrinsic motivation from competent self-efficacious performance feedback. Results were discussed in terms of distinguishing between intrinsic motivation and the Zeigarnik effect as sources of reengagement motivation. It was concluded that, in the presence of self-efficacious performance feedback, the competent-incompetent impression was more salient than task-completion feedback.Preparation of this article was supported by Texas Christian University grant TCU/RF 5-23757.     

Person perception from changing emotional expressions: primacy,recency, or averaging effect?

ABSTRACT

Dynamic changes in emotional expressions are a valuable source of information in social interactions. As the expressive behaviour of a person changes, the inferences drawn from the behaviour may also change. Here, we test the possibility that dynamic changes in emotional expressions affect person perception in terms of stable trait attributions. Across three experiments, we examined perceivers’ inferences about others’ personality traits from changing emotional expressions. Expressions changed from one emotion (“start emotion”) to another emotion (“end emotion”), allowing us to disentangle potential primacy, recency, and averaging effects. Drawing on three influential models of person perception, we examined perceptions of dominance and affiliation (Experiment 1a), competence and warmth (Experiment 1b), and dominance and trustworthiness (Experiment 2). A strong recency effect was consistently found across all trait judgments, that is, the end emotion of dynamic expressions had a strong impact on trait ratings. Evidence for a primacy effect was also observed (i.e. the information of start emotions was integrated), but less pronounced, and only for trait ratings relating to affiliation, warmth, and trustworthiness. Taken together, these findings suggest that, when making trait judgements about others, observers weigh the most recently displayed emotion in dynamic expressions more heavily than the preceding emotion.