Rapid communication: Global-local processing affects recognition of distractor emotional faces

Recent studies have shown links between happy faces and global, distributed attention as well as sad faces to local, focused attention. Emotions have been shown to affect global-local processing. Given that studies on emotion-cognition interactions have not explored the effect of perceptual processing at different spatial scales on processing stimuli with emotional content, the present study investigated the link between perceptual focus and emotional processing. The study investigated the effects of global-local processing on the recognition of distractor faces with emotional expressions. Participants performed a digit discrimination task with digits at either the global level or the local level presented against a distractor face (happy or sad) as background. The results showed that global processing associated with broad scope of attention facilitates recognition of happy faces, and local processing associated with narrow scope of attention facilitates recognition of sad faces. The novel results of the study provide conclusive evidence for emotion-cognition interactions by demonstrating the effect of perceptual processing on emotional faces. The results along with earlier complementary results on the effect of emotion on global-local processing support a reciprocal relationship between emotional processing and global-local processing. Distractor processing with emotional information also has implications for theories of selective attention.     

Effects of fluency on psychological distance and mental construal (or why New York is a large city, but New York is a civilized jungle)

People construe the world along a continuum from concretely (focusing on specific, local details) to abstractly (focusing on global essences). We show that people are more likely to interpret the world abstractly when they experience cognitive disfluency, or difficulty processing stimuli in the environment, than when they experience cognitive fluency. We observed this effect using three instantiations of fluency: visual perceptual fluency (Study 1b), conceptual priming fluency (Study 2b), and linguistic fluency (Study 3). Adopting the framework of construal theory, we suggest that one mechanism for this effect is perceivers' tendency to interpret disfluently processed stimuli as farther from their current position than fluently processed stimuli (Studies 1a and 2a).     

Do We Feel the Same Way If We Think the Same Way? Shared Attitudes and the Social Induction of Affect

Drawing on the literature on emotional mimicry, we argue that attitude similarity between a sender and a receiver influences the social induction of affect. Studies 1, 2, and 3 supported this reasoning by showing that similarity fostered, whereas dissimilarity blocked concordant reactions to a happy sender (but not to a sad sender). We also examined the mechanism behind these effects and found that similarity influenced liking of the happy sender but did not affect liking of the sad sender. Study 4 provided causal evidence for this idea by showing that similarity influenced the induction of positive affect through liking.     

Mixed matters: fluency impacts trust ratings when faces range on valence but not on motivational implications

Facial features that resemble emotional expressions influence key social evaluations, including trust. Here, we present four experiments testing how the impact of such expressive features is qualified by their processing difficulty. We show that faces with mixed expressive features are relatively devalued, and faces with pure expressive features are relatively valued. This is especially true when participants first engage in a categorisation task that makes processing of mixed expressions difficult and pure expressions easy. Critically, we also demonstrate that the impact of categorisation fluency depends on the specific nature of the expressive features. When faces vary on valence (i.e. sad to happy), trust judgments increase with their positivity, but also depend on fluency. When faces vary on social motivation (i.e. angry to sad), trust judgments increase with their approachability, but remain impervious to disfluency. This suggests that people intelligently use fluency to make judgments on valence-relevant judgment dimensions – but not when faces can be judged using other relevant criteria, such as motivation. Overall, the findings highlight that key social impressions (like trust) are flexibly constructed from inputs related to stimulus features and processing experience.     

Motion or emotion: Infants discriminate emotional biological motion based on low-level visual information

Infants’ ability to discriminate emotional facial expressions and tones of voice is well-established, yet little is known about infant discrimination of emotional body movements. Here, we asked if 10–20-month-old infants rely on high-level emotional cues or low-level motion related cues when discriminating between emotional point-light displays (PLDs). In Study 1, infants viewed 18 pairs of angry, happy, sad, or neutral PLDs. Infants looked more at angry vs. neutral, happy vs. neutral, and neutral vs. sad. Motion analyses revealed that infants preferred the PLD with more total body movement in each pairing. Study 2, in which infants viewed inverted versions of the same pairings, yielded similar findings except for sad-neutral. Study 3 directly paired all three emotional stimuli in both orientations. The angry and happy stimuli did not significantly differ in terms of total motion, but both had more motion than the sad stimuli. Infants looked more at angry vs. sad, more at happy vs. sad, and about equally to angry vs. happy in both orientations. Again, therefore, infants preferred PLDs with more total body movement. Overall, the results indicate that a low-level motion preference may drive infants’ discrimination of emotional human walking motions.     

Mood and Information Processing: When Happy and Sad Look the Same

Two studies were conducted to demonstrate that sad and happy moods can cause individuals to be similarly sensitive to the valence of observed stimuli with regard to how effortfully such stimuli are processed. In Study 1, individuals in whom a sad or happy mood had been induced unitized a behavior sequence less finely when its contents were neutral as opposed to positive. Individuals in a neutral mood state maintained a comparable level of unitization regardless of the valence of the behavior sequence. In Study 2, individuals in whom a sad or a happy mood had been induced processed the arguments in a persuasive communication more extensively when its contents were affectively uplifting rather than depressing. Sad individuals showed this pattern only if no prior affective expectation was provided. Taken together, these studies may fit with the notion that under certain conditions sad and happy individuals similarly decrease the amount of information processed from a neutral (Study 1) or depressing (Study 2), relative to a positive, stimulus.     

Effects of emotional state on lexical decision performance

The effect of emotional state on lexical processing was investigated. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a happy or sad mood condition. Emotional state was then induced by listening to 8 min of classical music previously rated to induce happy or sad moods. Response times and error rates were analyzed in a lexical decision task involving sad words, happy words, and pseudowords. Results suggest that emotion aided the participants in responding to emotion-congruent stimuli. The sad group responded faster than the happy group to sad words and the happy group responded faster than the sad group to happy words. Results are discussed with regard to information processing and emotion.     

Approach-avoidance responses to infant facial expressions in nulliparous women: Associations with early experience and mood induction

Infant expressions are important signals for eliciting caregiving behaviors in parents. The present study sought to test if infant expressions affect adults’ behavioral response, taking into account the role of a mood induction and childhood caregiving experiences. A modified version of the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT) was employed to study nulliparous female university students’ implicit responses to infant faces with different expressions. Study 1 showed that sad, neutral and sleepy expressions elicit a tendency for avoidance, while no tendency for approach or avoidance was found for happy faces. Notably, differences between approach and avoidance response latencies for sad faces and participants’ negative caregiving experiences were positively correlated (r = 0.30, p = 0.04, Bonferroni corrected), indicating that individuals who experienced insensitive parental care show more bias toward sad infant faces. In Study 2, we manipulated participants' current mood (inducing sad and happy mood by asking to recall a happy or sad event of their recent life) before the AAT. Results showed that sad mood enhanced the bias toward sad faces that is buffered by positive mood induction. In conclusion, these findings indicate that implicit approach avoidance behaviors in females depend on the emotional expression of infant faces and are associated with childhood caregiving experiences and current mood.     

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.     

Adult attachment and attentional inhibition of interpersonal stimuli

In two studies, we used a negative affective priming task with pictures of angry (Study 1), sad (Study 2), and happy faces (Studies 1 and 2) to measure attentional inhibition of emotional stimuli as a function of attachment style. Results showed that attachment avoidance was associated with a stronger inhibition of both angry and sad faces. This indicates that the regulatory strategies of avoidant individuals involve inhibition of different types of negative, but not positive, stimuli. Attachment anxiety, on the other hand, showed no association with inhibitory responding to negative stimuli, although we did find indications of impaired inhibitory processing of happy faces in Study 1. The results are discussed in relation to current evidence on avoidant affect-regulation strategies.     

Exploring "fringe" consciousness: the subjective experience of perceptual fluency and its objective bases

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency.     

Adult attachment and attentional inhibition of interpersonal stimuli

In two studies, we used a negative affective priming task with pictures of angry (Study 1), sad (Study 2), and happy faces (Studies 1 and 2) to measure attentional inhibition of emotional stimuli as a function of attachment style. Results showed that attachment avoidance was associated with a stronger inhibition of both angry and sad faces. This indicates that the regulatory strategies of avoidant individuals involve inhibition of different types of negative, but not positive, stimuli. Attachment anxiety, on the other hand, showed no association with inhibitory responding to negative stimuli, although we did find indications of impaired inhibitory processing of happy faces in Study 1. The results are discussed in relation to current evidence on avoidant affect-regulation strategies.     

Emotional context at learning systematically biases memory for facial information

Emotion influences memory in many ways. For example, when a mood-dependent processing shift is operative, happy moods promote global processing and sad moods direct attention to local features of complex visual stimuli. We hypothesized that an emotional context associated with to-be-learned facial stimuli could preferentially promote global or local processing. At learning, faces with neutral expressions were paired with a narrative providing either a happy or a sad context. At test, faces were presented in an upright or inverted orientation, emphasizing configural or analytical processing, respectively. A recognition advantage was found for upright faces learned in happy contexts relative to those in sad contexts, whereas recognition was better for inverted faces learned in sad contexts than for those in happy contexts. We thus infer that a positive emotional context prompted more effective storage of holistic, configural, or global facial information, whereas a negative emotional context prompted relatively more effective storage of local or feature-based facial information     

Updating positive and negative stimuli in working memory in depression

Difficulties in the ability to update stimuli in working memory (WM) may underlie the problems with regulating emotions that lead to the development and perpetuation of mood disorders such as depression. To examine the ability to update affective material in WM, the authors had diagnosed depressed and never-disordered control participants perform an emotion 2-back task in which participants were presented with a series of happy, sad, and neutral faces and were asked to indicate whether the current face had the same (match-set) or different (break-set or no-set) emotional expression as that presented 2 faces earlier. Participants also performed a 0-back task with the same emotional stimuli to serve as a control for perceptual processing. After transforming reaction times to control for baseline group differences, depressed and nondepressed participants exhibited biases in updating emotional content that reflects the tendency to keep negative information and positive information, respectively, active in WM. Compared with controls, depressed participants were both slower to disengage from sad stimuli and faster to disengage from happy facial expressions. In contrast, nondepressed controls took longer to disengage from happy stimuli than from neutral or sad stimuli. These group differences in reaction times may reflect both protective and maladaptive biases in WM that underlie the ability to effectively regulate negative affect.     

Fluency and positivity as possible causes of the truth effect

Statements’ rated truth increases when people encounter them repeatedly. Processing fluency is a central variable to explain this truth effect. However, people experience processing fluency positively, and these positive experiences might cause the truth effect. Three studies investigated positivity and fluency influences on the truth effect. Study 1 found correlations between elicited positive feelings and rated truth. Study 2 replicated the repetition-based truth effect, but positivity did not influence the effect. Study 3 conveyed positive and negative correlations between positivity and truth in a learning phase. We again replicated the truth effect, but positivity only influenced judgments for easy statements in the learning phase. Thus, across three studies, we found positivity effects on rated truth, but not on the repetition-based truth effect: We conclude that positivity does not explain the standard truth effect, but the role of positive experiences for truth judgments deserves further investigation.     

Effects of induced emotional state on lexical processing in younger and older adults

The authors investigated the effects of an induced emotional mood state on lexical decision task (LDT) performance in 50 young adults and 25 older adults. Participants were randomly assigned to either happy or sad mood induction conditions. An emotional mood state was induced by having the participants listen to 8 min of classical music previously rated to induce happy or sad moods. Results replicated previous studies with young adults (i.e., sad-induced individuals responded faster to sad words and happy-induced individuals responded faster to happy words) and extended this pattern to older adults. Results are discussed with regard to information processing, aging, and emotion.     

No difference in flanker effects for sad and happy schematic faces: A parametric study of temporal parameters

Flanker effects with schematic faces have been reported to be larger for happy than for sad faces, allegedly because sad faces restrict the focus of spatial attention. We report a parametric study that fails to replicate this effect. Participants performed speeded identifications of happy or sad faces accompanied by compatible or incompatible flanker faces. We varied the temporal interval between presentation of central target and flanker faces because differential attentional effects of happy and sad faces should critically depend on this variable. In contradiction to the literature, we found large compatibility effects that were modulated by temporal parameters, but not by the emotional valence of the faces, and not in the way consistent with differential attentional modulation. We conclude that previously reported asymmetries in flanker tasks with schematic faces are not due to changes in attentional scope (mediated by emotion or otherwise), but rather to perceptual low-level differences.     

记忆加工策略对ECM的影响

该研究采用ECM实验范式,操纵记忆加工策略验证联想网络模型或情绪渗透模型。电影片段诱发被试高兴或悲伤的情绪状态后,被试在有意识记和无意识记加工策略下学习情绪词,然后进行自由回忆。结果：情绪电影片段成功诱发被试高兴或悲伤情绪;被试在采用无意识记和有意识记加工策略学习情绪词时均出现ECM,无意识记加工策略下效应量的大小显著高于有意识记加工策略下效应量的大小,实验结果支持情绪渗透模型。     

Effects of Induced Emotional State on Lexical Processing in Younger and Older Adults

The authors investigated the effects of an induced emotional mood state on lexical decision task (LDT) performance in 50 young adults and 25 older adults. Participants were randomly assigned to either happy or sad mood induction conditions. An emotional mood state was induced by having the participants listen to 8 min of classical music previously rated to induce happy or sad moods. Results replicated previous studies with young adults (i.e., sad-induced individuals responded faster to sad words and happy-induced individuals responded faster to happy words) and extended this pattern to older adults. Results are discussed with regard to information processing, aging, and emotion.     

Sad or fearful? The influence of body posture on adults’ and children’s perception of facial displays of emotion

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing fear). Adults and 8-year-olds made more errors and had longer reaction times on incongruent trials than on congruent trials when judging sad versus fearful facial expressions, an effect that was larger in 8-year-olds. The congruency effect was reduced when faces and bodies were misaligned, providing some evidence for holistic processing. Neither adults nor 8-year-olds were affected by congruency when judging sad versus happy expressions. Evidence that congruency effects vary with age and with similarity of emotional expressions is consistent with dimensional theories and "emotional seed" models of emotion perception.