BRIEF REPORT The dynamic aspects of emotional facial expressions

In this study, we presented computer‐morphing animations of the facial expressions of six emotions to 43 subjects and asked them to evaluate the naturalness of the rate of change of each expression. The results showed that the naturalness of the expressions depended on the velocity of change, and the patterns for the four velocities differed with the emotions. Principal component analysis of the data extracted the structures that underlie the evaluation of dynamic facial expressions, which differed from previously reported structures for static expressions in some aspects. These results suggest that the representations of facial expressions include not only static but also dynamic properties.     

BRIEF REPORT

This study examined the different facets of emotional intelligence, alexithymia, and mood awareness. Undergraduate students (N = 129) completed the Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS), the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Mood Awareness Scale (MAS). A factor analysis revealed two dimensions, attention to and clarity of emotions, that cut across all three instruments. These two dimensions were differentially associated with personality, as measured by the neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience portions of the NEO-FFI, and with performance on an emotional Stroop task. We discuss the implications for the conceptualisation of broad constructs such as emotional intelligence and alexithymia, as well as the potential utility of more narrowly defined individual differences.     

BRIEF REPORT

The effects of masking task load on latent inhibition (LI, poorer learning for a previously exposed irrelevant stimulus than for a novel stimulus) were examined as a function of levels of schizotypality. With low load, LI was present in low schizotypal but not high schizotypal participants. With high load, LI was abolished in low schizotypal, but was present in high schizotypal participants. The data support a distraction rather than a resource limitation model of attentional dysfunction in high schizotypal normals. Implications of the model for understanding the attentional dysfunction in schizophrenia are discussed.     

BRIEF REPORT

Fascination for extremely negative scenes was examined by exposing 152 students to pictures of September 11 attacks 8 months after their occurrence. Participants rated their orientation toward the pictures, their felt emotions, and their self and world views. Factor analysis of the orientation items yielded three clusters. Fascination characterized 32.9% of respondents; it was related only to attention and interest. Rejection (23%) involved aversion for the pictures and related thoughts; it was correlated to dysphoric emotions and to motivational depletion. Ambivalence (20.4%) was related to attention and interest, to most specific negative emotions, to an inclination to process the pictures cognitively and interpersonally, and to indices of enhanced social reliance and personal growth. These results are discussed in reference to various relevant theoretical models.     

BRIEF REPORT

The aim of this study was to explore the impact of quantifiers on depressed future thinking. Universal quantifiers, such as all and none, express bleak expectations and their global nature suggests no alternatives or exceptions (e.g., “ None of the future will be happy; all of it will be bleak”). We hypothesised that less extreme quantifiers would access alternative future perspectives. Depressed participants with high levels of hopelessness generated continuations to sentence stems that quantified different amounts of future time. Averaging over conditions, the depressed were more negative than never-depressed controls, but differences were attenuated in response to the quantifier some —the depressed were more positive and less negative under this condition (e.g., “ Some of the future…will be good”). By differentiating subsets of the future, some produced contrasts with negative global models and accessed positive alternatives.     

BRIEF REPORT

The emotional Stroop task has been widely used to examine attentional bias in a variety of psychological disorders. In one format of this task, words are presented to participants in a mixed randomised or quasi-randomised sequence. We present data from two independent studies involving smokers, the results of which show that words appearing after smoking-related items in the mixed sequence are responded to more slowly than words appearing after neutral items. These carry-over effects may reduce the size of emotional Stroop effects on the mixed Stroop task. We discuss the implications of these carry-over effects for research using the emotional Stroop task.     

BRIEF REPORT

We employed a psychophysiological marker of directed attention (the visual scanpath) to investigate visuocognitive processing of particular facial expressions in healthy individuals (N = 47). Visual scanpaths were recorded using video-oculography while subjects viewed digitised photographs of threat-related (fear, anger) and nonthreat (sad, happy, neutral) facial expressions. Hypotheses regarding the existence of a differential viewing strategy for threat-related facial expressions were based upon the adaptive significance of rapid detection and effective appraisal of social threat from conspecific face stimuli. When compared with each of the nonthreat faces, viewing strategies for expressions of anger and fear were characterised by increased distance between fixations (extended scanning), with more fixations, of longer duration, to feature areas of these faces. The extended scanning style suggests that threat-related faces evoke a "vigilant" style of scanning, whereby longer saccadic eye movements may reflect heightened autonomic responses to threat, while the increased foveal attention to feature areas of threat-related faces may facilitate cognitive appraisal of the personal significance and direction of impending threat. These results suggest the existence of distinct visuocognitive patterns for processing threat-related facial expressions, in response to the evolutionary advantage of detecting and appraising social threat.     

Remembering emotional events

Recent experiments have implied that emotional arousal causes a narrowing of attention and, therefore, impoverished memory encoding. In contrast, other studies have found that emotional arousal enhances memory for all aspects of an event. We report two experiments investigating whether these differing results are due to the different retention intervals employed in past studies or to their different categorization schemes for the to-be-remembered material. Our results indicate a small role for retention interval in moderating emotion's effects on memory. However, emotion had markedly different impacts on different types of material: Emotion improved memory for gist and basic-level visual information and for plot-irrelevant details associated, both temporally and spatially, with the event's center. In contrast, emotion undermined memory for details not associated with the event's center. The mechanisms for emotion's effects are discussed.     

BRIEF REPORT Forgetting “murder” is not harder than forgetting “circle”: Listwise-directed forgetting of emotional words

The list-method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm has attracted the attention of clinical psychologists because it is widely believed that a retrieval inhibition mechanism underlies its effects. Thus, the idea is that people are capable of intentionally forgetting negative emotional material. On the other hand, there are reasons to believe that negative stimuli are relatively resistant to forgetting. The present experiment compared listwise DF of emotional and neutral words in healthy college students. A modified procedure (i.e., a simulated computer crash) showed a reliable DF-effect in that list 1 recall was larger under remember than forget instructions whereas the reverse was true for list 2 recall. Emotionality did not modulate the magnitude of this effect. Thus, negative emotional material is not resistant to forgetting. Although overall, the present findings are in line with a retrieval inhibition interpretation (i.e., decreased access to list 1 material), attentional focusing during list 2 learning may provide a sufficient explanation.     

BRIEF REPORT: LATENCY FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF ELOPEMENT

Elopement is a potentially dangerous problem behavior prevalent among individuals with developmental disabilities. However, functional analysis of elopement presents unique challenges including potential confounds because of the need for participant retrieval during functional analysis sessions. In the current study, we implemented a latency functional analysis with an eight‐year‐old child with an intellectual disability, in which the dependent measure was latency to elopement. Following the latency functional analysis, a functional communication intervention was developed and its effectiveness in decreasing elopement was evaluated using an ABAB design. Findings suggest that a functional analysis of latency may be a suitable methodology to identify the operant function of elopement. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

BRIEF REPORT Bilinguals' recall and recognition of emotion words

Recall of emotion words is superior to neutral words. Prior work reported in this journal (Anooshian & Hertel, 1994) found that this effect was absent in a second language. Words in a second language may thus lack the emotional associations of words acquired in childhood. To determine whether memory probes may be generally useful for assessing emotionality effects in a first versus a second language, Anooshian and Hertel's paradigm was extended in several ways. Recall was compared to recognition, and a variety of types of emotion words were studied, including taboo terms, and phrases likely to be learned in childhood (reprimands). Superior memory for emotion words was obtained in both the recall and recognition tasks, but this occurred in both the first and second language and indeed was stronger, for some stimuli, in the second language. This suggests that, even for bilingual speakers who acquire their second late (after age 12), words in the second language retain rich emotional associations.     

Perception of emotional expression in musical performance

Expression in musical performance is largely communicated by the manner in which a piece is played; interpretive aspects that supplement the written score. In piano performance, timing and amplitude are the principal parameters the performer can vary. We examined the way in which such variation serves to communicate emotion by manipulating timing and amplitude in performances of classical piano pieces. Over three experiments, listeners rated the emotional expressivity of performances and their manipulated versions. In Experiments 1 and 2, timing and amplitude information were covaried; judgments were monotonically decreasing with performance variability, demonstrating that the rank ordering of acoustical manipulations was captured by participants' responses. Further, participants' judgments formed an S-shaped (sigmoidal) function in which greater sensitivity was seen for musical manipulations in the middle of the range than at the extremes. In Experiment 3, timing and amplitude were manipulated independently; timing variation was found to provide more expressive information than did amplitude. Across all three experiments, listeners demonstrated sensitivity to the expressive cues we manipulated, with sensitivity increasing as a function of musical experience.     

Perception of sequence in auditory events

A series of tape-recorded sentences were presented to various groups of listeners, totalling 164. During each sentence an extraneous sound was present on the recording, and the listener had to indicate the exact point in the sentence at which this sound occurred. It was found that errors were made which were large compared with the duration of a single speech sound; which suggests that the listener does not deal with each sound separately but rather with a group of sounds. Errors were reduced if the sentence consisted of a series of digits rather than an ordinary text, or if the listeners were trained in phonetics. Prior knowledge of the content of the sentence did not affect accuracy. The direction of error was usually to refer the extra sound to an early point, but it is affected by the relative position of the extra sound in the sentence. These results can be regarded as an extension, to the case where all stimuli are presented to the same sense, of classic results on prior entry.     

Narrating emotional events in schizophrenia

Research has indicated that schizophrenia patients report similar amounts of experienced emotion in response to emotional material compared with nonpatients. However, less is known about how schizophrenia patients describe and make sense of their emotional life events. We adopted a narrative approach to investigate schizophrenia patients' renderings of their emotional life experiences. In Study 1, patients' (n=42) positive and negative narratives were similarly personal, tellable, engaged, and appropriate. However, negative narratives were less grammatically clear than positive narratives, and positive narratives were more likely to involve other people than negative narratives. In Study 2, emotional (positive and negative) narratives were less tellable and detached, yet more linear and social compared with neutral narratives for both schizophrenia patients (n=24) and healthy controls (n=19). However, patients' narratives about emotional life events were less appropriate to context and less linear, and patients' narratives, whether emotional or not, were less tellable and more detached compared with controls' narratives. Although schizophrenia patients are capable of recounting life events that trigger different emotions, the telling of these life events is fraught with difficulty.     

Preschoolers' fantasy-reality distinctions of emotional events

Research suggests that emotions influence children's ability to discern fantasy from reality; however, reasons for this association remain unknown. The current research sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying children's distinctions by examining the roles discrete emotions and context have in 3- to 5-year-olds' evaluations of fantasy and reality. In Study 1, children's fantasy-reality distinctions of images depicting happy, frightening, or sad events were obtained under two conditions: Children responded freely or were motivated to respond accurately. When responding freely, older children reported that happy and sad fantastic and real events could occur but frightening events could not. When motivated to respond accurately, children's accuracy improved for fantasy but not for reality. Study 2 examined real events exclusively and found that children may lack the knowledge that frightening, but not happy or sad, real events can occur. The findings provide new insight into how emotions affect children's fantasy-reality distinctions.     

Retrospective duration estimation of public events

In three experiments, we investigated subjects' retrospective estimation of the duration of publicly reported events such as, for example, the Falkland's war. In Experiment 1, duration estimates were found to be positively correlated with event knowledge, in keeping with Ornstein's (1969) model of duration estimation. Event duration was, however, generally underestimated, suggesting that the relationship between event knowledge and estimated duration might reflect an increase in estimation accuracy. Other results of Experiment 1 were consistent with this interpretation and suggested that the duration estimates might be largely reconstructed. In Experiment 2, duration estimates of specific events and general categories of events were found to be highly correlated, and the subjects in Experiment 3 indicated that they used knowledge of the general characteristic of different types of events to estimate event duration. Overall, reallife duration estimates appear to be based on a combination of specific event information and knowledge derived about that category of event.     

BRIEF REPORT: THE EQUIVALENCE OF TWO MULTIVARIATE CLASSlFICATION SCHEMES

The equivalence of two multivariate classification schemes is shown when the sizes of the samples drawn from the populations to which assignment is required are identical. One scheme is based on posterior probabilities determined from a Bayesian density function; the second scheme is based on likelihood ratio discriminated scores. Both of these procedures involve prior probabilities; if estimates of these priors are obtained from the identical sample sizes, the equivalence follows.     

BRIEF REPORT Self‐reference,ambiguity, and dysphoria

The present study examined two aspects of a dysphoric attentional bias: (1) the role of the emotional tone of the stimuli; and (2) the role of self‐referential processing. A total of 40 nondepressed participants were divided into groups of high and low dysphoria and then primed using a series of formal and self‐referent tasks. Word fragments were presented, using a computer. Each word fragment could be completed with either of two solutions: (i) a word primed through a formal learning process: or (ii) a word primed through a self‐referential process. Results indicated that dysphoric participants; (1) showed a bias towards negative information in general; and (2) showed a bias towards using self‐referent words to complete ambiguous word fragments, independent of the emotional tone of the stimuli. The implications of these findings for both the dysphoric self‐concept and cognitive therapy are discussed.