Delayed reconfiguration of a non-emotional task set through reactivation of an emotional task set in task switching: an ageing study

ABSTRACT

In our everyday life, we frequently switch between different tasks, a faculty that changes with age. However, it is still not understood how emotion impacts on age-related changes in task switching. Using faces with emotional and neutral expressions, Experiment 1 investigated younger (n?=?29; 18–38 years old) and older adults’ (n?=?32; 61–80 years old) ability to switch between an emotional and a non-emotional task (i.e. responding to the face's expression vs. age). In Experiment 2, younger and older adults also viewed emotional and neutral faces, but switched between two non-emotional tasks (i.e. responding to the face's age vs. gender). Data from Experiment 1 demonstrated that switching from an emotional to a non-emotional task was slower when the expression of the new face was emotional rather than neutral. This impairment was observed in both age groups. In contrast, Experiment 2 revealed that neither younger nor older adults were affected by block-wise irrelevant emotion when switching between two non-emotional tasks. Overall, the findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion can impair task switching through reactivation of the competing emotional task set. They also suggest that this effect and the ability to shield task-switching performance from block-wise irrelevant emotion are preserved in ageing.     

Cognitive Control in the Face of Fear: Reduced Cognitive-Emotional Flexibility in Women with a History of Child Abuse

Child abuse can negatively affect neurobiological systems involved in regulating emotions. Adults who were maltreated as children show diminished capacity to flexibly integrate the prefrontal and limbic circuits underlying emotion regulation. Using a facial identification Stroop task with nonemotional and emotional stimuli, we found that women who reported more childhood abuse (N = 44) were no different from women reporting less childhood abuse (N = 45) on nonemotional conflict adaptation, but were significantly less able to adapt to emotional conflict. Women who reported more abuse were especially impaired in adapting to emotional conflict when incongruent stimuli involved a fearful face. These results help characterize the relation between cognitive control and emotion regulation and highlight the far-reaching effects of childhood abuse on cognitive-emotional flexibility.     

Emotion Regulation and Parenting in AD/HD and Comparison Boys: Linkages with Social Behaviors and Peer Preference

Children's emotion regulation strategies and parenting responses in a family task that elicited frustration are investigated by, comparing core attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) symptomatology, emotional reactivity, and emotional regulation in the prediction of social behaviors and peer social preference. Participants were boys, ages 6–12 years, either with AD/HD (n = 45) or without problem behaviors (comparison; n = 34). A high-aggressive subgroup of AD/HD boys showed a significantly less constructive pattern of emotional coping than did both a low-aggressive AD/HD subgroup of boys and nondiagnosed comparison boys, who did not differ. With statistical control of core AD/HD symptomatology, noncompliance in a naturalistic summer camp was predicted by boys' overall emotion regulation and three specific strategies (emotional accommodation, problem solving, negative responses) during the parent–child interaction. Emotional accommodation and negative responses to the frustration task also marginally predicted social preference at the camp. These emotion regulation variables outperformed emotional reactivity in predicting such outcomes. Some emotion-related parenting behaviors were associated with child coping in the task. We discuss the relationship of emotion regulation to core AD/HD symptomatology and emotional reactivity, and the role of parents' behaviors in influencing children's emotional responses.     

Data versus Spock: lay theories about whether emotion helps or hinders

The android Data from Star Trek admired human emotion whereas Spock viewed emotion as irrational and maladaptive. The theory that emotions fulfil adaptive functions is widely accepted in academic psychology but little is known about laypeople’s theories. The present study assessed the extent to which laypeople share Data’s view of emotion as helpful or Spock’s view of emotion as a hindrance. We also assessed how help and hinder theory endorsement were related to reasoning, emotion regulation, and well-being. Undergraduates (N?=?630) completed a stressful timed reasoning task and questionnaires that assessed their theories of emotion, emotion regulation strategies, happiness, and social support. Overall, participants viewed emotion more as a help than a hindrance. The more they endorsed the view that emotion helps, the better their reasoning scores. Endorsing a help theory also predicted the use of reappraisal which, in turn, predicted greater happiness and social support. In contrast, endorsing the view that emotion hinders was associated with emotion suppression and less social support. Thus, people’s theories about the functionality of emotion may have important implications for their reasoning and emotional well-being.     

Less is more? Effects of exhaustive vs. minimal emotion labelling on emotion regulation strategy planning

Previous research suggests that labelling emotions, or describing affective states using emotion words, facilitates emotion regulation. But how much labelling promotes emotion regulation? And which emotion regulation strategies does emotion labelling promote? Drawing on cognitive theories of emotion, we predicted that labelling emotions using fewer words would be less confusing and would facilitate forms of emotion regulation requiring more cognitively demanding processing of context. Participants (N?=?82) mentally immersed themselves in an emotional vignette, were randomly assigned to an exhaustive or minimal emotion labelling manipulation, and then completed an emotion regulation strategy planning task. Minimal (vs. exhaustive) emotion labelling promoted higher subjective emotional clarity. Furthermore, in terms of specific emotion regulation strategies, minimal emotion labelling prompted more plans for problem solving and marginally more plans for reappraisal, but did not affect plans for behavioural activation or social support seeking. We discuss implications for the cognitive mechanisms supporting the generation of emotion regulation strategies.     

Emotional intelligence and attentional bias for threat‐related emotion under stress

Emotional intelligence (EI ) can buffer potentially harmful effects of situational and chronic stressors to safeguard psychological wellbeing (e.g., Mikolajczak, Petrides, Coumans & Luminet, 2009 ), yet understanding how and when EI operates to promote adaptation remains a research priority. We explored whether EI (both trait and ability) modulated early attentional processing of threat‐related emotion under conditions of stress. Using a dot probe paradigm, eye movement (fixation to emotive facial stimuli, relative to neutral) and manual reaction time data were collected from 161 adults aged 18–57 years (mean age = 25.24; SD = 8.81) exposed to either a stressful (failure task) or non‐stressful (control) situation. Whilst emotion management ability and trait wellbeing corresponded to avoidance of negative emotion (angry and sad respectively), high trait sociability and emotionality related to a bias for negative emotions. With most effects not restricted to stressful conditions, it is unclear whether EI underscores ‘adaptive’ processing, which carries implications for school‐based social and emotional learning programs.     

自动情绪调节对负性情绪面孔注意偏向的影响

本研究通过成语匹配任务启动情绪调节目标,在情绪flanker任务中考察了自动情绪调节启动对注意偏向的影响。结果表明,中性启动条件下,被试表现出对负性情绪面孔的注意偏向,而情绪调节启动条件下,被试对正性、负性情绪面孔的注意分配不存在显著差异。这一结果说明自动情绪调节可以有效地减弱被试的负性情绪面孔注意偏向。     

Trait Mindfulness Predicts Efficient Top‐Down Attention to and Discrimination of Facial Expressions

In social situations, skillful regulation of emotion and behavior depends on efficiently discerning others' emotions. Identifying factors that promote timely and accurate discernment of facial expressions can therefore advance understanding of social emotion regulation and behavior. The present research examined whether trait mindfulness predicts neural and behavioral markers of early top‐down attention to, and efficient discrimination of, socioemotional stimuli. Attention‐based event‐related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses were recorded while participants (N = 62; White; 67% female; M_age = 19.09 years, SD = 2.14 years) completed an emotional go/no‐go task involving happy, neutral, and fearful facial expressions. Mindfulness predicted larger (more negative) N100 and N200 ERP amplitudes to both go and no‐go stimuli. Mindfulness also predicted faster response time that was not attributable to a speed‐accuracy trade‐off. Significant relations held after accounting for attentional control or social anxiety. This study adds neurophysiological support for foundational accounts that mindfulness entails moment‐to‐moment attention with lower tendencies toward habitual patterns of responding. Mindfulness may enhance the quality of social behavior in socioemotional contexts by promoting efficient top‐down attention to and discrimination of others' emotions, alongside greater monitoring and inhibition of automatic response tendencies.     

The effect of emotion regulation strategies on anger

This study examined the effects of different emotion regulation strategies on the experience and expression of anger. Participants consisted of undergraduate students who endorsed at least a moderate level of state anger. As part of a laboratory experiment, they were instructed to reappraise (n = 24), suppress (n = 24), or accept (n = 25) their anger during a frustrating task. Reappraisal was more effective at reducing anger than attempts to suppress or accept it. Furthermore, participants in the reappraisal condition persisted significantly longer with the frustrating task than those who were instructed to suppress or accept their negative feelings. These findings suggest that reappraisal techniques are more effective than acceptance and suppression techniques for modulating the experience and expression of anger.     

Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational (Study 1; N?=?301) and an experimental field study (Study 2; N?=?125). Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so.     

Spatial location and emotion modulate voice perception

ABSTRACT

How do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice perception. Thirty participants listened to nonverbal vocalizations coming from different locations around the head (left vs. right; front vs. back), and differing in valence (neutral, positive [amusement] or negative [anger]). They were instructed to identify the location of the vocalizations (Experiment 1) and to evaluate their emotional qualities (Experiment 2). Emotion-space interactions were observed, but only in Experiment 1: emotional vocalizations were better localised than neutral ones when they were presented from the back and the right side. In Experiment 2, emotion recognition accuracy was increased for positive vs. negative and neutral vocalizations, and perceived arousal was increased for emotional vs. neutral vocalizations, but this was independent of spatial location. These findings indicate that emotional salience affects how we perceive the spatial location of voices. They additionally suggest that the interaction between spatial (“where”) and emotional (“what”) properties of the voice differs as a function of task.     

中国情绪调节词语库的初步编制与试用

使用具有情绪调节含义的词语启动某种调节策略, 是实现情绪调节目标的重要方法。然而, 目前国内外尚缺乏标准化的情绪调节词语库, 这可能导致所选词语与目标策略不匹配以及不同实验室研究结果缺乏可比性等问题。为此, 我们对多种情绪调节词语进行筛选、分类和评定, 建立了一个标准化的情绪调节词语库, 并通过实验验证其效用。首先, 对情绪调节词语与多种情绪调节策略的相关程度进行评定; 根据结果对词语进行筛选和分类, 建立词语库, 并进一步对词语属性进行评定。其次, 使用句子整理范式, 检验词语库中的词语所诱发的内隐情绪调节策略对负性情绪的调节作用。结果显示：(1) 149个情绪调节词汇纳入词语库中, 可以较好地反映5种情绪调节目标(接受、注意分散、认知重评、表达抑制和表情宣泄)与中性目标; 词语库具有较好的信度与内部一致性。(2)内隐认知重评、表达抑制策略调节了负性情绪效价和唤醒度, 内隐注意分散策略降低了负性情绪唤醒度。这说明词语库可靠性较高, 其中材料可用于情绪调节目标的实现。     

What's parenting got to do with it: emotional autonomy and brain and behavioral responses to emotional conflict in children and adolescents

Healthy parenting may be protective against the development of emotional psychopathology, particularly for children reared in stressful environments. Little is known, however, about the brain and behavioral mechanisms underlying this association, particularly during childhood and adolescence, when emotional disorders frequently emerge. Here, we demonstrate that psychological control, a parenting strategy known to limit socioemotional development in children, is associated with altered brain and behavioral responses to emotional conflict in 27 at‐risk (urban, lower income) youth, ages 9–16. In particular, youth reporting higher parental psychological control demonstrated lower activity in the left anterior insula, a brain area involved in emotion conflict processing, and submitted faster but less accurate behavioral responses—possibly reflecting an avoidant pattern. Effects were not replicated for parental care, and did not generalize to an analogous nonemotional conflict task. We also find evidence that behavioral responses to emotional conflict bridge the previously reported link between parental overcontrol and anxiety in children. Effects of psychological control may reflect a parenting style that limits opportunities to practice self‐regulation when faced with emotionally charged situations. Results support the notion that parenting strategies that facilitate appropriate amounts of socioemotional competence and autonomy in children may be protective against social and emotional difficulties.     

Emotion processing and regulation in women with morbid obesity who apply for bariatric surgery

Emotional eating, the tendency to eat when experiencing negative affect, is prevalent in morbid obesity and may indicate that ways to deal with emotions are disturbed. Our aim was to compare emotion processing and regulation between 102 women with morbid obesity who apply for bariatric surgery and 102 women from the general population (control group) and to examine in the group with morbid obesity the association of emotion processing and regulation with emotional eating. The group with morbid obesity reported higher scores on difficulty identifying feelings (alexithymia, p?=?0.002) and suppression of emotions (p?=?0.003) than the control group. In the women with morbid obesity, more negative affect and a higher difficulty identifying feelings were correlated with more emotional eating (r?=?0.36 and r?=?0.35, p?<?0.001). Our study suggests that negative emotions and unhealthy emotion processing may play a role in emotional eating, and it indicates the possible relevance of emotion processing and emotional regulation as initiating or perpetuating mechanisms in morbid obesity.     

Emotional content enhances true but not false memory for categorized stimuli

Past research has shown that emotion enhances true memory, but that emotion can either increase or decrease false memory. Two theoretical possibilities—the distinctiveness of emotional stimuli and the conceptual relatedness of emotional content—have been implicated as being responsible for influencing both true and false memory for emotional content. In the present study, we sought to identify the mechanisms that underlie these mixed findings by equating the thematic relatedness of the study materials across each type of valence used (negative, positive, or neutral). In three experiments, categorically bound stimuli (e.g., funeral, pets, and office items) were used for this purpose. When the encoding task required the processing of thematic relatedness, a significant true-memory enhancement for emotional content emerged in recognition memory, but no emotional boost to false memory (Exp. 1). This pattern persisted for true memory with a longer retention interval between study and test (24 h), and false recognition was reduced for emotional items (Exp. 2). Finally, better recognition memory for emotional items once again emerged when the encoding task (arousal ratings) required the processing of the emotional aspect of the study items, with no emotional boost to false recognition (Exp. 3). Together, these findings suggest that when emotional and neutral stimuli are equivalently high in thematic relatedness, emotion continues to improve true memory, but it does not override other types of grouping to increase false memory.     

Heightened sensitivity to emotional expressions in generalised anxiety disorder,compared to social anxiety disorder,and controls

Few studies have examined potential differences between social anxiety disorder (SAD) and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) in the sensitivity to detect emotional expressions. The present study aims to compare the detection of emotional expressions in SAD and GAD. Participants with a primary diagnosis of GAD (n?=?46), SAD (n?=?70), and controls (n?=?118) completed a morph movies task. The task presented faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expressions. Participants used a slide bar to view the movie frames from left to right, and to stop at the first frame where they perceived an emotion. The frame selected thus indicated the intensity of emotion required to identify the facial expression. Participants with GAD detected the onset of facial emotions at lower intensity of emotion than participants with SAD (p?=?0.002) and controls (p?=?0.039). In a multiple regression analysis controlling for age, race, and depressive symptom severity, lower frame at which the emotion was detected was independently associated and GAD diagnosis (B?=?–5.73, SE?=?1.74, p?相似文献   

The effects of optimism and pessimism on updating emotional information in working memory

In the present study we elucidate the emotional and executive control interactions that might underlie optimism and pessimism. Participants completed a self-report measure of optimism/pessimism and performed an emotion faces categorisation task and an emotion n-back task in which they indicated whether each of a series of faces had the same or a different emotional expression (happy, sad, neutral) as the face presented two trials before. Trials were structured to measure latency to update emotional content in working memory (WM). More pessimistic individuals formed connections among positive stimuli, and broke connections among positive and sad stimuli, in WM more slowly than did less pessimistic individuals; levels of optimism/pessimism did not affect the rate with which individuals formed and broke connections among neutral representations in WM. It appears, therefore, that levels of pessimism are related to specific affective cognitive mechanisms in WM that may be involved in emotion regulation.     

Emotional reactivity and regulation in preschool-age children who stutter

Purpose.

This study experimentally investigated behavioral correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation and their relation to speech (dis)fluency in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not (CWNS) stutter during emotion-eliciting conditions.

Method.

Participants (18 CWS, 14 boys; 18 CWNS, 14 boys) completed two experimental tasks (1) a neutral (“apples and leaves in a transparent box,” ALTB) and (2) a frustrating (“attractive toy in a transparent box,” ATTB) task, both of which were followed by a narrative task. Dependent measures were emotional reactivity (positive affect, negative affect), emotion regulation (self-speech, distraction) exhibited during the ALTB and the ATTB tasks, percentage of stuttered disfluencies (SDs) and percentage of non-stuttered disfluencies (NSDs) produced during the narratives.

Results.

Results indicated that preschool-age CWS exhibited significantly more negative emotion and more self-speech than preschool-age CWNS. For CWS only, emotion regulation behaviors (i.e., distraction, self-speech) during the experimental tasks were predictive of stuttered disfluencies during the subsequent narrative tasks. Furthermore, for CWS there was no relation between emotional processes and non-stuttered disfluencies, but CWNS's negative affect was significantly related to nonstuttered disfluencies.

Conclusions.

In general, present findings support the notion that emotional processes are associated with childhood stuttering. Specifically, findings are consistent with the notion that preschool-age CWS are more emotionally reactive than CWNS and that their self-speech regulatory attempts may be less than effective in modulating their emotions.Educational objectives. The reader will be able to: (a) communicate the relevance of studying the role of emotion in developmental stuttering close to the onset of stuttering and (b) describe the main findings of the present study in relation to previous studies that have used different methodologies to investigate the role of emotion in developmental stuttering of young children who stutter.     

Suicidal Behavior and Problems with Emotion Regulation

We examined in two independent samples whether: (1) difficulties with emotion regulation predict suicide ideation and (2) depressed adults with a history of attempting suicide report and exhibit more emotion dysregulation compared to healthy and depressed controls. Difficulties with emotional clarity and relationship status were significant predictors of suicide ideation (Study 1). In Study 2, when compared to controls, depressed attempters reported significantly more difficulties with emotional clarity and emotional impulsivity. Attempters had significantly more difficulty than controls returning to heart rate baseline following a stressful task. Problems with emotions are therefore differentially connected to suicidal behaviors.     

The relation between emotion regulation choice and posttraumatic growth

ABSTRACT

Previous research has examined emotion regulation (ER) and trauma in the context of psychopathology, yet little research has examined ER in posttraumatic growth (PTG), the experience of positive psychological change following a traumatic event. ER typically involves decreasing negative affect by engaging (e.g. reappraisal) or disengaging (e.g. distraction) with emotional content. To investigate how ER may support PTG, participants who experienced a traumatic event in the past 6 months completed a PTG questionnaire and an ER choice task in which they down regulated their negative emotion in response to negative pictures of varying intensity by choosing to distract or reappraise. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that an increase in reappraisal choice from low to high subjective stimulus intensity predicted higher PTG, suggesting that individuals who chose reappraisal more as intensity increased reported higher PTG. Findings suggest that reappraisal of negative stimuli following a traumatic event may be a key component of PTG.