Personality and mental time travel: a differential approach to autonoetic consciousness

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel (MTT). Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future.     

The development and coherence of future-oriented behaviors during the preschool years

Although previous research has identified a number of interesting aspects of future thinking in adults, little is known about the developmental trajectory and coherence of future-oriented behaviors during early childhood. The primary goal of this study was to explore these issues by administering a battery of tasks assessing different aspects of future thinking, including mental time travel, delay of gratification, planning, and prospective memory, to 72 preschoolers. Results revealed that performance on all of the tasks increased significantly between 3 and 5 years of age. Although most tasks were correlated, suggesting “behavioral” coherence, many of these significant correlations dropped out once age and receptive vocabulary were controlled. These results are discussed with respect to theories about, and measurement of, future orientation.     

The face of chauvinism: How prejudice expectations shape perceptions of facial affect

Are individuals who chronically expect to be treated prejudicially biased toward perceiving rejecting emotions in the faces of out-group others? In two studies, participants watched a series of computer-generated movies showing animated faces morphing from expressions of rejection (i.e., contempt and anger) to acceptance, and indicated when the initial expression of rejection changed. We also assessed stigma consciousness. Study 1 tested the connection between gender-based stigma consciousness and perceptions of contempt in male vs. female faces among female participants. Study 2 examined this connection for both men and women and for perceptions of contempt as well as anger. Results show that prejudice expectations lead individuals to interpret out-group faces as more rejecting than in-group faces, but only for female perceivers, and not for males. Further, our results suggest that prejudice expectations affect perceptions of contempt, but not anger. These results are discussed in relation to intergroup relations and emotion.     

The future is here: A review of foresight systems in anxiety and depression

Cognitive models of anxiety and depression have long suggested a central role for future-oriented thinking in these disorders. Experimental studies suggest that anxiety and depression are characterised by distinct future-oriented thinking profiles, and that these profiles are markedly different from those of asymptomatic adults. In this paper, we review these profiles and propose two explanatory models marked by two different neurocognitive systems. The Reconstructive Memory Model emphasises a role for emotionally driven learning and retrieval in episodic foresight (i.e., the construction of future-oriented scenarios), and the Valuation Model proposes that an overweighing of risk and uncertainty estimates can be invoked to explain the future-oriented thought patterns. We consider the effectiveness of interventions aimed at altering such thought patterns. We suggest that future research aimed at elucidating the neurobiological underpinnings of future-oriented thinking in anxiety and depression can play an important role in advancing development of effective biological and psychosocial interventions for these disorders.     

Brief Report The coherence of emotion systems: Comparing “on‐line” measures of appraisal and facial expressions,and self‐report

Recently, investigators have challenged long‐standing assumptions that facial expressions of emotion follow specific emotion‐eliciting events and relate to other emotion‐specific responses. We address these challenges by comparing spontaneous facial expressions of anger, sadness, laughter, and smiling with concurrent, “on‐line” appraisal themes from narrative data, and by examining whether coherence between facial and appraisal components were associated with increased experience of emotion. Consistent with claims that emotion systems are loosely coupled, facial expressions of anger and sadness co‐occurred to a moderate degree with the expected appraisal themes, and when this happened, the experience of emotion was stronger. The results for the positive emotions were more complex, but lend credence to the hypothesis that laughter and smiling are distinct. Smiling co‐occurred with appraisals of pride, but never occurred with appraisals of anger. In contrast, laughter occurred more often with appraisals of anger, a finding consistent with recent evidence linking laughter to the dissociation or undoing of negative emotion.     

Losing control in front of a fearful face: The effect of emotional information on cognitive control

How is our cognitive control system modulated by emotional information, especially fearful stimuli? An intuitive hypothesis is that fearful stimuli would enhance cognitive control so that people could switch from the ongoing task to emergent events more quickly to secure themselves. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the influence of emotional information on the shift function of cognitive control by using the task-cueing procedure, in which face images were presented as cues. With the gender of faces indicating which task to do, we manipulated the emotional valence of faces (neutral vs. fearful), finding that the switch costs were larger in the trials containing fearful cues than in the trials containing neutral cues (Experiment 1). This effect was not caused by enlarging task-set interference (Experiment 2), nor by slowing down cue encoding (Experiment 3). Contrary to the intuitive hypothesis, our results suggested that the endogenous task-set reconfiguration process was impaired when fearful faces were presented. We speculated that the benefit of decreasing cognitive flexibility in face of fearful stimuli is to speed up response in a dangerous environment, and this accelerating response is achieved by suppressing the goal-directed system to permit the fast, automatic stimulus-driven system to govern behaviours.     

Personality styles in a non-clinical sample: The role of emotion dysregulation and impulsivity

Theories of personality and personality disorders are increasingly considering the centrality of emotion regulation and its dimensions. Impulsivity as well is recognized as a personality trait underlying diverse symptom presentations. Although research in this field has mainly regarded borderline personality disorder, recent studies supported the association of both emotion dysregulation and impulsivity with personality styles across all clusters. In the present study, we sought to extend extant research by investigating the joint contribution of selected difficulties in emotion regulation and impulsivity to traits of four personality styles in a community sample (N = 399, mean age = 37.91, 56.6% males). In particular, we focused on depressive, masochistic, passive-aggressive and sadistic personality styles. Multiple regression analyses showed the unique association of several domains of emotion dysregulation with all personality styles examined. Nonacceptance of emotional response was significantly and positively related with scores of all personality styles. Lack of emotional awareness was also characteristic of different styles. Beyond these similarities, distinct patterns were able to distinguish between externalizing (sadistic and passive-aggressive), and internalizing (depressive and masochistic) traits. Beyond the role of emotion dysregulation, trait impulsivity was also related to masochistic, passive-aggressive, and sadistic traits, independently explaining a significant amount of additional variance.     

Chimpanzee (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan troglodytes</Emphasis>) and orangutan (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pongo abelii</Emphasis>) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use

Planning for future needs has traditionally been considered to be restricted to human cognition. Although recent studies on great ape and corvid cognition challenge this belief, the phylogenesis of human planning remains largely unknown. The complex skill for future planning has not yet been satisfactorily established in any other extant primate species than our own. In humans, planning for future needs rely heavily on two overarching capacities, both of which lie at the heart of our cognition: self-control, often defined as the suppression of immediate drives in favor of delayed rewards, and mental time travel, which could be described as a detached mental experience of a past or future event. Future planning is linked to additional high complexity cognition such as metacognition and a consciousness usually not attributed to animals. In a series of four experiments based on tool use, we demonstrate that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo abelii) override immediate drives in favor of future needs, and they do not merely rely on associative learning or semantic prospection when confronted with a planning task. These results suggest that great apes engage in planning for the future by out competing current drives and mentally pre-experiencing an upcoming event. This suggests that the advanced mental capacities utilized in human future planning are shared by phylogenetically more ancient species than previously believed.     

Mental rotation of cubes with a snake face: The role of the human-body analogy revisited

ABSTRACT

Previous research has demonstrated repeatedly that the mental rotation of human-like objects can be performed more quickly than the mental rotation of abstract objects (a body analogy effect). According to existing accounts, the body analogy effect is mediated by projections of one’s own body axes onto objects (spatial embodiment), and the mental emulation of the observed body posture (motoric embodiment). To test whether motoric embodiment facilitates the mental rotation of human-like objects, we conducted an experiment using a snake-like object that had its own body axes but would be difficult to emulate. Twenty-four participants performed the mental rotation of snake-shaped cubes with or without a snake face as well as human-shaped cubes with or without a human face. Results showed that the presence of a face increased mental rotation speeds for both human-shaped and snake-shaped cubes, confirming both the human-body and snake analogy effects. More importantly, the snake analogy effect was equal to the human-body analogy effect. These findings contradict the motoric embodiment account and suggest that any object that can be regarded as a unit facilitates holistic mental rotation, which in turn leads to improved performance.     

Mental time travel after trauma: The specificity and temporal distribution of autobiographical memories and future-directed thoughts

The present study investigated the relationship between trauma exposure and specificity and temporal distribution of autobiographical memories and future-directed thoughts. A group of sexual assault victims were compared with women without previous trauma exposure in relation to specificity of autobiographical memories, as measured by the Autobiographical Memory Task (AMT) and specificity of future-directed thoughts as measured by the Future Cueing Task (FCT). The temporal distribution of future-directed thoughts and autobiographical memories was studied by asking the participants to estimate when each memory reported on the AMT had occurred and when each future event reported on the FCT would occur. The results showed no difference between the trauma group and the controls on specificity of autobiographical memories and future-directed thoughts. In line with a review of Moore and Zoellner (2007), PTSD symptoms as measured by the Impact of Event Scale (IES) correlated negatively with specificity. Furthermore, we observed no difference in temporal distribution of future-directed thoughts or autobiographical memories between trauma exposed participants and controls.     

The role of inhibitory control and ADHD symptoms in the occurrence of involuntary thoughts about the past and future: An individual differences study

In everyday life, people often experience involuntary thoughts about their personal past and future events in response to incidental cues in the environment. Yet, despite the abundance of such cues, our consciousness is not constantly flooded by these involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and involuntary future thoughts (IFTs). The main goal of the present study was to further investigate the possibility that cognitive inhibitory control keeps these involuntary cognitions at bay. To test this inhibition hypothesis, we conducted a large-scale study (n = 157) in which groups of participants with different levels of inhibitory control (low, medium, high) and individuals with ADHD spectrum symptoms were engaged in a laboratory vigilance task in which the frequency of IFTs and IAMs was assessed. Contrary to predictions, although participants across groups differed significantly in terms of their individual inhibitory control capacity, the number of IFTs and IAMs reported during the vigilance task was comparable. In addition, individuals with the ADHD spectrum symptoms did not report more spontaneous thoughts compared to other groups. Together, these findings lend little support for the idea that inhibition is a key mechanism that regulates the occurrence of IAMs and IFTs in everyday life. Other possible mechanisms and avenues for future research are discussed.