Can blindsight be superior to 'sighted-sight'?

DB, the first blindsight case to be tested extensively (Weiskrantz, 1986) has demonstrated the ability to detect and discriminate a range of visual stimuli presented within his perimetrically blind visual field defect. In a temporal two alternative forced choice (2AFC) detection experiment we have investigated the limits of DB's detection ability within his field defect. Blind field performance was compared to his sighted field performance and to an age-matched control group (n=6). DB reliably detected the presence of a small (2 degrees ), low contrast (7%), 4.6c/ degrees Gabor patch with the same space-averaged luminance as the background presented within his blind field but performed at chance levels at the same eccentricity (11.3 degrees ) within his sighted field. Investigation of detection as a function of stimulus contrast revealed DB's ability to detect the presence of an 8% contrast stimulus within his blind field, compared to 12% in his sighted field. No significant difference in detection performance between DB's sighted field and the performance of six age-matched control participants suggests poor sighted field performance does not account for the results. Monocular testing also rules out differences between the eyes as an explanation, suggesting that DB demonstrates superior detection for certain stimuli within his visual field defect compared to normal vision.     

Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition?

A recent study by Keysar, Hayakawa, and An (2012) suggests that “thinking in a foreign language” may reduce decision biases because a foreign language provides a greater emotional distance than a native tongue. The possibility of such “disembodied” cognition is of great interest for theories of affect and cognition and for many other areas of psychological theory and practice, from clinical and forensic psychology to marketing, but first this claim needs to be properly evaluated. The purpose of this review is to examine the findings of clinical, introspective, cognitive, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies of affective processing in bilingual speakers in order to identify converging patterns of results, to evaluate the claim about “disembodied cognition,” and to outline directions for future inquiry. The findings to date reveal two interrelated processing effects. First‐language (L1) advantage refers to increased automaticity of affective processing in the L1 and heightened electrodermal reactivity to L1 emotion‐laden words. Second‐language (L2) advantage refers to decreased automaticity of affective processing in the L2, which reduces interference effects and lowers electrodermal reactivity to negative emotional stimuli. The differences in L1 and L2 affective processing suggest that in some bilingual speakers, in particular late bilinguals and foreign language users, respective languages may be differentially embodied, with the later learned language processed semantically but not affectively. This difference accounts for the reduction of framing biases in L2 processing in the study by Keysar et al. (2012). The follow‐up discussion identifies the limits of the findings to date in terms of participant populations, levels of processing, and types of stimuli, puts forth alternative explanations of the documented effects, and articulates predictions to be tested in future research.     

Mere ownership: Affective self-bias or evaluative conditioning?

Experimental evidence is presented supporting Nuttin's (1985, 1987) conclusion that the name letter effect (i.e. a preference for letters occurring in the own name above not-own name letters) is an affective consequence of mere ownership. We argue that ‘evaluative conditioning’ (e.g. Martin & Levey, 1987) was not fully eradicated by Hoorens (1990) as an alternative explanation for the name letter effect. In the present experiment, we tried to separate evaluative conditioning from ownership induction. An essential requirement for ‘mere’ ownership postulated by Nuttin (1987) is that the preferences for owned versus noi-owned objects are measured or obtained in absence of subjects' awareness of their belongingness to self. This criterion was perhaps not fully satisfied. However, our results are more in agreement with the mere ownership view than with an account solely based on evaluative conditioning. The mere ownership effect (i.e. a preference for any object belonging to the self above any similar object belonging to another) is described as disclosing a purely affective self-bias.     

Praise or blame? Affective influences on attributions for achievement

Three experiments showed that mood influences achievement attributions and that cognitive processes underlie these effects. In Experiment 1, happy Ss made more internal and stable attributions for success than failure in typical 'life dilemmas'. In Experiment 2, attributions for real-life exam performance were more internal and stable in a happy than in a sad mood. Dysphoric moods resulted in self-critical rather than self-enhancing attributions, contrary to motivational theories, but consistent with cognitive models and the clinical literature on depression. In Experiment 3 this pattern was repeated with direct self vs. other comparisons, and for self-efficacy judgements. The results are interpreted as supporting cognitive rather than motivational theories of attribution biases. The implications of the results for clinical research, and contemporary affect-cognition theories are considered.     

Does Regulating Others' Feelings Influence People's Own Affective Well-Being?

ABSTRACT

Individuals in a variety of social contexts try to regulate other people's feelings, but how does this process affect the regulators themselves? This research aimed to establish a relationship between people's use of interpersonal affect regulation and their own affective well-being. In a field study, self- and other-reported data were collected from prisoners and staff members in a therapeutic prison using two surveys separated in time. In a laboratory study, a student sample reported their affect before and after attempting to influence the feelings of talent show contestants in a role-play task. The results of both studies indicated congruent associations between the use of affect-improving and affect-worsening interpersonal affect regulation and strategy agents' affective well-being. Our findings highlight that, when performing interpersonal affect regulation, people may not be immune from the effects of their own actions.     

Reducing Affective Polarization: Warm Group Relations or Policy Compromise?

Hostility between rival political partisans, referred to as affective polarization, has increased in the United States over the last several decades generating considerable interest in its reduction. The current study examines two distinct sets of factors that potentially reduce affective polarization, drawn respectively from a group-based and a policy-based model of its origins. Specifically, we contrast the degree to which warm social relations and policy compromise reduce affective polarization. In two experimental studies (N = 937), respondents read a mock news story about an observed interaction between Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader, and Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader. The leaders either interact in a warm or hostile manner and independently compromise, or fail to compromise, on immigration matters. In both studies, warm leader relations reduced affective polarization whereas policy compromise did not. We consider the implications of these findings for the study of affective polarization and its reduction.     

Does sunshine prime loyal? Affective priming in the naming task

Recent work has found an affective priming effect using the naming task: In pronouncing target words, pronunciation latencies were consistently shorter when the target (e.g., loyal) was preceded by an evaluatively congruent (e.g., sunshine) rather than incongruent prime word (e.g, rain). Using the naming task, no affective priming was found in the present studies irrespective of prime-set size and target-set size (Experiment 1), irrespective of stimulus-onset asynchrony (Experiment 2), and even when a nearly exact replication of previous work that demonstrated the effect was conducted (Experiment 3). Finally, bilingual German/English speakers exhibited strong associative priming, but no affective priming, in both the English as well as the German language (Experiment 4). The results show that priming for evaluatively related words is not a general finding.     

Is the Divide a Chasm?: Bridging Affective Science with Clinical Practice

This special section endeavors to facilitate the integration of biologically-based assessments of emotion into the clinical setting. This goal is consistent with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative, which aims to identify transdiagnostic biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie mental disorders. We focus on four challenges to applying biologically-informed research on emotion and emotion regulation to clinical contexts: (1) How do we assess emotion in an RDoC framework? (2) How do we integrate measures of emotion with other systems in a wider context? (3) What do physiological indices of emotion tell us about clinical phenomena? and (4) How do we integrate physiological assessments into clinical practice? Throughout this comment, we refer to the articles in this special section to make our points, and, when possible, offer suggestions for future work to continue to address these challenges.     

The Virtue Blind Spot: Do Affective Forecasting Errors Undermine Virtuous Behavior?

Why is it difficult to be virtuous? Although cultural wisdom teaches that cultivating virtue brings happiness—and empirical studies have demonstrated the long‐term benefits of acting virtuously—many people seem to behave as though exercising virtues is difficult, or even painful. When it comes to virtue, any benefits for the self may seem distant: short‐term pain for long‐term gain. We propose, however, that behaving virtuously often provides affective benefits even in the short term, but these benefits are obscured by systematic affective forecasting errors. Using five virtues (humanity, wisdom, courage, temperance, and transcendence), we demonstrate that people tend to feel happier after acting virtuously. We also show that people do not realize that these short‐term emotional benefits will occur; when asked to predict how they will feel, people make inaccurate affective forecasts. We argue that these affective forecasting errors drive people away from the exercise of virtue.     

Affective matching moderates S–R binding

We investigated the moderating influence of affective matching on S–R binding processes in a sequential priming study in which positive and negative nouns had to be categorised as referring to a person or to an object. Irrelevant positive and negative distractor words (adjectives) were integrated with responses into S–R episodes if they had the same valence as the target (affective match condition). In this case, repeating the prime distractor in the probe led to a retrieval of the prime response, which facilitated performance for response repetition sequences but had no effect on performance when responses changed between prime and probe. However, if target and distractor had different valences (affective mismatch condition), no interaction of distractor relation and response relation occurred, indicating that distractors were less likely to be associated with responses into event files during the prime trial episode. Findings reveal that affective mismatches are detected automatically and modulate a binding of irrelevant information with responses.     

Individual Differences in Affective Priming Effects: Any Links with Personality and Trait Affectivity?

Processing tendencies refer to individual differences in the automatic processing of affective stimuli. Using the affective priming paradigm one can tap these processing tendencies and differentiate positive and negative affective priming scores. In this study we used a classical evaluative decision task with nouns as primes and adjectives as targets to assess individual differences in positive and negative affective priming in two time points. Using Steyer’s (Steyer et al. in Methods of Psychological Research Online 2(1), 21–33, 1997) true intraindividual change modeling approach, the positive and negative priming scores were defined on a latent level. No significant relationships were found between positive affective priming and trait positive affect nor extraversion, as well as between negative affective priming and trait negative affect and neuroticism. As these findings are not in line with previous research (Robinson et al. in Emotion 10(5), 615–626, 2010; Robinson et al. in Personality and Individual Differences 42(7), 1221–1231, 2007) possible moderating influences are discussed.     

On the Edge of Reason? Armed Robbery,Affective Transgression,and Bounded Rationality

Based on interviews with convicted armed robbers, this article presents their self-reported motivations. Aside from anticipated monetary reward, some of the distinctive foreground qualities of armed robbery, including hedonic thrills, fear arousal and control are revealed. The concept of “crime as defibrillation” is introduced to account for the sensory surge craved by these men to counter a life of systematic structural exclusion, dysphoria, and lack of prospect. Suffering from sensory asystole, it is only the most extreme and risky behavior, in the form of serious violent crime, that can revive a life otherwise flatlining and out of control.     

Can happy mood reduce the just world bias? Affective influences on blaming the victim

Do temporary moods influence people's tendency to blame victims for undeserved negative events? Based on research on the just world effect and recent affect theories, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood decreased and negative mood increased people's motivation to blame innocent victims for their misadventures. Participants (N = 70) were induced into positive or negative mood by viewing films, and subsequently read a newspaper article describing a random assault on either a fellow student (in-group member) or a corporate employee (out-group member). Their reactions were assessed on three measures: attributions of responsibility, dissociation from the victim and character evaluations. Positive mood reduced and negative mood increased the tendency to blame the victim, and in-group victims were blamed more than out-group victims. These results are discussed in terms of recent theories of affect and motivation, and their implications for real-life social judgments are considered.     

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Can temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social event. Experiments 2 and 3 further confirmed that mood influenced communication strategies, and not merely the encoding (Exp. 2) and retrieval (Exp. 3) of the relevant information. These findings are consistent with affect–cognition theories predicting that positive affect promotes a more internally focused and assimilative thinking and communication style, and negative mood promotes more externally focused and accommodative thinking, resulting in the closer observance of communication norms. The relevance of these findings for recent affect/cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the results for everyday conversational strategies are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is Expressed Emotion an Index of a Transactional Process? I. Parents' Affective Style

The degree to which expressed emotion (EE) attitudes in key relatives reflect ongoing transactional processes in families is a topic of controversy. The associations between EE attitudes, as measured during an acute hospitalization (using the Camberwell Family Interview) and during the aftercare period (using 5-minute speech samples), and interactional behavior in parents of recent-onset schizophrenics (this article) and in patients themselves (second article), were investigated. In the first study, EE attitudes manifested by parents during the aftercare period were stronger correlates of their interactional behaviors during the aftercare period than were EE attitudes measured during the inpatient period, despite the frequent correspondence between the two EE measures. The pattern of attitudes shown between the inpatient and outpatient periods also predicted transactional styles in parents during the outpatient period, findings not accounted for by clinical attributes of patients. When high-EE attitudes persist during the aftercare period and are reflected in transactional behaviors, the risk for subsequent patient relapse may be enhanced.     

Do We Know How Happy We Are? On Some Limits of Affective Introspection and Recall

This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self‐assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are unable to discern them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block's controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self‐reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways.     

Affective and normative commitment to organization, supervisor, and coworkers: Do collectivist values matter?

Employees’ commitment to their organization is increasingly recognized as comprising of different bases (affect-, obligation-, or cost-based) and different foci (e.g., supervisor, coworkers). Two studies investigated affective and normative commitment to the organization, supervisor and coworkers in the Turkish context. The results of Study 1 confirmed that employees differentiate between affect versus obligation-based commitment towards the organization, supervisor and coworkers. Study 2 tested the “cultural hypothesis” which argues for the moderating influence of collectivistic values on the relationship between person (local) commitments and organizational-level (global) outcomes. The results failed to support the cultural hypothesis and showed that commitment to organization was predictive of organizational-level outcomes (e.g., turnover intentions), and commitment to supervisor was predictive of supervisor-related outcomes (e.g., citizenship towards supervisor). These findings suggest that the influence of culture may be less straightforward and may require a more sophisticated measurement of the nature of relationships and organizational characteristics in general.