Mood effects on attentional control: a preregistered replication study and critical analysis

In a widely cited paper, Jefferies et al. (2008) report a study in which they manipulated participants’ mood and examined the effects of this manipulation on their performance on the Attentional Blink task. Their results revealed an interaction between emotional valence and arousal: attentional control of participants who experienced a negative mood with low arousal (i.e. sadness) was best, whereas it was worst for participants who experienced a negative mood with high arousal (i.e. anxiety). Performance for participants who were in a positive mood, either with low arousal (i.e. calmness) or high arousal (i.e. happiness) had intermediate scores. In this study, I examined the replicability of this effect and performed additional analyses to investigate the extent to which this effect is due to perceptual or attentional processes and to examine the role of distraction on AB performance. Importantly, the results showed that the crucial interaction between emotional valence and arousal did not reach significance. This could be due a diversity of factors that are addressed in the discussion.     

Alcohol, sexual arousal, and intentions to use condoms in young men: applying alcohol myopia theory to risky sexual behavior.

Data from 7 studies were aggregated to examine how reported sexual arousal and alcohol intoxication interact to affect attitudes and intentions toward engaging in unprotected sexual intercourse in college-age men (N = 358). When participants were in a sober or placebo condition, their self-reports of sexual arousal had no effect on their responses. When participants were intoxicated, however, those who felt sexually aroused reported more favorable attitudes, thoughts, and intentions toward having unprotected sex than did those who did not feel aroused. These findings support alcohol myopia theory (C. M. Steele & R. A. Josephs, 1990), which states that alcohol intoxication restricts attentional capacity so that people are highly influenced by the most salient cues in their environment. It is suggested that sexual arousal is a powerful internal cue that interacts with alcohol intoxication to enhance attitudes and intentions toward risky sexual behaviors.     

Swinging into thought: Directed movement guides insight in problem solving

Can directed actions unconsciously influence higher order cognitive processing? We investigated how movement interventions affected participants’ ability to solve a classic insight problem. The participants attempted to solve Maier’s two-string problem while occasionally taking exercise breaks during which they moved their arms either in a manner related to the problem’s solution (swing group) or in a manner inconsistent with the solution (stretch group). Although most of the participants were unaware of the relationship between their arm movement exercises and the problem-solving task, the participants who moved their arms in a manner that suggested the problem’s solution were more likely to solve the problem than were those who moved their arms in other ways. Consistent with embodied theories of cognition, these findings show that actions influence thought and, furthermore, that we can implicitly guide people toward insight by directing their actions.     

Using Implementation Intentions in Shopping Situations: How Arousal Can Help Shield Consumers Against Temptation

Previous research has suggested that individuals who repeatedly experience self‐regulatory failure in purchasing behaviour have trouble shielding themselves against temptations. Because shopping is often accompanied by increased arousal, we examined whether attending to affective arousal could help people keep their attention focused. Before participants completed a visual distraction task embedded in a shopping context, we (i) instructed them to formulate an implementation intention with affective arousal as the eliciting cue and concentrating on the task as the intention; (ii) instructed them to formulate the goal intention of concentrating on the task without mentioning an eliciting cue; or (iii) gave them no further instructions. During the task, we recorded eye movements to measure the time they looked at the target products. The findings suggest that implementation intentions with affective arousal as an eliciting cue enable consumers who repeatedly perceive self‐regulatory failure to focus their attention on their initial shopping goal. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Fears of Evaluation About Performance (FEAP) Task: Inducing Anxiety-Related Responses to Direct Exposure to Negative and Positive Evaluations

Fears of negative and positive evaluation (i.e., evaluative fears) manifest within performance-based situations (e.g., public speaking, group presentations), particularly among those experiencing social anxiety. Within these performance-based situations, individuals experiencing such evaluative fears frequently display a variety of impairments (e.g., avoidance, nervousness) that might manifest within and across various settings (e.g., employment, school). How do those who experience these fears react to in-the-moment feedback about their performance? We constructed the Fear of Evaluation About Performance (FEAP) task to examine ecologically valid experiences with anxiety when reacting to positive and negative feedback. During the task, participants gave a speech, and subsequent to this and in counterbalanced order, received positive and negative feedback about their speech, with continued assessment of anxiety-related arousal throughout the task. We tested the FEAP task among 127 adults, who provided self-reports of fears of positive and negative evaluation before completing the task. Fears of positive evaluation uniquely predicted arousal following receipt of positive feedback, whereas fears of negative evaluation uniquely predicted arousal following receipt of negative feedback. Relative to participants receiving positive feedback first, those receiving negative feedback first experienced elevated post-feedback arousal, followed by a steep decline in arousal post-positive feedback. Conversely, participants receiving positive feedback first experienced a buffer effect whereby arousal post-negative feedback remained low, relative to the arousal experienced post-negative feedback among those who received negative feedback first. We expect the FEAP task to inform basic science on fears of negative and positive evaluation, as well as treatment planning in applied clinical settings.     

暴力电子游戏的短期脱敏效应：两种接触方式比较

比较主、被动接触暴力电子游戏的脱敏效应,以44名男性大学生为被试,利用生物反馈仪测量被试主动参与游戏或被动观看游戏录像前后,及随后观看暴力视频过程中皮电与心率的变化（脱敏效应的生理指标）。结果表明：（1）暴力电子游戏可以产生脱敏效应。接触游戏15分钟后,暴力游戏组观看暴力视频过程中皮电的增加值明显小于非暴力游戏组;（2）游戏的接触方式对于脱敏效应的程度无显著影响,但主动参与组对于游戏内容知觉到更高的愉快与更低的沮丧     

BRIEF REPORT Functional and dysfunctional feelings in Ellis' cognitive theory of emotion: An empirical analysis

This study is to our knowledge the first to investigate how rational and irrational beliefs (RBs and IBs) generate qualitatively different feelings/emotions based on the same physiological arousal when the immediate environment is devoid of relevant cues. Participants in this study (N = 120) were evaluated for and primed with rational or irrational beliefs. Next, they exercised or sat still, and either immediately or after a delay, rated their emotional state. Consistent with the bifactorial theory of emotion and with Ellis' cognitive theory of emotion, participants in the exercise delayed‐rating condition, who lacked an obvious explanation for their residual arousal, interpreted their arousal in terms of primed beliefs. RBs were associated with positive emotions, while IBs were associated with dysfunctional negative emotions and their corresponding functional negative emotions (e.g., both depressed and sad). Participants in the exercise immediate‐rating condition and those in the no‐exercise condition were not influenced by their primed beliefs. Implications for Ellis' cognitive theory of emotion are discussed.     

Upbeat and happy: Arousal as an important factor in studying attention

The present study examined the effects of music-induced mood changes on different components of visual attention. Affective valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high vs. low) were manipulated by having participants listen to one of four versions of a Mozart Sonata that varied in mode (major or minor) and tempo (fast or slow). Attention was measured in three domains—alerting, orienting, and executive control. Affective valence and arousal had an effect on executive control, but not on alerting or orienting. Individuals who experienced positive valence had less efficient control over their responses than those who experienced negative valence, but only when arousal levels were high. Positive and negative valence did not influence executive control measures when arousal levels were low. These findings demonstrate that affective valence and arousal interact with one another to influence the processing of items in visual attention.     

Upbeat and happy: arousal as an important factor in studying attention

The present study examined the effects of music-induced mood changes on different components of visual attention. Affective valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high vs. low) were manipulated by having participants listen to one of four versions of a Mozart Sonata that varied in mode (major or minor) and tempo (fast or slow). Attention was measured in three domains-alerting, orienting, and executive control. Affective valence and arousal had an effect on executive control, but not on alerting or orienting. Individuals who experienced positive valence had less efficient control over their responses than those who experienced negative valence, but only when arousal levels were high. Positive and negative valence did not influence executive control measures when arousal levels were low. These findings demonstrate that affective valence and arousal interact with one another to influence the processing of items in visual attention.     

Superior perception of phasic physiological arousal and the detrimental consequences of the conviction to be aroused on worrying and metacognitions in GAD

Although people suffering from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) often report arousal symptoms, psychophysiological studies show no evidence of autonomic hyperarousal. Hypersensitivity toward and catastrophic interpretation of phasic arousal cues may explain this discrepancy. The authors tested (a) whether GAD sufferers perceive nonspecific skin conductance fluctuations (NSCFs), an indicator of phasic autonomic arousal, better than controls do and (b) whether the conviction to be aroused contributes to the maintenance of worrying and metacognitive beliefs about worrying. Thirty-three GAD sufferers and 34 healthy controls participated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to detect their own NSCFs during a signal detection task. GAD sufferers accurately detected more of their NSCFs than did controls, who tended to miss NSCFs. In Experiment 2, participants were instructed to relax following worry induction. While relaxing, they received nonveridical feedback indicating either arousal or relaxation. Arousal feedback conserved negative metacognitive beliefs regarding worrying and also maintained negative mood and worry exclusively in GAD participants. These findings suggest that superior perception of phasic arousal cues and their catastrophic misinterpretation increases worrying, negative metacognitive beliefs about worrying, and anxious mood in GAD.     

Situational factors and personality traits as determinants of college students’ mood

In the present study we measured three dimensions of mood (energetic arousal, tense arousal, and hedonic tone) using a student sample in six academic situations. The first three measurements took place during neutral lectures, the fourth and fifth before and after an exam, respectively, and the last during the two weeks after the exam when students’ grades were announced. Moreover, we also measured students’ personality traits according to the five factor model. The study revealed a few significant results. First, each mood dimension had different dynamics during the semester. Second, the most consistent personality predictors of mood were neuroticism (positive relationship with tense arousal and negative with hedonic tone) and conscientiousness (positive association with energetic arousal). Moreover, the results showed different relationships between tense and energetic arousals across situations, with the weakest association being before an exam.     

Gender and Self-Reported Sexual Arousal in Response to Sexual Stimuli: A Meta-Analytic Review

Social constructionist theories and sociobiological perspectives have led to increased interest in gender differences in sexual behavior. This study involved a meta-analysis of gender differences in sexual arousal in response to sexual stimuli. Forty-six studies in which participants were presented with a sexual stimulus depicting males and females and in which participants responded using a self-report measure of arousal were compiled, and 62 independent effect sizes were aggregated. An overall effect size of d = .31 showed a small to moderate-sized gender difference in sexual arousal with men reporting more arousal than women across all studies. There was significant variation in the effect sizes, though, which was only partially explained by variables coded from the studies. It was found that the gender difference was slightly larger for studies using pornographic vs. erotic stimuli, was larger for studies where participants were tested in a private setting or small group compared to a large group, and was much larger for college age participants compared to those who were older than college age. Generally, the pattern of results provided more support for predictions from social influence theories compared to sociobiological theory.     

Mind over matter: reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress

Researchers have theorized that changing the way we think about our bodily responses can improve our physiological and cognitive reactions to stressful events. However, the underlying processes through which mental states improve downstream outcomes are not well understood. To this end, we examined whether reappraising stress-induced arousal could improve cardiovascular outcomes and decrease attentional bias for emotionally negative information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a reappraisal condition in which they were instructed to think about their physiological arousal during a stressful task as functional and adaptive, or to 1 of 2 control conditions: attention reorientation and no instructions. Relative to controls, participants instructed to reappraise their arousal exhibited more adaptive cardiovascular stress responses-increased cardiac efficiency and lower vascular resistance-and decreased attentional bias. Thus, reappraising arousal shows physiological and cognitive benefits. Implications for health and potential clinical applications are discussed.     

Emotions in reading: Disgust, empathy and the contextual learning hypothesis

Emotion effects in reading have typically been investigated by manipulating words' emotional valence and arousal in lexical decision. The standard finding is that valence and arousal can have both facilitatory and inhibitory effects, which is hard to reconcile with current theories of emotion processing in reading. Here, we contrasted these theories with the contextual-learning hypothesis, according to which, sensitivity to a specific emotion - disgust in the present study - rather than valence or arousal affects lexical decision performance. Participants were divided into two groups (high versus low disgust sensitivity). Results showed that participants with high disgust sensitivity showed an inhibitory effect, whereas participants with low-disgust sensitivity showed a facilitatory effect. Individual differences in lexical decision performance were predicted by disgust sensitivity but not valence, arousal, or general emotion sensitivity. These findings highlight the need to focus on individual differences both in studies and theories of emotion processing in reading.     

Musical preferences during and after relaxation and exercise

Effects of the listening context on responses to music largely have been neglected despite the prevalence of music listening in our everyday lives. This article reports 2 studies in which participants chose music of high or low arousal potential during (Experiment 1) or immediately after (Experiment 2) exercise or relaxation. In Experiment 1, participants preferred appropriate arousal-polarizing music over arousal-moderating music. In Experiment 2, participants preferred arousal-moderating music over arousal-polarizing music, such that their listening times contrasted clearly with those in the first study even though the same music and methods were used. Thus musical preferences interact with the listening situation, and participants' music selections represent an attempt to optimize their responses to that situation. When motivated to maintain a state of polarized arousal, listeners use music to achieve this; when they have no such goal, they use music to moderate arousal.     

Do Police Officers' Beliefs About Emotional Witnesses Influence the Questions They Ask?

High emotional arousal associated with witnessing a crime promotes memory error. Police are trained to use open‐ended questioning (i.e., Cognitive Interview) to guard against contaminating fragile witness memory, but do they follow this protocol? We investigated whether officers' belief about arousal's impact on crime scene memory influenced their questioning procedures. Officers read crime scenarios describing the witness/victim as either emotionally distraught or calm, and then they chose among open‐ended and close‐ended question options for witness interviews. Results showed that emotionally aroused witnesses were asked more closed questions by officers who believed arousal did not hurt memory, while officers who believed arousal negatively impacted memory accuracy asked more open‐ended questions. This relationship was not influenced by police experience. Results suggest that regardless of training and empirical findings, beliefs about the arousal–memory relationship may guide the questioning technique that officers employ, potentially contaminating already vulnerable witness memory. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How is physiological arousal related to self-reported measures of emotional intensity and valence of events and their autobiographical memories?

Research suggests that emotionally intense experiences that elicit higher-than-average physiological arousal responses lead to particularly durable and detailed autobiographical memories. Yet, the lack of objective measures of physiological arousal while events unfold in everyday life makes it hard to corroborate this lab finding. Also, it is uncertain how well arousal maps onto self-reports of the phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical events and memories. Here, we examined how physiological measures of arousal, taken while everyday life events develop, correlate with self-reports. Our results showed that physiological arousal during an event not only was related to self-evaluations of its assessed physical reaction —at the time of report—, but also predicted evaluations of physical reaction, positivity, and importance of their memories one week after. Further analyses revealed that, while arousal affected evaluations of emotional intensity of events and memories, this relationship was moderated by participants’ level of awareness about their own emotional processes.     

Brief,pre-retrieval stress differentially influences long-term memory depending on sex and corticosteroid response

Previous work has indicated that stress generally impairs memory retrieval. However, little research has addressed discrepancies that exist in this line of work and the factors that could explain why stress can exert differential effects on retrieval processes. Therefore, we examined the influence of brief, pre-retrieval stress that was administered immediately before testing on long-term memory in males and females. Participants learned a list of 42 words varying in emotional valence and arousal. Following the learning phase, participants were given an immediate free recall test. Twenty-four hours later, participants submerged their non-dominant hand in a bath of ice cold (Stress) or warm (No Stress) water for 3 min. Immediately following this manipulation, participants’ memory for the word list was assessed via free recall and recognition tests. We observed no group differences on short-term memory. However, male participants who showed a robust cortisol response to the stress exhibited enhanced long-term recognition memory, while male participants who demonstrated a blunted cortisol response to the stress exhibited impaired long-term recall and recognition memory. These findings suggest that the effects of brief, pre-retrieval stress on long-term memory are sex-specific and mediated by corticosteroid mechanisms.     

Media violence and the self: The impact of personalized gaming characters in aggressive video games on aggressive behavior

A recent development in video games is that players can design and personalize their own in-game characters. It was predicted that this innovation could lead to elevations in the intensity of the psychological effects of video games. The present study confirmed this hypothesis, revealing that participants who played an aggressive video game using their own, personalized character exhibited higher levels of aggressive behavior than participants who played an aggressive game with a non-personalized character. The aggressive behavior levels of the own-character players also exceeded those of individuals who played a non-aggressive game, regardless of whether or not they used a personalized character. Process analyses revealed that participants playing a violent video game with a personalized game character experienced more arousal and self-activation than they did when playing with an impersonal, default game character, which in turn increased aggressive responses.     

Hypervigilance to rejecting stimuli in rejection sensitive individuals: Behavioral and neurocognitive evidence

Individuals who are high in rejection sensitivity are vigilant toward social cues that signal rejection, and they exhibit attention biases towards information that confirms expectations of rejection. Little is known, however, about the neural correlates of rejection sensitivity. The present study examined whether rejection sensitivity is associated with individuals’ neural responses to rejection-relevant information. Female participants, classified as high or average in rejection sensitivity, completed a modified dot-probe task in which a neutral face was paired with either another neutral face or a gaze-averted (“rejecting”) face while EEG was collected and ERP components were computed. Behavioral results indicated that average rejection sensitive participants showed an attention bias away from rejecting faces, while high rejection sensitive participants were equally vigilant to neutral and rejecting faces. High rejection sensitivity was associated with ERP components signaling elevated attention and arousal to faces. These findings suggest that rejection sensitivity shapes behavioral and neurocognitive responses to faces.