The enduring impact of transient emotions on decision making

People often do not realize they are being influenced by an incidental emotional state. As a result, decisions based on a fleeting incidental emotion can become the basis for future decisions and hence outlive the original cause for the behavior (i.e., the emotion itself). Using a sequence of ultimatum and dictator games, we provide empirical evidence for the enduring impact of transient emotions on economic decision making. Behavioral consistency and false consensus are presented as potential underlying processes.     

厌恶和恐惧情绪对跨期选择的不同影响：基于ERP的研究

本研究运用事件相关电位技术(ERPs)考察厌恶和恐惧情绪对跨期选择的影响。其中,厌恶和恐惧情绪采用情绪面孔图片进行启动,分析跨期选择任务中评估阶段所诱发的ERP成分。行为结果发现,与中性面孔相比,厌恶面孔启动使个体倾向于选择立即奖赏。ERP结果发现,在选项评估阶段,厌恶面孔比中性和恐惧面孔启动诱发更大的P2、P3和LPP波幅。这说明,厌恶情绪促使个体投入更多的注意和动机资源对跨期选项进行评估,进而使个体倾向即时满足。     

厌恶和恐惧情绪对跨期选择的不同影响：基于ERP的研究

本研究运用事件相关电位技术(ERPs)考察厌恶和恐惧情绪对跨期选择的影响。其中,厌恶和恐惧情绪采用情绪面孔图片进行启动,分析跨期选择任务中评估阶段所诱发的ERP成分。行为结果发现,与中性面孔相比,厌恶面孔启动使个体倾向于选择立即奖赏。ERP结果发现,在选项评估阶段,厌恶面孔比中性和恐惧面孔启动诱发更大的P2、P3和LPP波幅。这说明,厌恶情绪促使个体投入更多的注意和动机资源对跨期选项进行评估,进而使个体倾向即时满足。     

Drawing mixed emotions: Sequential or simultaneous experiences?

With a view to measuring subjective experience of mixed emotions, we designed an Analogical Emotional Scale (AES). This scale permits the analysis of how, at the subjective level, the emotions evolve from the beginning to the end of the experience, allowing discrimination between simultaneous mixed emotional experiences (i.e., two emotions taking place at the same time) and sequential mixed emotional experiences (i.e., two emotions switching rapidly back and forth). In Study 1 we asked participants to recall a naturally occurring situation, in Study 2 we induced simple vs. mixed emotions in a controlled situation, and in Study 3 we manipulated the structure of emotional stimuli, sequential versus simultaneous. The results showed that the combined use of rating scales and the AES permits us to obtain a more accurate estimation of the actual presence of simultaneous mixed emotional experiences.     

Challenge and threat emotions as antecedents of recovery experiences: findings from a diary study with blue-collar workers

The aim of this study was (1) to investigate whether threat (e.g., anxiety, fear) and challenge (e.g., confidence, excitement) emotions that employees experience before work while thinking about the upcoming workday predict their recovery experiences (i.e., psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control) after work and (2) to explore the moderating role of job control on the effect of threat and challenge emotions on recovery experiences. For two to four weeks, 57 blue-collar workers at an airport’s hub station completed a diary. Multilevel analyses (N = 1104) reveal that threat emotions in the morning decrease psychological detachment and relaxation after work. Job control buffers this negative effect. Furthermore, challenge emotions in the morning boost mastery after work. Next, when employees have low job control, challenge emotions also boost the recovery experience control. Practical implications and the need for future studies to examine more fine-grained mechanisms for better understanding how threat and challenge emotions experienced before starting work affect recovery experiences after work are discussed.     

感激情绪的认知评估体系

本文从情绪认知理论的角度出发, 通过3个研究探究与感激情绪有关的认知评价维度, 进而建立感激情绪的认知评价体系。研究1使用回忆不同类型的情绪性事件法初步探究了感激情绪的认知评估体系; 研究2使用操作认知评估维度法探究了认知评价的变化对感激体验的影响; 研究3使用故事情境法分别从个体特质和情境因素的角度, 探究个体特质与感激情绪之间的关系如何受到个体认知评价的影响, 进而为感激情绪的评价体系提供更多的证据支持。研究1发现感激情绪体验与受关怀感、符合道德规范和他人负责性3个维度之间存在正相关关系。研究2发现3个认知评估维度体验的有无均会导致个体在感激情绪体验上出现显著差异。研究3表明感激特质可以预测个体的认知评价和感激情绪体验; 同时, 受关怀感、道德规范、他人负责3个认知评价维度在感激特质与感激情绪关系间起到中介作用。结论：3个研究结果表明, 受关怀感、道德规范、他人负责性3个认知评价维度与感激密切相关, 并在区分开感激与自豪、亏欠感等情绪中起重要作用。因此, 这3个认识评估维度共同组成了感激情绪认知评价体系。     

Effects of specific emotions on subjective judgment,driving performance,and perceived workload

The aim of this paper was to explore effects of specific emotions on subjective judgment, driving performance, and perceived workload. The traditional driving behavior research has focused on cognitive aspects such as attention, judgment, and decision making. Psychological findings have indicated that affective states also play a critical role in a user’s rational, functional, and intelligent behaviors. Most applied emotion research has concentrated on simple valence and arousal dimensions. However, recent findings have indicated that different emotions may have different impacts, even though they belong to the same valence or arousal. To identify more specific affective effects, seventy undergraduate participants drove in a vehicle simulator under three different road conditions, with one of the following induced affective states: anger, fear, happiness, or neutral. We measured their subjective judgment of driving confidence, risk perception, and safety level after affect induction; four types of driving errors: Lane Keeping, Traffic Rules, Aggressive Driving, and Collision while driving; and the electronic NASA-TLX after driving. Induced anger clearly showed negative effects on subjective safety level and led to degraded driving performance compared to neutral and fear. Happiness also showed degraded driving performance compared to neutral and fear. Fear did not have any significant effect on subjective judgment, driving performance, or perceived workload. Results suggest that we may need to take emotions and affect into account to construct a naturalistic and generic driving behavior model. To this end, a specific-affect approach is needed, beyond the sheer valence and arousal dimensions. Given that workload results are similar across affective states, examining affective effects may also require a different approach than just the perceived workload framework. The present work is expected to guide emotion detection research and help develop an emotion regulation model and adaptive interfaces for drivers.     

Willingness to express emotion: The impact of relationship type,communal orientation,and their interaction

This research examines the effects of relationship type (close vs. business), a personality variable (dispositional communal orientation), and the interaction of these two variables on individuals’ willingness to express emotions to relationship partners. Results supported our predictions that (a) people are willing to express more emotion in relationships likely to be high in communal strength than in relationships likely to be low in communal strength, (b) individuals high in communal orientation are willing to express more emotion than those who are low in communal orientation, and (c) relationship type and communal orientation interact to influence willingness to express two emotions that reveal weakness and vulnerability (fear and anxiety). Specifically, communal orientation had little effect on willingness to express fear and anxiety in business relationships, whereas high relative to low communal orientation was associated with willingness to express more fear and anxiety within close relationships.     

The effects of incorrect pain expectations on acquired fear and pain responses

Previous experimental research on the effects of incorrect intensity expectations of aversive events can be criticized because intensity expectations were not manipulated independently from changes in objective intensity. The present study aims at investigating the effects of incorrect intensity expectations on the immediate and later responses to a painful stimulus, and on the acquisition of anticipatory responses, with proper experimental control. Subjects (n = 62) received 20 painful stimuli of varying intensity. In the control group intensities were correctly signalled on all trials by an analogue signal. On 3 trials the signal was too large in the overprediction condition, and too small in the underestimation condition. Underpredicted painful experiences were related to subsequent higher pain responses on the physiological level, but not on the subjective level; and to increased anticipatory responses (increased pain expectations, uncertainty, subjective fear, skin conductance responses). Skin conductance level also indicated increased fear after underpredicted experiences. Overpredicted painful experiences were related to a faster decrease in subjective fear compared to the control group, but did not influence other variables. The findings support the notion that underpredictions contribute to the acquistion of fear and disrupt habituation processes. The asymmetrical processing of the two kinds of incorrectly predicted experiences is discussed.     

Emotional Policy: Personal Sadness and Anger Shape Judgments about a Welfare Case

When making decisions about a welfare case, it is reasonable for one's thoughts and feelings about the potential welfare recipient to influence the decision. It is less reasonable for one's "incidental" feelings (e.g., sadness or anger arising from an event in one's personal life) to influence such decisions. In two studies, however, data reveal that incidental anger and sadness do in fact carry over, shaping welfare policy preferences. Study 1 found that incidental anger decreased the amount of welfare assistance participants recommended providing relative to neutral emotion, whereas sadness increased the amount recommended. Study 2 replicated the results and found that limiting participants' cognitive resources eliminated the difference between sadness and anger, thus implying that differences in depth-of-thought drove the effects. In sum, the results reveal ways in which: (a) personal emotions carry over to shape preferences for public policies, (b) emotions of the same valence have opposing effects, and (c) differential depth-of-cognitive-processing contributes to such effects.     

Recognition of facial affect in Borderline Personality Disorder

Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been described as emotionally hyperresponsive, especially to anger and fear in social contexts. The aim was to investigate whether BPD patients are more sensitive but less accurate in terms of basic emotion recognition, and show a bias towards perceiving anger and fear when evaluating ambiguous facial expressions. Twenty-five women with BPD were compared with healthy controls on two different facial emotion recognition tasks. The first task allowed the assessment of the subjective detection threshold as well as the number of evaluation errors on six basic emotions. The second task assessed a response bias to blends of basic emotions. BPD patients showed no general deficit on the affect recognition task, but did show enhanced learning over the course of the experiment. For ambiguous emotional stimuli, we found a bias towards the perception of anger in the BPD patients but not towards fear. BPD patients are accurate in perceiving facial emotions, and are probably more sensitive to familiar facial expressions. They show a bias towards perceiving anger, when socio-affective cues are ambiguous. Interpersonal training should focus on the differentiation of ambiguous emotion in order to reduce a biased appraisal of others.     

Effects of incidental positive emotion and cognitive reappraisal on affective responses to negative stimuli

Previous studies have identified two powerful ways to regulate emotional responses to a stressor: experiencing incidental positive emotions and using cognitive reappraisal to reframe the stressor. Several cognitive and motivational theories of positive emotion support the formulation that incidental positive emotions may facilitate cognitive reappraisal. To test the separate and interacting effects of positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal, we first adapted an established picture-based reappraisal paradigm by interspersing blocks of positive emotion inducing and neutral pictures. Across two pre-registered studies (Studies 1, 2), reappraisal effectively decreased self-reported negative emotions and increased self-reported positive emotions; however, experiencing incidental positive emotions did not facilitate reappraisal success. In another preregistered study (Study 3), we employed a more powerful positive emotion induction via virtual reality (VR), used a social stress anticipation task, and instructed participants to reappraise the anticipated stressor positively. Although there was a robust effect of the positive emotion induction (relative to the neutral induction) on feeling more positive emotions throughout stress anticipation, the results again indicated that incidental positive emotions did not facilitate cognitive reappraisal. We propose that incidental positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal may constitute separate pathways of influence when regulating one's responses to negative events.     

Incidental emotions associated with uncertainty appraisals impair decisions in the Iowa Gambling Task

With the Appraisal Tendency Framework, it has been established that (un)certainty appraisals associated with incidental emotions trigger the kind of information processing to cope with situation. We tested the impact of (un)certainty-associated emotions on a sequential task, the Iowa Gambling Task. In this task, intuitive processing is necessary to lead participants to rely on emotional cues arising from previous decisions and to making advantageous decisions. We predicted that certainty-associated emotions would engage participants in intuitive processing, whereas uncertainty-associated emotions would engage them in deliberative processing and lead them to make disadvantageous decisions. As expected, we observed in two distinct experiments, that participants induced to feel uncertainty (fear, sadness) were found to decide less advantageously than participants induced to feel certainty (anger, happiness, disgust).     

The effects of incidental anger,contempt, and disgust on hostile language and implicit behaviors

Recent studies have suggested that the combination of the emotions anger‐contempt‐disgust (ANCODI) is associated with intergroup hostility. This study examined if incidental elicitation of this emotion combination causally produces hostile cognitions, language, and behaviors. Members of political groups were primed with either ANCODI, fear + sadness, or no emotion, and then engaged in creativity task in relation to their opponent or a non‐opponent outgroup. The ANCODI mix produced more hostile cognitions, language, and implicit behaviors associated with hostility, in some cases specifically toward their opponent outgroups, than individuals primed with other emotions. Multiple mediation analyses indicated that the three emotions and their interactions mediated many of the effects.     

积极情绪对条件性恐惧泛化的抑制作用

恐惧的过度泛化是焦虑障碍的核心症状之一,表现为患者对与原危险刺激极不相似的安全刺激也产生恐惧反应。本研究采用经典条件恐惧范式,以US主观预期、回溯性恐惧评定、回溯性效价评定和皮电反应作为恐惧反应的指标,通过"最好自我"训练来诱发被试的积极情绪,考察了恐惧习得后的积极情绪对于恐惧泛化的影响。本研究发现,积极情绪能有效地抑制条件性恐惧的泛化,增强被试对安全信号的学习,并对消退后的恐惧重建现象起到预防作用。研究同时显示,恐惧泛化在主观评定指标和生理指标间出现了分离,这表明积极情绪对恐惧泛化的抑制作用是一个综合的过程,可能涉及到不同的作用机制。本研究结果提示可以通过诱发积极情绪,抑制条件性恐惧的泛化,对临床干预有一定的启发意义。     

Facial expressions and subjective assessments of emotions

There was conducted an experimental comparison of the objective (FaceReader 4.0) and subjective assessment of the severity of emotions on different scales. As objects, 18 short (no more than 2 s) videos were used, on which the same person (actress) expressed the given emotions by pronouncing the word “Yes”. These stimuli were selected based on previously conducted subjective scaling experiments. We used (1) a direct subjective quantitative assessment of each video clip separately for each of the parameters selected in the FaceReader 4.0 program (neutral, happy, angry, disgust, fear, sad, surprise) – the severity of the corresponding emotion was evaluated in points; (2) a direct subjective assessment of each video clip for each of the parameters allocated in the 4-dimensional spherical model of emotions (bad – good; confidence – surprise; attraction; defensive reaction: fear – aggression); (3) the methodology of the Semantic Differential Scaling (SD) by C. Osgood; (4) the PXLab Self-Assessment-Manikin Scales. As a result, the relationship of all the scales used was investigated and it was shown that the objective qualification of emotions (using the FaceReader 4.0 program) does not coincide with the results of subjective assessment of the same samples.     

初中生依恋与主观幸福感:自尊的中介作用

为了探讨初中生亲子依恋、同伴依恋对其主观幸福感的影响以及集体自尊和个体自尊在两者之间所起的中介作用,本研究采用问卷调查的方法对两所初中学校的857名初一至初三的学生进行了调查.主要结果如下:(1)总体而言,男生的父子依恋水平、集体自尊水平和生活满意度更高,女生的同伴依恋水平和消极情绪更高;(2)男女生表现出不同的年级发展特点,女生在亲子依恋、集体自尊和消极情绪,男生在集体自尊上表现出明显的初二现象;(3)亲子依恋、同伴依恋水平越高,初中生的集体自尊和个体自尊水平越高,其主观幸福感程度也越强;(4)母子依恋、同伴依恋、个体自尊和父子依恋依次显著正向预测初中生的生活满意度,并依次负向预测初中生的消极情绪;同伴依恋、个体自尊、母子依恋和集体自尊依次显著正向预测初中生的积极情绪;(5)亲子、同伴依恋不仅能直接影响初中生的主观幸福感,而且通过两种途径(依恋→集体自尊→主观幸福感;依恋→集体自尊→个体自尊→主观幸福感)间接对其产生影响.     

基于不公平感的谣言对转基因风险评价的影响

谣言是常见的社会现象,但其传播过程的"心理黑箱"还是缺乏探索的问题。在情绪评价理论的基础上,采用对照实验,通过转基因食品情景模拟来考察不公平谣言及辟谣行为对风险认知评价及情绪的影响。结果表明:(1)转基因风险评价产生的情绪可分为后果型和伦理型;(2)不公平感会导致更强烈的伦理型及后果型情绪,并使得被试倾向于高估转基因风险;(3)辟谣对转基因风险评价能起到一定干预作用,但不能完全抵消谣言对情绪的影响。     

Fitness- and appearance-related self-conscious emotions and sport experiences: A prospective longitudinal investigation among adolescent girls

Despite well-documented benefits of sport participation for adolescents, girls are less likely to initiate participation and more likely to disengage from sport, compared to boys. Due to the highly evaluative and social nature of the sport context, girls’ emotional experiences around their body’s abilities, function, and fitness are important – yet understudied – predictors of sport participation. The objectives of this longitudinal study were to describe changes in fitness-related and appearance-related self-conscious emotions (i.e., guilt, shame, authentic pride, hubristic pride) and sport experiences (i.e., sport commitment, enjoyment, anxiety) over time, and examine whether between- and within-person differences in these emotions predict sport experiences during adolescence. A sample of 518 girls involved in organized sport completed questionnaires once a year over a three-year period. Results from multilevel models reveal detrimental changes in emotions, sport commitment and enjoyment over time. Further, fitness-related emotions remain significant predictors of sport experiences above and beyond appearance-related emotions thus highlighting the importance of fitness-related emotions in predicting sport experiences. Examining both between and within-person effects is novel in elucidating the predictive capacity of fitness-related emotions as they explain differences between girls – as well as variations in girls’ sport experiences over time.     

Emotion,Decision, and Risk: Betting on Gambles versus Betting on People

We examined the effects of two emotions, fear and anger, on risk‐taking behavior in two types of tasks: Those in which uncertainty is generated by a randomizing device (“lottery risk”) and those in which it is generated by the uncertain behavior of another person (“person‐based risk”). Participants first completed a writing task to induce fear or anger. They then made choices either between lotteries (Experiment 1) or between actions in risky two‐person decisions (Experiments 2 and 3). The experiments involved substantial real‐money payoffs. Replicating earlier studies (which used hypothetical rewards), Experiment 1 showed that fearful participants were more risk‐averse than angry participants in lottery‐risk tasks. However—the key result of this study—fearful participants were substantially less risk‐averse than angry participants in a two‐person task involving person‐based risk (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 offered options and payoffs identical to those of Experiment 2 but with lottery‐type risk. Risk‐taking returned to the pattern of Experiment 1. The impact of incidental emotions on risk‐taking appears to be contingent on the class of uncertainty involved. For lottery risk, fear increased the frequency of risk‐averse choices and anger reduced it. The reverse pattern was found when uncertainty in the decision was person‐based. Further, the effect was specifically on differences in willingness to take risks rather than on differences in judgments of how much risk was present. The impact of different emotions on risk‐taking or risk‐avoiding behavior is thus contingent on the type, as well as the degree, of uncertainty the decision maker faces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.