Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether focal attention can be guided by an analysis of the emotional expression in a face. Participants searched displays of 7, 11, 15, and 19 schematic faces for the location of a unique face expressing either a positive or a negative emotion located among distractor faces expressing a neutral emotion. The slopes of the search functions for locating the negative face were shallower than the slopes of the search functions for locating the positive face (Experiments 1A and 2A). When the faces were inverted to reduce holistic face perception, the slopes of the search functions for locating positive and negative faces were not different (Experiments 1B and 2B). The results suggest that the emotional expression in a face can be perceived outside the focus of attention and can guide focal attention to the location of the face.     

Mapping Good Therapy Sessions: A Pilot Study of Within-Session Client Affect

The purpose of the present study was to measure client affect over small timescales within therapy sessions, in order to identify affective patterns that might distinguish good versus poor sessions. Toward this end, patterns of affect were observed across 15-s intervals throughout one therapy session for each of four different clients being treated for generalized anxiety disorder using cognitive-behavioral therapy. The primary hypothesis was that during “good” therapy sessions (as defined by high session alliance scores and good therapy outcomes), clients would exhibit a pattern of positive–negative–positive (PNP) affect during the course of the session, reflecting prolonged periods of negative affect consistent with productive therapeutic work, situated between periods of positive feeling. Clients in “poor” sessions were not expected to show this pattern. The findings were consistent with predictions. There was also a non-significant trend suggesting that clients in good sessions demonstrated a greater frequency of very small PNPs—as brief as 45 s—suggesting a potentially greater number of “micro-episodes” of therapeutic work. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Safeguarding Youth Interrogation Rights: The Effect of Grade Level and Reading Complexity of Youth Waiver Forms on the Comprehension of Legal Rights

The extent to which youths understand their interrogation rights was examined. High school students (N = 160) from five different grades were presented with one of two Canadian youth waiver forms—varying widely in reading complexity—and tested on their knowledge of their legal rights. Results showed that comprehension of both waiver forms was equally deficient, and systematic misunderstandings of vital legal rights were discovered (e.g., the right to remain silent). There was also a positive linear relationship between high school grade level and amount of comprehension. Potential ways to enhance youths' understanding of their rights and provide them protection during interrogations are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Young Freud's linkage with Persia

Abstract

Sigmund Freud's hands helped to mutilate a volume containing a series of “colored plates” like the one replicated in Figure 1 in the text. As a young adult, his personal library included a fairytale whose German text was entitled Die Träumleiter: Ein Marchen. No one has yet been able to authenticate the author's identity beyond the following imprint: “S. Andreas (1832).” The poetic play centers upon a celestial meeting featuring Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dschami. It has been translated into English (The dream ladder: A fairy tale), but still awaits a psychoanalytically informed exegesis.     

Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether focal attention can be guided by an analysis of the emotional expression in a face. Participants searched displays of 7, 11, 15, and 19 schematic faces for the location of a unique face expressing either a positive or a negative emotion located among distractor faces expressing a neutral emotion. The slopes of the search functions for locating the negative face were shallower than the slopes of the search functions for locating the positive face (Experiments 1A and 2A). When the faces were inverted to reduce holistic face perception, the slopes of the search functions for locating positive and negative faces were not different (Experiments 1B and 2B). The results suggest that the emotional expression in a face can be perceived outside the focus of attention and can guide focal attention to the location of the face.     

What influences visual search efficiency? Disentangling contributions of preattentive and postattentive processes

The present experiments introduce a new search technique for disentangling contributions of preattentive guidance and postattentive template matching to search efficiency. Participants performed searches (for negative or positive faces in Experiment 1; pop-out search in Experiment 2; conjunction search in Experiment 3) under either standard viewing conditions or a new restricted viewing condition in which items were occluded by black placeholders and revealed only when a participant moved the mouse pointer over the black square. Under full viewing conditions, search performance can be aided by both preattentive and postattentive mechanisms, whereas the mouse-contingent search relies solely on postattentive template-matching processes. Results demonstrate the utility of this new methodology for distinguishing contributions of preattentive guidance and postattentive template-matching processes in ambiguous search situations. Furthermore, application of the new restricting viewing method to search for emotionally expressive faces suggested that emotional information is processed preattentively and influences the allocation of focal attention.     

Individuals with social phobia are biased to become aware of negative faces

To evaluate whether individuals with social phobia are biased to become aware of negative faces participants searched visual displays containing varying number of neutral face distractors for the location of positive and negative faces. Individuals with social phobia had shallower search slopes for locating negative compared to positive faces, suggesting that they are biased to become aware of negative faces more readily than they become aware of positive faces. A similar bias was found for individuals with panic disorder; but no such bias was found either for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder or for control participants. The findings illustrate the importance of considering the characteristics of participants in the study of human attention.     

Monitoring eye movements while searching for affective faces

A single experiment is reported in which we provide a novel analysis of eye movements during visual search to disentangle the contributions of unattended guidance and focal target processing to visual search performance. This technique is used to examine the controversial claim that unattended affective faces can guide attention during search. Results indicated that facial expression influences how efficiently the target was fixated for the first time as a function of set size. However, affective faces did not influence how efficiently the target was identified as a function of set size after it was first fixated. These findings suggest that, in the present context, facial expression can influence search before the target is attended and that the present measures are able to distinguish between the guidance of attention by targets and the processing of targets within the focus of attention.