Acute effects of exercise on women with pre-existing body image concerns: A test of potential mediators

The primary purpose of this study was to propose and test a mediation model of changes in physical self-efficacy, physical self-perceptions, and affect as mediators by which a single bout of exercise improves state body image. A secondary purpose was to identify how long improvements in state body image are sustained post-exercise. Sixty university-aged women (19.57 ± 1.37 y) with pre-existing body image concerns, and who exercised regularly, were randomized to perform 30 min of moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise or quiet reading. State body image, physical self-efficacy, physical self-perceptions and affect were assessed. Mediational analyses revealed self-perceptions of body fatness (95% CI [0.03, 0.44], κ² = 0.13, ab_ps = 0.20) and strength (95% CI [0.15, 0.60], κ² = 0.23, ab_ps = 0.33) mediated improvements in state body image which were sustained at least 20 min post-exercise. These results contribute to the development of a model explaining the effects of exercise on body image and practical recommendations for the use of exercise to improve body image.     

Swimming as an accretive practice in healthy blue space

Cultural geographers are increasingly interested in research on water and water-based practices as sites of study. Parallel literatures on therapeutic landscapes, especially emergent work on healthy blue space, have also begun to explore emotional geographies. This paper is an empirical study of outdoor swimming in Ireland with a specific focus on health and wellbeing. A key aim is to uncover evidence on how specific blue places and practices enable health. The idea of a continuum is utilised to link theory and practice and connect rather than divide affect, feeling and emotion. This is articulated through a set of embodied experiential practices that proposed swimming as a process of therapeutic accretion. Both personal and shared histories are used to identify the importance of both swimming practices and places to show how therapeutic accretions emerge to build healthy resilience. Additional insights suggest aspects of embodied health that are enhanced by outdoor swimming, especially in relation to bodies perceived to be inactive due to age, illness or disability. While the risks are not ignored, the need to better value outdoor swimming in cooler climates for public health is proposed, suggesting new directions for research on outdoor swimming to simultaneously capture active and passive embodied and emotional experiences within blue space.     

Velocity explains the links between personality states and affect

The present research examined whether perceived rate of progress toward a goal (velocity) mediated the relationships between personality states and affective states. Drawing from control theories of self-regulation, we hypothesized (i) that increased velocity would mediate the association between state extraversion and state positive affect, and (ii) that decreased velocity would mediate the association between state neuroticism and state negative affect. We tested these hypotheses in 2 experience sampling methodology studies that each spanned 2 weeks. Multilevel modeling analyses showed support for each of the bivariate links in our model, and multilevel path analyses supported our mediation hypotheses. We discuss implications for understanding the relations between personality states and affective states, control theories of self-regulation, and goal striving.     

Motor Imagery Shapes Abstract Concepts

The concepts of “good” and “bad” are associated with right and left space. Individuals tend to associate good things with the side of their dominant hand, where they experience greater motor fluency, and bad things with their nondominant side. This mapping has been shown to be flexible: Changing the relative fluency of the hands, or even observing a change in someone else's motor fluency, results in a reversal of the conceptual mapping, such that good things become associated with the side of the nondominant hand. Yet, based on prior studies, it is unclear whether space–valence associations were determined by the experience of fluent versus disfluent actions, or by the mere expectation of fluency. Here, we tested the role of expected fluency by removing motor execution and perceptual feedback altogether. Participants were asked to imagine themselves performing a psychomotor task with one of their hands impaired, after which their implicit space–valence mapping was measured. After imagining that their right hand was impaired, right‐handed participants showed the “good is left” association typical of left‐handers. Motor imagery can change people's implicit associations between space and emotional valence. Although asymmetric motor experience may be necessary to establish body‐specific associations between space and valence initially, neither motoric nor perceptual experience is needed to change these associations subsequently. The mere expectation of fluent versus disfluenct actions can drive fluency‐based effects on people's implicit spatialization of “good” and “bad.” These results suggest a reconsideration of the mechanisms and boundary conditions of fluency effects.     

Shame and guilt: A hundred years of apples and oranges

An original model of shame- and guilt-related emotions is proposed and the model's theoretical background discussed. Shame is conceptualized as an affect (i.e., basic emotion), elicited by personal devaluation and evolved by social selection. Guilt is conceptualized as a cognitively assessed condition. In response to awareness of one's own condition of guilt, one may feel a number of affects or no affect. The phrase feeling guilty is a non-specific reference to feeling as one typically feels when in the condition of guilt [Ortony, A. (1987). Is guilt an emotion? Cognition and emotion, 1, 283-298]. Thus, shame as a construct represents a single affect, while feelings of guilt represent multiple affective-cognitive hybrids, which may be associated with the condition of guilt. In terms of levels of categorization [Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 27-48). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum], shame, as an affect, is a basic level category with subordinates such as embarrassment and humiliation; in contrast, the multiple feelings of guilt constitute multiple subordinate affective-cognitive hybrids—subordinate to a number of basic level affects. This model integrates a great deal of existing data, suggests a large number of hypotheses, and implies the need for a profile approach to the assessment of guilt. By conceptualizing shame as an affect, and making the distinction between guilt as a state and the multiple affective-cognitive hybrids of guilt, much of the confusion and imprecision in past theory and research may be clarified.     

Is positivity a cue or a response option? Warm glow vs evaluative matching in the familiarity for attractive and not-so-attractive faces

Monin (2003) showed that the attractiveness of a face increases its perceived familiarity regardless of prior exposure, and suggested that this beautiful-is-familiar effect was due to the misattribution to familiarity of the positive affect (or “warm glow”) elicited by attractive faces. This research tests the alternative interpretation that an evaluative match between a positive stimulus (an attractive face) and a positive response (“familiar”) accounts for this effect in the absence of any misattribution. In a face recognition task, participants were led to signal their sense of familiarity with previously seen and unseen faces by selecting either a pleasant (affectively congruent) or unpleasant (affectively incongruent) image. Consistent with the warm glow heuristic, higher false alarm rates were obtained for more attractive distracters, and this effect survived (and was, if anything, stronger) when an affectively incongruent response format was used. These findings are discussed in the context of current face memory and perceptual fluency models.     

Emotion Specificity and Consumer Behavior: Anger, Sadness, and Preference for Activity

We examine the influence of two specific negative emotions (i.e., sadness and anger) on consumers' preference for an advertised product promoting either activity (e.g., exercise) or passivity (e.g., relaxation). On the basis of empirical distinctions between the level of activation accompanying sadness and anger, and drawing upon a mood-as-information perspective, we hypothesized that individuals will have a preference for activity to passivity when in an angry compared to a sad emotional state. Thus, when angry, they preferred a product advertised as active, whereas when sad they preferred a product described in more passive terms.     

测量内隐态度的情感错误归因程序

情感错误归因程序（AMP）是一种新近发展出来的以投射为基本原理的内隐社会认知研究方法。AMP的内部处理机制可分为情绪的激发、归因以及猜测三个过程,每种过程都有其发生概率。AMP具有良好的信度和效度,最突出的特点是其对警告的抗拒性。此外虽作为一种相对性的内隐测量工具,但AMP也能很好地研究单一的态度对象。还介绍了几种新近出现的AMP改进范式。     

面孔识别特异性本质的ERP研究

本研究记录了16名被试在完成有整体结构变化和局部特征变化的面孔/房屋图片的一致性判断时的脑内时程变化,以期对面孔识别的特异性本质进行探讨。结果显示,N170波幅和潜伏期的刺激类型主效应显著;面孔/房屋所诱发的N170成分在波幅和潜伏期上均不存在加工方式上的显著差异。晚期成分(300～700ms)上也得到类似的结果。这表明:面孔与房屋(非面孔)的加工在早期和晚期成分上都有差异性,体现出面孔的加工在早期视觉刺激的加工和晚期识别的加工上都具有特异性;晚期识别加工的脑电结果不支持"面孔识别是整体的,结构的,而非面孔客体的识别是局部的,基于特征的"加工观点。