Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

Some stimuli can orient attentional resources and access awareness even if they appear outside the focus of voluntary attention. Stimuli with low-level perceptual salience and stimuli with an emotional content can modulate attention independently of voluntary processes. In Experiment 1, we used a spatial cuing task to investigate whether stimuli that are controlled for their perceptual salience can modulate the rapid orienting of attention based exclusively on their affective relevance. Affective relevance was manipulated through a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm in which an arbitrary and affectively neutral perceptual stimulus was associated with a primary reward (i.e., a chocolate odor). Results revealed that, after conditioning, attentional resources were rapidly oriented toward the stimulus that was previously associated with the reward. In Experiment 2, we used the very same conditioning procedure, but we devaluated the reward after conditioning for half of the participants through a sensory-specific satiation procedure. Strikingly, when the reward was devaluated, attention was no longer oriented toward reward-associated stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest that reward associations rapidly modulate visual processing independently of both voluntary processing and the perceptual salience of the stimulus. This supports the notion that stimuli associated with primary rewards modulate rapid attention orienting on the basis of the affective relevance of the stimulus.     

Impulsivity mediates the association between borderline personality pathology and body mass index

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with obesity, a major risk factor for a number of chronic illnesses (e.g., cardiovascular disease). We examined whether impulsivity and affective instability mediate the association between BPD pathology and body mass index (BMI). Participants were a community sample of adults ages 55–64 and their informants. The Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality measured BPD symptoms and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory measured self- and informant-report impulsivity and affective instability. Mediation analyses demonstrated that only higher self-report impulsivity significantly mediated the association between greater BPD pathology and higher BMI. A subsequent model revealed that higher scores on the impulsiveness (lack of inhibitory control) and deliberation (planning) facets of impulsivity mediated the BPD–BMI association, with impulsiveness exerting a stronger mediation effect than deliberation. Obesity interventions that improve inhibitory control may be most effective for individuals with BPD pathology.     

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.     

Engagement and Disengagement in Mutual-Help Addiction Recovery Housing: A Test of Affective Events Theory

This study tested an affective events theory (AET) model in the Oxford House network of recovery homes. Residents’ congruence with their home (P–E fit) was hypothesized to directly influence behavior that supported the house and other residents—citizenship behavior. We further hypothesized P–E fit would be related to member intentions to leave, with attitudes toward the home mediating that relationship. To assess this, we administered a cross‐sectional national survey to 296 residents of 83 randomly selected Oxford Houses. Although the AET model demonstrated good fit with the data, an alternative model fit better. This alternative model suggested an additional indirect relationship between P–E fit and citizenship mediated by attitudes. Results suggested affective experiences such as feeling like one fits with a community may influence engagement and disengagement. There appears to be a direct influence of fit on citizenship behavior and an indirect influence of fit through recovery home attitudes on both citizenship and intentions to leave the home. We conclude affective experiences could be important for community engagement and disengagement but AET may need to integrate cognitive dissonance theory.     

Neuroticism and momentary differentiation of positive and negative affect

Affective differentiation is the degree to which positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) are uncorrelated. The dynamic model of affect (Zautra, Potter, & Reich, 1997) posits that the link between PA and NA should be stronger when stress is high. Because neuroticism relates to more negative everyday stress perceptions and therefore higher daily stress, we hypothesized that neuroticism should be associated with lower affective differentiation on a daily basis. We examined how neuroticism impacts momentary affective differentiation in undergraduate students (n = 126) using an experience sampling design with mood monitored four times daily for one week. We found that neuroticism moderates the within-person relationship between PA and NA: those who are higher in neuroticism experience less affective differentiation. This effect was not mediated or moderated by recent major life stress. We replicated the main finding in two subsequent samples (n = 102 and n = 120, respectively), and thus present the first large set of studies to demonstrate consistently that neuroticism moderates the within-person link between PA and NA.     

The power of a smile: Stronger working memory effects for happy faces in adolescents compared to adults

Theories of adolescent behaviour attribute increases in risk-taking and sensation-seeking in this age group to a heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli on the one hand and a relatively immature cognitive control system on the other hand. However, little research has outlined to what extent relevant and irrelevant emotional stimuli bias the imbalance between affective processing and cognitive control. Thirty-three adolescents (19 females, aged 12–14) and 37 adults (18 females, aged 18–29) completed two attentional conditions of an emotional face working memory (WM) 0-back/2-back task. Participants were asked to attend to the emotional facial expression in the “relevant” emotion condition, and to the gender of the face in the “irrelevant” condition. The results revealed a WM improvement for happy faces in the relevant condition in both age groups, and an impairment for irrelevant happy faces in adolescents, but not adults. Furthermore, the difference between both attentional conditions for happy faces was larger in adolescents than adults. Results are discussed within the framework of theories of adolescent behaviour.     

Lady Liberty and Godfather Death as candidates for linguistic relativity? Scrutinizing the gender congruency effect on personified allegories with explicit and implicit measures

Linguistic relativity—the idea that language affects thought by way of its grammatical categorizations—has been controversially debated for decades. One of the contested cases is the grammatical gender of nouns, which is claimed to affect how their referents are conceptualized (i.e., as rather female or male in congruence with the grammatical gender of the noun), especially when used allegorically. But is this association strong enough to be detected in implicit measures, and, if so, can we disentangle effects of grammatical gender and allegorical association? Three experiments with native speakers of German tackled these questions. They revealed a gender congruency effect on allegorically used nouns, but this effect was stronger with an explicit measure (assignment of biological sex) than with an implicit measure (Extrinsic Affective Simon Task) and disappeared in the implicit measure when grammatical gender and allegorical associations were set into contrast. Taken together, these findings indicate that the observed congruency effect was driven by the association of nouns with personifications rather than by their grammatical gender. In conclusion, we also discuss implications of these findings for linguistic relativity.     

Vibrant memory scapes: Encountering memorials on unstable ground

This article uses walking ethnography to approach the memoryscape of Stockton, a peninsula settlement opposite the city of Newcastle, Australia. As new residents of the city, we walked the memoryscape of Stockton together and with friends and family seeking encounters with the material objects of local memory as an entry into place. Stockton's memoryscape is full of objects gravid with deeply localised meanings. In some cases, our encounters have stimulated inquiry into documented histories and stories behind the objects, however we remain primarily concerned with the prospects, and limitations, of encountering the memoryscape ‘fresh’. From these experiences we adopt a three-part argument. First, Stockton's memoryscape exhibits a shared local identity based on defiance evident in three groups of memorial objects: (i) unintentional memorials created by the unstable landscape (ii) DIY memorials made by local residents, and (iii) monuments sanctioned by local authorities. Second, Stockton's memoryscape remains powerfully rooted in place. It is vibrant, defying digitisation, defying displacement and re-placement. Stockton's memorials and monuments need to be found, encountered, shared in situ on the unstable ground of ballast and sinking sand. Third, walking ethnography restricted to a bounded area, mode of mobility (walking), theme (memorials), and epistemology (encounter with objects) generates rich ethnographic material on place, even without expert knowledge of the past. These experiments in walking and encountering objects in the vernacular memoryscape animated our imagination even with only limited detail on what to remember and how to feel about it. This offers a contribution to interdisciplinary research on the affective power of found material objects in ethnographic analysis.     

Reading Emotion From Mouse Cursor Motions: Affective Computing Approach

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16–26 trajectory features during a choice‐reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, film clips, or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10‐fold cross‐validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from “known” participants (training data) could predict nearly 10%–20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of “unknown” participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users.