Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.     

Behavioral Approach System Sensitivity and Risk Taking Interact to Predict Left-Frontal EEG Asymmetry

The Behavioral Approach System (BAS) hypersensitivity theory of bipolar disorder (BD; Alloy & Abramson, 2010; Depue & Iacono, 1989) suggests that hyperreactivity in the BAS results in the extreme fluctuations of mood characteristic of BD. In addition to risk conferred by BAS hypersensitivity, cognitive and personality variables may play a role in determining risk. We evaluated relationships among BAS sensitivity, risk taking, and an electrophysiological correlate of approach motivation, relative left-frontal electroencephalography (EEG) asymmetry. BAS sensitivity moderated the relationship between risk taking and EEG asymmetry. More specifically, individuals who were high in BAS sensitivity showed left-frontal EEG asymmetry regardless of their level of risk-taking behavior. However, among individuals who were moderate in BAS sensitivity, risk taking was positively associated with asymmetry. These findings suggest that cognitive and personality correlates of bipolar risk may evidence unique contributions to a neural measure of trait-approach motivation. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Negative affectivity and EEG asymmetry interact to predict emotional interference on attention in early school-aged children

Negative affectivity (NA) is a broad construct that has been associated with the development of psychopathologies, such as anxiety, and with exaggerated attention to threatening stimuli. EEG asymmetry reflects biological individual differences in emotional reactivity that may underlie the association between NA and attention to threat. The present study included a sample of 31 five-seven year olds (M age in months = 74.39, SD = 6.57) to test the hypothesis that greater NA, combined with greater right anterior and posterior asymmetries, predicts increased attention interference following threat stimuli. Children completed an executive attention task which presented task-irrelevant threat (angry) and non-threat (neutral) faces prior to each trial. EEG asymmetry was measured at baseline for anterior, anterior-temporal and posterior scalp regions and child NA was measured via maternal report. As predicted, children showing greater NA and greater right anterior-temporal asymmetry showed more attention interference following angry faces. Additionally, two trend-level effects emerged: children showing greater NA and greater left anterior-temporal asymmetry showed less attention interference following angry faces, and children showing greater NA and greater left posterior asymmetry showed less attention interference, but only following neutral faces. Discussion focuses on the utility of using EEG asymmetry in the study of temperament, attentional biases, and the biological processes by which temperament confers risk for psychopathology.     

Assessment of driver’s attentional resource allocation to visual,cognitive, and action processing by brain and eye signals

Driving a vehicle is comprised of multiple tasks (e.g., monitoring the environment around the vehicle, planning the trajectory, and controlling the vehicle), and requires the allocation of capacity-limited attentional resources to visual, cognitive, and action processing; otherwise, the quality of task performance will deteriorate, increasing the risk of near-accidents or crashes. The present study proposes that variations in the total amount as well as the individual amounts of attentional resources allocated to visual, cognitive, and action processing depending on the driving situations could be objectively estimated by the combined use of three physiological measures: (1) the duration of eye blinks during driving, (2) the size of eye-fixation-related potentials (EFRPs), i.e., event-related potentials (ERPs) that are time-locked to the offset of saccadic eye-movements during driving, and (3) the size of auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs), i.e., ERPs time-locked to the onset of task-unrelated auditory stimuli discretely presented during driving. We implemented these measures when participants (N = 16) drove a vehicle on a slalom course under four driving conditions defined by a combination of two levels of speed requirement (fast and slow) and two levels of path width (narrow and wide). The findings suggested that, (1) when driving at fast compared to slow speeds, the total amount of resources allocated to overall processing increased, which consisted of an increase in the amount of resources allocated to cognitive (and possibly action) processing and a decrease in the amount of resources allocated to visual processing, and (2) when driving on narrow compared to wide paths, the total amount of resources allocated to overall processing remained almost the same (due to complementary speed reduction), which consisted of an increase in the amount of resources allocated to visual processing, a decrease in the amount of resources allocated to cognitive processing, and almost the same amount of resources allocated to action processing. The driver’s resource management strategies indicated by these results as well as the utility and limitations of the proposed method are discussed.     

Intra- and interindividual differences in lateralized cognitive performance and asymmetrical EEG activity in the frontal cortex

The study shows that changes in relative verbal vs. figural working memory and fluency performance from one session to a second session two to 3 weeks apart covary with spontaneously occurring changes of cortical asymmetry in the lateral frontal and central cortex, measured by electroencephalography (EEG) in resting conditions before the execution of tasks. That is, it was examined whether the current state of cortical asymmetry predicts verbal vs. figural performance. The findings complete the circle from studies showing correlations between changes of EEG asymmetry in the lateral frontal cortex and changes of mood to studies showing correlations between changes of mood and changes of relative verbal vs. figural working memory and fluency performance. The study suggests that state-dependent changes of lateralized cortical activity may underlie certain cognitive-emotional interactions observed in previous studies, and supports the assumption of reciprocal influences of specific emotional and specific cognitive processes.     

Visual field differences in visual word recognition can emerge purely from perceptual learning: evidence from modeling Chinese character pronunciation

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is skewed to the right, whereas in PS characters it is skewed to the left. Through training a computational model for SP and PS character recognition that takes into account of the locations in which the characters appear in the visual field during learning, but does not assume any fundamental hemispheric processing difference, we show that visual field differences can emerge as a consequence of the fundamental structural differences in information between SP and PS characters, as opposed to the fundamental processing differences between the two hemispheres. This modeling result is also consistent with behavioral naming performance. This work provides strong evidence that perceptual learning, i.e., the information structure of word stimuli to which the readers have long been exposed, is one of the factors that accounts for hemispheric asymmetry effects in visual word recognition.     

Functional ear (a)symmetry in brainstem neural activity relevant to encoding of voice pitch: a precursor for hemispheric specialization?

Pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere; linguistic pitch is further mediated by left cortical areas. This experiment investigates whether ear asymmetries vary in brainstem representation of pitch depending on linguistic status. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were elicited by monaural stimulation of the left and right ear of 15 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese using two synthetic speech stimuli that differ in linguistic status of tone. One represented a native lexical tone (Tone 2: T2); the other, T2′, a nonnative variant in which the pitch contour was a mirror image of T2 with the same starting and ending frequencies. Two 40-ms portions of f₀ contours were selected in order to compare two regions (R1, early; R2 late) differing in pitch acceleration rate and perceptual saliency. In R2, linguistic status effects revealed that T2 exhibited a larger degree of FFR rightward ear asymmetry as reflected in f₀ amplitude relative to T2′. Relative to midline (ear asymmetry = 0), the only ear asymmetry reaching significance was that favoring left ear stimulation elicited by T2′. By left- and right-ear stimulation separately, FFRs elicited by T2 were larger than T2′ in the right ear only. Within T2′, FFRs elicited by the earlier region were larger than the later in both ears. Within T2, no significant differences in FFRS were observed between regions in either ear. Collectively, these findings support the idea that origins of cortical processing preferences for perceptually-salient portions of pitch are rooted in early, preattentive stages of processing in the brainstem.     

Word learning and phonetic processing in preschool-age children

Consonants and vowels have been shown to play different relative roles in different processes, including retrieving known words from pseudowords during adulthood or simultaneously learning two phonetically similar pseudowords during infancy or toddlerhood. The current study explores the extent to which French-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds exhibit a so-called “consonant bias” in a task simulating word acquisition, that is, when learning new words for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, the to-be-learned words differed both by a consonant and a vowel (e.g., /byf/-/duf/), and children needed to choose which of the two objects to associate with a third one whose name differed from both objects by either a consonant or a vowel (e.g., /dyf/). In such a conflict condition, children needed to favor (or neglect) either consonant information or vowel information. The results show that only 3-year-olds preferentially chose the consonant identity, thereby neglecting the vowel change. The older children (and adults) did not exhibit any response bias. In Experiment 2, children needed to pick up one of two objects whose names differed on either consonant information or vowel information. Whereas 3-year-olds performed better with pairs of pseudowords contrasting on consonants, the pattern of asymmetry was reversed in 4-year-olds, and 5-year-olds did not exhibit any significant response bias. Interestingly, girls showed overall better performance and exhibited earlier changes in performance than boys. The changes in consonant/vowel asymmetry in preschoolers are discussed in relation with developments in linguistic (lexical and morphosyntactic) and cognitive processing.     

Hemispheric asymmetry in the efficiency of attentional networks

Despite the fact that hemispheric asymmetry of attention has been widely studied, a clear picture of this complex phenomenon is still lacking. The aim of the present study was to provide an efficient and reliable measurement of potential hemispheric asymmetries of three attentional networks, i.e. alerting, orienting and executive attention. Participants (N=125) were tested with the Lateralized Attention Network Test (LANT) that allowed us to investigate the efficiency of the networks in both visual fields (VF). We found a LVF advantage when a target occurred in an unattended location, which seems to reflect right hemisphere superiority in control of the reorienting of attention. Furthermore, a LVF advantage in conflict resolution was observed, which may indicate hemispheric asymmetry of the executive network. No VF effect for alerting was found. The results, consistent with the common notion of general right hemisphere dominance for attention, provide a more detailed account of hemispheric asymmetries of the attentional networks than previous studies using the LANT task.     

赢者诅咒：心理机制、影响因素及应对策略

赢者诅咒是指在拍卖情境中, 竞价者为了获得拍卖品会过高估计其价值, 竞价成功以后当他发现其价值和自己之前的期望不一致时所产生的一种“诅咒”心理。赢者诅咒现象普遍存在于企业的资产拍卖、兼并重组、博彩游戏、投资决策等领域。损失规避和过度自信理论是赢者诅咒的主要心理机制, 而其影响因素主要有竞拍商品价值的不确定性、竞价人数、信息因素和竞价经验等。赢者诅咒的应对策略主要包括联合竞标、信息共享和学习。未来对赢者诅咒的研究需要进一步探讨赢者诅咒的心理机制、研究范式及本土化等问题。