Attentional mechanisms associated with repressive distancing

This research explores the role of attentional shift and disengagement in repressive distancing. During a target-detection task in which emotional and neutral facial expressions were used as cues, participants received performance feedback intended to elicit a negative emotional reaction that rendered the task either threatening or not threatening to self-concept. When the task was perceived to threaten self-concept, repressors distanced themselves by rapidly disengaging their attention from the facial expressions rather than by slowly shifting or not shifting their attention to the facial expressions. Attentional disengagement was accompanied by sympathetic nervous system activity suggestive of a defense response. This research provides further insight into the nature and consequences of the interplay of dispositional tendencies, situational contexts, and higher order cognitive influences in attentional behavior.     

Accuracy of judging others’ traits and states: Comparing mean levels across tests

Tests of accuracy in interpersonal perception take many forms. Often, such tests use designs and scoring methods that produce overall accuracy levels that cannot be directly compared across tests. Therefore, progress in understanding accuracy levels has been hampered. The present article employed several techniques for achieving score equivalency. Mean accuracy was converted to a common metric, pi [Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (1989). Effect size estimation for one-sample multiple-choice-type data: Design, analysis, and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 332–337] in a database of 109 published results representing tests that varied in terms of scoring method (proportion accuracy versus correlation), content (e.g., personality versus affect), number of response options, item preselection, cue channel (e.g., face versus voice), stimulus duration, and dynamism. Overall, accuracy was midway between guessing level and a perfect score, with accuracy being higher for tests based on preselected than unselected stimuli. When item preselection was held constant, accuracy was equivalent for judging affect and judging personality. However, comparisons must be made with caution due to methodological variations between studies and gaps in the literature.     

How aging affects the recognition of emotional speech

To successfully infer a speaker's emotional state, diverse sources of emotional information need to be decoded. The present study explored to what extent emotional speech recognition of 'basic' emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasant surprise, sadness) differs between different sex (male/female) and age (young/middle-aged) groups in a behavioural experiment. Participants were asked to identify the emotional prosody of a sentence as accurately as possible. As a secondary goal, the perceptual findings were examined in relation to acoustic properties of the sentences presented. Findings indicate that emotion recognition rates differ between the different categories tested and that these patterns varied significantly as a function of age, but not of sex.     

Emotional attention: effects of emotion and gaze direction on overt orienting of visual attention

In the present study we considered the two factors that have been advocated for playing a role in emotional attention: perception of gaze direction and facial expression of emotions. Participants performed an oculomotor task in which they had to make a saccade towards one of the two lateral targets, depending on the colour of the fixation dot which appeared at the centre of the computer screen. At different time intervals (stimulus onset asynchronies, SOAs: 50,100,150 ms) following the onset of the dot, a picture of a human face (gazing either to the right or to the left) was presented at the centre of the screen. The gaze direction of the face could be congruent or incongruent with respect to the location of the target, and the expression could be neutral or angry. In Experiment 1 the facial expressions were presented randomly in a single block, whereas in Experiment 2 they were shown in separate blocks. Latencies for correct saccades and percentage of errors (saccade direction errors) were considered in the analyses. Results showed that incongruent trials determined a significantly higher percentage of saccade direction errors with respect to congruent trials, thus confirming that gaze direction, even when task-irrelevant, interferes with the accuracy of the observer’s oculomotor behaviour. The angry expression was found to hold attention for a longer time with respect to the neutral one, producing delayed saccade latencies. This was particularly evident at 100 ms SOA and for incongruent trials. Emotional faces may then exert a modulatory effect on overt attention mechanisms.     

A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain

Linguistic theory since the Cognitive Revolution has followed one of the premises of that revolution by largely sidelining the issue of emotions and concentrating on those aspects of language that are more strictly cognitive. However, during the last two decades research in cognitive science, especially in neuropsychology, has begun to fill in the gaps left by the exclusion of emotions from cognitive research. This article proposes a model for applying the fruits of this new research in emotion to our understanding of language itself. Building on Karl Pribram`s integrated model of emotions and motivations, the presentation it offers a propositional explanation for how the emotions may have contributed to the emergence of symbolic formation and, ultimately, to every aspect of language from lexis to literature.

Negative self-focused cognitions mediate the effect of trait social anxiety on state anxiety

The cognitive model of social anxiety predicts that negative self-focused cognitions increase anxiety when anticipating social threat. To test this prediction, 36 individuals were asked to anticipate and perform a public-speaking task. During anticipation, negative self-focused cognitions or relaxation were experimentally induced while self-reported anxiety, autonomic arousal (heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductance level), and acoustic eye-blink startle response were assessed. As predicted, negative self-focused cognitions mediated the effects of trait social anxiety on self-reported anxiety and heart rate variability during negative anticipation. Furthermore, trait social anxiety predicted increased startle amplitudes. These findings support a central assumption of the cognitive model of social anxiety.     

Understanding the relationship between emotional and behavioral dysregulation: emotional cascades

Recent research suggests that many dysregulated behaviors, such as binge-eating and non-suicidal self-injury, often occur during times of emotional distress. These behaviors also appear to decrease negative affect. Why is it, however, that individuals engage in these behaviors to reduce emotional distress rather than taking a shower or talking to a friend? This study proposes the role of emotional cascades, an emotional phenomenon that occurs when an individual intensely ruminates on negative affect, thus increasing the magnitude of that negative affect to the point that an individual engages in a dysregulated behavior in order to distract from that rumination. The purpose of these studies was to examine the relationship between rumination and dysregulated behaviors, and in doing so determine if there is some support for the emotional cascade model of behavioral dysregulation. Using two different studies we were able to demonstrate that rumination is associated with some dysregulated behaviors, both cross-sectionally using structural equation modeling, and temporally using a two time-point method.     

Differential time-dependent effects of emotion on recollective experience and memory for contextual information

Emotion has been suggested to slow forgetting via a mechanism that enhances memory consolidation. Here, we investigate whether this time dependent process influences the subjective experience of recollection as well as the ability to retrieve specific contextual details of the study event. To do so we examined recognition for emotional and neutral pictures at two retention intervals and collected remember/know reports and reports about the task that had been performed with the item during encoding. Recollective experience was enhanced for emotional compared to neutral photos after a 24-h delay, but not immediately after encoding. In contrast, memory for the task performed during encoding did not differ between emotional and neutral photos at either time point. The findings indicate that emotion slows the effects of forgetting on the recollective experience associated with studied events, without necessarily slowing the forgetting of specific contextual details of those events.     

Transdiagnostic emotion regulation processes in bipolar disorder and insomnia

Research and treatment have traditionally adopted a 'disorder-focused' approach by targeting one specific disorder, aiming to understanding its cause, maintenance and treatment. The aim of the present study was to contribute to the burgeoning interest in examining common, or 'transdiagnostic,' processes across disorders. Three candidate transdiagnostic processes involved in emotion regulation - rumination, worry, and automatic negative thoughts - were examined in euthymic bipolar I disorder (n=21) and insomnia (n=19), and a non-clinical control group (n=20). Rumination and worry were endorsed to a larger degree by the bipolar and insomnia groups compared to the control group. However, while the bipolar group had more negative automatic thoughts than the control group, there were no significant differences in negative automatic thoughts between the bipolar and insomnia groups or the insomnia and control groups. These results suggested that rumination and worry, but not negative automatic thoughts, might be common across bipolar disorder and insomnia. However, these findings no longer remained significant when current symptoms of anxiety and depression were controlled for. Prospective and experimental studies are needed to test the extent to which these processes contribute to the etiology or maintenance of insomnia and bipolar disorder.     

Cross-modal interactions in the experience of musical performances: physiological correlates

This experiment was conducted to investigate cross-modal interactions in the emotional experience of music listeners. Previous research showed that visual information present in a musical performance is rich in expressive content, and moderates the subjective emotional experience of a participant listening and/or observing musical stimuli [Vines, B. W., Krumhansl, C. L., Wanderley, M. M., & Levitin, D. J. (2006). Cross-modal interactions in the perception of musical performance. Cognition, 101, 80--113.]. The goal of this follow-up experiment was to replicate this cross-modal interaction by investigating the objective, physiological aspect of emotional response to music measuring electrodermal activity. The scaled average of electrodermal amplitude for visual-auditory presentation was found to be significantly higher than the sum of the reactions when the music was presented in visual only (VO) and auditory only (AO) conditions, suggesting the presence of an emergent property created by bimodal interaction. Functional data analysis revealed that electrodermal activity generally followed the same contour across modalities of presentation, except during rests (silent parts of the performance) when the visual information took on particular salience. Finally, electrodermal activity and subjective tension judgments were found to be most highly correlated in the audio-visual (AV) condition than in the unimodal conditions. The present study provides converging evidence for the importance of seeing musical performances, and preliminary evidence for the utility of electrodermal activity as an objective measure in studies of continuous music-elicited emotions.