An anxiety-induced bias in the perception of a bistable point-light walker

Human sensitivity for social cues is exquisite, as illustrated by the ease with which simplified point-light movements invoke social and emotional responses. Compared to faces, these biological motion stimuli only recently started to be used to explore questions regarding social cognition and anxiety. We presented human point-light walkers that could be perceived as facing towards or facing away from the observer, and tested whether participants with high social anxiety would perceive these bistable stimuli differently, because this type of stimuli has particular relevance for them. The results showed that observers with high social anxiety tended to see walkers as facing away more frequently than those with low social anxiety. This may mean that high socially anxious observers are biased towards the more positive perceptual alternative because they are motivated to protect themselves against threatening social experiences, but we also explore alternative explanations. The findings are in line with the evidence for a positivity bias in perception, also called wishful seeing, but in contrast with the attentional negativity bias often found in social anxiety. We discuss reasons for this divergence and possible limitations of the current study.     

Sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation as transdiagnostic processes in a comorbid sample

Sleep disturbance and emotion dysregulation have been identified as etiologic and maintaining factors for a range of psychopathology and separate literatures support their relationships to anxiety, depression, PTSD, and alcohol dependence (AD) symptom severity. Previous studies have examined these relationships in isolation, failing to account for the high rates of comorbidity among disorders. It is not yet known whether these processes uniquely predict symptom severity in each of these domains. Participants were 220 patients in residential substance abuse treatment, who had experienced a potentially traumatic event and exceeded screening cutoffs for probable PTSD and problematic alcohol use. Controlling for emotion dysregulation and the interrelationships among the outcome variables, insomnia was uniquely associated with anxiety (B = .27, p < .001), depression (B = .25, p < .001), PTSD (B = .22, p < .001), and AD (B = .17, p = .01) symptom severity. Similarly, controlling for insomnia, emotion dysregulation was uniquely associated with anxiety (B = .40, p < .001), depression (B = .47, p < .001), PTSD (B = .38, p < .001), and AD (B = .26, p < .001) symptom severity. Insomnia and emotion dysregulation appear to be transdiagnostic processes uniquely associated with symptom severity across a number of different domains and might be important treatment targets for individuals with PTSD and AD.     

The relationship between emotional clarity and suicidal ideation among trauma-exposed adolescents in inpatient psychiatric care: does distress tolerance matter?

ABSTRACT

The present investigation examined associations between low emotional clarity (the extent to which individuals are confused about the specific emotions they are experiencing) and suicidal ideation in a diverse sample of trauma-exposed inpatient adolescents, as well as the moderating role of distress tolerance (DT) in this association. Participants (N = 50; 52.0% female; M = 15.1 years, SD = .51; 44% White) completed measures of emotion dysregulation, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suicidal ideation/attempts, as well as a behavioral measure of DT. Controlling for age, gender, presence of mood disorder, and past history of attempts, results revealed a significant interaction between DT and low emotional clarity in relation to suicidal ideation. Specifically, lower emotional clarity was related to suicidal ideation at higher, but not lower, levels of DT. Findings suggest that presence of suicidal ideation among traumatized youth with low emotion clarity is most likely when these emotional deficits are coupled with a high tolerance for cognitive/psychological distress. Given that the ability to withstand distress is arguably a key factor in transitioning individuals from ideation to lethal suicidal behavior, attention to the presence of this construct in the context of clinical practice may be warranted.     

Top-down control settings and the attentional blink: Evidence for nonspatial contingent capture

Previous studies have shown that spatial attention can be “captured” by irrelevant events, but only if the eliciting stimulus matches top-down attentional control settings. Here we explore whether similar principles hold for nonspatial attentional selection. Subjects searched for a coloured target letter embedded in an RSVP stream of letters inside a box centred on fixation. On critical trials, a distractor, consisting of a brief change in the colour of the box, occurred at various temporal lags prior to the target. In Experiment 1, the distractor produced a decrement in target detection, but only when it matched the target colour. Experiments 2 and 3 provide evidence that this effect does not reflect masking or the dispersion of spatial attention. The results establish that (1) nonspatial selection is subject to “capture”, (2) such capture is contingent on top-down attentional control settings, and (3) control settings for nonspatial capture can vary in specificity.     

A reversal of the search asymmetry favouring negative schematic faces

Quite a number of studies have tested whether the affective valence of stimuli can guide attention in visual search. Studies using schematic affective faces frequently found a relative search asymmetry (RSA), with more efficient search for a negative face in a friendly crowd than vice versa. Whether, however, this effect relates to differences in affect or to the confounded differences in perceptual features is unknown. The present study proposes and tests a similarity-based account for the RSA. Experiments 1a and 1b first replicate the typical RSA. Experiment 2 shows that the stimulus could be simplified to some degree without losing the RSA. Experiments 3 and 4, finally, demonstrate that the RSA could be reversed by a rather simple stimulus change, that leaves the facial expression intact. It is concluded that the strong dependence of the RSA on stimulus factors seriously questions the claim that emotional factors drive the RSA.     

How people think “if only …” about reasons for actions

When people think about how a situation might have turned out differently, they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives to their actions. We report the results of three experiments which show that people imagine alternatives to actions differently when they know about a reason for the action. The first experiment (n = 36) compared reason – action sequences to cause – effect sequences. It showed that people do not imagine alternatives to reasons in the way they imagine alternatives to causes: they imagine an alternative to an action more than an effect, and to a cause more than a reason. The second experiment (n = 214) and the third experiment (n = 190) both show that different sorts of reasons have different sorts of effects on how people imagine alternatives to actions. People imagine an alternative to an action (the protagonist went to a ball) less often when they know the reason for the action was an obligation (he had to participate in fundraising) compared to when they know about a weaker reason (he wanted to meet a famous violinist) or no reason. The second experiment shows the effect for a social obligation and the third experiment replicates and extends it to a health obligation. We interpret the results in terms of the possibilities that people keep in mind about actions and their reasons.     

Measurement invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). A cross-national validity study

The goal of this research was to examine the measurement invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) across two European nations. Participants were Italian and German undergraduate students. First, confirmatory factor analysis was used to test for the two-factor structure of the ERQ; subsequently, measurement invariance was analysed. The results showed acceptable fit indices for the German and Italian sample; however, results with regard to the Italian sample showed lower fit indices than results regarding the German one. Measurement invariance of the ERQ across Italy and Germany was confirmed. Despite the fact that we assumed measurement invariance of the ERQ, future research is needed to deal with the lower fit regarding the Italian version.     

The interference effect of emotional expressions on facial identity recognition in preschool-aged children

The present study aims to explore the influence of facial emotional expressions on pre-scholars' identity recognition was analyzed using a two-alternative forced-choice matching task. A decrement was observed in children's performance with emotional faces compared with neutral faces, both when a happy emotional expression remained unchanged between the target face and the test faces and when the expression changed from happy to neutral or from neutral to happy between the target and the test faces (Experiment 1). Negative emotional expressions (i.e. fear and anger) also interfered with children's identity recognition (Experiment 2). Obtained evidence suggests that in preschool-age children, facial emotional expressions are processed in interaction with, rather than independently from, the encoding of facial identity information. The results are discussed in relationship with relevant research conducted with adults and children.     

Audiovisual speech from emotionally expressive and lateralized faces

Emotional expression and how it is lateralized across the two sides of the face may influence how we detect audiovisual speech. To investigate how these components interact we conducted experiments comparing the perception of sentences expressed with happy, sad, and neutral emotions. In addition we isolated the facial asymmetries for affective and speech processing by independently testing the two sides of a talker's face. These asymmetrical differences were exaggerated using dynamic facial chimeras in which left- or right-face halves were paired with their mirror image during speech production. Results suggest that there are facial asymmetries in audiovisual speech such that the right side of the face and right-facial chimeras supported better speech perception than their left-face counterparts. Affective information was also found to be critical in that happy expressions tended to improve speech performance on both sides of the face relative to all other emotions, whereas sad emotions generally inhibited visual speech information, particularly from the left side of the face. The results suggest that approach information may facilitate visual and auditory speech detection.