The moderating effects of contamination sensitivity on state affect and information processing: Examination of disgust specificity

Although contamination sensitivity has been implicated in several disorders, there is a paucity of research examining the influence of this trait on various outcomes. Accordingly, the present study examined the extent to which individual differences in contamination sensitivity moderated state affect in response to a mood induction and subsequent information processing biases, as assessed by a lexical decision task (LDT). It was hypothesised that the moderating effects of contamination sensitivity would be specific to disgust responding to a negative but not positive mood induction, and to reaction times to disgust and fear compared to happy words on the LDT. The findings were largely consistent with this hypothesis, as contamination sensitivity predicted increased disgust and arousal to the negative mood induction. Contamination sensitivity was also a better predictor of reaction times to disgust and fear words than happy words. However, the moderating effect of contamination sensitivity on reaction times on the LDT was not mediated by its effects on response to the negative mood induction. Implications of these findings for conceptualising the role of contamination sensitivity and its association with disgust in specific disorders are discussed.     

The relation between emotion regulation choice and posttraumatic growth

ABSTRACT

Previous research has examined emotion regulation (ER) and trauma in the context of psychopathology, yet little research has examined ER in posttraumatic growth (PTG), the experience of positive psychological change following a traumatic event. ER typically involves decreasing negative affect by engaging (e.g. reappraisal) or disengaging (e.g. distraction) with emotional content. To investigate how ER may support PTG, participants who experienced a traumatic event in the past 6 months completed a PTG questionnaire and an ER choice task in which they down regulated their negative emotion in response to negative pictures of varying intensity by choosing to distract or reappraise. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that an increase in reappraisal choice from low to high subjective stimulus intensity predicted higher PTG, suggesting that individuals who chose reappraisal more as intensity increased reported higher PTG. Findings suggest that reappraisal of negative stimuli following a traumatic event may be a key component of PTG.     

The within-subjects design in the study of facial expressions

The common within-subjects design of studies on the recognition of emotion from facial expressions allows the judgement of one face to be influenced by previous faces, thus introducing the potential for artefacts. The present study (N=344) showed that the canonical “disgust face” was judged as disgusted, provided that the preceding set of faces included “anger expressions”, but was judged as angry when the preceding set of faces excluded anger but instead included persons who looked sad or about to be sick. Chinese observers showed lower recognition of the “disgust face” than did American observers. Chinese observers also showed lower recognition of the “fear face” when responding in Chinese than in English.     

Age effects and gaze patterns in recognising emotional expressions: An in-depth look at gaze measures and covariates

The present study investigated predictors of age effects in emotion recognition accuracy. Older and younger adults were tested on a battery of cognitive, vision, and affective questionnaires; participants' eyes were also tracked while they completed an emotion recognition task. Older adults were worse at recognising sad, angry, and fearful expressions than younger adults. When controlling for covariates related to emotion recognition accuracy, younger adults still outperformed older adults in recognising anger and sadness. Younger adults tended to pay more attention to the eyes than older adults. Results suggest that age-related gaze patterns in emotion recognition may depend on the specific emotion being recognised and may not generalise across stimuli sets.     

An effect of mood on the perception of geographical slant

Previous research has shown that hills appear steeper to those who are fatigued, encumbered, of low physical fitness, elderly, or in declining health (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Proffitt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, & Midgett, 1995). The prevailing interpretation of this research is that observers’ perceptions of the environment are influenced by their capacity to navigate that environment. The current studies extend this programme by investigating more subtle embodied effects on perception of slant; namely those of mood. In two studies, with two different mood manipulations, and two estimates of slant in each, observers in a sad mood reported hills to be steeper. These results support the role of mood and motivational factors in influencing spatial perception, adding to the previous work showing that energetic potential can influence perception.     

Robust anger: Recognition of deteriorated dynamic bodily emotion expressions

In two studies, the robustness of anger recognition of bodily expressions is tested. In the first study, video recordings of an actor expressing four distinct emotions (anger, despair, fear, and joy) were structurally manipulated as to image impairment and body segmentation. The results show that anger recognition is more robust than other emotions to image impairment and to body segmentation. Moreover, the study showed that arms expressing anger were more robustly recognised than arms expressing other emotions. Study 2 added face blurring as a variable to the bodily expressions and showed that it decreased accurate emotion recognition—but more for recognition of joy and despair than for anger and fear. In sum, the paper indicates the robustness of anger recognition in multileveled deteriorated bodily expressions.     

Attentional control capacity for emotion: An individual-difference measure of internal controlled attention

The purpose of this study was to develop an individual-difference measure of the ability to apply internal controlled attention to emotional mental representations and investigate this measure's relationship to emotion regulation. Attentional control capacity for emotion (ACCE) was measured by adapting a task-switching paradigm where participants had to shift between emotional and neutral task sets. Undergraduate students (N = 91) were randomly assigned to perform either a task measuring ACCE or an emotionally neutral switching task to determine the discriminant validity of ACCE. ACCE predicted behaviour during a stressful anagram task. Individuals who were more efficient at an emotional to neutral task switch persisted longer on the stressful task. In contrast, individuals who more efficient at a neutral to emotional task switch persisted for a shorter time on the stressful task. These results provide insight into the role of attentional deployment in emotion regulation and clinical theories of rumination and anxiety.     

Stop crying! The impact of situational demands on interpersonal emotion regulation

ABSTRACT

Crying is a common response to emotional distress that elicits support from the environment. People may regulate another’s crying in several ways, such as by providing socio-affective support (e.g. comforting) or cognitive support (e.g. reappraisal), or by trying to emotionally disengage the other by suppression or distraction. We examined whether people adapt their interpersonal emotion regulation strategies to the situational context, by manipulating the regulatory demand of the situation in which someone is crying. Participants watched a video of a crying man and provided support by recording a video message. We hypothesised that when immediate down-regulation was required (i.e. high regulatory demand), participants would provide lower levels of socio-affective and cognitive support, and instead distract the crying person or encourage them to suppress their emotions, compared to when there is no such urgency (i.e. low regulatory demand). As predicted, both self-reported and behavioural responses indicated that high (as compared to low) regulatory demand led to a reduction in socio-affective support provision, and a strong increase in suppression and distraction. Cognitive support provision, however, was unaffected by regulatory demand. When the context required more immediate down-regulation, participants thus employed more regulation strategies aimed at disengaging from the emotional experience. This study provides a first step in showing that people take the context into account when attempting to regulate others’ emotions.     

Spatial location and emotion modulate voice perception

ABSTRACT

How do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice perception. Thirty participants listened to nonverbal vocalizations coming from different locations around the head (left vs. right; front vs. back), and differing in valence (neutral, positive [amusement] or negative [anger]). They were instructed to identify the location of the vocalizations (Experiment 1) and to evaluate their emotional qualities (Experiment 2). Emotion-space interactions were observed, but only in Experiment 1: emotional vocalizations were better localised than neutral ones when they were presented from the back and the right side. In Experiment 2, emotion recognition accuracy was increased for positive vs. negative and neutral vocalizations, and perceived arousal was increased for emotional vs. neutral vocalizations, but this was independent of spatial location. These findings indicate that emotional salience affects how we perceive the spatial location of voices. They additionally suggest that the interaction between spatial (“where”) and emotional (“what”) properties of the voice differs as a function of task.     

Differentiated associations between childhood maltreatment experiences and social understanding: A meta-analysis and systematic review

The extreme parenting experiences encountered by children who are physically abused or neglected place them at increased risk for impaired socio-emotional development. There is growing evidence that maltreated children may apprehend interpersonal encounters in different ways from children without such traumatic histories. This systematic review examines the links between childhood physical abuse and neglect and various constituent skills of social understanding (including emotion recognition and understanding, perspective taking, false belief understanding, and attributional biases) in 51 empirical studies. The review incorporates a meta-analysis of 19 studies on emotion recognition and understanding in this population. This showed an overall negative effect of maltreatment, but moderation analyses revealed that significantly stronger effects were found for measures of emotion understanding rather than recognition, and for younger rather than older age groups. The broader review also reveals a complex and differentiated profile of social understanding among maltreated children. Directions for future research that addresses individual differences in children’s experiences, both within and outside the maltreatment context, are discussed.