Happy people thrive on adversity: Pre-existing mood moderates the effect of emotion inductions on creative thinking

Past research on the relationship between affect and creativity has yielded contradictory results. Most of the evidence has tended to show that brief positive emotions as well as more enduring positive moods enhance creativity. No study to date, however, has attempted to determine whether the influence of momentary emotions on creativity depends on pre-existing moods. In the present study, 96 undergraduates completed one of two creative tasks (generating or evaluating captions for photographs) on three occasions, after watching videos designed to induce positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing depressed mood. Results confirmed that the effect of emotion inductions on creativity depended on pre-existing mood. Participants low in depression wrote more creative captions and rated captions more accurately with induced negative emotion than with induced positive emotion. In contrast, participants high in depression appeared impervious to the effect of emotion inductions.     

Would I lie to you? “leakage” in deceptive facial expressions relates to psychopathy and emotional intelligence

This was the first investigation of individual differences in adopting deceptive universal emotional expressions. We hypothesized that psychopathic traits would lead to a heightened ability to suppress emotional expressions and exhibit less “leakage” of inconsistent emotions during deceptive displays. Further, we predicted that emotional intelligence (EI) would lead to a heightened ability to simulate emotional expressions. Participants (N = 100) viewed emotionally arousing (happy, sad, fearful, disgusting) images, responding to each with a genuine or deceptive expression. Each video frame (30/sec) was coded for emotion (in)consistent with the intended expression (365,550 frames coded for 2437 expressions). As predicted, psychopathic traits - specifically, high levels of interpersonal manipulation - were related to shorter durations of unintended emotional “leakage” during deceptive expressions. In contrast, the erratic lifestyle element of psychopathy predicted greater emotional inconsistency during deceptive displays. Individuals higher in EI - specifically, the ability to perceive and express emotion - feigned emotions more convincingly than others but were not more immune to emotional leakage.     

Lateralisation of language and emotion in schizotypal personality: Evidence from dichotic listening

Striking disturbances have been reported in language and emotional prosody processing by patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. In view of this and of research suggesting that schizotypal personality traits can also be expressed sub-clinically, the present study aimed to discover whether similar disturbances would be reflected in cognitive laterality patterns when symptoms of schizotypy are present yet at a non-clinical level. A dichotic listening task was used to examine the sensitivity and speed with which 132 right-handed participants (85 females and 47 males, mean age = 32.44, SD = 12.29) detected both words and emotional prosody, all of whom also completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. Findings indicated that both high (n = 64) and low (n = 68) schizotypy groups demonstrated the typical right ear advantage for the detection of words and left ear advantage for the detection of emotional prosody. Individuals with higher schizotypal personality scores also demonstrated poorer sensitivity in detecting emotional prosody. These results reveal that within the healthy population, higher levels of schizotypy are not associated with the atypical lateralisation of language and emotion. Nevertheless, the existence of these symptoms does signal the presence of shared characteristics with the clinical sphere, namely poorer emotion recognition performance.     

How emotional pictures influence visuospatial binding in short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease?

The present study examines the prediction that emotion can facilitate short-term memory. Nevertheless, emotion also recruits attention to process information, thereby disrupting short-term memory when tasks involve high attentional resources. In this way, we aimed to determine whether there is a differential influence of emotional information on short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Fourteen patients with mild AD, 14 healthy older participants (NC), and 14 younger adults (YA) performed two tasks. In the first task, involving visual short-term memory, participants were asked to remember a picture among four different pictures (negative or neutral) following a brief delay. The second task, a binding memory task, required the recognition by participants of a picture according to its spatial location. The attentional cost involved was higher than for the first task. The pattern of results showed that visual memory performance was better for negative stimuli than for neutral ones, irrespective of the group. In contrast, binding memory performance was essentially poorer for the location of negative pictures in the NC group, and for the location of both negative and neutral stimuli in the AD group, in comparison to the YA group. Taken together, these results show that emotion has beneficial effects on visual short-term memory in ageing and AD. In contrast, emotion does not improve their performances in the binding condition.     

Evidence for two facets of pride in consumption: Findings from luxury brands

This paper documents the multifaceted nature of pride in consumer behavior. Drawing on recent psychological research on pride, we provide evidence for two separate facets of pride in consumption. In a series of studies, we propose a model wherein luxury brand consumption and pride are systematically interrelated. Whereas authentic (but not hubristic) pride leads to a heightened desire for luxury brands, hubristic (but not authentic) pride is the outcome of these purchases, and is the form of pride signaled to observers by these purchases. Further, we show that these effects are generally exacerbated for those low in narcissism. These findings shed new light on why consumers purchase luxury brands, highlighting a paradox: these purchases may be sought out of heightened feelings of accomplishment (and not arrogance), but they instead signal arrogance to others (rather than accomplishment).     

Cerebral perfusion and neuropsychological follow up in mild traumatic brain injury: Acute versus chronic disturbances?

In a subgroup of patients with mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) residual symptoms, interfering with outcome and return to work, are found. With neuropsychological assessment cognitive deficits can be demonstrated although the pathological underpinnings of these cognitive deficits are not fully understood. As the admission computed tomography (CT) often is normal, perfusion CT imaging may be a useful indicator of brain dysfunction in the acute phase after injury in these patients.In the present study, directly after admission perfusion CT imaging was performed in mild TBI patients with follow-up neuropsychological assessment in those with complaints and a normal non-contrast CT. Neuropsychological tests comprised the 15 Words test Immediate Recall, Trailmaking test part B, Zoo Map test and the FEEST, which were dichotomized into normal and abnormal. Perfusion CT results of patients with normal neuropsychological test scores were compared to those with abnormal test scores.In total eighteen patients were included. Those with an abnormal score on the Zoo Map test had a significant lower CBV in the right frontal and the bilateral parieto-temporal white matter. Patients with an abnormal score on the FEEST had a significant higher MTT in the bilateral frontal white matter and a significant decreased CBF in the left parieto-temporal grey matter. No significant relation between the perfusion CT parameters and the 15 Words test and the Trailmaking test part B was present.In conclusion, impairments in executive functioning and emotion perception assessed with neuropsychological tests during follow up were related to differences in cerebral perfusion at admission in mild TBI. The pathophysiological concept of these findings is discussed.     

Moral cognition,affect, and psychopathy

Few theorists would challenge the idea that affect and emotion directly influence decision-making and moral judgment. There is good reason to think that they also significantly assist in decision-making and judgment, and in fact are necessary for fully effective moral cognition. However, they are not sufficient. Deliberation and more reflective thought processes likewise play a crucial role, and in fact are inseparable from affective processes. I will argue that while the dual-process account of moral judgment set forth by Craigie (2011) has great merit, it fails to appreciate fully the extent to which affective and reflective processes are not only integrated, but also mutually interdependent. Evidence from psychopathy indicates that when reflective processes are not assisted adequately by what I will call ‘affective framing’, and moral cognition is of the “cooler,” less emotionally-informed variety, what results is not effective cognitive functioning, but rather psychopathology. My proposed account of affective framing aims to make sense of the way in which affect plays a strictly necessary and integral role not just in intuitive moral responses, but also in reflective moral judgments, so that moral cognition is accomplished by the joint operation of affective processes and reflective reasoning processes.     

Unique associations between young adult men's emotional functioning and their body dissatisfaction and disordered eating

Research on emotional functioning, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating in males is predominated by studies of negative affect and emotion regulation. Other aspects of emotional functioning, namely emotion recognition and attentional biases toward emotional stimuli, have received little empirical attention. The present study investigated the unique associations between different aspects of men's emotional functioning and their disordered eating attitudes, muscularity dissatisfaction, and body fat dissatisfaction. Results from 132 male undergraduates showed that muscularity dissatisfaction was uniquely associated with both emotion regulation difficulties and an attentional bias toward rejecting faces. Body fat dissatisfaction was not uniquely associated with any aspect of emotional functioning. Disordered eating was uniquely associated with emotion regulation difficulties. Collectively, the results indicate differences in the patterns of associations between men's emotional functioning and their body dissatisfaction and disordered eating.