Attentional capture by irrelevant emotional distractor faces is contingent on implicit attentional settings

Although expressions of facial emotion hold a special status in attention relative to other complex objects, whether they summon our attention automatically and against our intentions remains a debated issue. Studies supporting the strong view that attentional capture by facial expressions of emotion is entirely automatic reported that a unique (singleton) emotional face distractor interfered with search for a target that was also unique on a different dimension. Participants could therefore search for the odd-one out face to locate the target and attentional capture by irrelevant emotional faces might be contingent on the adoption of an implicit set for singletons. Here, confirming this hypothesis, an irrelevant emotional face captured attention when the target was the unique face with a discrepant orientation, both when this orientation was unpredictable and when it remained constant. By contrast, no such capture was observed when the target could not be found by monitoring displays for a discrepant face and participants had to search for a face with a specific orientation. Our findings show that attentional capture by emotional faces is not purely stimulus driven and thereby resolve the apparent inconsistency that prevails in the literature on the automaticity of attentional capture by emotional faces.     

Arousal (but not valence) amplifies the impact of salience

Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favouring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli. The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds’ valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets.     

Fear of evaluation unpacked: day-to-day correlates of fear of negative and positive evaluation

Background and objectives: Social interactions inevitably go along with repeated evaluations. Some individuals are particularly sensitive to social evaluations: Psychometric studies suggest stable and distinct individual differences on fear of negative evaluations (FNE) and fear of positive evaluation (FPE). However, little is known about day-to-day correlates of FNE and FPE, particularly their respective contribution to positive/negative affect level and affect reactivity to different stressor types.

Design: Two studies naturalistically assessed the level of negative/positive affect and its reactivity to different stressor types (from distant or close social network, work and daily hassles, assessed daily) as a function of FNE/FPE.

Method: Ecological Momentary Assessment employed five daily prompts during 12/10 days in convenience samples of 50/59 participants.

Results: FNE predicted lower positive affect level only in Study 2. Consistent across studies negative affect reactivity to stressors emanating from the distant social network was increased in individuals high in FNE or FPE.

Conclusions: Results document the relevance of both types of evaluation fears (FNE/FPE) for day-to-day affect and stress reactivity. They further specify whose evaluations are well tolerated (close network) or feared (distant network), thereby refining current psycho-evolutionary accounts of FNE/FPE.     

Flexible and inflexible task sets: Asymmetric interference when switching between emotional expression,sex, and age classification of perceived faces

The present study investigated whether the processing characteristics of categorizing emotional facial expressions are different from those of categorizing facial age and sex information. Given that emotions change rapidly, it was hypothesized that processing facial expressions involves a more flexible task set that causes less between-task interference than the task sets involved in processing age or sex of a face. Participants switched between three tasks: categorizing a face as looking happy or angry (emotion task), young or old (age task), and male or female (sex task). Interference between tasks was measured by global interference and response interference. Both measures revealed patterns of asymmetric interference. Global between-task interference was reduced when a task was mixed with the emotion task. Response interference, as measured by congruency effects, was larger for the emotion task than for the nonemotional tasks. The results support the idea that processing emotional facial expression constitutes a more flexible task set that causes less interference (i.e., task-set “inertia”) than processing the age or sex of a face     

Age and age of acquisition: An evaluation of the cumulative frequency hypothesis

An important determinant of picture and word naming speed is the age at which the names were learned (age of acquisition). Two related interpretations of these effects are that they reflect differences between words in their cumulative frequency of use, or that they reflect differences in the amount of time early and lateacquired words have spent in lexical memory. Both theories predict that differences between early and late-acquired words will be less apparent in older than younger adults. Two experiments are reported in which younger and older adults read words varying in age of acquisition or frequency, or named objects varying in age of acquisition. There was an observed effect of word frequency only for young adults' word naming. In contrast, strong age of acquisition effects were found for both the young and the old participants. The implications of these results for theories of how age of acquisition might affect lexical processing are discussed.     

Deployment dynamics of hypnotic anger modulation

To understand the role that attention plays in the deployment timeline of hypnotic anger modulation, we composed an Attentional Blink paradigm where the first and second targets were faces, expressing neutral or angry emotions. We then suppressed the salience of angry faces through a “hypnotic numbing” suggestion. We found that hypnotic suggestion only attenuated the emotional salience of the second target (T2). By implementing drift-diffusion decision modelling, we also found that hypnotic suggestion mainly affected decision thresholds. These findings suggest that hypnotic numbing resulted from belated changes in response strategy. Interestingly, a contrast against non-hypnotized participants revealed that the numbing suggestion had the instruction-like feature of incorporating emotional valence into the attentional task-set. Together, our results portray hypnotic anger modulation as a two-tiered process: first, hypnotic suggestion alters the attentional task-set; second, provided processing and response preparation are not interrupted, a hypnotizability-dependent response based on said altered task-set is produced through late cognitive control strategies.     

“Piensa” twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making

In this article, we assess to what extent decision making is affected by the language in which a given problem is presented (native vs. foreign). In particular, we aim to ask whether the impact of various heuristic biases in decision making is diminished when the problems are presented in a foreign language. To this end, we report four main studies in which more than 700 participants were tested on different types of individual decision making problems. In the first study, we replicated Keysar et al.’s (2012) recent observation regarding the foreign language effect on framing effects related to loss aversion. In the second section, we assessed whether the foreign language effect is present in other types of framing problems that involve psychological accounting biases rather than gain/loss dichotomies. In the third section, we studied the foreign language effect in several key aspects of the theory of decision making under risk and uncertainty. In the fourth study, we assessed the presence of a foreign language effect in the cognitive reflection test, a test that includes logical problems that do not carry emotional connotations. The absence of such an effect in this test suggests that foreign language leads to a reduction of heuristic biases in decision making across a range of decision making situations and provide also some evidence about the boundaries of the phenomenon. We explore several potential factors that may underlie the foreign language effect in decision making.     

Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and migration

Migrant life experiences and the migration process offer a rich, complex and under-examined field for social research on emotion. This article introduces this Special Issue collection of papers, all authored by migration scholars, by providing an overview of migration and emotions studies, hopefully inspiring further scholarly work and orienting newcomers to the field. We examine research to date on topics such as the development of emotional life “on the move” over time and space; the interface between emotion in proximity and from a distance; the influence of mobility on emotional cultures and on their changing social and ethnic boundaries; the mixed ways in which emotions are dis-embodied and re-embodied – out of place and re-emplaced – in response to migrant life trajectories. In all of these domains, available research points to the migrant emotional condition as a complex and multifaceted one. Far from being the opposite of the instrumental (i.e. economically-driven) dimension of migrant life, the emotional dimension is its inescapable complement, in which ambivalence is more common than straightforward “either (home-)/or (host-oriented)” emotional states. The relevance of emotion to the debate on immigrant integration, identity and belonging, and the political significance of emotion both for top-down politics and day-to-day ethnic relations, is also analysed. A case is made for further comparative, multi-method and interdisciplinary research on migration and emotion given the important intersections of these fields.     

Sweetheart, you really make me happy: romantic relationship quality and personality as predictors of happiness among emerging adults

Two studies investigated the predictive ability of romantic relationship quality in happiness above and beyond the influence of personality (Big Five) among emerging adults. Study 1 (n = 221) showed that global romantic relationship quality accounted for 3% of the variance in happiness while controlling for personality. Study 2 (n = 187) replicated this finding by assessing happiness and relationship quality with different scales. Second study also extended the first study in two ways. First, emotional security and companionship emerged as the strongest features of romantic relationship quality that predicted happiness. Second, identity formation moderated the relationship between relationship quality and happiness such that emerging adults were happier when they experienced high quality relationships at high levels of identity formation. Findings across the two studies were discussed in the light of the literature and suggestions for future research were made.     

Evidence for an emotion-cognition interaction in the statistical prediction of suicide attempts

Suicidal behavior is a prevalent problem among adolescents and young adults. Although most theoretical models of suicide suggest that this behavior results from the interaction of different risk factors, most prior studies have tested only bivariate associations between individual risk factors and suicidal behaviors. The current study was designed to address this limitation by testing the effect of an emotion–cognition interaction on suicide attempts among youth. Specifically, we hypothesized that the interaction of emotion reactivity and problem-solving skills would statistically predict the probability of a recent suicide attempt among 87 adolescents and young adults. Results revealed a significant interaction, such that emotion reactivity was strongly associated with the probability of a suicide attempt among those with poor problem-solving skills, moderately associated among those with average problem-solving skills, and not significantly associated among those with good problem-solving skills. The next generation of studies on suicidal behavior should continue to examine how risk factors interact to predict this dangerous outcome.