Autonomic and subjective responsivity to emotional images in people with dissociative seizures

People with dissociative seizures (DS) report a range of difficulties in emotional functioning and exhibit altered responding to emotional facial expressions in experimental tasks. We extended this research by investigating subjective and autonomic reactivity (ratings of emotional valence, arousal and skin conductance responses [SCRs]) to general emotional images in 39 people with DS relative to 42 healthy control participants, whilst controlling for anxiety, depression, cognitive functioning and, where relevant, medication use. It was predicted that greater subjective negativity and arousal and increased SCRs in response to the affective pictures would be observed in the DS group. The DS group as a whole did not differ from controls in their subjective responses of valence and arousal. However, SCR amplitudes were greater in ‘autonomic responders’ with DS relative to ‘autonomic responders’ in the control group. A positive correlation was also observed between SCRs for highly arousing negative pictures and self‐reported ictal autonomic arousal, in DS ‘autonomic responders’. In the DS subgroup of autonomic ‘non‐responders’, differences in subjective responses were observed for some conditions, compared to control ‘non‐responders’. The findings indicate unaffected subjective responses to emotional images in people with DS overall. However, within the group of people with DS, there may be subgroups characterized by differences in emotional responding. One subgroup (i.e., ‘autonomic responders’) exhibit heightened autonomic responses but intact subjective emotional experience, whilst another subgroup (i.e., ‘autonomic non‐responders’) seem to experience greater subjective negativity and arousal for some emotional stimuli, despite less frequent autonomic reactions. The current results suggest that therapeutic interventions targeting awareness and regulation of physiological arousal and subjective emotional experience could be of value in some people with this disorder.     

Approach-avoidance,attentional and evaluation biases in hair pulling disorder and their relationship with symptom severity

The present study examined approach-avoidance, attentional and evaluation biases in Hair Pulling Disorder (HPD). Although none of the tasks showed indications of biased action tendencies in response to hair pulling-related pictures, or biased attention for hair pulling-related words, we found that patients were slower to react to hair pulling-related stimuli than to neutral stimuli. This slowing down may indicate that patients are ambivalent towards hair pulling. This “ambivalence” positively correlated with HPD symptom severity, but only on one of the three severity measures we assessed. Concerning action tendencies towards hair pulling-related words, patients were, however, faster to react to hair pulling-related words when compared to words related to resisting hair pulling. Future research is needed to disentangle this ambivalent response pattern in HPD.     

The perception of (naked only) bodies and faceless heads relies on holistic processing: Evidence from the inversion effect

Faces and bodies are more difficult to perceive when presented inverted than when presented upright (i.e., stimulus inversion effect), an effect that has been attributed to the disruption of holistic processing. The features that can trigger holistic processing in faces and bodies, however, still remain elusive. In this study, using a sequential matching task, we tested whether stimulus inversion affects various categories of visual stimuli: faces, faceless heads, faceless heads in body context, headless bodies naked, whole bodies naked, headless bodies clothed, and whole bodies clothed. Both accuracy and inversion efficiency score results show inversion effects for all categories but for clothed bodies (with and without heads). In addition, the magnitude of the inversion effect for face, naked body, and faceless heads was similar. Our findings demonstrate that the perception of faces, faceless heads, and naked bodies relies on holistic processing. Clothed bodies (with and without heads), on the other side, may trigger clothes-sensitive rather than body-sensitive perceptual mechanisms.     

Prototypes and same-gender bias in perceptions of hiring discrimination

The present study investigated the relative importance of two explanations behind perceptions of gender discrimination in hiring: prototypes and same-gender bias. According to the prototype explanation, people perceive an event as discrimination to the extent that it fits their preconceptions of typical discrimination. In contrast, the same-gender bias explanation asserts that people more readily detect discrimination toward members of their own gender. In four experiments (n = 797), women and men made considerably stronger discrimination attributions, and were moderately more discouraged from seeking work, when the victim was female rather than male. Further, a series of regressions analyses showed beliefs in discrimination of women to be moderately correlated with discrimination attributions of female victims, but little added explanatory value of participant gender, stigma consciousness, or feminist identification. The results offer strong support for the prototype explanation.     

Attentional bias during emotional processing: evidence from an emotional flanker task using IAPS

Attention is biased towards threat-related stimuli. In three experiments, we investigated the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this processing bias. An emotional flanker task simultaneously presented affective or neutral pictures from the international affective picture system database either as central response-relevant stimuli or surrounding response-uninformative flankers. Participants’ response times to central stimuli was measured. The attentional bias was observed when stimuli were presented either for 1500?ms (Experiment 1) or 500?ms (Experiment 2). The threat-related attentional bias held regardless of the stimuli competing for attention even when presentation time was further reduced to 200?ms (Experiment 3). The results indicate that automatic and controlled mechanisms may interact to modulate the orientation of attention to threat. The data presented here shed new light on the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this long investigated by still largely unknown processing bias.     

Auditory driving and affective influences

Past research has shown that variations in musical tempo influence the perceived rate of visual motion. The goal here was to investigate whether this effect is influenced by audiovisual affect. Participants were presented with montages (slideshows) of positive or negative scenes accompanied by positive or negative music whose rate was either the same as, or 15% faster or slower than that of the montage. The results of a subsequent recognition task showed a higher false alarm rate to faster and slower visual scenes in the presence of accelerated and decelerated soundtracks, respectively. Moreover, the magnitude of these effects significantly increased when music–montage pairs displayed a positive and negative affect, respectively. In contrast, variations in visual rate exerted no influence on auditory rate recognition. These findings have implications for audiovisual art forms as well as theories of cross‐modal perception.     

Associative false consumer memory: effects of need for cognition and encoding task

Two experiments investigated the effects of product–attribute associations on false consumer memory. In both experiments, subjects were presented with sets of related product attributes under incidental encoding conditions. Later, recognition memory was tested with studied attributes, non-studied but associated attributes (critical lures) and non-studied unrelated attributes. In Experiment 1, the effect of Need for Cognition (NFC) was assessed. It was found that individuals high in NFC recognised more presented attributes and falsely recognised more associative critical lures. The increase in both true and associative false memory was accompanied by a greater number of responses that index the retrieval of detailed episodic-like information. Experiment 2, replicated the main findings through an experimental manipulation of the encoding task that required subjects to consider purchase likelihood. Explanations for these findings are considered from the perspective of activation processes and knowledge structures in the form of gist-based representations.     

Examining the visual processing patterns of lonely adults

Prior research has shown that loneliness is associated with hypervigilance to social threats, with eye‐tracking research showing lonely people display a specific attentional bias when viewing social rejection and social exclusion video footage (Bangee, Harris, Bridges, Rotenberg & Qualter, 2014; Qualter, Rotenberg, Barrett et al ., 2013). The current study uses eye‐tracker methodology to examine whether that attentional bias extends to negative emotional faces and negative social non‐rejecting stimuli, or whether it could be explained only as a specific bias to social rejection/exclusion. It is important to establish whether loneliness relates to a specific or general attention bias because it may explain the maintenance of loneliness. Participants (N = 43, F = 35, M age = 20 years and 2 months, SD = 3 months) took part in three tasks, where they viewed different social information: Task 1 – slides displaying four faces each with different emotions (anger, afraid, happy and neutral), Task 2 – slides displaying sixteen faces with varying ratios expressing happiness and anger, and Task 3 – slides displaying four visual scenes (socially rejecting, physically threatening, socially positive, neutral). For all three tasks, eye movements were recorded in real time with an eye‐tracker. Results showed no association between loneliness and viewing patterns of facial expressions, but an association between loneliness and hypervigilant viewing of social rejecting stimuli. The findings indicate that lonely adults do not have a generalised hypervigilance to social threat, but have, instead, a specific attentional bias to rejection information in social contexts. Implications of the findings for interventions are discussed.