The curiosity and exploration inventory-II: Development, factor structure, and psychometrics

Given curiosity’s fundamental role in motivation, learning, and well-being, we sought to refine the measurement of trait curiosity with an improved version of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; [Kashdan, T. B., Rose, P., & Fincham, F. D. (2004). Curiosity and exploration: Facilitating positive subjective experiences and personal growth opportunities. Journal of Personality Assessment, 82, 291–305]). A preliminary pool of 36 items was administered to 311 undergraduate students, who also completed measures of emotion, emotion regulation, personality, and well-being. Factor analyses indicated a two-factor model—motivation to seek out knowledge and new experiences (Stretching; five items) and a willingness to embrace the novel, uncertain, and unpredictable nature of everyday life (Embracing; five items). In two additional samples (ns = 150 and 119), we cross-validated this factor structure and provided initial evidence for construct validity. This includes positive correlations with personal growth, openness to experience, autonomy, purpose in life, self-acceptance, psychological flexibility, positive affect, and positive social relations, among others. Applying item response theory (IRT) to these samples (n = 578), we showed that the items have good discrimination and a desirable breadth of difficulty. The item information functions and test information function were centered near zero, indicating that the scale assesses the mid-range of the latent curiosity trait most reliably. The findings thus far provide good evidence for the psychometric properties of the 10-item CEI-II.     

Self-referential processing of negative stimuli within the ventral anterior cingulate gyrus and right amygdala

Neural activity associated with self-referential processing of emotional stimuli was investigated using whole brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Fifteen healthy subjects underwent fMRI scanning while making judgments about positive and negative trait words in four conditions (self-reference, other-reference, semantic processing, and letter processing). Significant activity was observed in the right ventral anterior cingulate gyrus and the right amygdala in the negative-word/self-reference condition, and in the left amygdala in the positive-word/self-reference condition. Compared with the semantic-processing condition, the self-reference conditions showed significantly more activity in the medial prefrontal and temporal gyri, posterior cingulate gyrus, and precuneus. These results suggest that the medial prefrontal gyrus, posterior cingulate gyrus, and precuneus are associated with a self-referential processing, and the ventral anterior cingulate gyrus is involved in self-referential processing of negative emotional stimuli. The results also suggest that the amygdala is associated with self-referential processing of both positive and negative emotional stimuli.     

Evaluative priming from subliminal emotional words: Insights from event-related potentials and individual differences related to anxiety

The present ERP study investigated effects of subliminal emotional words on preference judgments about subsequent visual target stimuli (paintings, portraits). Each target was preceded by a masked 17-ms emotional adjective. Four classes of prime words were distinguished according to the combinations of positive/negative valence and high/low arousal. Targets were liked significantly more after positive-arousing primes (e.g., happy), relative to negative-arousing (brutal), positive-nonarousing (mild), and negative-nonarousing primes (lazy). In the target ERP, amplitude of right-hemisphere positive slow wave was increased after positive-arousing compared to negative-arousing primes. Evaluative priming effects on judgments and ERPs were more pronounced in high state-anxious participants. The results suggest that (1) there is indeed affective/semantic processing of unconscious words, (2) evaluative priming operates relatively late during target processing, (3) to be effective, prime words need to score high on the arousal dimension, and (4) individual differences in state anxiety modulate the susceptibility to subliminal evaluative priming.     

Impact of Traumatic Life Events in a Community Sample of Toddlers

Toddlers may be at particularly high risk for a number of psychiatric, developmental and neurobiological consequences in the aftermath of trauma. The social and emotional impact of potentially traumatic life events experienced between 6 and 36-months of age was assessed in an epidemiological birth cohort of 18- to 36-month-olds from the Greater New Haven Area. Event-exposed toddlers evidenced greater symptom severity on the ITSEA Internalizing, Externalizing, Dysregulation, Atypical and Maladaptive scales, as well on the CBCL Internalizing and Externalizing scales than those not exposed. Approximately one-fifth of event-exposed toddlers were reported by their parents to have experienced a dramatic change in functioning following the event, and were described as experiencing higher levels of symptoms consistent with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), namely re-experiencing and arousal, than exposed toddlers whose parents did not report a change in their functioning. Implications for clinicians and child care providers working with toddlers and their parents are discussed.     

Sleep in children enhances preferentially emotional declarative but not procedural memories

Although the consolidation of several memory systems is enhanced by sleep in adults, recent studies suggest that sleep supports declarative memory but not procedural memory in children. In the current study, the influence of sleep on emotional declarative memory (recognition task) and procedural memory (mirror tracing task) in 20 healthy children (10-13 years of age) was examined. After sleep, children showed an improvement in declarative memory. Separate analysis with respect to the emotional stimulus content revealed that sleep enhances the recognition of emotional stimuli (p > .001) rather than neutral stimuli (p = .084). In the procedural task, however, no sleep-enhanced memory improvement was observed. The results indicate that sleep in children, comparable to adults, enhances predominantly emotional declarative memory; however, in contrast to adults, it has no effect on the consolidation of procedural memory.     

Development of perceptual expertise in emotion recognition

How do children’s early social experiences influence their perception of emotion-specific information communicated by the face? To examine this question, we tested a group of abused children who had been exposed to extremely high levels of parental anger expression and physical threat. Children were presented with arrays of stimuli that depicted the unfolding of facial expressions, from neutrality to peak emotions. The abused children accurately recognized anger early in the formation of the facial expression, when few physiological cues were available. The speed of children’s recognition was associated with the degree of anger/hostility reported by the child’s parent. These data highlight the ways in which perceptual learning can shape the timing of emotion perception.     

An implicit measure of anti-gay attitudes: Prospective associations with emotion regulation strategies and psychological distress

Members of stigmatized groups are at increased risk for mental health problems, and recent research has suggested that emotion dysregulation may be one mechanism explaining the stigma-distress association. However, little is known regarding characteristics that predict vulnerabilities to emotion dysregulation and subsequent distress. We examined whether anti-gay attitudes would predict poorer emotion regulation and greater psychological distress in 31 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) respondents. Respondents completed implicit and explicit attitude measures at baseline, and participated in an experience sampling study examining stigma-related stressors, emotion regulation strategies, and mood over the course of ten days. Implicit and explicit attitude measures were not correlated. LGB respondents with greater implicit anti-gay attitudes engaged in significantly more rumination and suppression and reported more psychological distress. Rumination fully mediated the prospective association between implicit prejudicial attitudes and psychological distress, and suppression was a marginally significant mediator.     

I feel our pain: Antecedents and consequences of emotional self-stereotyping

According to Intergroup Emotions Theory people categorized as group members experience the emotions of their ingroup as a consequence of that membership. Four experiments showed that participants converged toward what they believed to be their specific ingroup’s distinct emotional experience when reporting emotions as group members, but not when reporting emotions as individuals. Such self-stereotyping of ingroup emotions occurred for an experimentally fabricated ingroup as well as a range of naturally occurring groups. Demonstrating the roots of this process in categorization, self-stereotyping was increased when motivations to affiliate were amplified and was moderated by ingroup identification. The adoption of ingroup emotions changed participants’ cognitive processing in a predictable way, demonstrating that emotional self-stereotyping involved the experience rather than merely the expression of group-based emotions. Self-stereotyping of ingroup emotions is thus one mechanism by which group-based emotions are shared and can be changed.     

Comparing emotional reactivity and regulation in infants born ELGA and VLGA

Emotional reactivity and regulation behaviors were compared in infants born extremely low gestational age (ELGA) and very low gestational age (VLGA) during the still-face procedure. Infants born ELGA demonstrated greater emotional reactivity and displayed less frequent gaze avoidance, more frequent gestures, and more self-comforting behaviors.     

Consciousness and emotion: ERP modulation and attentive vs. pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expressions by backward masking

Facial stimulus processing is an important topic to explain how people comprehend affective disposition in others. The effect of attentive and pre-attentive elaboration of emotional facial expression was explored in the present research by using backward masking procedure. Specifically, unconscious mental process of emotion comprehension was analyzed: pictures presenting a happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised expressions were submitted to 21 subjects in both attentive and pre-attentive conditions and event-related potentials (ERPs) were registered in the two conditions. The two processes, attentive and pre-attentive, seem to be similar in their nature, since they are marked by analogous ERP deflections. In fact, two ERP effects were found, a positive (P300) deflection, maximally distributed on the parietal regions, and a negative (N200) deflection, more localized on the frontal sites. Nevertheless, some differences between the two conditions were found in terms of quantitative modulations of the two peaks. The N200 effect, ampler in attentive condition, may be considered such as an index of conscious processing of emotional faces, whereas the P3 (P3a) effect, higher in pre-attentive condition, was considered a specific marker of the automatic, unconscious process during the emotional face comprehension.