Anxious mood narrows attention in feature space

Spatial attention can operate like a spotlight whose scope can vary depending on task demands. Emotional states contribute to the spatial extent of attentional selection, with the spotlight focused more narrowly during anxious moods and more broadly during happy moods. In addition to visual space, attention can also operate over features, and we show here that mood states may also influence attentional scope in feature space. After anxious or happy mood inductions, participants focused their attention to identify a central target while ignoring flanking items. Flankers were sometimes coloured differently than targets, so focusing attention on target colour should lead to relatively less interference. Compared to happy and neutral moods, when anxious, participants showed reduced interference when colour isolated targets from flankers, but showed more interference when flankers and targets were the same colour. This pattern reveals that the anxious mood caused these individuals to attend to the irrelevant feature in both cases, regardless of its benefit or detriment. In contrast, participants showed no effect of colour on interference when happy, suggesting that positive mood did not influence attention in feature space. These mood effects on feature-based attention provide a theoretical bridge between previous findings concerning spatial and conceptual attention.     

Mental state decoding in past major depression: Effect of sad versus happy mood induction

Individuals with mild depression show an enhanced ability to read or “decode” others' mental states. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether this pattern of performance is related specifically to the pathology of depression or whether it is simply a feature of the transient dysphoric state. Forty-one undergraduates with a previous episode of major depression and 52 undergraduates with no depression history participated in a mental state decoding task following a sad versus happy mood induction. Previously depressed participants were significantly more accurate in their mental state judgements than were the never-depressed participants, suggesting that enhanced mental state decoding may be a specific feature of depression in remission. Furthermore, previously depressed participants whose positive mood increased in response to the happy mood induction showed a poorer level of performance on the task, similar to that observed in the never-depressed group. Thus, a happy mood may have induced a somewhat less accurate, but perhaps more adaptive, approach to processing social information. These findings were robust after controlling for current level of depression and anxiety symptoms, intensity of response to the mood induction, response times, and performance on a control task.     

The Relationship between Intelligence and Age among Superior Adults

The authors addressed whether parental expression of disappointment should be included as a distinct factor in M. L. Hoffman's (2000) well-established typology of parenting styles (induction, love withdrawal, power assertion). Hoffman's 3-factor model, along with a more inclusive 4-factor model (induction, love withdrawal, power assertion, and expressions of disappointment), were respectively evaluated in exploratory factor analyses. The analysis utilized extant data (J. Krevans &; J. C. Gibbs, 1996) comprised of responses by children (N = 73) and their mothers (N = 67) to an adaptation of M. L. Hoffman and H. D. Saltzstein's (1967) parental discipline measure. The findings supported Hoffman's original model. Disappointment may be reducible to love withdrawal or induction, although disappointment may be a more appropriate induction for adolescents.     

Impact of Experimentally Induced Positive and Anxious Mood on Alcohol Expectancy Strength in Internally Motivated Drinkers

The effects of musically‐induced positive and anxious mood on explicit alcohol‐related cognitions (alcohol expectancy strength) in 47 undergraduate students who consume alcohol either to enhance positive mood states (for enhancement motives) or to cope with anxiety (for anxiety‐related coping motives) were investigated. Pre‐ and post‐mood induction, participants completed the emotional reward and emotional relief subscales of the Alcohol Craving Questionnaire – Now. The hypothesis that anxiety‐related coping motivated drinkers in the anxious mood condition (but not those in the positive mood condition) would exhibit increases in strength of explicit emotional relief alcohol expectancies after the mood induction was supported. An additional, unanticipated finding was that enhancement‐motivated drinkers in the anxious condition also showed significant increases in strength of explicit emotional relief (but not emotional reward) alcohol expectancies. The hypothesis that enhancement‐motivated (but not anxiety‐related coping motivated) participants would exhibit increases in explicit emotional reward expectancies following exposure to the positive mood induction procedure was not supported. Taken together with past research findings, the current results highlight the importance of distinguishing between subtypes of negative affect (i.e., anxious and depressed affect) in exploring the affective antecedents of explicit alcohol outcome expectancies.     

Dual frames for causal induction: the normative and the heuristic

Causal induction in the real world often has to be quick and efficient as well as accurate. We propose that people use two different frames to achieve these goals. The A-frame consists of heuristic processes that presuppose rarity and can detect causally relevant factors quickly. The B-frame consists of analytic processes that can be highly accurate in detecting actual causes. Our dual frame theory implies that several factors affect whether people use the A-frame or the B-frame in causal induction: among these are symmetrical negation, intervention and commitment. This theory is tested and sustained in two experiments. The results also provide broad support for dual process accounts of human thinking in general.     

Emotional, cognitive and physiological correlates of abuse-related stress in borderline and antisocial personality disorder

Childhood abuse is an important precursor of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). The current study compared the emotional reactivity to abuse-related stress of these patients on a direct and an indirect level. Changes in self-reported affect and schema modes, psychophysiology and reaction time based cognitive associations were assessed following confrontation with an abuse-related film fragment in patients with BPD (n = 45), ASPD (n = 21), Cluster C personality disorder (n = 46) and non-patient controls (n = 36). Results indicated a hyperresponsivity of BPD-patients on self-reported negative affect and schema modes, on some psychophysiological indices and on implicit cognitive associations. The ASPD-group was comparable to the BPD group on implicit cognitions but did not show self-reported and physiological hyper-reactivity. These findings suggest that BPD and ASPD-patients are alike in their implicit cognitive abuse-related stress reactivity, but can be differentiated in their self-reported and physiological response patterns.     

A rose in any other font would not smell as sweet: effects of perceptual fluency on categorization

Fluency--the ease with which people process information--is a central piece of information we take into account when we make judgments about the world. Prior research has shown that fluency affects judgments in a wide variety of domains, including frequency, familiarity, and confidence. In this paper, we present evidence that fluency also plays a role in categorization judgments. In Experiment 1, participants judged a variety of different exemplars to be worse category members if they were less fluent (because they were presented in a smaller typeface). In Experiment 2, we found that fluency also affected judgments of feature typicality. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that the effects of fluency can be reversed when a salient attribution for reduced fluency is available (i.e., the stimuli are hard to read because they were printed by a printer with low toner). In Experiment 4 we replicated these effects using a within-subject design, which ruled out the possibility that the effects were a statistical artifact caused by aggregation of data. We propose a possible mechanism for these effects: if an exemplar and its category are closely related, activation of one will cause priming of the other, leading to increased fluency. Over time, feelings of fluency come to be used as a valid cue that can become confused with more traditional sources of information about category membership.