Happy to See Me,Aren’t You,Sally? Signal Detection Analysis of Emotion Detection in Briefly Presented Male and Female Faces

Using signal detection methods, possible effects of emotion type (happy, angry), gender of the stimulus face, and gender of the participant on the detection and response bias of emotion in briefly presented faces were investigated. Fifty-seven participants (28 men, 29 women) viewed 90 briefly presented faces (30 happy, 30 angry, and 30 neutral, each with 15 male and 15 female faces) answering yes if the face was perceived as emotional and no if it was not perceived as emotional. Sensitivity [d', z(hit rate) minus z(false alarm rate)] and response bias (β, likelihood ratio of "signal plus noise" vs. "noise") were measured for each face combination for each presentation time (6.25, 12.50, 18.75, 25.00, 31.25 ms). The d' values were higher for happy than for angry faces and higher for angry-male than for angry-female faces, and there were no effects of gender-of-participant. Results also suggest a greater tendency for participants to judge happy-female faces as emotional, as shown by lower β values for these faces as compared to the other emotion-gender combinations. This happy-female response bias suggests, at least, a partial explanation to happy-superiority effects in studies where performance is only measured as percent correct responses, and, in general, that women are expected to be happy.     

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.     

The effect of psychological stress and expectation on auditory perception: A signal detection analysis

Both psychological stress and predictive signals relating to expected sensory input are believed to influence perception, an influence which, when disrupted, may contribute to the generation of auditory hallucinations. The effect of stress and semantic expectation on auditory perception was therefore examined in healthy participants using an auditory signal detection task requiring the detection of speech from within white noise. Trait anxiety was found to predict the extent to which stress influenced response bias, resulting in more anxious participants adopting a more liberal criterion, and therefore experiencing more false positives, when under stress. While semantic expectation was found to increase sensitivity, its presence also generated a shift in response bias towards reporting a signal, suggesting that the erroneous perception of speech became more likely. These findings provide a potential cognitive mechanism that may explain the impact of stress on hallucination‐proneness, by suggesting that stress has the tendency to alter response bias in highly anxious individuals. These results also provide support for the idea that top‐down processes such as those relating to semantic expectation may contribute to the generation of auditory hallucinations.     

幽默加工中不一致探测与解决的脑机制分离

本fMRI研究使用“文字背景—漫画图片”实验范式,设计了三种实验条件（可笑、不可笑和无关）,试图对幽默加工中不一致探测与解决的脑机制进行分离。可笑与不可笑条件对比的结果与前人研究一致,证明了新实验范式的有效性。其次,无关与不可笑条件比较,右侧脑岛激活,说明脑岛可能与不一致探测有关。综合分析发现,脑岛与杏仁核可能共同参与了不一致探测加工。此外,结果还第一次区分了幽默加工中不一致解决与一般问题解决的脑区。     

Can I borrow your alibi? The applicability of the verifiability approach to the case of an alibi witness

The present experiment tested the applicability of the verifiability approach to the case of an alibi witness. Pairs of truth tellers carried out non-criminal activities. Pairs of liars were separated whereby Member 1 carried out the same non-criminal activities as the pairs of truth tellers while Member 2 committed a mock crime. Participants were asked to provide statements about their whereabouts, whereby pairs of liars were requested to pretend that they carried out Member 1's activities together. Participants were informed that their statements would be assessed in terms of providing verifiable evidence that they had carried out the activities together. Results showed that 88% of the pairs were correctly classified by the verifiability approach. Groups differed in their strategies: Truth-tellers focused mainly on “staying with the truth”, and provided evidence that they were together, whereas liars attempted to make it difficult to refute their claims that they were together.     

Eyewitness identification discriminability: ROC analysis versus logistic regression

To reach conclusions regarding the respective accuracy of two conditions, eyewitness researchers evaluate correct and false identification rates computed across participants. Two approaches typically are employed. One approach relies on ratio-based probative value measures; but Wixted and Mickes (2012) and Gronlund, Wixted, and Mickes (2014) showed that these measures fail to disentangle an assessment of accuracy (i.e., discriminability between guilty and innocent suspects) from response bias (i.e., a willingness to make a response). Our focus is on a second approach, logistic regression analyses of the correct and of the false identification rates. Logistic regression also fails to disentangle discriminability from bias. Therefore, it only can denote the most accurate condition in limited circumstances. The best approach for reaching the proper conclusion regarding which condition is most accurate is to use receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis. Simulated ROC data illustrate the problem with a reliance on logistic regression to assess accuracy.     

Both fearful and happy expressions interact with gaze direction by 200 ms SOA to speed attention orienting

Attention orienting towards a gazed-at location is fundamental to social attention. Whether gaze cues can interact with emotional expressions other than those signalling environmental threat to modulate this gaze cueing, and whether this integration changes over time, remains unclear. With four experiments we demonstrate that, when perceived motion inherent to dynamic displays is controlled for, gaze cueing is enhanced by both fearful and happy faces compared to neutral faces. This enhancement is seen with stimulus-onset asynchronies ranging from 200–700?ms. Thus, gaze cueing can be reliably modulated by positive expressions, albeit to a smaller degree than fearful ones, and this gaze–emotion integration impacts behaviour as early as 200?ms post-cue onset.     

Can Everyday Brands Be Threatening? Responses to Brand Primes Depend on Childhood Socioeconomic Status

The current work investigates whether childhood socioeconomic status influences how people respond to brands. Results from two experiments show that, perhaps counterintuitively, everyday brands—and not luxury brands—can threaten the self‐esteem of people who had poor childhoods. Supported by the results of our pilot study, we argue this is because everyday brands represent a material norm that can be difficult for low‐income consumers to achieve. Furthermore, our findings suggest that consumers from poor backgrounds may cope with this threat by becoming morse self‐interested, as indicated by decreased volunteer intentions.     

Action‐semantic and syntactic deficits in subjects at risk for Huntington's disease

Frontostriatal networks play critical roles in grounding action semantics and syntactic skills. Indeed, their atrophy distinctively disrupts both domains, as observed in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease, even during early disease stages. However, frontostriatal degeneration in these conditions may begin up to 15 years before the onset of clinical symptoms, opening avenues for pre‐clinical detection via sensitive tasks. Such a mission is particularly critical in HD, given that patients’ children have 50% chances of inheriting the disease. Against this background, we assessed whether deficits in the above‐mentioned domains emerge in subjects at risk to develop HD. We administered tasks tapping action semantics, object semantics, and two forms of syntactic processing to 18 patients with HD, 19 asymptomatic first‐degree relatives, and sociodemographically matched controls for each group. The patients evinced significant deficits in all tasks, but only those in the two target domains were independent of overall cognitive state. More crucially, relative to controls, the asymptomatic relatives were selectively impaired in action semantics and in the more complex syntactic task, with both patterns emerging irrespective of the subjects’ overall cognitive state. Our findings highlight the relevance of these dysfunctions as potential prodromal biomarkers of HD. Moreover, they offer theoretical insights into the differential contributions of frontostriatal hubs to both domains while paving the way for innovations in diagnostic procedures.