Children's Causal Explanations of Psychogenic Bodily Reactions

In Experiment 1, 4‐, 5‐, 8‐ and 11‐year‐old Japanese children (n = 69) and adults (n = 21) explained their reasons for bodily induced reactions (e.g. overeating leads to vomiting) and psychogenic bodily reactions (bodily outcomes originating in the mind, e.g. frustration leads to vomiting). Children gave vitalistic explanations, that is, explaining causal connections by referring to a vital force, in responses concerning bodily induced reactions, whereas adults typically gave these explanations in responses concerning psychogenic bodily reactions. In Experiment 2, 5‐, 8‐ and 11‐year‐old children (n = 96) and adults (n = 24) explained bodily induced and psychogenic bodily reactions, and psychological behaviour, for example, that frustration leads to nail biting. As in Experiment 1, vitalistic explanations tended to be found for psychogenic tasks but were seldom found in either children's or adults' explanations of psychological behaviour. The findings suggest that with age vitalistic causality obtains cross mind‐body implications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Angry faces hold the eyes

Efficient processing of complex social and biological stimuli associated with threat is crucial for survival. Previous studies have suggested that threatening stimuli such as angry faces not only capture visual attention, but also delay the disengagement of attention from their location. However, in the previous studies disengagement of attention was measured indirectly and was inferred on the basis of delayed manual responses. The present study employed a novel paradigm that allows direct examination of the delayed disengagement hypothesis by measuring the time it takes to disengage the eyes from threatening stimuli. The results showed that participants were indeed slower to make an eye movement away from an angry face presented at fixation than from either a neutral or a happy face. This finding provides converging support that the delay in disengagement of attention is an important component of processing threatening information.     

Processing emotion information from both the face and body: An eye-movement study

This study examined the perception of emotional expressions, focusing on the face and the body. Photographs of four actors expressing happiness, sadness, anger, and fear were presented in congruent (e.g., happy face with happy body) and incongruent (e.g., happy face with fearful body) combinations. Participants selected an emotional label using a four-option categorisation task. Reaction times and accuracy for the categorisation judgement, and eye movements were the dependent variables. Two regions of interest were examined: face and body. Results showed better accuracy and faster reaction times for congruent images compared to incongruent images. Eye movements showed an interaction in which there were more fixations and longer dwell times to the face and fewer fixations and shorter dwell times to the body with incongruent images. Thus, conflicting information produced a marked effect on information processing in which participants focused to a greater extent on the face compared to the body.     

“Tears of joy” & “smiles of joy” prompt distinct patterns of interpersonal emotion regulation

Close relationship partners often respond to happiness expressed through smiles with capitalization, i.e. they join in attempting to up-regulate and prolong the individual’s positive emotion, and they often respond to crying with interpersonal down-regulation of negative emotions, attempting to dampen the negative emotions. We investigated how people responded when happiness was expressed through tears, an expression termed dimorphous. We hypothesised that the physical expression of crying would prompt interpersonal down-regulation of emotion when the onlooker perceived that the expresser was experiencing negative or positive emotions. When participants were asked how they would behave when faced with smiles of joy, we expected capitalization responses, and when faced with tears of joy, we expected down-regulation responses. In six experimental studies using video and photographic stimuli, we found support for our hypotheses. Throughout our investigations we test and discuss boundaries of and possible mechanisms for such responsiveness.     

Mixed matters: fluency impacts trust ratings when faces range on valence but not on motivational implications

Facial features that resemble emotional expressions influence key social evaluations, including trust. Here, we present four experiments testing how the impact of such expressive features is qualified by their processing difficulty. We show that faces with mixed expressive features are relatively devalued, and faces with pure expressive features are relatively valued. This is especially true when participants first engage in a categorisation task that makes processing of mixed expressions difficult and pure expressions easy. Critically, we also demonstrate that the impact of categorisation fluency depends on the specific nature of the expressive features. When faces vary on valence (i.e. sad to happy), trust judgments increase with their positivity, but also depend on fluency. When faces vary on social motivation (i.e. angry to sad), trust judgments increase with their approachability, but remain impervious to disfluency. This suggests that people intelligently use fluency to make judgments on valence-relevant judgment dimensions – but not when faces can be judged using other relevant criteria, such as motivation. Overall, the findings highlight that key social impressions (like trust) are flexibly constructed from inputs related to stimulus features and processing experience.     

Is the sense of bodily ownership related to pre-reflective bodily awareness? A reply to Kuhle

There are two ways in which we are aware of our bodies: reflectively, when we attend to them, and pre-reflectively, a kind of marginal awareness that pervades regular experience. However, there is an inherent issue with studying bodily awareness of the pre-reflective kind: given that it is, by definition, non-observational, how can we observe it? Kuhle claims to have found a way around this problem—we can study it indirectly by investigating an aspect of reflective bodily awareness: the sense of bodily ownership. Unfortunately, I argue, there is little reason to believe a relationship between pre-reflective bodily awareness and the sense of bodily ownership exists. Until more work is done, pre-reflective bodily awareness remains beyond our empirical grasp.     

Threatening joy: Approach and avoidance reactions to emotions are influenced by the group membership of the expresser

It has been repeatedly stated that approach and avoidance reactions to emotional faces are triggered by the intention signalled by the emotion. This line of thought suggests that each emotion signals a specific intention triggering a specific behavioural reaction. However, empirical results examining this assumption are inconsistent, suggesting that it might be too short-sighted. We hypothesise that the same emotional expression can signal different social messages and, therefore, trigger different reactions; which social message is signalled by an emotional expression should be influenced by moderating variables, such as the group membership of the expresser. In two experiments, we show that group membership influences approach and avoidance reactions to emotional expressions: Emotions (fear and happiness) expressed by in-group members elicited concordant behaviour, whereas emotions expressed by out-group members activated the reverse pattern. A third experiment, in which participants directly evaluated smiling and fearful individuals resembling in-group and out-group members supported this result.     

Processing emotional category congruency between emotional facial expressions and emotional words

Facial expressions are critical for effective social communication, and as such may be processed by the visual system even when it might be advantageous to ignore them. Previous research has shown that categorising emotional words was impaired when faces of a conflicting valence were simultaneously presented. In the present study, we examined whether emotional word categorisation would also be impaired when faces of the same (negative) valence but different emotional category (either angry, sad or fearful) were simultaneously presented. Behavioural results provided evidence for involuntary processing of basic emotional facial expression category, with slower word categorisation when the face and word categories were incongruent (e.g., angry word and sad face) than congruent (e.g., angry word and angry face). Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the presentation of the word–face pairs also revealed that emotional category congruency effects were evident from approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset.