The Role of Emotion in Decision Making: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

ABSTRACT— Decision making often occurs in the face of uncertainty about whether one's choices will lead to benefit or harm. The somatic-marker hypothesis is a neurobiological theory of how decisions are made in the face of uncertain outcome. This theory holds that such decisions are aided by emotions, in the form of bodily states, that are elicited during the deliberation of future consequences and that mark different options for behavior as being advantageous or disadvantageous. This process involves an interplay between neural systems that elicit emotional/bodily states and neural systems that map these emotional/bodily states.     

Positive Affect and Health

ABSTRACT— Negative affective styles such as anxiety, depression, and hostility have long been accepted as predictors of increased risk for illness and mortality. In contrast, positive affective styles have been relatively ignored in the health literature. Here we highlight consistent patterns of research associating trait positive affect (PA) and physical health. The evidence we review suggests an association of trait PA and lower morbidity and decreased symptoms and pain. PA is also associated with increased longevity among community-dwelling elderly. The association of PA and survival among those with serious illness is less clear and suggests the possibility that PA may be harmful in some situations. We conclude by raising conceptual and methodological reservations about this literature and suggesting directions for future research.     

本土化情绪声音库的编制和评定

为情绪研究提供一套本土量化的声音刺激材料,在大量收集各种声音刺激的基础上精选出453个声音,并征集50名大学生对声音的愉悦度、唤醒度和优势度进行了自我报告的9点量表评分。结果表明男女生对部分声音的情绪感受有所不同;聚类分析可将声音聚为6类,大致可引发愉快、悲伤、恐惧、厌恶等情绪,提示可以同时从情绪维度和情绪类型两种途径研究情绪问题,两者结果也有相互比较的可能性;本情绪声音库还有待进一步完善。     

冲突管理研究中的冲突定义

近年来许多学者致力于冲突管理的研究,在已有的研究成果中,对冲突的定义不尽相同。本文对先前研究中学者们对冲突所下的定义做以总结。在阅读了大量文献资料的基础上,本文按照不同意见、负面情感、恶意妨碍三个方面对冲突的定义进行分类,共总结出关于冲突的七种定义。对于每种定义,本文都阐述了冲突的产生及其对组织的影响。     

关于情绪与推理的理论与实验研究进展

人们普遍认为情绪会影响推理活动,但长期以来缺乏实证研究的证据。文章总结近年来有关情绪对推理影响研究的实验证据,围绕情绪的两方面因素即情绪状态与情绪信息是否影响逻辑推理的问题,对情绪与推理的关系进行探讨。简要介绍了情绪与推理的理论假设以及其实验范式,主要介绍情绪与推理研究的新进展。     

How I learned to stop fearing: Ideological differences in choice of reappraisal content

In down-regulating intergroup fear, an intense emotion common to intractable intergroup conflicts, people may employ various fear-reducing appraisals. Adopting a motivated reasoning perspective, we posited that the contents of individuals’ ideological beliefs influence the contents they employ to down-regulate fear, with rightists preferring ingroup-empowering content and leftists preferring outgroup-weakening content. In Study 1, rightists (vs. leftists) reported greater use of ingroup-empowering reappraisal to down-regulate fear, but no differences emerged in the use of outgroup-weakening reappraisal. Study 2 manipulated the contents’ perceived instrumentality in reducing fear, to examine this as an alternative mechanism. Perceived instrumentality influenced participants’ behavioral content preferences ahead of a fear induction, but the manipulation did not mitigate the right-left differences in ingroup-empowering reappraisal use once participants were confronted with the stimulus, replicating Study 1. Study 3 extended these findings, identifying ideological differences in two additional fear-reappraisal themes and in the attitudinal outcomes of fear regulation.     

Anger Mediates the Effects of Fear on Support for the Far Right—A Rejoinder

We are grateful to John Jost for carefully engaging with our work and presenting a different interpretation of our findings on the effects of fear and anger stemming from the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks on the propensity to vote for the far right. Jost advances a model that holds that anger mediates the effect of fear on support for the far right. In this rejoinder, we respond to the issues he raises regarding our model specification, consider his alternative suggestion, and offer some conclusions about how to resolve this debate empirically. We hope this exchange advances the literature on the impact of various societal threats on voting for the far right.     

Effects of incidental positive emotion and cognitive reappraisal on affective responses to negative stimuli

Previous studies have identified two powerful ways to regulate emotional responses to a stressor: experiencing incidental positive emotions and using cognitive reappraisal to reframe the stressor. Several cognitive and motivational theories of positive emotion support the formulation that incidental positive emotions may facilitate cognitive reappraisal. To test the separate and interacting effects of positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal, we first adapted an established picture-based reappraisal paradigm by interspersing blocks of positive emotion inducing and neutral pictures. Across two pre-registered studies (Studies 1, 2), reappraisal effectively decreased self-reported negative emotions and increased self-reported positive emotions; however, experiencing incidental positive emotions did not facilitate reappraisal success. In another preregistered study (Study 3), we employed a more powerful positive emotion induction via virtual reality (VR), used a social stress anticipation task, and instructed participants to reappraise the anticipated stressor positively. Although there was a robust effect of the positive emotion induction (relative to the neutral induction) on feeling more positive emotions throughout stress anticipation, the results again indicated that incidental positive emotions did not facilitate cognitive reappraisal. We propose that incidental positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal may constitute separate pathways of influence when regulating one's responses to negative events.     

No experimental evidence for emotion-specific gaze cueing in a threat context

We examined the utility of a gaze cueing paradigm to examine sensitivity to differences among negatively valenced expressions. Participants judged target stimuli (dangerous or safe), the location of which was cued by the gaze direction of a central face. Dawel et al. reported that gaze cueing effects (faster response times on valid vs. invalid trials) were larger when the central face displayed fear than when it displayed happiness. Our aim was to determine whether this effect was specific to fear, to all threat-related expressions (fear, anger), or to all negatively valenced expressions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust) with the aim of using this protocol to study the development of implicit discrimination of negatively valenced expressions. Across five experiments in which we varied the number of models (1 vs. 4), the number of expressions (2 vs. 5), and the country of residence of participants (Canada vs. Australia) we found no evidence that the magnitude of gaze cueing effects is modulated by expression. We discuss our failure to replicate in the context of the broader literature.     

情绪对连续事件定向遗忘的影响

本研究采用项目法定向遗忘范式以中性和负性连续事件的视频为实验材料, 通过2个实验考察了情绪对连续事件定向遗忘的影响, 并进一步探讨了情绪对细节记忆和要义记忆的定向遗忘的影响。结果发现, 情绪可以消除细节记忆的定向遗忘效应, 而仅有要义记忆的定向遗忘效应则主要受到事件连续性而非情绪的影响。