Facial Expressions and the Ability to Recognize Emotions from the Eyes or Mouth: A Comparison Between Children and Adults

The authors sought to contribute to the literature on the ability to recognize anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, and neutral emotions from facial information. They aimed to investigate if—regardless of age—this pattern changes. More specifically, the present study aimed to compare the difference between the performance of adults and 6- to 7-year-old children in detecting emotions from the whole face and a specific face region, namely the eyes and mouth. The findings seem to indicate that, for both groups, recognizing disgust, happiness, and surprise is facilitated when pictures represent the whole face. However, with regard to a specific region, a prevalence for children was not found between the eyes and mouth. Meanwhile, for adults, would seem to detect a greater role of the eye region. Finally, regarding the differences in the performance of emotions recognition, adults are better only in a few cases, whereas children are better in recognizing anger from the mouth.     

Faces of Shame: Implications for Self-Esteem,Emotion Regulation,Aggression, and Well-Being

There is an increasing interest in psychological research on shame experiences and their associations with other aspects of psychological functioning and well-being, as well as with possible maladaptive outcomes. In an attempt to confirm and extend previous knowledge on this topic, we investigated the nomological network of shame experiences in a large community sample (N = 380; 66.1% females), adopting a multidimensional conceptualization of shame. Females reported higher levels of shame (in particular, bodily and behavioral shame), guilt, psychological distress, emotional reappraisal, and hostility. Males had higher levels of self-esteem, emotional suppression, and physical aggression. Shame feelings were associated with low self-esteem, hostility, and psychological distress in a consistent way across gender. Associations between characterological shame and emotional suppression, as well as between bodily shame and anger occurred only among females. Moreover, characterological and bodily shame added to the prediction of low self-esteem, hostility, and psychological distress above and beyond the influence of trait shame. Finally, among females, emotional suppression mediated the influence of characterological shame on hostility and psychological distress. These findings extend current knowledge on the nomological net surrounding shame experiences in everyday life, supporting the added value of a multidimensional conceptualization of shame feelings.     

Children's preference for mixed‐ versus fixed‐ratio schedules of reinforcement: A translational study of risky choice

Laboratory research has shown that when subjects are given a choice between fixed‐ratio and bi‐valued mixed‐ratio schedules of reinforcement, preference typically emerges for the mixed‐ratio schedule even with a larger ratio requirement. The current study sought to replicate and extend these findings to children's math problem completion. Using an ABCBC reversal design, four fourth‐grade students were given the choice of completing addition problems reinforced on either a fixed‐ratio 5 schedule or one of three mixed‐ratio schedules; an equivalent mixed‐ratio (1, 9) schedule, a mixed‐ratio (1, 11) schedule with a 20% larger ratio requirement, and an equally lean mixed‐ratio (5, 7) schedule without the small fixed‐ratio 1 component. This was followed by a reversal back to the preceding phase in which preference for the mixed‐ratio schedule had been observed, and a final reversal back to the mixed‐ratio (5, 7) phase. Findings were consistent with previous research in that all children preferred the mixed‐ratio (1, 9) schedule over the equivalent fixed‐ratio 5 schedule. Preference persisted for the leaner mixed‐ratio (1, 11) schedule for three of the four children. Indifference or preference for the fixed‐ratio 5 alternative was observed in phases containing the mixed‐ratio (5, 7) schedule. These results extend previous research on risky choice to children's math problem completion and highlight the importance of a small ratio component in the emergence of preference for bi‐valued mixed‐ratio schedules. Implications of these results for arranging reinforcement to increase children's academic responding are discussed.     

Flashbulb memories of the Paris attacks

Flashbulb memories are vivid autobiographical memories of the circumstances where an individual first learns about emotionally significant public events. Our paper assesses whether these memories were triggered by the attacks of Friday 13 November 2015 in Paris. Two hundred and ninety‐one participants answered a web‐based questionnaire that assessed their memory of the circumstances in which they first learned of the attacks. The questionnaire also assessed vividness, rehearsal, emotion, surprise and novelty. The results showed substantial and vivid recall of the context in which the participants first learned of the event. This recall was associated with fair rehearsal, negative emotional valence, surprise, and novelty. Regression analysis showed that the flashbulb recall was predicted by negative emotion. Negative emotion seems to play a key role in the formation of flashbulb memories, at least those associated with the Paris attacks.     

Pessimism moderates negative emotional responses to naturally occurring stress

Repeated experiences with stress and negative emotion (NE) can decrease psychological and physical well-being. Ruminating on stressful events can further prolong NE responses, especially for those who are pessimistic. For three days participants (N = 68) reported hourly on their current stress, rumination, perceived control, and NE. Tests of mediation conducted using multilevel modeling suggested that rumination mediated same-time reports of stress on NE, and predicted perpetuation of NE over time. Tests of moderated mediation indicated that the pathways from previous stress to rumination, and from rumination to current NE were moderated by pessimism, but not optimism. Perception of control also accounted for some of the variability between concurrent stress and NE, though these associations were not affected by pessimism.     

Lonely adolescents exhibit heightened sensitivity for facial cues of emotion

Contradicting evidence exists regarding the link between loneliness and sensitivity to facial cues of emotion, as loneliness has been related to better but also to worse performance on facial emotion recognition tasks. This study aims to contribute to this debate and extends previous work by (a) focusing on both accuracy and sensitivity to detecting positive and negative expressions, (b) controlling for depressive symptoms and social anxiety, and (c) using an advanced emotion recognition task with videos of neutral adolescent faces gradually morphing into full-intensity expressions. Participants were 170 adolescents (49% boys; M_age?=?13.65 years) from rural, low-income schools. Results showed that loneliness was associated with increased sensitivity to happy, sad, and fear faces. When controlling for depressive symptoms and social anxiety, loneliness remained significantly associated with sensitivity to sad and fear faces. Together, these results suggest that lonely adolescents are vigilant to negative facial cues of emotion.     

Emotional variability and clarity in depression and social anxiety

Recent research has underscored the importance of elucidating specific patterns of emotion that characterise mental disorders. We examined two emotion traits, emotional variability and emotional clarity, in relation to both categorical (diagnostic interview) and dimensional (self-report) measures of major depressive disorder (MDD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) in women diagnosed with MDD only (n?=?35), SAD only (n?=?31), MDD and SAD (n?=?26) or no psychiatric disorder (n?=?38). Results of the categorical analyses suggest that elevated emotional variability and diminished emotional clarity are transdiagnostic of MDD and SAD. More specifically, emotional variability was elevated for MDD and SAD diagnoses compared to no diagnosis, showing an additive effect for co-occurring MDD and SAD. Similarly diminished levels of emotional clarity characterised all three clinical groups compared to the healthy control group. Dimensional findings suggest that although emotional variability is associated more consistently with depression than with social anxiety, emotional clarity is associated more consistently with social anxiety than with depression. Results are interpreted using a threshold and dose–response framework.     

Cognitive fusion and emotion differentiation: does getting entangled with our thoughts dysregulate the generation,experience and regulation of emotion?

We tested whether cognitive fusion impairs emotion differentiation and thereby mediates relations between cognitive fusion and depression and panic symptoms among 55 adults (M_age?=?26.8 (3.9), 50.9% women). Using visual stimuli, we elicited multiple emotion states and measured (a) emotional intensity – the subjective emotion intensity of elicited emotions (i.e. Specific Emotion Intensity – SEI), as well as (b) emotional differentiation – the degree of co-activation of multiple negative emotions when a specific emotion was elicited (i.e. Multiple Emotion Co-Activation – MECA). First, as hypothesised, we found that cognitive fusion predicted lower levels of emotion differentiation (MECA). In contrast, as hypothesised, these effects were significantly greater than the (null) effects of cognitive fusion on emotion intensity (SEI). Second, as predicted, MECA, but not SEI, predicted depression and panic symptoms. Finally, we found that MECA mediated the effects of cognitive fusion on depression and panic symptoms. The present findings contribute novel, preliminary empirical insight into associations between cognitive fusion, impaired emotion differentiation and mental ill-health.     

The effect of induced sadness and moderate depression on attention networks

This study investigates how sadness and minor/moderate depression influences the three functions of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control using the Attention Network Test. The aim of the study is to investigate whether minor-to-moderate depression is more similar to sadness or clinical depression with regard to attentional processing. It was predicted that both induced sadness and minor-to-moderate depression will influence executive control by narrowing spatial attention and in turn this will lead to less interference from the flanker items (i.e. less effects of congruency) due to a focused attentional state. No differences were predicted for alerting or orienting functions. The results from the two experiments, the first inducing sadness (Experiment 1) and the second measuring subclinical depression (Experiment 2), show that, as expected, participants who are sad or minor to moderately depressed showed less flanker interference compared to participants who were neither sad nor depressed. This study provides strong evidence, that irrespective of its aetiology, sadness and minor/moderate depression have similar effects on spatial attention.