Person perception from changing emotional expressions: primacy,recency, or averaging effect?

ABSTRACT

Dynamic changes in emotional expressions are a valuable source of information in social interactions. As the expressive behaviour of a person changes, the inferences drawn from the behaviour may also change. Here, we test the possibility that dynamic changes in emotional expressions affect person perception in terms of stable trait attributions. Across three experiments, we examined perceivers’ inferences about others’ personality traits from changing emotional expressions. Expressions changed from one emotion (“start emotion”) to another emotion (“end emotion”), allowing us to disentangle potential primacy, recency, and averaging effects. Drawing on three influential models of person perception, we examined perceptions of dominance and affiliation (Experiment 1a), competence and warmth (Experiment 1b), and dominance and trustworthiness (Experiment 2). A strong recency effect was consistently found across all trait judgments, that is, the end emotion of dynamic expressions had a strong impact on trait ratings. Evidence for a primacy effect was also observed (i.e. the information of start emotions was integrated), but less pronounced, and only for trait ratings relating to affiliation, warmth, and trustworthiness. Taken together, these findings suggest that, when making trait judgements about others, observers weigh the most recently displayed emotion in dynamic expressions more heavily than the preceding emotion.     

Scheduled running wheel activity indexes the specificity of pharmacological anorexia.

Nondeprived male Sprague-Dawley rats that were given scheduled access to running wheels for 60 min daily ran immediately and energetically. Intraperitoneal injections of 400 micrograms/kg pancreatic glucagon and 0.15 microgram/kg cholecystokinin octapeptide had no effect on scheduled running, but significantly inhibited feeding when the rats were offered condensed milk instead of access to the running wheels. This is consistent with the hypothesized function of these peptides as postprandial satiety signals. In contrast, 0.5 mg/kg amphetamine and 75 microM/kg LiCl, which produced similar degrees of anorexia, inhibited running by about 50%. Amphetamine, but neither peptide, also inhibited water drinking and disrupted the behavioral sequence of postprandial satiety. The distance run during scheduled running tests was inversely related to body weight, but the patterns of the drugs' effects were not altered by baseline running differences. Scheduled wheel running is a robust consummatory behavior that appears to provide a relatively valid, simple, and sensitive test of the behavioral specificity of pharmacological anorexia.     

Das Absetzen antiandrogener Medikation im ambulanten Setting

In the Forensic Therapeutic Outpatient department in Berlin a total of n?=?20 individually justified, therapeutically accompanied withdrawals from antiandrogenic treatment have been implemented. The sample was compared with n?=?20 patients under antiandrogenic treatment. Patients with withdrawal have been significantly older, than patients without withdrawal. No differences were found regarding their duration of further imprisonment and standardized risk-assessment (HCR-20, LSI-R, Static-99, Stable-2007, PCL-R). Firsts results of the monitoring of the withdrawals indicate, that the symptom-checklist SCL-90-R is not appropriate for that purpose. However, post-hoc both known sexual reoffendings could be identified by the Massachusetts General Hospital Sexual Functioning Questionnaire. By means of practical experience results are getting discussed.     

Region-based shielding of visual search from salient distractors: Target detection is impaired with same- but not different-dimension distractors

Shielding visual search against interference from salient distractors becomes more efficient over time for display regions where distractors appear more frequently, rather than only rarely Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014). We hypothesized that the locus of this learned distractor probability-cueing effect depends on the dimensional relationship of the to-be-inhibited distractor relative to the to-be-attended target. If the distractor and target are defined in different visual dimensions (e.g., a color-defined distractor and orientation-defined target, as in Goschy et al. (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014), distractors may be efficiently suppressed by down-weighting the feature contrast signals in the distractor-defining dimension Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38: 941–957, 2012), with stronger down-weighting being applied to the frequent- than to the rare-distractor region. However, given dimensionally coupled feature contrast signal weighting (cf. Müller J, Heller & Ziegler (Perception & Psychophysics 57:1–17, 1995), this dimension-(down-)weighting strategy would not be effective when the target and the distractors are defined within the same dimension. In this case, suppression may operate differently: by inhibiting the entire frequent-distractor region on the search-guiding master saliency map. The downside of inhibition at this level is that, although it reduces distractor interference in the inhibited (frequent-distractor) region, it also impairs target processing in that region—even when no distractor is actually present in the display. This predicted qualitative difference between same- and different-dimension distractors was confirmed in the present study (with 184 participants), thus furthering our understanding of the functional architecture of search guidance, especially regarding the mechanisms involved in shielding search from the interference of distractors that consistently occur in certain display regions.

     

Developmentally Sensitive Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Adolescent School Refusal: Rationale and Case Illustration

School refusal can be difficult to treat and the poorest treatment response is observed among older school refusers. This poor response may be explained, in part, by the impact of developmental transitions and tasks upon the young person, their family, and the treatment process. This paper describes and illustrates the @school program, a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) designed to promote developmental sensitivity when planning and delivering treatment for adolescent school refusal. Treatment is modularized and it incorporates progress reviews, fostering a planned yet flexible approach to CBT. The treatment is illustrated in the case of Allison, a 16-year-old female presenting with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. A case formulation guided the selection, sequencing, and pacing of modules targeting predisposing, precipitating, perpetuating, and protective factors. Treatment comprised 16 sessions with Allison (interventions addressing depression, anxiety, and school attendance) and 15 concurrent sessions with her mother (strategies to facilitate an adolescent’s school attendance), including two sessions with Allison and mother together (family communication and problem solving to reduce parent–adolescent conflict). Two treatment-related consultations were also conducted with Allison’s homeroom teacher. Allison’s school attendance improved during the course of treatment. By post-treatment, there was a decrease in internalizing behavior, an increase in self-efficacy, and remission of depressive disorder and anxiety disorder. Clinically significant treatment gains were maintained at 2-month follow-up. Factors influencing outcome may include those inherent to the @school program together with less specific factors. Special consideration is given to parents’ use of both authoritative and autonomy-granting approaches when helping an adolescent to attend school.     

Can perceivers recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions?

Posed stimuli dominate the study of nonverbal communication of emotion, but concerns have been raised that the use of posed stimuli may inflate recognition accuracy relative to spontaneous expressions. Here, we compare recognition of emotions from spontaneous expressions with that of matched posed stimuli. Participants made forced-choice judgments about the expressed emotion and whether the expression was spontaneous, and rated expressions on intensity (Experiments 1 and 2) and prototypicality (Experiment 2). Listeners were able to accurately infer emotions from both posed and spontaneous expressions, from auditory, visual, and audiovisual cues. Furthermore, perceived intensity and prototypicality were found to play a role in the accurate recognition of emotion, particularly from spontaneous expressions. Our findings demonstrate that perceivers can reliably recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions, and that depending on the comparison set, recognition levels can even be equivalent to that of posed stimulus sets.     

Pre-verbal infants perceive emotional facial expressions categorically

Adults perceive emotional expressions categorically, with discrimination being faster and more accurate between expressions from different emotion categories (i.e. blends with two different predominant emotions) than between two stimuli from the same category (i.e. blends with the same predominant emotion). The current study sought to test whether facial expressions of happiness and fear are perceived categorically by pre-verbal infants, using a new stimulus set that was shown to yield categorical perception in adult observers (Experiments 1 and 2). These stimuli were then used with 7-month-old infants (N = 34) using a habituation and visual preference paradigm (Experiment 3). Infants were first habituated to an expression of one emotion, then presented with the same expression paired with a novel expression either from the same emotion category or from a different emotion category. After habituation to fear, infants displayed a novelty preference for pairs of between-category expressions, but not within-category ones, showing categorical perception. However, infants showed no novelty preference when they were habituated to happiness. Our findings provide evidence for categorical perception of emotional expressions in pre-verbal infants, while the asymmetrical effect challenges the notion of a bias towards negative information in this age group.     

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Anxious Adolescents: Developmental Influences on Treatment Design and Delivery

Anxiety disorders in adolescence are common and disruptive, pointing to a need for effective treatments for this age group. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is one of the most popular interventions for adolescent anxiety, and there is empirical support for its application. However, a significant proportion of adolescent clients continue to report anxiety symptoms post-treatment. This paper underscores the need to attend to the unique developmental characteristics of the adolescent period when designing and delivering treatment, in an effort to enhance treatment effectiveness. Informed by the literature from developmental psychology, developmental psychopathology, and clinical child and adolescent psychology, we review the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of developmentally appropriate CBT for anxious adolescents. ‘Why’ it is important to consider developmental factors in designing and delivering CBT for anxious adolescents is addressed by examining the age-related findings of treatment outcome studies and exploring the influence of developmental factors, including cognitive capacities, on engagement in CBT. ‘How’ clinicians can developmentally tailor CBT for anxious adolescents in six key domains of treatment design and delivery is illustrated with suggestions drawn from both clinically and research-oriented literature. Finally, recommendations are made for research into developmentally appropriate CBT for anxious adolescents.