Emotional and hemispheric asymmetries in shifts of attention: an ERP study

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to the larger response time to cued targets appearing at long cue-to-target intervals. Given emotion-attention interactions and associated visual field (VF) asymmetries, we examined the effects of emotions and hemispheric processing on object- and location-based IOR. We expected reduced IOR and right hemispheric bias accompanied by differences in event-related potentials (ERPs) including lack of suppression of cued N1 and enhancement of Nd components for sad targets. Reaction times and ERPs were recorded in an exogenous cuing detection task using happy and sad schematic faces. Results revealed reduced IOR for left compared to right VF with sad faces but no such asymmetry for happy faces. Cued N1 amplitudes were suppressed for happy targets but not for sad targets presented to the left VF. Nd amplitudes were enhanced for right-hemispheric sad faces especially with object-based IOR. The results indicate right-hemispheric advantage in the capture of attention by negative emotion especially with object-based selection.     

When expressing forgiveness backfires in the workplace: victim power moderates the effect of expressing forgiveness on transgressor compliance

Expressing (vs. withholding) forgiveness is often promoted as a beneficial response for victims. In the present research, we argue that withholding (vs. expressing) forgiveness can also be beneficial to victims by stimulating subsequent transgressor compliance – a response that is valuable in restoring the victim’s needs for control. Based on deterrence theory, we argue that a victim’s withheld (vs. expressed) forgiveness promotes transgressor compliance when the victim has low power, relative to the transgressor. This is because withheld (vs. expressed) forgiveness from a low-power victim elicits transgressor fear. On the other hand, because people are fearful of high-power actors, high-power victims can expect high levels of compliance from a transgressor, regardless of whether they express forgiveness or not. A critical incidents survey (Study 1) and an autobiographic recall study (Study 2) among employees, as well as a laboratory experiment among business students (Study 3), support these predictions. These studies are among the first to reveal that withholding forgiveness can be beneficial for low-power victims in a hierarchical context – ironically, a context in which offering forgiveness is often expected.     

Bullying Behaviors and Victimization Experiences Among Adolescent Students: The Role of Resilience

The role of resilience in the relationship between bullying behaviors, victimization experiences, and self-efficacy was examined. Participants were 393 (191 young men, 202 young women) adolescents (M age = 15.88 years, SD = 0.64 years) from schools in Coimbatore, India, who completed scales to assess bullying behaviors and victimization experiences, resilience, and self-efficacy. Multigroup structural equation modeling, with separate groups created according to participant gender, revealed that resilience mediated the relationship between bullying behaviors and self-efficacy in young men. Young men engaged in bullying behaviors and experienced victimization more frequently than young women. The findings of the study have implication for designing intervention programs to enhance resilience among adolescents and young adults to enable them to manage bullying behaviors.     

Cross-Cultural Evaluation of the International Affective Picture System on an Indian Sample

The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is widely used in emotion and attention research. Currently, there is neither a standard database of affective images for use in research with Indian population nor data on the way people from India respond to emotional pictures in terms of different dimensions. In the present study, we investigated whether self-reported Indian ratings are comparable to the original normative ratings (based on a North American sample) to evaluate its usability in Indian research context. The ratings were obtained from a sample of eighty Indian participants (age range?=?18 to 29 years, M _age?=?23.7, SD?=?2.67, 45 % females) on a stratified representative sample of 100 IAPS pictures. Similar to the normative data collected from the North American sample in the original IAPS database, the ratings were collected across three dimensions – valence (how pleasant/attractive or unpleasant/aversive), arousal (how calm or excited was the intensity of activation), and dominance (how controlling). Our results indicate similarities in valence ratings, but differences in arousal and dominance ratings between the Indian and the North American samples. The relationship between arousal and valence showed a similar (but less curved) boomerang shaped distribution seen with the North American sample. Unlike the North American sample, slopes were higher and intercepts were different for the Indian sample. However, the Indian sample also showed positivity offset and negative bias like the North American sample. These affective ratings show a fair amount of similarity but care is needed especially with arousal values in using these pictures for research with Indian population. While there are subtle differences in the relationship between different affective dimensions, there are also major similarities across cultures in affective judgments.     

Soul murders,wolf mother: Re-reading the Mowgli stories of The Jungle Book in a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective

Kipling’s (1894) ‘Mowgli stories’ a trio of tales set in India and written by an Englishman during the colonial period, are a natural bedfellow with cultural psychoanalysis; an approach to the unconscious that takes into account regional geography. While psychoanalysis’ interest in The Jungle Book began early and affectionately with Freud, both he and his successors read Kipling from the viewpoint of a certain geography and history associated with early European psychoanalysis. As such, psychoanalytic and post-colonial literary ways of reading Kipling, have, like the East and West of the writer’s ballad, generally resisted meeting. In this paper, I re-read the Mowgli Stories of Kipling’s Jungle Book with an awareness of how geography might have affected the subjectivity of prior analytic readers, offering the Mowgli stories anew to modern – by which I mean post-colonial – readers.     

Rapid communication: Global-local processing affects recognition of distractor emotional faces

Recent studies have shown links between happy faces and global, distributed attention as well as sad faces to local, focused attention. Emotions have been shown to affect global-local processing. Given that studies on emotion-cognition interactions have not explored the effect of perceptual processing at different spatial scales on processing stimuli with emotional content, the present study investigated the link between perceptual focus and emotional processing. The study investigated the effects of global-local processing on the recognition of distractor faces with emotional expressions. Participants performed a digit discrimination task with digits at either the global level or the local level presented against a distractor face (happy or sad) as background. The results showed that global processing associated with broad scope of attention facilitates recognition of happy faces, and local processing associated with narrow scope of attention facilitates recognition of sad faces. The novel results of the study provide conclusive evidence for emotion-cognition interactions by demonstrating the effect of perceptual processing on emotional faces. The results along with earlier complementary results on the effect of emotion on global-local processing support a reciprocal relationship between emotional processing and global-local processing. Distractor processing with emotional information also has implications for theories of selective attention.     

The exploration of meditation in the neuroscience of attention and consciousness

Many recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies have revealed the importance of investigating meditation states and traits to achieve an increased understanding of cognitive and affective neuroplasticity, attention and self-awareness, as well as for their increasingly recognized clinical relevance. The investigation of states and traits related to meditation has especially pronounced implications for the neuroscience of attention, consciousness, self-awareness, empathy and theory of mind. In this article we present the main features of meditation-based mental training and characterize the current scientific approach to meditation states and traits with special reference to attention and consciousness, in light of the articles contributed to this issue.     

Types of attention matter for awareness: A study with color afterimages

It has been argued that attention and awareness might oppose each other given that attending to an adapting stimulus weakens its afterimage. We argue instead that the type of attention guided by spatial extent and perceptual levels is critical and might result in differences in awareness using afterimages. Participants performed a central task with small, large, local, or global letters and a blue square as an adapting stimulus in three experiments and indicated the onset and offset of the afterimage. We found that increases in the spatial spread of attention resulted in the decrease of afterimage duration. In terms of levels of processing, global processing produced larger afterimage durations with stimuli controlled for spatial extent. The results suggest that focused or distributed attention produce different effects on awareness, possibly through their differential interactions with polarity dependent and independent processes involved in the formation of color afterimages.