Intrinsic enjoyment and boredom coping scales: Validation with personality,evoked potential and attention measures

This paper reports the validation of brief, self-report measures of intrinsic enjoyment and boredom coping. Intrinsic enjoyment is characterized by intense involvement, interest and absorbed concentration; boredom coping is designed to reflect the disposition to restructure one's perceptions and participation in potentially boring activities so as to decrease boredom. Both traits are hypothesized to reflect the capacity for good attentional control across a variety of situations. Reliability was established by test-retest correlation and by an inter-item consistency measurement. Construct validity was established by comparison with previously-validated personality tests, real-life measures (such as Random Activities Experiential Sampling, which involves repeated self-report measures in daily life), as well as with laboratory measures of attention (including the averaged visual evoked potential (EP) and the Continuous Performance Test). Intrinsic enjoyment is significantly correlated with an independent measure of intrinsic involvement (low wish to be elsewhere in one's daily life), the affective experience of potency, self-reports of concentrating well with ease, high ego development, an internal locus of control, lack of boredom susceptibility and certain EP indices of attentional change and ‘cortical’ augmenting. Boredom coping is associated with a higher percent of time actually spent alone, high continuous performance task measures of attentional capacity, and low MMPI and Research Diagnostic Criteria indices of psychopathology.     

Video playback,affective witnessing,and the mobility of trauma: Video evidence of violent crime in the criminal justice system

In today's technologically mediated society, video is increasingly relied upon as an objective and reliable source of evidence in the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes. The now pervasive presence of violent video in the criminal justice system, however, presents new challenges for understanding repeated work-related exposure to and witnessing of potentially traumatic material and its impacts. Thus, this project seeks to qualitatively examine the relational affective processes that occur among criminal justice professionals when violent crimes are captured on video. We present four key categories organized around the circumstances of exposure and its impacts: 1) playback in the investigative and pre-trial process; 2) sharing videos among colleagues; 3) playing videos for victims, witnesses, and families and; 4) transmission in the broader public. Findings suggest this work involves deeply embodied processes where video evidence of violent crime enables a virtual presence at scenes and an emotional proximity to events through new forms of witnessing. These affective experiences are one relational dynamic that keeps witnessing active, thus expanding the mobility of trauma, its reach and potential impacts.     

负荷水平和作业信息输入输出形式对视觉追踪操作心理负荷评估敏感性的影响

就负荷水平和信息输入形式、输出形式对视觉追踪作业心理负荷评估指标敏感性的影响进行了实验．获得以下主要结果：①主任务绩效具有较好的评估敏感性;②作业信息输入形式、输出形式对评估指标敏感性有显著影响．     

Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations

An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task. Faces with happy, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions were presented as masked primes for 33 ms (Study 1) or 14 ms (Studies 2 and 3) followed by emotional target faces (Studies 1 and 2) or emotional adjectives (Study 3). Participants’ task was to categorise the target emotion. In all three studies, discrimination of targets was significantly affected by the emotional primes beyond a simple positive versus negative distinction. Results indicate that specific aspects of emotions might be automatically disentangled in addition to valence, even under conditions of subjective unawareness.     

The role of affective touch in whole-body embodiment remains equivocal

Previous studies have highlighted that affective touch delivered at slow velocities (1–10 cm/s) enhances body-part embodiment during multisensory illusions, yet its role towards whole-body embodiment is less established. Across two experiments, we investigated the role of affective touch towards subjective embodiment of a whole mannequin body within the full body illusion, amongst healthy females. Participants perceived affective touch to be more pleasant than non-affective touch, but this did not enhance subjective embodiment within the illusion and no interaction between synchrony (Experiment 1), or congruency (Experiment 2), and the velocity of touch was observed. Finally, the perceived pleasantness of touch was not modulated by subthreshold eating disorder psychopathology, as measured by means of a self-report questionnaire. Therefore, the present findings suggest that enhancement of embodiment due to affective touch may be body-part specific, and not generalise to greater ownership towards a whole body.     

Does inconsistency always lead to negative affect? The influence of need for closure on affective reactions to cognitive inconsistency

We present an experiment showing that need for closure (NFC)—defined as the epistemic desire for certainty—can moderate individuals' affective reactions to cognitive inconsistency. Informed by Kruglanski and colleagues' new theory, that cognitive inconsistency elicits negative affect particularly under certain circumstances, we find that NFC (i.e. the desire for certain, stable and unambiguous knowledge) influences the strength of consistency effects and resulting negative affect. More specifically, we find that individuals who are high on NFC experience more negative affect upon encountering an inconsistent (vs. consistent) cognition. However, when individuals are low on NFC, inconsistency is irrelevant, and their affect depends on whether the ultimate outcome of the cognition is positive or negative. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research.     

Recognizing images: The role of motivational significance,complexity, social content,age, and gender

Memory for affective events plays an important role in determining people’s behavior and well-being. Its determinants are far from being completely understood. We investigated how recognition memory for affective pictures depends on pictures’ motivational significance (valence and arousal), complexity (figure-ground compositions vs. scenes), and social content (pictures with people vs. without people) and on observers’ age and gender. Younger, middle-aged, and older adults viewed 84 pictures depicting real-life situations. After a break, the participants viewed 72 pictures, half of which had been viewed previously and half of which were novel, and were asked to endorse whether each picture was novel or had been presented previously. Hits, false alarms, and overall performance (discrimination accuracy) were our dependent variables. The main findings were that, across participants, recognition memory was better for unpleasant than pleasant pictures and for pictures depicting people than pictures without people. Low-arousal pictures were more accurately recognized than high-arousal pictures, and this effect was significantly larger among middle-aged and older adults than younger adults. Recognition memory worsened across adulthood, and this decline was steeper among men than women. Middle-aged and older women outperformed their male counterparts. This study suggests that how well we are able to successfully discriminate previously seen pictorial stimuli from novel stimuli depends on several pictures’ properties related to their motivational significance and content, and on observer’s age and gender.     

Integrating self-report and performance-based assessment of adaptability in a university context

This research examined different conceptualisations and measurements of adaptability in a university context. We compared two approaches to adaptability: (1) personal attribute and (2) performance construct. In the extant literature, the former is dominated by self-report measures, whereas the latter is dominated by performance-based tasks. In two studies, we developed and tested the factorial structure of self-report adaptability measures and the factorial structure of performance-based tasks. Self-report measures of adaptability converged into two factors: adaptability and inflexibility. Performance-based metrics of adaptability did not converge, however. Self-reported and performance measures were unrelated, calling for a multitrait-multimethod approach to further evaluate construct validity of adaptability measurement. Self-reported adaptability was related to Big-5 personality, whilst performance-based adaptability was related to cognitive abilities.     

Socially emotional brain-inspired cognitive architecture framework for artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence of the next generation needs to interact with users socially, convincing them in its ability to understand human minds, including emotions. For this to happen, an artificial emotional intelligence is needed, capable of adequate, believable behavior in social emotional interactions. Building on previous developments, the present work extends the general framework of emotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA: Samsonovich, 2013, 2018), endowing it with fluents describing, in addition to appraisals, somatic markers, feelings, emotions, moods, emotional reactions and biases. Key building blocks that integrate them are moral schemas and semantic maps. The model describes interaction of three factors: plans and commitments, moral and ethical values, and somatic comfort. Learning in this framework includes self-organization of semantic maps that in turn may provide guidance for active humanlike learning. Implications for empirical studies and practical applications are discussed together with the expected impact.     

What's working in working memory: a role for the Central Executive

Two experiments are reported which seek to explore the nature of the Central Executive of Baddeley's (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974) model of working memory. Experiment 1 uses a dual task methodology to compare performance on two storage tasks, making use of the two slave systems, the Phonological Loop (PL) and the Visuo-Spatial Scratch Pad (VSSP). Results suggest that storage can be thought of as based on the use of slave system independent resources. Experiment 2 uses a similar approach to compare performance on 2 processing tasks, again one PL based, the other VSSP based. These results suggest that processing is based on a central, shared set of resources. The two experiments support both a multiple resources model of working memory and more specifically identify a role for the Central Executive.