Sad people are more accurate at face recognition than happy people

Mood has varied effects on cognitive performance including the accuracy of face recognition (Lundh & Ost, 1996). Three experiments are presented here that explored face recognition abilities in mood-induced participants. Experiment 1 demonstrated that happy-induced participants are less accurate and have a more conservative response bias than sad-induced participants in a face recognition task. Using a remember/know/guess procedure, Experiment 2 showed that sad-induced participants had more conscious recollections of faces than happy-induced participants. Additionally, sad-induced participants could recognise all faces accurately, whereas, happy- and neutral-induced participants recognised happy faces more accurately than sad faces. In Experiment 3, these effects were not observed when participants intentionally learnt the faces, rather than incidentally learnt the faces. It is suggested that happy-induced participants do not process faces as elaborately as sad-induced participants.     

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.     

Influence of intensity on children’s sensitivity to happy, sad, and fearful facial expressions

Most previous studies investigating children’s ability to recognize facial expressions used only intense exemplars. Here we compared the sensitivity of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds with that of adults (n = 24 per age group) for less intense expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear. The developmental patterns differed across expressions. For happiness, by 5 years of age, children were as sensitive as adults even to low intensities. For sadness, by 5 years of age, children were as accurate as adults in judging that the face was expressive (i.e., not neutral), but even at 10 years of age, children were more likely to misjudge it as fearful. For fear, children’s thresholds were not adult-like until 10 years of age, and children often confused it with sadness at 5 years of age. For all expressions, including even happy expressions, 5- and 7-year-olds were less accurate than adults in judging which of two expressions was more intense. Together, the results indicate that there is slow development of accurate decoding of subtle facial expressions.     

Maternal Emotion Socialization and the Development of Inhibitory Control in an Emotional Condition

Although several studies have implicated parental socialization in children's development of multiple executive functions, little is known about how parenting may predict inhibitory control when emotion is involved. In this study, 42 children completed two tasks with their mothers at 3.5 years. Maternal emotion language was coded during a storybook task, and maternal scaffolding was coded during a puzzle task. At 3.5 and 4 years, children's inhibitory control was assessed with Day–Night and Happy–Sad card games, Stroop‐like tasks that differ in that the latter contains emotion content. Accuracy and latency on Happy–Sad were predicted by maternal emotion language but not scaffolding. In contrast, latency on Day–Night was predicted by scaffolding but not emotion language. This shows context‐specificity in the links between parenting and cognitive control, such that emotion socialization predicted children's performance in an emotional context only, while more general scaffolding behaviours predicted inhibitory control in the non‐emotional condition. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Non-response to sad mood induction: implications for emotion research

Experimental induction of sad mood states is a mainstay of laboratory research on affect and cognition, mood regulation, and mood disorders. Typically, the success of such mood manipulations is reported as a statistically significant pre- to post-induction change in the self-rated intensity of the target affect. The present commentary was motivated by an unexpected finding in one of our studies concerning the response rate to a well-validated sad mood induction. Using the customary statistical approach, we found a significant mean increase in self-rated sadness intensity with a moderate effect size, verifying the “success” of the mood induction. However, that “success” masked that, between one-fifth and about one-third of our samples (adolescents who had histories of childhood-onset major depressive disorder and healthy controls) reported absolutely no sadness in response to the mood induction procedure. We consider implications of our experience for emotion research by (1) commenting upon the typically overlooked phenomenon of nonresponse, (2) suggesting changes in reporting practices regarding mood induction success, and (3) outlining future directions to help scientists determine why some subjects do not respond to experimental mood induction.