Mood-congruent biases in facial emotion perception and their gender dependence

Due to mood-congruency effects, we expect the emotion perceived on a face to be biased towards one's own mood. But the findings in the scant literature on such mood effects in normal healthy populations have not consistently and adequately supported this expectation. Employing effective mood manipulation techniques that ensured that the intended mood was sustained throughout the perception task, we explored mood-congruent intensity and recognition accuracy biases in emotion perception. Using realistic face stimuli with expressive cues of happiness and sadness, we demonstrated that happy, neutral and ambiguous expressions were perceived more positively in the positive than in the negative mood. The mood-congruency effect decreased with the degree of perceived negativity in the expression. Also, males were more affected by the mood-congruency effect in intensity perception than females. We suggest that the greater salience and better processing of negative stimuli and the superior cognitive ability of females in emotion perception are responsible for these observations. We found no evidence for mood-congruency effect in the recognition accuracy of emotions and suggest with supporting evidence that past reports of this effect may be attributed to response bias driven by mood.     

The role of emotion transition for the perception of social dominance and affiliation

Individuals who show anger are rated as higher in dominance and lower in affiliation, whereas those who express sadness are rated lower in dominance and higher in affiliation. Little is known about situations where people show both expressions in sequence as happens when a first emotional reaction is followed by a second, different one. This question was examined in two studies. Overall, we found that the last emotion shown had a strong impact on perceived behavioural intentions. However, the information about the previously shown emotion was also integrated. The specific mode of integration was dependent on the salience of the change and naive theories about the type of person who changes their emotion in the face of changing events.     

Sadness as Pleasure-Seeking Prime and Anxiety as Attentiveness Prime: The “Different Affect–Different Effect” (DADE) Model

According to popular interpretations of both the mood repair and affect-as-information theories, affective states of the same valence should have equivalent influences on behavior. We propose, instead, the Different Affect–Different Effect (DADE) model. Building on cognitive and psychoevolutionary theories of affect, we predict that while sadness leads to seeking pleasurable stimuli (consistent with mood repair predictions), anxiety leads to becoming more attentive (consistent with affect-as-information predictions). These predictions are tested using consumption stimuli and, across two experiments, results were consistent with our hypotheses. This research helps resolve apparent discrepancies among our findings and those found in previous mood repair and affect-as-information literatures. Specifically, we suggest that in previous demonstrations of mood repair through seeking pleasurable stimuli, the mood-state in question was most closely related to that of sadness. Likewise, we argue that in previous demonstrations of sadness leading to greater attentiveness, the procedure used to evoke sadness is also likely to have evoked anxiety.     

Perception of emotional tears with body postures,visual scenes,and written scenarios

Emotional tears tend to increase perceived sadness in facial expressions. However, it is unclear whether tears would still be seen as an indicator of sadness when a tearful face is observed in an emotional context (e.g., a touching moment during a wedding ceremony). We examine the influence of context on the sadness enhancement effect of tears in three studies. In Study 1, participants evaluated tearful or tearless expressions presented without body postures, with emotionally neutral postures, or with emotionally congruent postures (i.e., postures indicating the same emotion as the face). The results show that the presence of tears increases the perceived sadness of faces regardless of context. Similar results are found in Studies 2 and 3, which used visual scenes and written scenarios as contexts, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that tears on faces reliably indicate sadness, even in the presence of contextual information that suggests non-sadness emotions.     

幼儿对生气和伤心情绪倾向同伴的接受性比较

本研究通过生气-伤心两可情景,考察了116名4~6岁幼儿对生气和伤心倾向同伴的认知偏好,并通过二选一的封闭式访谈考察幼儿对生气和伤心情绪结果的理解,以反映幼儿的偏好原因。结果表明:①从认知上看,相比生气倾向的同伴,幼儿更偏好伤心倾向的同伴。②5岁、6岁组幼儿比4岁组幼儿更偏好伤心倾向的同伴。③在情绪结果理解上,幼儿认为生气引发他人更多的远离,伤心引发他人更多的目标恢复、道歉和趋近。可见,生气倾向的幼儿比伤心倾向的幼儿更不被同伴接受。     

Examining Personal Control Beliefs as a Mediating Variable in the Health-Damaging Behavior of Substance Use: An Alternative Approach

Substance use continues to be a concern for researchers and health professionals alike. One of the most extensive areas of research on health-related behaviors such as smoking and drug use has been on personal control beliefs. Since many health actions (both facilitative and deleterious) depend on voluntary behaviors, and many health-related prevention and intervention programs are predicted on an assumption of controllability, this is an important area to consider. This article is a review of some of the literature and presents an alternative approach that entails using area-specific and domain-specific methods to examine the role that control beliefs play in the health-damaging behavior of substance use.     

Gender differences in aggression: The role of displaying facial emotional cues in a competitive situation

Prior studies have shown that facial emotion displays communicate emotional states and interpersonal intentions. This study addressed gender differences in aggression based on the facial emotional cues expressed from a fictional opponent. A modified version of the competitive reaction time task (CRTT) was used to measure aggression. Participants (N = 251), between 18 and 35 years of age, were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions of the fictional opponents’ facial emotional cue displayed during the CRTT: anger, sadness, neutral, or the absence of facial expression. After each trial, participants were asked to report their own feelings and to choose a level of noise to administer to their opponent. Finally, motives for aggression were assessed. Results showed that women were less aggressive than men when receiving emotional cues of sadness and anger from the sender. In contrast, no gender differences occurred when a neutral expression was displayed or in the absence of any expression. In addition, men displayed similar levels of aggression across the four conditions, whereas women were more aggressive in both neutral and no feedback conditions than in the sad and anger conditions. Instrumental motives contributed to explaining the overall gender differences in aggression. These results suggest important moderator and mediator factors of gender differences in aggressive behavior.     

Defensive emotions and evaluative judgements: Sensitivity to anger and fear predicts moral judgements,whereas sensitivity to disgust predicts aesthetic judgements

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.     

不同情绪模式的词语和图片刺激启动的时间效应

分别使用图片和词语刺激,通过2个实验启动愉快和悲伤情绪,实验分2个实验组和1个控制组,每个组设计了5个处理水平,分别研究不同处理水平状态下的情绪变化。无论是使用图片还是词语启动,研究结果表明,随着时间的推移,愉快情绪轻微波动,而且略有上升势态,启动的愉快情绪至少持续8分钟。另一方面,悲伤情绪则随着时间的推移出现明显的下降趋势,而且呈现先快后慢的特点,在最初的2分钟时间内,下降速度最快,基本接近控制组,4分钟后,悲伤情绪稳定;启动的悲伤情绪一般持续2~4分钟。     

Degree of extraversion and physiological responses to physical pain and sadness

Extraversion is a personality frequently discussed as one of the strongest and most consistent factors that relates to individual subjective wellbeing. The goal of this study was to better understand how people with varying degrees of extraversion psychologically and physiologically respond differently to unpleasant circumstances. Emotional responses (e.g., levels of intensity, valence, and arousal) were assessed in determining the sensitivity level to negative stimuli that were specifically designed to provoke physical pain and sadness emotion. Physiological changes (e.g., heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)) were also measured during pain and sadness to observe sympathetic and parasympathetic activities. Our results showed that the degree of extraversion was associated with less unpleasant responses to sadness, less HR responses to both pain and sadness, and greater RSA responses to sadness. The findings suggest that the lower HR reactivity to painful and sad situations and greater RSA reactivity to sad situations in extraversion could be possibly due to increased parasympathetic activity. Additionally, enhanced parasympathetic activity to negative situations may explain an important mechanism underlying the positive connection between extraversion and subjective wellbeing.