Impact of civil war on emotion recognition: the denial of sadness in Sierra Leone.

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Maria Alessandra eUmilta'

2013-09-01

Full Text Available Studies of children with atypical emotional experience demonstrate that childhood exposure to high levels of hostility and threat biases emotion perception. This study investigates emotion processing, in former child soldiers and non-combatant civilians. All participants have experienced prolonged violence exposure during childhood. The study, carried out in Sierra Leone, aimed to examine the effects of exposure to and forced participation in acts of extreme violence on the emotion processing of young adults war survivors. A total of 76 young, male adults (38 former child soldier survivors and 38 civilian survivors were tested in order to assess participants’ ability to identify four different facial emotion expressions from photographs and movies. Both groups were able to recognize facial expressions of emotion. However, despite their general ability to correctly identify facial emotions, participants showed a significant response bias in their recognition of sadness. Both former soldiers and civilians made more errors in identifying expressions of sadness than in the other three emotions and when mislabeling sadness participants most often described it as anger. Conversely, when making erroneous identifications of other emotions, participants were most likely to label the expressed emotion as sadness. In addition, while for three of the four emotions participants were better able to make a correct identification the greater the intensity of the expression, this pattern was not observed for sadness. During movies presentation the recognition of sadness was significantly worse for soldiers. While both former child soldiers and civilians were found to be able to identify facial emotions, a significant response bias in their attribution of negative emotions was observed. Such bias was particularly pronounced in former child soldiers. These findings point to a pervasive long-lasting effect of childhood exposure to violence on emotion processing

Neural evidence that human emotions share core affective properties.

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Wilson-Mendenhall, Christine D; Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Barsalou, Lawrence W

2013-06-01

Research on the "emotional brain" remains centered around the idea that emotions like fear, happiness, and sadness result from specialized and distinct neural circuitry. Accumulating behavioral and physiological evidence suggests, instead, that emotions are grounded in core affect--a person's fluctuating level of pleasant or unpleasant arousal. A neuroimaging study revealed that participants' subjective ratings of valence (i.e., pleasure/displeasure) and of arousal evoked by various fear, happiness, and sadness experiences correlated with neural activity in specific brain regions (orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, respectively). We observed these correlations across diverse instances within each emotion category, as well as across instances from all three categories. Consistent with a psychological construction approach to emotion, the results suggest that neural circuitry realizes more basic processes across discrete emotions. The implicated brain regions regulate the body to deal with the world, producing the affective changes at the core of emotions and many other psychological phenomena.

It's Sad but I Like It: The Neural Dissociation Between Musical Emotions and Liking in Experts and Laypersons.

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Brattico, Elvira; Bogert, Brigitte; Alluri, Vinoo; Tervaniemi, Mari; Eerola, Tuomas; Jacobsen, Thomas

2015-01-01

Emotion-related areas of the brain, such as the medial frontal cortices, amygdala, and striatum, are activated during listening to sad or happy music as well as during listening to pleasurable music. Indeed, in music, like in other arts, sad and happy emotions might co-exist and be distinct from emotions of pleasure or enjoyment. Here we aimed at discerning the neural correlates of sadness or happiness in music as opposed those related to musical enjoyment. We further investigated whether musical expertise modulates the neural activity during affective listening of music. To these aims, 13 musicians and 16 non-musicians brought to the lab their most liked and disliked musical pieces with a happy and sad connotation. Based on a listening test, we selected the most representative 18 sec excerpts of the emotions of interest for each individual participant. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings were obtained while subjects listened to and rated the excerpts. The cortico-thalamo-striatal reward circuit and motor areas were more active during liked than disliked music, whereas only the auditory cortex and the right amygdala were more active for disliked over liked music. These results discern the brain structures responsible for the perception of sad and happy emotions in music from those related to musical enjoyment. We also obtained novel evidence for functional differences in the limbic system associated with musical expertise, by showing enhanced liking-related activity in fronto-insular and cingulate areas in musicians.

It's Sad but I Like It: The Neural Dissociation Between Musical Emotions and Liking in Experts and Laypersons

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Brattico, Elvira; Bogert, Brigitte; Alluri, Vinoo; Tervaniemi, Mari; Eerola, Tuomas; Jacobsen, Thomas

2016-01-01

Emotion-related areas of the brain, such as the medial frontal cortices, amygdala, and striatum, are activated during listening to sad or happy music as well as during listening to pleasurable music. Indeed, in music, like in other arts, sad and happy emotions might co-exist and be distinct from emotions of pleasure or enjoyment. Here we aimed at discerning the neural correlates of sadness or happiness in music as opposed those related to musical enjoyment. We further investigated whether musical expertise modulates the neural activity during affective listening of music. To these aims, 13 musicians and 16 non-musicians brought to the lab their most liked and disliked musical pieces with a happy and sad connotation. Based on a listening test, we selected the most representative 18 sec excerpts of the emotions of interest for each individual participant. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings were obtained while subjects listened to and rated the excerpts. The cortico-thalamo-striatal reward circuit and motor areas were more active during liked than disliked music, whereas only the auditory cortex and the right amygdala were more active for disliked over liked music. These results discern the brain structures responsible for the perception of sad and happy emotions in music from those related to musical enjoyment. We also obtained novel evidence for functional differences in the limbic system associated with musical expertise, by showing enhanced liking-related activity in fronto-insular and cingulate areas in musicians. PMID:26778996

Recognizing Induced Emotions of Happiness and Sadness from Dance Movement

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Van Dyck, Edith; Vansteenkiste, Pieter; Lenoir, Matthieu; Lesaffre, Micheline; Leman, Marc

2014-01-01

Recent research revealed that emotional content can be successfully decoded from human dance movement. Most previous studies made use of videos of actors or dancers portraying emotions through choreography. The current study applies emotion induction techniques and free movement in order to examine the recognition of emotional content from dance. Observers (N = 30) watched a set of silent videos showing depersonalized avatars of dancers moving to an emotionally neutral musical stimulus after emotions of either sadness or happiness had been induced. Each of the video clips consisted of two dance performances which were presented side-by-side and were played simultaneously; one of a dancer in the happy condition and one of the same individual in the sad condition. After every film clip, the observers were asked to make forced-choices concerning the emotional state of the dancer. Results revealed that observers were able to identify the emotional state of the dancers with a high degree of accuracy. Moreover, emotions were more often recognized for female dancers than for their male counterparts. In addition, the results of eye tracking measurements unveiled that observers primarily focus on movements of the chest when decoding emotional information from dance movement. The findings of our study show that not merely portrayed emotions, but also induced emotions can be successfully recognized from free dance movement. PMID:24587026

[Exploration on Electroencephalogram Mechanism Differences of Negative Emotions Induced by Disgusted and Sad Situation Images].

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Wang, Xin; Jin, Jingna; Li, Song; Liu, Zhipeng; Yin, Tao

2015-12-01

Evolutionary psychology holds such an opinion that negative situation may threaten survival, trigger avoidance motive and have poor effects on the human-body function and the psychological quality. Both disgusted and sad situations can induce negative emotions. However, differences between the two situations on attention capture and emotion cognition during the emotion induction are still not well known. Typical disgusted and sad situation images were used in the present study to induce two negative emotions, and 15 young students (7 males and 8 females, aged 27 ± 3) were recruited in the experiments. Electroencephalogram of 32 leads was recorded when the subjects were viewing situation images, and event-related potentials (ERP) of all leads were obtained for future analysis. Paired sample t tests were carried out on two ERP signals separately induced by disgusted and sad situation images to get time quantum with significant statistical differences between the two ERP signals. Root-mean-square deviations of two ERP signals during each time quantum were calculated and the brain topographic map based on root-mean-square deviations was drawn to display differences of two ERP signals in spatial. Results showed that differences of ERP signals induced by disgusted and sad situation images were mainly manifested in T1 (120-450 ms) early and T2 (800-1,000 ms) later. During the period of T1, the occipital lobe reflecting attention capture was activated by both disgusted and sad situation images, but the prefrontal cortex reflecting emotion sense was activated only by disgusted situation images. During the period of T2, the prefrontal cortex was activated by both disgusted and sad situation images. However, the parietal lobe was activated only by disgusted situation images, which showed stronger emotional perception. The research results would have enlightenment to deepen understanding of negative emotion and to exploredeep cognitive neuroscience mechanisms of negative

Sad benefit in face working memory: an emotional bias of melancholic depression.

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Linden, Stefanie C; Jackson, Margaret C; Subramanian, Leena; Healy, David; Linden, David E J

2011-12-01

Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion-cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of "sad benefit", which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Specificity of Cognitive Vulnerability in Fear and Sad Affect: Anxiety Sensitivity, Looming Cognitive Style and Hopelessness in Emotion Reactivity and Recovery

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del Palacio Gonzalez, Adriana; Clark, David A.

2015-01-01

Cognitive models of the pathogenesis of anxiety and depressive disorders identify looming cognitive style (LCS) and anxiety sensitivity (AS) as vulnerability factors specifically related to anxiety disorders, whereas hopelessness (HS) is considered more applicable to depression. Given...... their dimensional perspective most cognitive models of psychopathology may also be extended to explain normal emotional responses. To investigate the effect of cognitive vulnerability on the reactivity and regulation of negative emotion, 183 undergraduates were assigned to watch a sad or fearful movie clip. Then......, all participants retrieved positive memories in an expressive writing task. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that LCS was uniquely associated with greater fear reactivity. AS and HS were significant predictors of greater fear and sadness after a down-regulation task, respectively...

Do you remember your sad face? The roles of negative cognitive style and sad mood.

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Caudek, Corrado; Monni, Alessandra

2013-01-01

We studied the effects of negative cognitive style, sad mood, and facial affect on the self-face advantage in a sample of 66 healthy individuals (mean age 26.5 years, range 19-47 years). The sample was subdivided into four groups according to inferential style and responsivity to sad mood induction. Following a sad mood induction, we examined the effect on working memory of an incidental association between facial affect, facial identity, and head-pose orientation. Overall, head-pose recognition was more accurate for the self-face than for nonself face (self-face advantage, SFA). However, participants high in negative cognitive style who experienced higher levels of sadness displayed a stronger SFA for sad expressions than happy expressions. The remaining participants displayed an opposite bias (a stronger SFA for happy expressions than sad expressions), or no bias. These findings highlight the importance of trait-vulnerability status in the working memory biases related to emotional facial expressions.

Why is happy-sad more difficult? Focal emotional information impairs inhibitory control in children and adults.

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Kramer, Hannah J; Lagattuta, Kristin Hansen; Sayfan, Liat

2015-02-01

This study compared the relative difficulty of the happy-sad inhibitory control task (say "happy" for the sad face and "sad" for the happy face) against other card tasks that varied by the presence and type (focal vs. peripheral; negative vs. positive) of emotional information in a sample of 4- to 11-year-olds and adults (N = 264). Participants also completed parallel "name games" (direct labeling). All age groups made more errors and took longer to respond to happy-sad compared to other versions, and the relative difficulty of happy-sad increased with age. The happy-sad name game even posed a greater challenge than some opposite games. These data provide insight into the impact of emotions on cognitive processing across a wide age range. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

Sharing experienced sadness : Negotiating meanings of self-defined sad music within a group interview session

OpenAIRE

Peltola, Henna-Riikka

2017-01-01

Sadness induced by music listening has been a popular research focus in music and emotion research. Despite the wide consensus in affective sciences that emotional experiences are social processes, previous studies have only concentrated on individuals. Thus, the intersubjective dimension of musical experience – how music and music-related emotions are experienced between individuals – has not been investigated. In order to tap into shared emotional experiences, group discussions about experi...

Emotion perception, but not affect perception, is impaired with semantic memory loss.

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Lindquist, Kristen A; Gendron, Maria; Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Dickerson, Bradford C

2014-04-01

For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have hypothesized that the ability to perceive emotions on others' faces is inborn, prelinguistic, and universal. Concept knowledge about emotion has been assumed to be epiphenomenal to emotion perception. In this article, we report findings from 3 patients with semantic dementia that cannot be explained by this "basic emotion" view. These patients, who have substantial deficits in semantic processing abilities, spontaneously perceived pleasant and unpleasant expressions on faces, but not discrete emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, or sadness, even in a task that did not require the use of emotion words. Our findings support the hypothesis that discrete emotion concept knowledge helps transform perceptions of affect (positively or negatively valenced facial expressions) into perceptions of discrete emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. These findings have important consequences for understanding the processes supporting emotion perception.

Mapping emotions through time: how affective trajectories inform the language of emotion.

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Kirkland, Tabitha; Cunningham, William A

2012-04-01

The words used to describe emotions can provide insight into the basic processes that contribute to emotional experience. We propose that emotions arise partly from interacting evaluations of one's current affective state, previous affective state, predictions for how these may change in the future, and the experienced outcomes following these predictions. These states can be represented and inferred from neural systems that encode shifts in outcomes and make predictions. In two studies, we demonstrate that emotion labels are reliably differentiated from one another using only simple cues about these affective trajectories through time. For example, when a worse-than-expected outcome follows the prediction that something good will happen, that situation is labeled as causing anger, whereas when a worse-than-expected outcome follows the prediction that something bad will happen, that situation is labeled as causing sadness. Emotion categories are more differentiated when participants are required to think categorically than when participants have the option to consider multiple emotions and degrees of emotions. This work indicates that information about affective movement through time and changes in affective trajectory may be a fundamental aspect of emotion categories. Future studies of emotion must account for the dynamic way that we absorb and process information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Fatty acid-induced gut-brain signaling attenuates neural and behavioral effects of sad emotion in humans.

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Van Oudenhove, Lukas; McKie, Shane; Lassman, Daniel; Uddin, Bilal; Paine, Peter; Coen, Steven; Gregory, Lloyd; Tack, Jan; Aziz, Qasim

2011-08-01

Although a relationship between emotional state and feeding behavior is known to exist, the interactions between signaling initiated by stimuli in the gut and exteroceptively generated emotions remain incompletely understood. Here, we investigated the interaction between nutrient-induced gut-brain signaling and sad emotion induced by musical and visual cues at the behavioral and neural level in healthy nonobese subjects undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects received an intragastric infusion of fatty acid solution or saline during neutral or sad emotion induction and rated sensations of hunger, fullness, and mood. We found an interaction between fatty acid infusion and emotion induction both in the behavioral readouts (hunger, mood) and at the level of neural activity in multiple pre-hypothesized regions of interest. Specifically, the behavioral and neural responses to sad emotion induction were attenuated by fatty acid infusion. These findings increase our understanding of the interplay among emotions, hunger, food intake, and meal-induced sensations in health, which may have important implications for a wide range of disorders, including obesity, eating disorders, and depression.

Sadness is unique: Neural processing of emotions in speech prosody in musicians and non-musicians

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mona ePark

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Musical training has been shown to have positive effects on several aspects of speech processing, however, the effects of musical training on the neural processing of speech prosody conveying distinct emotions are yet to be better understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI to investigate whether the neural responses to speech prosody conveying happiness, sadness, and fear differ between musicians and non-musicians. Differences in processing of emotional speech prosody between the two groups were only observed when sadness was expressed. Musicians showed increased activation in the middle frontal gyrus, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the retrosplenial cortex. Our results suggest an increased sensitivity of emotional processing in musicians with respect to sadness expressed in speech, possibly reflecting empathic processes.

Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect.

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Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) is also involved in these processes. According to the hierarchy model, emotions are considered organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy, in which emotion prototypes are organized following affective valence. By controlling different congruencies of emotion relations (i.e., matches or mismatches between valences and prototypes of emotion), the present study showed both an evaluative congruency effect (Experiment 1) and a discrete emotional congruency effect (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that not only affective valences but also discrete emotions can be activated under the present priming lexical decision task. However, the present findings also suggest that discrete emotions might be activated at the later priming stage as compared to valences. The present work provides evidence that information about discrete emotion could be involved in word processing. This might be a result of subjects' embodied experiences.

The Musical Emotional Bursts: A validated set of musical affect bursts to investigate auditory affective processing.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sébastien ePaquette

2013-08-01

Full Text Available The Musical Emotional Bursts (MEB consist of 80 brief musical executions expressing basic emotional states (happiness, sadness and fear and neutrality. These musical bursts were designed to be the musical analogue of the Montreal Affective Voices (MAV – a set of brief non-verbal affective vocalizations portraying different basic emotions. The MEB consist of short (mean duration: 1.6 sec improvisations on a given emotion or of imitations of a given MAV stimulus, played on a violin (n:40 or a clarinet (n:40. The MEB arguably represent a primitive form of music emotional expression, just like the MAV represent a primitive form of vocal, nonlinguistic emotional expression. To create the MEB, stimuli were recorded from 10 violinists and 10 clarinetists, and then evaluated by 60 participants. Participants evaluated 240 stimuli (30 stimuli x 4 [3 emotions + neutral] x 2 instruments by performing either a forced-choice emotion categorization task, a valence rating task or an arousal rating task (20 subjects per task; 40 MAVs were also used in the same session with similar task instructions. Recognition accuracy of emotional categories expressed by the MEB (n:80 was lower than for the MAVs but still very high with an average percent correct recognition score of 80.4%. Highest recognition accuracies were obtained for happy clarinet (92.0% and fearful or sad violin (88.0% each MEB stimuli. The MEB can be used to compare the cerebral processing of emotional expressions in music and vocal communication, or used for testing affective perception in patients with communication problems.

Sad and happy emotion discrimination in music by children with cochlear implants.

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Hopyan, Talar; Manno, Francis A M; Papsin, Blake C; Gordon, Karen A

2016-01-01

Children using cochlear implants (CIs) develop speech perception but have difficulty perceiving complex acoustic signals. Mode and tempo are the two components used to recognize emotion in music. Based on CI limitations, we hypothesized children using CIs would have impaired perception of mode cues relative to their normal hearing peers and would rely more heavily on tempo cues to distinguish happy from sad music. Study participants were children with 13 right CIs and 3 left CIs (M = 12.7, SD = 2.6 years) and 16 normal hearing peers. Participants judged 96 brief piano excerpts from the classical genre as happy or sad in a forced-choice task. Music was randomly presented with alterations of transposed mode, tempo, or both. When music was presented in original form, children using CIs discriminated between happy and sad music with accuracy well above chance levels (87.5%) but significantly below those with normal hearing (98%). The CI group primarily used tempo cues, whereas normal hearing children relied more on mode cues. Transposing both mode and tempo cues in the same musical excerpt obliterated cues to emotion for both groups. Children using CIs showed significantly slower response times across all conditions. Children using CIs use tempo cues to discriminate happy versus sad music reflecting a very different hearing strategy than their normal hearing peers. Slower reaction times by children using CIs indicate that they found the task more difficult and support the possibility that they require different strategies to process emotion in music than normal.

Emotional tears facilitate the recognition of sadness and the perceived need for social support.

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Balsters, Martijn J H; Krahmer, Emiel J; Swerts, Marc G J; Vingerhoets, Ad J J M

2013-02-12

The tearing effect refers to the relevance of tears as an important visual cue adding meaning to human facial expression. However, little is known about how people process these visual cues and their mediating role in terms of emotion perception and person judgment. We therefore conducted two experiments in which we measured the influence of tears on the identification of sadness and the perceived need for social support at an early perceptional level. In two experiments (1 and 2), participants were exposed to sad and neutral faces. In both experiments, the face stimuli were presented for 50 milliseconds. In experiment 1, tears were digitally added to sad faces in one condition. Participants demonstrated a significant faster recognition of sad faces with tears compared to those without tears. In experiment 2, tears were added to neutral faces as well. Participants had to indicate to what extent the displayed individuals were in need of social support. Study participants reported a greater perceived need for social support to both sad and neutral faces with tears than to those without tears. This study thus demonstrated that emotional tears serve as important visual cues at an early (pre-attentive) level.

Are there age differences in attention to emotional images following a sad mood induction? Evidence from a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm.

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Speirs, Calandra; Belchev, Zorry; Fernandez, Amanda; Korol, Stephanie; Sears, Christopher

2017-10-30

Two experiments examined age differences in the effect of a sad mood induction (MI) on attention to emotional images. Younger and older adults viewed sets of four images while their eye gaze was tracked throughout an 8-s presentation. Images were viewed before and after a sad MI to assess the effect of a sad mood on attention to positive and negative scenes. Younger and older adults exhibited positively biased attention after the sad MI, significantly increasing their attention to positive images, with no evidence of an age difference in either experiment. A test of participants' recognition memory for the images indicated that the sad MI reduced memory accuracy for sad images for younger and older adults. The results suggest that heightened attention to positive images following a sad MI reflects an affect regulation strategy related to mood repair. The implications for theories of the positivity effect are discussed.

Acute exercise attenuates negative affect following repeated sad mood inductions in persons who have recovered from depression.

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Mata, Jutta; Hogan, Candice L; Joormann, Jutta; Waugh, Christian E; Gotlib, Ian H

2013-02-01

Identifying factors that may protect individuals from developing Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in the face of stress is critical. In the current study we experimentally tested whether such a potentially protective factor, engaging in acute exercise, reduces the adverse effects of repeated sad mood inductions in individuals who have recovered from depression. We hypothesized that recovered depressed participants who engage in acute exercise report a smaller increase in negative affect (NA) and a smaller decrease in positive affect (PA) when exposed to a repeated sad mood induction (i.e., habituation), whereas participants who do not exercise show sensitization (i.e., increased NA and decreased PA in response to a repeated adverse stimulus). Forty-one women recovered from MDD and 40 healthy control women were randomly assigned to either exercise for 15 minutes or quiet rest. Afterward, participants were exposed to two sad mood inductions and reported their levels of affect throughout the study. Recovered depressed participants who had not exercised exhibited higher NA after the second sad mood induction, a finding consistent with sensitization. In contrast, both recovered depressed participants who had engaged in acute exercise and healthy control participants showed no increase in NA in response to the repeated sad mood induction. Participants who exercised reported higher PA after the exercise bout; however, our hypothesis concerning reported PA trajectories following the sad mood inductions was not supported. Results suggest that exercise can serve as a protective factor in the face of exposure to repeated emotional stressors, particularly concerning NA in individuals who have recovered from depression. 2013 APA, all rights reserved

Not just fear and sadness: meta-analytic evidence of pervasive emotion recognition deficits for facial and vocal expressions in psychopathy.

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Dawel, Amy; O'Kearney, Richard; McKone, Elinor; Palermo, Romina

2012-11-01

The present meta-analysis aimed to clarify whether deficits in emotion recognition in psychopathy are restricted to certain emotions and modalities or whether they are more pervasive. We also attempted to assess the influence of other important variables: age, and the affective factor of psychopathy. A systematic search of electronic databases and a subsequent manual search identified 26 studies that included 29 experiments (N = 1376) involving six emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) across three modalities (facial, vocal, postural). Meta-analyses found evidence of pervasive impairments across modalities (facial and vocal) with significant deficits evident for several emotions (i.e., not only fear and sadness) in both adults and children/adolescents. These results are consistent with recent theorizing that the amygdala, which is believed to be dysfunctional in psychopathy, has a broad role in emotion processing. We discuss limitations of the available data that restrict the ability of meta-analysis to consider the influence of age and separate the sub-factors of psychopathy, highlighting important directions for future research. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Verbal and facial-emotional Stroop tasks reveal specific attentional interferences in sad mood

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Isaac, L.; Vrijsen, J.N.; Eling, P.A.T.M.; Oostrom, I.I.H. van; Speckens, A.E.M.; Becker, E.S.

2012-01-01

Mood congruence refers to the tendency of individuals to attend to information more readily when it has the same emotional content as their current mood state. The aim of the present study was to ascertain whether attentional interference occurred for participants in sad mood states for emotionally

Women's greater ability to perceive happy facial emotion automatically: gender differences in affective priming.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Uta-Susan Donges

Full Text Available There is evidence that women are better in recognizing their own and others' emotions. The female advantage in emotion recognition becomes even more apparent under conditions of rapid stimulus presentation. Affective priming paradigms have been developed to examine empirically whether facial emotion stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness color our impressions. It was observed that masked emotional facial expression has an affect congruent influence on subsequent judgments of neutral stimuli. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of gender on affective priming based on negative and positive facial expression. In our priming experiment sad, happy, neutral, or no facial expression was briefly presented (for 33 ms and masked by neutral faces which had to be evaluated. 81 young healthy volunteers (53 women participated in the study. Subjects had no subjective awareness of emotional primes. Women did not differ from men with regard to age, education, intelligence, trait anxiety, or depressivity. In the whole sample, happy but not sad facial expression elicited valence congruent affective priming. Between-group analyses revealed that women manifested greater affective priming due to happy faces than men. Women seem to have a greater ability to perceive and respond to positive facial emotion at an automatic processing level compared to men. High perceptual sensitivity to minimal social-affective signals may contribute to women's advantage in understanding other persons' emotional states.

Women's greater ability to perceive happy facial emotion automatically: gender differences in affective priming.

Science.gov (United States)

Donges, Uta-Susan; Kersting, Anette; Suslow, Thomas

2012-01-01

There is evidence that women are better in recognizing their own and others' emotions. The female advantage in emotion recognition becomes even more apparent under conditions of rapid stimulus presentation. Affective priming paradigms have been developed to examine empirically whether facial emotion stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness color our impressions. It was observed that masked emotional facial expression has an affect congruent influence on subsequent judgments of neutral stimuli. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of gender on affective priming based on negative and positive facial expression. In our priming experiment sad, happy, neutral, or no facial expression was briefly presented (for 33 ms) and masked by neutral faces which had to be evaluated. 81 young healthy volunteers (53 women) participated in the study. Subjects had no subjective awareness of emotional primes. Women did not differ from men with regard to age, education, intelligence, trait anxiety, or depressivity. In the whole sample, happy but not sad facial expression elicited valence congruent affective priming. Between-group analyses revealed that women manifested greater affective priming due to happy faces than men. Women seem to have a greater ability to perceive and respond to positive facial emotion at an automatic processing level compared to men. High perceptual sensitivity to minimal social-affective signals may contribute to women's advantage in understanding other persons' emotional states.

On the interaction between sad mood and cognitive control: the effect of induced sadness on electrophysiological modulations underlying Stroop conflict processing.

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Nixon, Elena; Liddle, Peter F; Nixon, Neil L; Liotti, Mario

2013-03-01

The present study employed high-density ERPs to examine the effect of induced sad mood on the spatiotemporal correlates of conflict monitoring and resolution in a colour-word Stroop interference task. Neuroimaging evidence and dipole modelling implicates the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) regions in conflict-laden interference control. On the basis that these structures have been found to mediate emotion-cognition interactions in negative mood states, it was predicted that Stroop-related cognitive control, which relies heavily on anterior neural sources, would be affected by effective sad mood provocation. Healthy participants (N=14) were induced into transient sadness via use of autobiographical sad scripts, a well-validated mood induction technique (Liotti et al., 2000a, 2002). In accord with previous research, interference effects were shown at both baseline and sad states while Stroop conflict was associated with early (N450) and late (Late Positive Component; LPC) electrophysiological modulations at both states. Sad mood induction attenuated the N450 effect in line with our expectation that it would be susceptible to modulation by mood, given its purported anterior limbic source. The LPC effect was displayed at the typical posterior lateral sites but, as predicted, was not affected by sad mood. However, frontocentral LPC activity-presumably generated from an additional anterior limbic source-was affected at sad state, hinting a role in conflict monitoring. Although the neurophysiological underpinnings of interference control are yet to be clarified, this study provided further insight into emotion-cognition interactions as indexed by Stroop conflict-laden processing. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Paradox of Music-Evoked Sadness: An Online Survey

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Taruffi, Liila; Koelsch, Stefan

2014-01-01

This study explores listeners’ experience of music-evoked sadness. Sadness is typically assumed to be undesirable and is therefore usually avoided in everyday life. Yet the question remains: Why do people seek and appreciate sadness in music? We present findings from an online survey with both Western and Eastern participants (N = 772). The survey investigates the rewarding aspects of music-evoked sadness, as well as the relative contribution of listener characteristics and situational factors to the appreciation of sad music. The survey also examines the different principles through which sadness is evoked by music, and their interaction with personality traits. Results show 4 different rewards of music-evoked sadness: reward of imagination, emotion regulation, empathy, and no “real-life” implications. Moreover, appreciation of sad music follows a mood-congruent fashion and is greater among individuals with high empathy and low emotional stability. Surprisingly, nostalgia rather than sadness is the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music. Correspondingly, memory was rated as the most important principle through which sadness is evoked. Finally, the trait empathy contributes to the evocation of sadness via contagion, appraisal, and by engaging social functions. The present findings indicate that emotional responses to sad music are multifaceted, are modulated by empathy, and are linked with a multidimensional experience of pleasure. These results were corroborated by a follow-up survey on happy music, which indicated differences between the emotional experiences resulting from listening to sad versus happy music. This is the first comprehensive survey of music-evoked sadness, revealing that listening to sad music can lead to beneficial emotional effects such as regulation of negative emotion and mood as well as consolation. Such beneficial emotional effects constitute the prime motivations for engaging with sad music in everyday life. PMID:25330315

The paradox of music-evoked sadness: an online survey.

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Liila Taruffi

Full Text Available This study explores listeners' experience of music-evoked sadness. Sadness is typically assumed to be undesirable and is therefore usually avoided in everyday life. Yet the question remains: Why do people seek and appreciate sadness in music? We present findings from an online survey with both Western and Eastern participants (N = 772. The survey investigates the rewarding aspects of music-evoked sadness, as well as the relative contribution of listener characteristics and situational factors to the appreciation of sad music. The survey also examines the different principles through which sadness is evoked by music, and their interaction with personality traits. Results show 4 different rewards of music-evoked sadness: reward of imagination, emotion regulation, empathy, and no "real-life" implications. Moreover, appreciation of sad music follows a mood-congruent fashion and is greater among individuals with high empathy and low emotional stability. Surprisingly, nostalgia rather than sadness is the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music. Correspondingly, memory was rated as the most important principle through which sadness is evoked. Finally, the trait empathy contributes to the evocation of sadness via contagion, appraisal, and by engaging social functions. The present findings indicate that emotional responses to sad music are multifaceted, are modulated by empathy, and are linked with a multidimensional experience of pleasure. These results were corroborated by a follow-up survey on happy music, which indicated differences between the emotional experiences resulting from listening to sad versus happy music. This is the first comprehensive survey of music-evoked sadness, revealing that listening to sad music can lead to beneficial emotional effects such as regulation of negative emotion and mood as well as consolation. Such beneficial emotional effects constitute the prime motivations for engaging with sad music in everyday life.

The paradox of music-evoked sadness: an online survey.

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Taruffi, Liila; Koelsch, Stefan

2014-01-01

This study explores listeners' experience of music-evoked sadness. Sadness is typically assumed to be undesirable and is therefore usually avoided in everyday life. Yet the question remains: Why do people seek and appreciate sadness in music? We present findings from an online survey with both Western and Eastern participants (N = 772). The survey investigates the rewarding aspects of music-evoked sadness, as well as the relative contribution of listener characteristics and situational factors to the appreciation of sad music. The survey also examines the different principles through which sadness is evoked by music, and their interaction with personality traits. Results show 4 different rewards of music-evoked sadness: reward of imagination, emotion regulation, empathy, and no "real-life" implications. Moreover, appreciation of sad music follows a mood-congruent fashion and is greater among individuals with high empathy and low emotional stability. Surprisingly, nostalgia rather than sadness is the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music. Correspondingly, memory was rated as the most important principle through which sadness is evoked. Finally, the trait empathy contributes to the evocation of sadness via contagion, appraisal, and by engaging social functions. The present findings indicate that emotional responses to sad music are multifaceted, are modulated by empathy, and are linked with a multidimensional experience of pleasure. These results were corroborated by a follow-up survey on happy music, which indicated differences between the emotional experiences resulting from listening to sad versus happy music. This is the first comprehensive survey of music-evoked sadness, revealing that listening to sad music can lead to beneficial emotional effects such as regulation of negative emotion and mood as well as consolation. Such beneficial emotional effects constitute the prime motivations for engaging with sad music in everyday life.

Affective norms of 875 Spanish words for five discrete emotional categories and two emotional dimensions.

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Hinojosa, J A; Martínez-García, N; Villalba-García, C; Fernández-Folgueiras, U; Sánchez-Carmona, A; Pozo, M A; Montoro, P R

2016-03-01

In the present study, we introduce affective norms for a new set of Spanish words, the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS), that were scored on two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and on five discrete emotional categories (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust), as well as on concreteness, by 660 Spanish native speakers. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic variables--grammatical class, word frequency, number of letters, and number of syllables--for the words are also included. We observed high split-half reliabilities for every emotional variable and a strong quadratic relationship between valence and arousal. Additional analyses revealed several associations between the affective dimensions and discrete emotions, as well as with some psycholinguistic variables. This new corpus complements and extends prior databases in Spanish and allows for designing new experiments investigating the influence of affective content in language processing under both dimensional and discrete theoretical conceptions of emotion. These norms can be downloaded as supplemental materials for this article from www.dropbox.com/s/o6dpw3irk6utfhy/Hinojosa%20et%20al_Supplementary%20materials.xlsx?dl=0 .

Regulating sadness and fear from outside and within: mothers' emotion socialization and adolescents' parasympathetic regulation predict the development of internalizing difficulties.

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Hastings, Paul D; Klimes-Dougan, Bonnie; Kendziora, Kimberly T; Brand, Ann; Zahn-Waxler, Carolyn

2014-11-01

Multilevel models of developmental psychopathology implicate both characteristics of the individual and their rearing environment in the etiology of internalizing problems and disorders. Maladaptive regulation of fear and sadness, the core of anxiety and depression, arises from the conjoint influences of ineffective parasympathetic regulation of emotion and ineffective emotion socialization experiences. In 171 youths (84 female, M = 13.69 years, SD = 1.84), we measured changes of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in response to sadness- and fear-inducing film clips and maternal supportive and punitive responses to youths' internalizing emotions. Youths and mothers reported on youths' internalizing problems and anxiety and depression symptoms concurrently and 2 years later at Time 2. Maternal supportive emotion socialization predicted fewer, and punitive socialization predicted more, mother-reported internalizing problems at Time 2 only for youths who showed RSA suppression to fear-inducing films. More RSA suppression to sadness-inducing films predicted more youth-reported internalizing problems at Time 2 in girls only. In addition, less supportive emotion socialization predicted more youth-reported depression symptoms at Time 2 only for girls who showed more RSA suppression to sadness. RSA suppression to sadness versus fear might reflect different patterns of atypical parasympathetic regulation of emotional arousal, both of which increase the risk for internalizing difficulties in youths, and especially girls, who lack maternal support for regulating emotions.

Categorical Perception of emotional faces is not affected by aging

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Mandy Rossignol

2009-11-01

Full Text Available Effects of normal aging on categorical perception (CP of facial emotional expressions were investigated. One-hundred healthy participants (20 to 70 years old; five age groups had to identify morphed expressions ranging from neutrality to happiness, sadness and fear. We analysed percentages and latencies of correct recognition for nonmorphed emotional expressions, percentages and latencies of emotional recognition for morphed-faces, locus of the boundaries along the different continua and the number of intrusions. The results showed that unmorphed happy and fearful faces were better processed than unmorphed sad and neutral faces. For morphed faces, CP was confirmed, as latencies increased as a function of the distance between the displayed morph and the original unmorphed photograph. The locus of categorical boundaries was not affected by age. Aging did not alter the accuracy of recognition for original pictures, no more than the emotional recognition of morphed faces or the rate of intrusions. However, latencies of responses increased with age, for both unmorphed and morphed pictures. In conclusion, CP of facial expressions appears to be spared in aging.

Disgust, Sadness, and Appraisal: Disgusted Consumers Dislike Food More Than Sad Ones

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Motoki, Kosuke; Sugiura, Motoaki

2018-01-01

According to the affect-as-information framework, consumers base judgments on their feelings. Disgust is associated with two kinds of appraisal: one in which the consumer avoids and distances him/herself immediately from the object concerned, and another in which the consumer is disgusted due to contamination and impurities within the environment. The first instance indicates that disgust can decrease a consumer’s preference for a product, regardless of its category. In contrast, the second case suggests that a product’s degree of depreciation is greater in products vulnerable to contamination, such as foods. However, it remains largely unknown how incidental disgust affects product preferences in accordance with the two appraisal-related goals. The present research investigates how incidental disgust (as opposed to sadness, an equally valenced but distinct emotion of appraisal) influences consumer preferences for products with or without a risk of contamination. Twenty-four participants repeatedly judged foods or household products after seeing an emotional image (conveying disgust, sadness, or neutrality). Foods and household products are the two representative product categories in grocery stores, but only foods are associated with a risk of contamination. The results showed that incidental disgust led to negative evaluations of both types of products; however, compared to sadness, incidental disgust demonstrated a stronger negative effect on preference for foods than household products. These findings elucidate that disgust and the appraisal of contamination specifically devalue foods, and broaden the application of the appraisal-information framework in consumer settings. PMID:29467697

Disgust, Sadness, and Appraisal: Disgusted Consumers Dislike Food More Than Sad Ones

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Kosuke Motoki

2018-02-01

Full Text Available According to the affect-as-information framework, consumers base judgments on their feelings. Disgust is associated with two kinds of appraisal: one in which the consumer avoids and distances him/herself immediately from the object concerned, and another in which the consumer is disgusted due to contamination and impurities within the environment. The first instance indicates that disgust can decrease a consumer’s preference for a product, regardless of its category. In contrast, the second case suggests that a product’s degree of depreciation is greater in products vulnerable to contamination, such as foods. However, it remains largely unknown how incidental disgust affects product preferences in accordance with the two appraisal-related goals. The present research investigates how incidental disgust (as opposed to sadness, an equally valenced but distinct emotion of appraisal influences consumer preferences for products with or without a risk of contamination. Twenty-four participants repeatedly judged foods or household products after seeing an emotional image (conveying disgust, sadness, or neutrality. Foods and household products are the two representative product categories in grocery stores, but only foods are associated with a risk of contamination. The results showed that incidental disgust led to negative evaluations of both types of products; however, compared to sadness, incidental disgust demonstrated a stronger negative effect on preference for foods than household products. These findings elucidate that disgust and the appraisal of contamination specifically devalue foods, and broaden the application of the appraisal-information framework in consumer settings.

Disgust, Sadness, and Appraisal: Disgusted Consumers Dislike Food More Than Sad Ones.

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Motoki, Kosuke; Sugiura, Motoaki

2018-01-01

According to the affect-as-information framework, consumers base judgments on their feelings. Disgust is associated with two kinds of appraisal: one in which the consumer avoids and distances him/herself immediately from the object concerned, and another in which the consumer is disgusted due to contamination and impurities within the environment. The first instance indicates that disgust can decrease a consumer's preference for a product, regardless of its category. In contrast, the second case suggests that a product's degree of depreciation is greater in products vulnerable to contamination, such as foods. However, it remains largely unknown how incidental disgust affects product preferences in accordance with the two appraisal-related goals. The present research investigates how incidental disgust (as opposed to sadness, an equally valenced but distinct emotion of appraisal) influences consumer preferences for products with or without a risk of contamination. Twenty-four participants repeatedly judged foods or household products after seeing an emotional image (conveying disgust, sadness, or neutrality). Foods and household products are the two representative product categories in grocery stores, but only foods are associated with a risk of contamination. The results showed that incidental disgust led to negative evaluations of both types of products; however, compared to sadness, incidental disgust demonstrated a stronger negative effect on preference for foods than household products. These findings elucidate that disgust and the appraisal of contamination specifically devalue foods, and broaden the application of the appraisal-information framework in consumer settings.

Sad or Fearful? The Influence of Body Posture on Adults' and Children's Perception of Facial Displays of Emotion

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Mondloch, Catherine J.

2012-01-01

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body…

The influence of self-generated emotions on physical performance: an investigation of happiness, anger, anxiety, and sadness.

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Rathschlag, Marco; Memmert, Daniel

2013-04-01

The present study examined the relationship between self-generated emotions and physical performance. All participants took part in five emotion induction conditions (happiness, anger, anxiety, sadness, and an emotion-neutral state) and we investigated their influence on the force of the finger musculature (Experiment 1), the jump height of a counter-movement jump (Experiment 2), and the velocity of a thrown ball (Experiment 3). All experiments showed that participants could produce significantly better physical performances when recalling anger or happiness emotions in contrast to the emotion-neutral state. Experiments 1 and 2 also revealed that physical performance in the anger and the happiness conditions was significantly enhanced compared with the anxiety and the sadness conditions. Results are discussed in relation to the Lazarus (1991, 2000a) cognitive-motivational-relational (CMR) theory framework.

Anticipated Coping with Interpersonal Stressors: Links with the Emotional Reactions of Sadness, Anger, and Fear

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Zimmer-Gembeck, Melanie J.; Skinner, Ellen A.; Morris, Helen; Thomas, Rae

2013-01-01

The same stressor can evoke different emotions across individuals, and emotions can prompt certain coping responses. Responding to four videotaped interpersonal stressors, adolescents ("N" = 230, the average values of "X"[subscript age] = 10 years) reported their sadness, fear "and" anger, and 12 coping strategies.…

Effect of regulating anger and sadness on decision-making.

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Szasz, Paul Lucian; Hofmann, Stefan G; Heilman, Renata M; Curtiss, Joshua

2016-11-01

The aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination for regulating anger and sadness on decision-making. Participants (N = 165) were asked to recall two autobiographical events in which they felt intense anger and sadness, respectively. Participants were then instructed to reappraise, accept, ruminate, or not use any strategies to regulate their feelings of anger and sadness. Following this manipulation, risk aversion, and decision-making strategies were measured using a computer-based measure of risk-taking and a simulated real-life decision-making task. Participants who were instructed to reappraise their emotions showed the least anger and sadness, the most adaptive decision-making strategies, but the least risk aversion as compared to the participants in the other conditions. These findings suggest that emotion regulation strategies of negative affective states have an immediate effect on decision-making and risk-taking behaviors.

Emotion-Specific Priming: Congruence Effects on Affect and Recognition across Negative Emotions.

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Hansen, Christine H.; Shantz, Cynthia A.

1995-01-01

Demonstrated the emotion-specific priming effects of negatively valenced emotions (anger, sadness, and fear) in a divided attention task. Results indicated that a negative emotion displayed by a target that matched the emotion induced by a priming manipulation was significantly stronger than an incongruous priming manipulation and displayed…

A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective states induced by classical music.

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Mitterschiffthaler, Martina T; Fu, Cynthia H Y; Dalton, Jeffrey A; Andrew, Christopher M; Williams, Steven C R

2007-11-01

The present study investigated the functional neuroanatomy of transient mood changes in response to Western classical music. In a pilot experiment, 53 healthy volunteers (mean age: 32.0; SD = 9.6) evaluated their emotional responses to 60 classical musical pieces using a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (sad) through 50 (neutral) to 100 (happy). Twenty pieces were found to accurately induce the intended emotional states with good reliability, consisting of 5 happy, 5 sad, and 10 emotionally unevocative, neutral musical pieces. In a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal contrast was measured in response to the mood state induced by each musical stimulus in a separate group of 16 healthy participants (mean age: 29.5; SD = 5.5). Mood state ratings during scanning were made by a VAS, which confirmed the emotional valence of the selected stimuli. Increased BOLD signal contrast during presentation of happy music was found in the ventral and dorsal striatum, anterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyrus, and auditory association areas. With sad music, increased BOLD signal responses were noted in the hippocampus/amygdala and auditory association areas. Presentation of neutral music was associated with increased BOLD signal responses in the insula and auditory association areas. Our findings suggest that an emotion processing network in response to music integrates the ventral and dorsal striatum, areas involved in reward experience and movement; the anterior cingulate, which is important for targeting attention; and medial temporal areas, traditionally found in the appraisal and processing of emotions. Copyright 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Age-related differences in affective responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music: a cross-sectional study.

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Vieillard, Sandrine; Gilet, Anne-Laure

2013-01-01

There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music. In the present study, eighteen older (60-84 years) and eighteen younger (19-24 years) listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a) reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b) showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c) were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d) showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity.

Age-related differences in affective responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music: a cross-sectional study

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Sandrine eVieillard

2013-10-01

Full Text Available There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for music. In the present study, eighteen older (60-84 years and eighteen younger (19-24 years listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard, et al., 2008 while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity.

Electrophysiological correlates of fearful and sad distraction on target processing in adolescents with attention deficit-hyperactivity symptoms and affective disorders.

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Anthony eSinghal

2012-12-01

Full Text Available In this study we used event-related brain potentials (ERP as neural markers of cognitive operations to examine emotion and attentional processing in a population of high-risk adolescents with mental health problems that included ADHD, anxiety, and depression. We included a healthy control group for comparison purposes, and employed a modified version of the emotional oddball paradigm, consisting of frequent distracters (scrambled pictures, infrequent distracters (sad, fearful, and neutral pictures and infrequent targets (circles. Participants were instructed to make a right hand button press to targets and a left hand button press to all other stimuli. EEG/ERP recordings were taken using a high-density 256-channel recording system. Behavioral data showed that for both clinical and non-clinical adolescents, reaction time was slowest in response to the fearful images. Electrophysiological data differentiated emotion and target processing between clinical and non-clinical adolescents. In the clinical group we observed a larger P100 and Late Positive Potential (LPP in response to fearful compared to sad or neutral pictures. There were no differences in these ERPs in the healthy sample. Emotional modulation of target processing was also identified in the clinical sample, where we observed an increase in P300 amplitude, and a larger sustained LPP in response to targets that followed emotional pictures (fear & sad compared to targets that followed neutral pictures or other targets. There were no differences in these target ERPs for the healthy participants. Taken together, we suggest that these data provide important and novel evidence of affective and attention dysfunction in this clinical population of adolescents, and offer an example of the disruptive effects of emotional reactivity on basic cognition.

Norms for 10,491 Spanish words for five discrete emotions: Happiness, disgust, anger, fear, and sadness.

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Stadthagen-González, Hans; Ferré, Pilar; Pérez-Sánchez, Miguel A; Imbault, Constance; Hinojosa, José Antonio

2017-09-18

The discrete emotion theory proposes that affective experiences can be reduced to a limited set of universal "basic" emotions, most commonly identified as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Here we present norms for 10,491 Spanish words for those five discrete emotions collected from a total of 2,010 native speakers, making it the largest set of norms for discrete emotions in any language to date. When used in conjunction with the norms from Hinojosa, Martínez-García et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 48, 272-284, 2016) and Ferré, Guasch, Martínez-García, Fraga, & Hinojosa (Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1082-1094, 2017), researchers now have access to ratings of discrete emotions for 13,633 Spanish words. Our norms show a high degree of inter-rater reliability and correlate highly with those from Ferré et al. (2017). Our exploration of the relationship between the five discrete emotions and relevant lexical and emotional variables confirmed findings of previous studies conducted with smaller datasets. The availability of such large set of norms will greatly facilitate the study of emotion, language and related fields. The norms are available as supplementary materials to this article.

An Age-Related Mechanism of Emotion Regulation: Regulating Sadness Promotes Children's Learning by Broadening Information Processing

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Davis, Elizabeth L.

2016-01-01

Emotion regulation predicts positive academic outcomes like learning, but little is known about "why". Effective emotion regulation likely promotes learning by broadening the scope of what may be attended to after an emotional event. One hundred twenty-six 6- to 13-year-olds' (54% boys) regulation of sadness was examined for changes in…

Effects of acute systemic inflammation on the interplay between sad mood and affective cognition.

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Benson, Sven; Brinkhoff, Alexandra; Lueg, Larissa; Roderigo, Till; Kribben, Andreas; Wilde, Benjamin; Witzke, Oliver; Engler, Harald; Schedlowski, Manfred; Elsenbruch, Sigrid

2017-12-11

Experimental endotoxemia is a translational model to study inflammatory mechanisms involved in the pathophysiology of mood disorders including depression. Disturbed affective cognition constitutes a core aspect in depression, but has never been studied in the context of inflammation. We combined experimental endotoxemia with an established experimental mood induction procedure to assess the interaction between acute inflammation and sad mood and their effects on affective cognition. In this randomized cross-over study, N = 15 healthy males received endotoxin (0.8 ng/kg lipopolysaccharide iv) on one study day and placebo an otherwise identical study day. The affective Go/Nogo task was conducted after experimental induction of neutral and sad mood. Inflammatory markers were assessed hourly. Endotoxin application induced a transient systemic inflammation, characterized by increased leukocyte counts, TNF-alpha and interleukin-6 plasma concentrations (all p sadness ratings, with highest ratings when sad mood was induced during inflammation (p sad vs. neutral mood) × 2 (sad vs. happy Go/Nogo target words) factorial design, we observed a significant target × endotoxin condition interaction (p sad targets during endotoxemia. Additionally, we found a valence × mood interaction (p sad targets in sad mood. In summary, acute inflammation and sad mood are risk factors for disturbed affective cognition. The results may reflect a mood-congruency effect, with prolonged and sustained processing of mood-congruent information during acute inflammation, which may contribute to depression risk.

Unconsciously Triggered Emotional Conflict by Emotional Facial Expressions

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Chen, Antao; Cui, Qian; Zhang, Qinglin

2013-01-01

The present study investigated whether emotional conflict and emotional conflict adaptation could be triggered by unconscious emotional information as assessed in a backward-masked affective priming task. Participants were instructed to identify the valence of a face (e.g., happy or sad) preceded by a masked happy or sad face. The results of two experiments revealed the emotional conflict effect but no emotional conflict adaptation effect. This demonstrates that emotional conflict can be triggered by unconsciously presented emotional information, but participants may not adjust their subsequent performance trial-by trial to reduce this conflict. PMID:23409084

Anger, Sadness and Fear in Response to Breaking Crime and Accident News Stories: How Emotions Influence Support for Alcohol-Control Public Policies via Concern about Risks

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Solloway, Tyler; Slater, Michael D.; Chung, Adrienne; Goodall, Catherine

2015-01-01

Prior research shows that discrete emotions, notably anger and fear, can explain effects of news articles on health and alcohol-control policy support. This study advances prior work by coding expressed emotional responses to messages (as opposed to directly manipulated emotions or forced responses), incorporating and controlling for central thoughts, including sadness (a particularly relevant response to tragic stories), and examining concern’s mediating role between emotion and policy support. An experiment with a national online adult panel had participants read one of 60 violent crime or accident news stories, each manipulated to mention or withhold alcohol’s causal contribution. Multi-group structural equation models suggest that stories not mentioning alcohol had a direct effect on policy support via fear and central thoughts, unmediated by concern. When alcohol was mentioned, sadness and anger affects alcohol-control support through concern. Findings help confirm that emotional responses are key in determining news story effects on public support of health policies. PMID:26491487

The pleasures of sad music: a systematic review.

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Sachs, Matthew E; Damasio, Antonio; Habibi, Assal

2015-01-01

Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, a response to distressing and adverse situations. In an aesthetic context, however, sadness is often associated with some degree of pleasure, as suggested by the ubiquity and popularity, throughout history, of music, plays, films and paintings with a sad content. Here, we focus on the fact that music regarded as sad is often experienced as pleasurable. Compared to other art forms, music has an exceptional ability to evoke a wide-range of feelings and is especially beguiling when it deals with grief and sorrow. Why is it, then, that while human survival depends on preventing painful experiences, mental pain often turns out to be explicitly sought through music? In this article we consider why and how sad music can become pleasurable. We offer a framework to account for how listening to sad music can lead to positive feelings, contending that this effect hinges on correcting an ongoing homeostatic imbalance. Sadness evoked by music is found pleasurable: (1) when it is perceived as non-threatening; (2) when it is aesthetically pleasing; and (3) when it produces psychological benefits such as mood regulation, and empathic feelings, caused, for example, by recollection of and reflection on past events. We also review neuroimaging studies related to music and emotion and focus on those that deal with sadness. Further exploration of the neural mechanisms through which stimuli that usually produce sadness can induce a positive affective state could help the development of effective therapies for disorders such as depression, in which the ability to experience pleasure is attenuated.

Empathy for positive and negative emotions in social anxiety disorder.

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Morrison, Amanda S; Mateen, Maria A; Brozovich, Faith A; Zaki, Jamil; Goldin, Philippe R; Heimberg, Richard G; Gross, James J

2016-12-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with elevated negative and diminished positive affective experience. However, little is known about the way in which individuals with SAD perceive and respond emotionally to the naturally-unfolding negative and positive emotions of others, that is, cognitive empathy and affective empathy, respectively. In the present study, participants with generalized SAD (n = 32) and demographically-matched healthy controls (HCs; n = 32) completed a behavioral empathy task. Cognitive empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets' and participants' continuous ratings of targets' emotions, whereas affective empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets' and participants' continuous self-ratings of emotion. Individuals with SAD differed from HCs only in positive affective empathy: they were less able to vicariously share others' positive emotions. Mediation analyses revealed that poor emotional clarity and negative interpersonal perceptions among those with SAD might account for this finding. Future research using experimental methodology is needed to examine whether this finding represents an inability or unwillingness to share positive affect. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Age-related differences in affective responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music: a cross-sectional study

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Vieillard, Sandrine; Gilet, Anne-Laure

2013-01-01

There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music. In the present study, eighteen older (60–84 years) and eighteen younger (19–24 years) listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a) reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b) showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c) were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d) showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity. PMID:24137141

How sadness and happiness influence ethnic stereotyping

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Žeželj Iris

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Incidental affective states tend to influence stereotyping in counterintuitive way: experimentally induced happiness leads to more stereotyping while experimentally induced sadness leads to less stereotyping. It was therefore predicted that happy subjects would a. would make more stereotype-consistent errors in memory task; b. attribute more stereotypical features to a specific ethnic group, and c. be less sensitive to ethnic discrimination in comparison to sad subjects. In a sample of 90 high school students from Belgrade, Serbia, differently valenced affects were successfully induced using 'autobiographic recollection' procedure. Experiment 1 showed that happy and sad subjects did not differ in the number of stereotype consistent errors in memory task. In experiment 2, however, happy subjects in comparison to sad subjects attributed more stereotypic traits to a non-stereotypical exemplar of a national category and expected him to behave more stereotypically in the future. Additionally, in thought listing task, happy subjects recorded more irrelevant and less story-focused thoughts in comparison to sad subjects. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N=66 sad subjects demonstrated more sensitivity to ethnic discrimination in comparison to happy subjects. These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of emotional experience on social information-processing strategies.

The affective tie that binds: Examining the contribution of positive emotions and anxiety to relationship formation in social anxiety disorder.

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Taylor, Charles T; Pearlstein, Sarah L; Stein, Murray B

2017-06-01

Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have difficulty forming social relationships. The prevailing clinical perspective is that negative emotions such as anxiety inhibit one's capacity to develop satisfying social connections. However, empirical findings from social psychology and affective neuroscience suggest that positive emotional experiences are fundamental to establishing new social bonds. To reconcile these perspectives, we collected repeated measurements of anxiety, positive emotions (pleasantness), and connectedness over the course of a controlled relationship formation encounter in 56 participants diagnosed with SAD (64% female; M age =23.3, SD=4.7). Participants experienced both increases in positive emotions and decreases in anxiety throughout the interaction. Change in positive emotions was the most robust predictor of subsequent increases in connectedness, as well as a greater desire to engage one's partner in future social activities, above and beyond reductions in anxiety (medium to large sized effects). Those findings suggest that anxiety-based models alone may not fully explain difficulties in relationship formation in SAD, and underscore the potential value of considering positive emotional experiences in conceptual and treatment models of SAD. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The effects of distraction and reappraisal on children's parasympathetic regulation of sadness and fear.

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Davis, Elizabeth L; Quiñones-Camacho, Laura E; Buss, Kristin A

2016-02-01

Children commonly experience negative emotions like sadness and fear, and much recent empirical attention has been devoted to understanding the factors supporting and predicting effective emotion regulation. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a cardiac index of parasympathetic function, has emerged as a key physiological correlate of children's self-regulation. But little is known about how children's use of specific cognitive emotion regulation strategies corresponds to concurrent parasympathetic regulation (i.e., RSA reactivity while watching an emotion-eliciting video). The current study describes an experimental paradigm in which 101 5- and 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of three different emotion regulation conditions: Control, Distraction, or Reappraisal. All children watched a sad film and a scary film (order counterbalanced), and children in the Distraction and Reappraisal conditions received instructions to deploy the target strategy to manage sadness/fear while they watched. Consistent with predictions, children assigned to use either emotion regulation strategy showed greater RSA augmentation from baseline than children in the Control condition (all children showed an overall increase in RSA levels from baseline), suggesting enhanced parasympathetic calming when children used distraction or reappraisal to regulate sadness and fear. But this pattern was found only among children who viewed the sad film before the scary film. Among children who viewed the scary film first, reappraisal promoted marginally better parasympathetic regulation of fear (no condition differences emerged for parasympathetic regulation of sadness when the sad film was viewed second). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of children's emotion regulation and affective physiology. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Fear, Sadness and Hope: Which Emotions Maximize Impact of Anti-Tobacco Mass Media Advertisements among Lower and Higher SES Groups?

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Durkin, Sarah; Bayly, Megan; Brennan, Emily; Biener, Lois; Wakefield, Melanie

2018-01-01

Emotive anti-tobacco advertisements can increase quitting. Discrete emotion theories suggest evoking fear may be more effective than sadness; less research has focused on hope. A weekly cross-sectional survey of smokers and recent quitters (N = 7683) measured past-month quit attempts. The main predictor was level of exposure to four different types of anti-tobacco advertisements broadcast in the two months prior to quit attempts: advertisements predominantly evoking fear, sadness, hope, or evoking multiple negative emotions (i.e., fear, guilt, and/or sadness). Greater exposure to fear-evoking advertisements (OR = 2.16, p < .01) increased odds of making a quit attempt and showed similar effectiveness among those in lower and higher SES areas. Greater exposure to advertisements evoking multiple negative emotions increased quit attempts (OR = 1.70, p < .01), but interactions indicated this was driven by those in lower SES, but not higher SES areas. Greater exposure to hope-evoking advertisements enhanced effects of fear-evoking advertisements among those in higher SES, but not lower SES areas. Findings suggest to be maximally effective across the whole population avoid messages evoking sadness and use messages eliciting fear. If the aim is to specifically motivate those living in lower SES areas where smoking rates are higher, multiple negative emotion messages, but not hope-evoking messages, may also be effective.

Being Moved by Unfamiliar Sad Music Is Associated with High Empathy

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Eerola, Tuomas; Vuoskoski, Jonna K.; Kautiainen, Hannu

2016-01-01

The paradox of enjoying listening to music that evokes sadness is yet to be fully understood. Unlike prior studies that have explored potential explanations related to lyrics, memories, and mood regulation, we investigated the types of emotions induced by unfamiliar, instrumental sad music, and whether these responses are consistently associated with certain individual difference variables. One hundred and two participants were drawn from a representative sample to minimize self-selection bias. The results suggest that the emotional responses induced by unfamiliar sad music could be characterized in terms of three underlying factors: Relaxing sadness, Moving sadness, and Nervous sadness. Relaxing sadness was characterized by felt and perceived peacefulness and positive valence. Moving sadness captured an intense experience that involved feelings of sadness and being moved. Nervous sadness was associated with felt anxiety, perceived scariness and negative valence. These interpretations were supported by indirect measures of felt emotion. Experiences of Moving sadness were strongly associated with high trait empathy and emotional contagion, but not with other previously suggested traits such as absorption or nostalgia-proneness. Relaxing sadness and Nervous sadness were not significantly predicted by any of the individual difference variables. The findings are interpreted within a theoretical framework of embodied emotions. PMID:27695424

The Pleasures of Sad Music: A Systematic Review

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Matthew eSachs

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, a response to distressing and adverse situations. In an aesthetic context, however, sadness is often associated with some degree of pleasure, as suggested by the ubiquity and popularity, throughout history, of music, plays, films and paintings with a sad content. Here, we focus on the fact that music regarded as sad is often experienced as pleasurable. Compared to other art forms, music has an exceptional ability to evoke a wide-range of feelings and is especially beguiling when it deals with grief and sorrow. Why is it, then, that while human survival depends on preventing painful experiences, mental pain often turns out to be explicitly sought through music? In this article we consider why and how sad music can become pleasurable. We offer a framework to account for how listening to sad music can lead to positive feelings, contending that this effect hinges on correcting an ongoing homeostatic imbalance. Sadness evoked by music is found pleasurable (1 when it is perceived as non-threatening; (2 when it is aesthetically pleasing; and (3 when it produces psychological benefits such as mood regulation, and empathic feelings, caused, for example, by recollection of and reflection on past events. We also review neuroimaging studies related to music and emotion and focus on those that deal with sadness. Further exploration of the neural mechanisms through which stimuli that usually produce sadness can induce a positive affective state could help the development of effective therapies for disorders such as depression, in which the ability to experience pleasure is attenuated.

Implicit negative affect predicts attention to sad faces beyond self-reported depressive symptoms in healthy individuals: An eye-tracking study.

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Bodenschatz, Charlott Maria; Skopinceva, Marija; Kersting, Anette; Quirin, Markus; Suslow, Thomas

2018-04-04

Cognitive theories of depression assume biased attention towards mood-congruent information as a central vulnerability and maintaining factor. Among other symptoms, depression is characterized by excessive negative affect (NA). Yet, little is known about the impact of naturally occurring NA on the allocation of attention to emotional information. The study investigates how implicit and explicit NA as well as self-reported depressive symptoms predict attentional biases in a sample of healthy individuals (N = 104). Attentional biases were assessed using eye-tracking during a free viewing task in which images of sad, angry, happy and neutral faces were shown simultaneously. Participants' implicit affectivity was measured indirectly using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. Questionnaires were administered to assess actual and habitual explicit NA and presence of depressive symptoms. Higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with sustained attention to sad faces and reduced attention to happy faces. Implicit but not explicit NA significantly predicted gaze behavior towards sad faces independently from depressive symptoms. The present study supports the idea that naturally occurring implicit NA is associated with attention allocation to dysphoric facial expression. The findings demonstrate the utility of implicit affectivity measures in studying individual differences in depression-relevant attentional biases and cognitive vulnerability. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of sad feelings in healthy girls.

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Lévesque, J; Joanette, Y; Mensour, B; Beaudoin, G; Leroux, J-M; Bourgouin, P; Beauregard, M

2003-01-01

Emotional development is indisputably one of the cornerstones of personality development during infancy. According to the differential emotions theory (DET), primary emotions are constituted of three distinct components: the neural-evaluative, the expressive, and the experiential. The DET further assumes that these three components are biologically based and functional nearly from birth. Such a view entails that the neural substrate of primary emotions must be similar in children and adults. Guided by this assumption of the DET, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study was conducted to identify the neural correlates of sad feelings in healthy children. Fourteen healthy girls (aged 8-10) were scanned while they watched sad film excerpts aimed at externally inducing a transient state of sadness (activation task). Emotionally neutral film excerpts were also presented to the subjects (reference task). The subtraction of the brain activity measured during the viewing of the emotionally neutral film excerpts from that noted during the viewing of the sad film excerpts revealed that sad feelings were associated with significant bilateral activations of the midbrain, the medial prefrontal cortex (Brodmann area [BA] 10), and the anterior temporal pole (BA 21). A significant locus of activation was also noted in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 47). These results are compatible with those of previous functional neuroimaging studies of sadness in adults. They suggest that the neural substrate underlying the subjective experience of sadness is comparable in children and adults. Such a similitude provides empirical support to the DET assumption that the neural substrate of primary emotions is biologically based.

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions.

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Bogert, Brigitte; Numminen-Kontti, Taru; Gold, Benjamin; Sams, Mikko; Numminen, Jussi; Burunat, Iballa; Lampinen, Jouko; Brattico, Elvira

2016-08-01

Music is often used to regulate emotions and mood. Typically, music conveys and induces emotions even when one does not attend to them. Studies on the neural substrates of musical emotions have, however, only examined brain activity when subjects have focused on the emotional content of the music. Here we address with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the neural processing of happy, sad, and fearful music with a paradigm in which 56 subjects were instructed to either classify the emotions (explicit condition) or pay attention to the number of instruments playing (implicit condition) in 4-s music clips. In the implicit vs. explicit condition, stimuli activated bilaterally the inferior parietal lobule, premotor cortex, caudate, and ventromedial frontal areas. The cortical dorsomedial prefrontal and occipital areas activated during explicit processing were those previously shown to be associated with the cognitive processing of music and emotion recognition and regulation. Moreover, happiness in music was associated with activity in the bilateral auditory cortex, left parahippocampal gyrus, and supplementary motor area, whereas the negative emotions of sadness and fear corresponded with activation of the left anterior cingulate and middle frontal gyrus and down-regulation of the orbitofrontal cortex. Our study demonstrates for the first time in healthy subjects the neural underpinnings of the implicit processing of brief musical emotions, particularly in frontoparietal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and striatal areas of the brain. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

How Major Depressive Disorder affects the ability to decode multimodal dynamic emotional stimuli

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FILOMENA SCIBELLI

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Most studies investigating the processing of emotions in depressed patients reported impairments in the decoding of negative emotions. However, these studies adopted static stimuli (mostly stereotypical facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions which do not reflect the way people experience emotions in everyday life. For this reason, this work proposes to investigate the decoding of emotional expressions in patients affected by Recurrent Major Depressive Disorder (RMDDs using dynamic audio/video stimuli. RMDDs’ performance is compared with the performance of patients with Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood (ADs and healthy (HCs subjects. The experiments involve 27 RMDDs (16 with acute depression - RMDD-A, and 11 in a compensation phase - RMDD-C, 16 ADs and 16 HCs. The ability to decode emotional expressions is assessed through an emotion recognition task based on short audio (without video, video (without audio and audio/video clips. The results show that AD patients are significantly less accurate than HCs in decoding fear, anger, happiness, surprise and sadness. RMDD-As with acute depression are significantly less accurate than HCs in decoding happiness, sadness and surprise. Finally, no significant differences were found between HCs and RMDD-Cs in a compensation phase. The different communication channels and the types of emotion play a significant role in limiting the decoding accuracy.

Sad mood induction has an opposite effect on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in euthymic patients with bipolar disorder and healthy controls.

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Horacek, Jiri; Mikolas, Pavol; Tintera, Jaroslav; Novak, Tomas; Palenicek, Tomas; Brunovsky, Martin; Höschl, Cyril; Alda, Martin

2015-03-01

Aberrant amygdala reactivity to affective stimuli represents a candidate factor predisposing patients with bipolar disorder (BD) to relapse, but it is unclear to what extent amygdala reactivity is state-dependent. We evaluated the modulatory influence of mood on amygdala reactivity and functional connectivity in patients with remitted BD and healthy controls. Amygdala response to sad versus neutral faces was investigated using fMRI during periods of normal and sad mood induced by autobiographical scripts. We assessed the functional connectivity of the amygdala to characterize the influence of mood state on the network responsible for the amygdala response. We included 20 patients with remitted BD and 20 controls in our study. The sad and normal mood exerted opposite effects on the amygdala response to emotional faces in patients compared with controls (F1,38 = 5.85, p = 0.020). Sad mood amplified the amygdala response to sad facial stimuli in controls but attenuated the amygdala response in patients. The groups differed in functional connectivity between the amygdala and the inferior prefrontal gyrus (p ≤ 0.05, family-wise error-corrected) of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) corresponding to Brodmann area 47. The sad mood challenge increased connectivity during the period of processing sad faces in patients but decreased connectivity in controls. Limitations to our study included long-term medication use in the patient group and the fact that we mapped only depressive (not manic) reactivity. Our results support the role of the amygdala-vlPFC as the system of dysfunctional contextual affective processing in patients with BD. Opposite amygdala reactivity unmasked by the mood challenge paradigm could represent a trait marker of altered mood regulation in patients with BD.

AFFECTIVE GUIDANCE OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS: How Emotion Controls Cognition1

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Clore, Gerald L.; Palmer, Janet E.

2008-01-01

Emotions and moods color cognition. In this article, we outline how emotions affect judgments and cognitive performance of human agents. We argue that affective influences are due, not to the affective reactions themselves, but to the information they carry about value, a potentially useful finding for creators of artificial agents. The kind of influence that occurs depends on the focus of the agent at the time. When making evaluative judgments, for example, agents may experience positive affect as a positive attitude toward a person or object. But when an agent focuses on a cognitive task, positive affect may act like performance feedback, with positive affect giving a green light to cognitive, relational processes. By contrast, negative affect tends to inhibit relational processing, resulting in a more perceptual, stimulus-specific processing. One result is that many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology occur readily in happy moods, but are inhibited in sad moods. PMID:19255620

Sadness and ruminative thinking independently depress people's moods.

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Jahanitabesh, Azra; Cardwell, Brittany A; Halberstadt, Jamin

2017-11-02

Depression and rumination often co-occur in clinical populations, but it is not clear which causes which, or if both are manifestations of an underlying pathology. Does rumination simply exacerbate whatever affect a person is experiencing, or is it a negative experience in and of itself? In two experiments we answer this question by independently manipulating emotion and rumination. Participants were allocated to sad or neutral (in Experiment 1), or sad, neutral or happy (Experiment 2) mood conditions, via a combination of emotionally evocative music and autobiographical recall. Afterwards, in both studies, participants either ruminated by thinking about self-relevant statements or, in a control group, thought about self-irrelevant statements. Taken together, our data show that, independent of participants' mood, ruminators reported more negative affect relative to controls. The findings are consistent with theories suggesting that self-focus is itself unpleasant, and illustrate that depressive rumination comprises both affective and ruminative components, which could be targeted independently in clinical samples. © 2017 International Union of Psychological Science.

The relationships between HIV stigma, emotional status, and emotional regulation among HIV-affected children in rural China.

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Wei, Wei; Li, Xiaoming; Harrison, Sayward; Zhao, Junfeng; Zhao, Guoxiang

2016-03-01

Children affected by HIV/AIDS have unique psychosocial needs that often go unaddressed in traditional treatment approaches. They are more likely than unaffected peers to encounter stigma, including overt discriminatory behaviors, as well as stereotyped attitudes. In addition, HIV-affected children are at risk for experiencing negative affect, including sadness and depression. Previous studies have identified a link between HIV stigma and the subsequent emotional status of children affected by HIV/AIDS. However, limited data are available regarding protective psychological factors that can mitigate the effects of HIV stigma and thus promote resiliency for this vulnerable population. Utilizing data from 790 children aged 6-17 years affected by parental HIV in rural central China this study aims to examine the association between HIV stigma, including both enacted and perceived stigma, and emotional status among HIV-affected children, as well as to evaluate the mediating effects of emotional regulation on the relationship between HIV stigma and emotional status. In addition, the moderating role of age is tested. Multiple regression was conducted to test the mediation model. We found that the experience of HIV stigma had a direct positive effect on negative emotions among children affected by HIV. Emotional regulation offers a level of protection, as it mediated the impact of HIV stigma on negative emotions. Moreover, age was found to moderate the relationship between perceived stigma and negative emotions. A significant interaction between perceived stigma and age suggested that negative emotions increase with age among those who perceived a higher level of stigmatization. Results suggest that children affected by HIV may benefit from interventions designed to enhance their capacity to regulate emotions and that health professionals should be aware of the link between stigma and negative emotion in childhood and adolescence and use the knowledge to inform their

Processing of facial affect in social drinkers: a dose-response study of alcohol using dynamic emotion expressions.

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Kamboj, Sunjeev K; Joye, Alyssa; Bisby, James A; Das, Ravi K; Platt, Bradley; Curran, H Valerie

2013-05-01

Studies of affect recognition can inform our understanding of the interpersonal effects of alcohol and help develop a more complete neuropsychological profile of this drug. The objective of the study was to examine affect recognition in social drinkers using a novel dynamic affect-recognition task, sampling performance across a range of evolutionarily significant target emotions and neutral expressions. Participants received 0, 0.4 or 0.8 g/kg alcohol in a double-blind, independent groups design. Relatively naturalistic changes in facial expression-from neutral (mouth open) to increasing intensities of target emotions, as well as neutral (mouth closed)-were simulated using computer-generated dynamic morphs. Accuracy and reaction time were measured and a two-high-threshold model applied to hits and false-alarm data to determine sensitivity and response bias. While there was no effect on the principal emotion expressions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger and disgust), compared to those receiving 0.8 g/kg of alcohol and placebo, participants administered with 0.4 g/kg alcohol tended to show an enhanced response bias to neutral expressions. Exploration of this effect suggested an accompanying tendency to misattribute neutrality to sad expressions following the 0.4-g/kg dose. The 0.4-g/kg alcohol-but not 0.8 g/kg-produced a limited and specific modification in affect recognition evidenced by a neutral response bias and possibly an accompanying tendency to misclassify sad expressions as neutral. In light of previous findings on involuntary negative memory following the 0.4-g/kg dose, we suggest that moderate-but not high-doses of alcohol have a special relevance to emotional processing in social drinkers.

Emotional Aging: A Discrete Emotions Perspective

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Ute eKunzmann

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Perhaps the most important single finding in the field of emotional aging has been that the overall quality of affective experience steadily improves during adulthood and can be maintained into old age. Recent lifespan developmental theories have provided motivation- and experience-based explanations for this phenomenon. These theories suggest that, as individuals grow older, they become increasingly motivated and able to regulate their emotions, which could result in reduced negativity and enhanced positivity. The objective of this paper is to expand existing theories and empirical research on emotional aging by presenting a discrete emotions perspective. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach, we focus on a discussion of the literature examining age differences in anger and sadness. These two negative emotions have been subsumed under the singular concept of negative affect. From a discrete emotions perspective, however, they are highly distinct. Sadness is elicited by an irreversible loss and associated with low situational control, high goal adjustment tendencies, and the motivation to search for social support. The experience of anger, by contrast, is typically triggered by other individuals who intentio

An experiment with spectral analysis of emotional speech affected by orthodontic appliances

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Přibil, Jiří; Přibilová, Anna; Ďuračková, Daniela

2012-11-01

The contribution describes the effect of the fixed and removable orthodontic appliances on spectral properties of emotional speech. Spectral changes were analyzed and evaluated by spectrograms and mean Welch’s periodograms. This alternative approach to the standard listening test enables to obtain objective comparison based on statistical analysis by ANOVA and hypothesis tests. Obtained results of analysis performed on short sentences of a female speaker in four emotional states (joyous, sad, angry, and neutral) show that, first of all, the removable orthodontic appliance affects the spectrograms of produced speech.

Stronger Association Between Valence- and Arousal Ratings of Affective Pictures with Older Age: Evidence for Variation Across Emotion Categories

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Mikkelsen, Mai Bjørnskov; Mehlsen, Mimi Yung; Lyby, Marlene Skovgaard

A sample of older and younger adults rated affective pictures according to valence, arousal and emotion category (happiness, sadness and disgust). Results indicate that older age is associated with a stronger linear association between ratings of arousal and valence. Further, the strength...... of the association vary according to emotion category....

Emotional competence and extrinsic emotion regulation directed toward an ostracized person.

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Nozaki, Yuki

2015-12-01

Positive interpersonal relationships hinge on individuals' competence in regulating others' emotions as well as their own. Nevertheless, little is known about the relationship between emotional competence and specific interpersonal behaviors. In particular, it is unclear which situations require emotional competence for extrinsic emotion regulation and whether emotionally competent individuals actually attempt to regulate others' emotions. To clarify these issues, the current investigation examined the relationship between emotional competence and extrinsic emotion regulation directed toward an ostracized person. The results of Study 1 (N = 39) indicated that interpersonal emotional competence (competence related to others' emotions) was positively associated with participants' efforts to relieve the ostracized person's sadness. In Study 2 (N = 120), this relationship was moderated by the ostracized person's emotional expression. In particular, participants with high interpersonal emotional competence were more likely to attempt to regulate the sadness of ostracized individuals who expressed neutral affect. In contrast, when the ostracized person expressed sadness, there were no significant relationships between high or low interpersonal emotional competence and extrinsic emotion regulation behavior. These results offer novel insight into how emotionally competent individuals use their competence to benefit others. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Encoding conditions affect recognition of vocally expressed emotions across cultures

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Rebecca eJürgens

2013-03-01

Full Text Available Although the expression of emotions in humans is considered to be largely universal, cultural effects contribute to both emotion expression and recognition. To disentangle the interplay between these factors, play-acted and authentic (non-instructed vocal expressions of emotions were used, on the assumption that cultural effects may contribute differentially to the recognition of staged and spontaneous emotions. Speech tokens depicting four emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear were obtained from German radio archives and reenacted by professional actors, and presented to 120 participants from Germany, Romania, and Indonesia. Participants in all three countries were poor at distinguishing between play-acted and spontaneous emotional utterances (58.73% correct on average with only marginal cultural differences. Nevertheless, authenticity influenced emotion recognition: across cultures, anger was recognized more accurately when play-acted (z = 15.06, p < .001 and sadness when authentic (z = 6.63, p < .001, replicating previous findings from German populations. German subjects revealed a slight advantage in recognizing emotions, indicating a moderate in-group advantage. There was no difference between Romanian and Indonesian subjects in the overall emotion recognition. Differential cultural effects became particularly apparent in terms of differential biases in emotion attribution. While all participants labeled play-acted expressions as anger more frequently than expected, German participants exhibited a further bias towards choosing anger for spontaneous stimuli. In contrast to the German sample, Romanian and Indonesian participants were biased towards choosing sadness. These results support the view that emotion recognition rests on a complex interaction of human universals and cultural specificities. Whether and in which way the observed biases are linked to cultural differences in self-construal remains an issue for further investigation.

The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music.

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Curtis, Meagan E; Bharucha, Jamshed J

2010-06-01

There is a long history of attempts to explain why music is perceived as expressing emotion. The relationship between pitches serves as an important cue for conveying emotion in music. The musical interval referred to as the minor third is generally thought to convey sadness. We reveal that the minor third also occurs in the pitch contour of speech conveying sadness. Bisyllabic speech samples conveying four emotions were recorded by 9 actresses. Acoustic analyses revealed that the relationship between the 2 salient pitches of the sad speech samples tended to approximate a minor third. Participants rated the speech samples for perceived emotion, and the use of numerous acoustic parameters as cues for emotional identification was modeled using regression analysis. The minor third was the most reliable cue for identifying sadness. Additional participants rated musical intervals for emotion, and their ratings verified the historical association between the musical minor third and sadness. These findings support the theory that human vocal expressions and music share an acoustic code for communicating sadness.

Sadness increases distraction by auditory deviant stimuli.

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Pacheco-Unguetti, Antonia P; Parmentier, Fabrice B R

2014-02-01

Research shows that attention is ineluctably captured away from a focal visual task by rare and unexpected changes (deviants) in an otherwise repeated stream of task-irrelevant auditory distractors (standards). The fundamental cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect have been the object of an increasing number of studies but their sensitivity to mood and emotions remains relatively unexplored despite suggestion of greater distractibility in negative emotional contexts. In this study, we examined the effect of sadness, a widespread form of emotional distress and a symptom of many disorders, on distraction by deviant sounds. Participants received either a sadness induction or a neutral mood induction by means of a mixed procedure based on music and autobiographical recall prior to taking part in an auditory-visual oddball task in which they categorized visual digits while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. The results showed that although all participants exhibited significantly longer response times in the visual categorization task following the presentation of rare and unexpected deviant sounds relative to that of the standard sound, this distraction effect was significantly greater in participants who had received the sadness induction (a twofold increase). The residual distraction on the subsequent trial (postdeviance distraction) was equivalent in both groups, suggesting that sadness interfered with the disengagement of attention from the deviant sound and back toward the target stimulus. We propose that this disengagement impairment reflected the monopolization of cognitive resources by sadness and/or associated ruminations. Our findings suggest that sadness can increase distraction even when distractors are emotionally neutral. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

The Experience of Anger and Sadness in Everyday Problems Impacts Age Differences in Emotion Regulation

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Blanchard-Fields, Fredda; Coats, Abby Heckman

2008-01-01

The authors examined regulation of the discrete emotions anger and sadness in adolescents through older adults in the context of describing everyday problem situations. The results support previous work; in comparison to younger age groups, older adults reported that they experienced less anger and reported that they used more passive and fewer…

Using affective knowledge to generate and validate a set of emotion-related, action words.

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Portch, Emma; Havelka, Jelena; Brown, Charity; Giner-Sorolla, Roger

2015-01-01

Emotion concepts are built through situated experience. Abstract word meaning is grounded in this affective knowledge, giving words the potential to evoke emotional feelings and reactions (e.g., Vigliocco et al., 2009). In the present work we explore whether words differ in the extent to which they evoke 'specific' emotional knowledge. Using a categorical approach, in which an affective 'context' is created, it is possible to assess whether words proportionally activate knowledge relevant to different emotional states (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger', Stevenson, Mikels & James, 2007a). We argue that this method may be particularly effective when assessing the emotional meaning of action words (e.g., Schacht & Sommer, 2009). In study 1 we use a constrained feature generation task to derive a set of action words that participants associated with six, basic emotional states (see full list in Appendix S1). Generation frequencies were taken to indicate the likelihood that the word would evoke emotional knowledge relevant to the state to which it had been paired. In study 2 a rating task was used to assess the strength of association between the six most frequently generated, or 'typical', action words and corresponding emotion labels. Participants were presented with a series of sentences, in which action words (typical and atypical) and labels were paired e.g., "If you are feeling 'sad' how likely would you be to act in the following way?" … 'cry.' Findings suggest that typical associations were robust. Participants always gave higher ratings to typical vs. atypical action word and label pairings, even when (a) rating direction was manipulated (the label or verb appeared first in the sentence), and (b) the typical behaviours were to be performed by the rater themselves, or others. Our findings suggest that emotion-related action words vary in the extent to which they evoke knowledge relevant for different emotional states. When measuring affective grounding, it may then be

Amygdala response to emotional faces in seasonal affective disorder

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Borgsted, Camilla; Ozenne, Brice; Mc Mahon, Brenda

2018-01-01

BACKGROUND: Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is characterized by seasonally recurring depression. Heightened amygdala activation to aversive stimuli is associated with major depressive disorder but its relation to SAD is unclear. We evaluated seasonal variation in amygdala activation in SAD......, we correlated change in symptom severity, assessed with The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression - Seasonal Affective Disorder version (SIGH-SAD), with change in amygdala activation. RESULTS: We found no season-by-group, season or group effect on our aversive contrast. Independent of season, SAD...... of the presence of depressive symptoms....

Do brain lesions in stroke affect basic emotions and attachment?

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Farinelli, Marina; Panksepp, Jaak; Gestieri, Laura; Maffei, Monica; Agati, Raffaele; Cevolani, Daniela; Pedone, Vincenzo; Northoff, Georg

2015-01-01

The aim of the current study was to investigate basic emotions and attachment in a sample of 86 stroke patients. We included a control group of 115 orthopedic patients (matched for age and cognitive status) without brain lesions to control for unspecific general illness effects of a traumatic recent event on basic emotions and attachment. In order to measure basic emotions and attachment style we applied the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS) and the Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ). The stroke patients showed significantly different scores in the SEEKING, SADNESS, and ANGER subscales of the ANPS as well as in the Relationship as Secondary Attachment dimension of the ASQ when compared to the control group. These differences show a pattern influenced by lesion location mainly as concerns basic emotions. Anterior, medial, left, and subcortical patients provide scores significantly lower in ANPS-SEEKING than the control group; ANPS-SADNESS scores in anterior, right, medial, and subcortical patients were significantly higher than those of the control group. ANPS-ANGER scores in posterior, right, and lateral patients were significantly higher than those in the control group; finally, the ANPS-FEAR showed slightly lower scores in posterior patients than in the control group. Minor effects on brain lesions were also individuated in the attachment style. Anterior lesion patients showed a significantly higher average score in the ASQ-Need for Approval subscale than the control group. ASQ-Confidence subscale scores differed significantly in stroke patients with lesions in medial brain regions when compared to control subjects. Scores at ANPS and ASQ subscales appear significantly more correlated in stroke patients than in the control group. Such finding of abnormalities, especially concerning basic emotions in stroke brain-lesioned patients, indicates that the effect of brain lesions may enhance the interrelation between basic emotions and attachment with

Pain, Sadness, Aggression and Joy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Grodal, Torben Kragh

2007-01-01

Based on film examples and evolutionary psychology, the article discusses why viewers are fascinated not only with funny and pleasure-evoking films, but also with sad and disgust-evoking ones. The article argues that a series of adaptations modify simple pleasure-unpleasure-mechanisms. Besides...... discussing how action-oriented films convert negative experiences to challenges, the article especially analyse how sad films are rituals of bonding (kinbonding, bonding to brothers in arms, tribal bonding etc. and the sadness is a way to express the importance of bonding in the negative. Keywords......: attachment, cognitive film theory, coping and emotions, evolutionary psychology, hedonic valence, melodrama, sadness, tragedy....

A sad mood increases attention to unhealthy food images in women with food addiction.

Science.gov (United States)

Frayn, Mallory; Sears, Christopher R; von Ranson, Kristin M

2016-05-01

Food addiction and emotional eating both influence eating and weight, but little is known of how negative mood affects the attentional processes that may contribute to food addiction. The purpose of this study was to compare attention to food images in adult women (N = 66) with versus without food addiction, before and after a sad mood induction (MI). Participants' eye fixations were tracked and recorded throughout 8-s presentations of displays with healthy food, unhealthy food, and non-food images. Food addiction was self-reported using the Yale Food Addiction Scale. The sad MI involved watching an 8-min video about a young child who passed away from cancer. It was predicted that: (1) participants in the food addiction group would attend to unhealthy food significantly more than participants in the control group, and (2) participants in the food addiction group would increase their attention to unhealthy food images following the sad MI, due to increased emotional reactivity and poorer emotional regulation. As predicted, the sad MI had a different effect for those with versus without food addiction: for participants with food addiction, attention to unhealthy images increased following the sad MI and attention to healthy images decreased, whereas for participants without food addiction the sad MI did not alter attention to food. These findings contribute to researchers' understanding of the cognitive factors underlying food addiction. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Enhancement of subjective pain experience and changes of brain function on sadness

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Yoshino, Atsuo; Takahashi, Terumichi; Okamoto, Yasumasa; Yoshimura, Shinpei; Kunisato, Yoshihiko; Okada, Go; Yamawaki, Shigeto; Onoda, Keiichi

2012-01-01

Pain is a multidimensional experience. Previous psychological studies have shown that a person's subjective pain threshold can change when certain emotions are recognized. We examined this association by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (15 healthy subjects) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) (19 healthy subjects). Subjects experienced pain stimuli in different emotional contexts induced by the presentation of sad, happy or neutral facial stimuli. They also rated their subjective pain intensity. We found: The intensity of subjective pain ratings increased in the sad emotional context, pain-related activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more pronounced in the sad context, and we demonstrated amygdala to ACC connections during the experience of pain in the sad context, and event-related desynchronization (ERD) of lower beta bands in the right hemisphere after pain stimuli was larger in the sad emotional condition. These results show that emotional stimuli can modulate neural responses to pain stimuli, and that it may be relevant to understanding the broader relationship between somatic complaints and negative emotion. (author)

Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE): New Method of Classifying Emotional Stimuli.

Science.gov (United States)

Wierzba, Małgorzata; Riegel, Monika; Wypych, Marek; Jednoróg, Katarzyna; Turnau, Paweł; Grabowska, Anna; Marchewka, Artur

2015-01-01

The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotional categories. Since the two perspectives are recognized as complementary, the aim of the present study was to supplement the NAWL database by the addition of categories corresponding to basic emotions. Thus, 2902 Polish words from the NAWL were presented to 265 subjects, who were instructed to rate them according to the intensity of each of the five basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The general characteristics of the present word database, as well as the relationships between the studied variables are shown to be consistent with typical patterns found in previous studies using similar databases for different languages. Here we present the Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE) as a database of verbal material suitable for highly controlled experimental research. To make the NAWL more convenient to use, we introduce a comprehensive method of classifying stimuli to basic emotion categories. We discuss the advantages of our method in comparison to other methods of classification. Additionally, we provide an interactive online tool (http://exp.lobi.nencki.gov.pl/nawl-analysis) to help researchers browse and interactively generate classes of stimuli to meet their specific requirements.

The effect of sadness on global-local processing.

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von Mühlenen, Adrian; Bellaera, Lauren; Singh, Amrendra; Srinivasan, Narayanan

2018-05-04

Gable and Harmon-Jones (Psychological Science, 21(2), 211-215, 2010) reported that sadness broadens attention in a global-local letter task. This finding provided the key test for their motivational intensity account, which states that the level of spatial processing is not determined by emotional valence, but by motivational intensity. However, their finding is at odds with several other studies, showing no effect, or even a narrowing effect of sadness on attention. This paper reports two attempts to replicate the broadening effect of sadness on attention. Both experiments used a global-local letter task, but differed in terms of emotion induction: Experiment 1 used the same pictures as Gable and Harmon-Jones, taken from the IAPS dataset; Experiment 2 used a sad video underlaid with sad music. Results showed a sadness-specific global advantage in the error rates, but not in the reaction times. The same null results were also found in a South-Asian sample in both experiments, showing that effects on global/local processing were not influenced by a culturally related processing bias.

Embracing your emotions: affective state impacts lateralisation of human embraces.

Science.gov (United States)

Packheiser, Julian; Rook, Noemi; Dursun, Zeynep; Mesenhöller, Janne; Wenglorz, Alrescha; Güntürkün, Onur; Ocklenburg, Sebastian

2018-01-18

Humans are highly social animals that show a wide variety of verbal and non-verbal behaviours to communicate social intent. One of the most frequently used non-verbal social behaviours is embracing, commonly used as an expression of love and affection. However, it can also occur in a large variety of social situations entailing negative (fear or sadness) or neutral emotionality (formal greetings). Embracing is also experienced from birth onwards in mother-infant interactions and is thus accompanying human social interaction across the whole lifespan. Despite the importance of embraces for human social interactions, their underlying neurophysiology is unknown. Here, we demonstrated in a well-powered sample of more than 2500 adults that humans show a significant rightward bias during embracing. Additionally, we showed that this general motor preference is strongly modulated by emotional contexts: the induction of positive or negative affect shifted the rightward bias significantly to the left, indicating a stronger involvement of right-hemispheric neural networks during emotional embraces. In a second laboratory study, we were able to replicate both of these findings and furthermore demonstrated that the motor preferences during embracing correlate with handedness. Our studies therefore not only show that embracing is controlled by an interaction of motor and affective networks, they also demonstrate that emotional factors seem to activate right-hemispheric systems in valence-invariant ways.

REM-Enriched Naps Are Associated with Memory Consolidation for Sad Stories and Enhance Mood-Related Reactivity.

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Gilson, Médhi; Deliens, Gaétane; Leproult, Rachel; Bodart, Alice; Nonclercq, Antoine; Ercek, Rudy; Peigneux, Philippe

2015-12-29

Emerging evidence suggests that emotion and affect modulate the relation between sleep and cognition. In the present study, we investigated the role of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep in mood regulation and memory consolidation for sad stories. In a counterbalanced design, participants (n = 24) listened to either a neutral or a sad story during two sessions, spaced one week apart. After listening to the story, half of the participants had a short (45 min) morning nap. The other half had a long (90 min) morning nap, richer in REM and N2 sleep. Story recall, mood evolution and changes in emotional response to the re-exposure to the story were assessed after the nap. Although recall performance was similar for sad and neutral stories irrespective of nap duration, sleep measures were correlated with recall performance in the sad story condition only. After the long nap, REM sleep density positively correlated with retrieval performance, while re-exposure to the sad story led to diminished mood and increased skin conductance levels. Our results suggest that REM sleep may not only be associated with the consolidation of intrinsically sad material, but also enhances mood reactivity, at least on the short term.

Hemispheric specialization in affective responses, cerebral dominance for language, and handedness: Lateralization of emotion, language, and dexterity.

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Costanzo, Elsa Yolanda; Villarreal, Mirta; Drucaroff, Lucas Javier; Ortiz-Villafañe, Manuel; Castro, Mariana Nair; Goldschmidt, Micaela; Wainsztein, Agustina Edith; Ladrón-de-Guevara, María Soledad; Romero, Carlos; Brusco, Luis Ignacio; Camprodon, Joan A; Nemeroff, Charles; Guinjoan, Salvador Martín

2015-07-15

Hemispheric specialization in affective responses has received little attention in the literature. This is a fundamental variable to understand circuit dynamics of networks subserving emotion. In this study we put to test a modified "valence" hypothesis of emotion processing, considering that sadness and happiness are processed by each hemisphere in relation to dominance for language and handedness. Mood induction and language activation during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were used in 20 right-handed and 20 nonright-handed subjects, focusing on interconnected regions known to play critical roles in affective responses: subgenual cingulate cortex, amygdala, and anterior insular cortex. We observed a consistent relationship between lateralization of affective processing, motor dexterity, and language in individuals with clear right-handedness. Sadness induces a greater activation of right-hemisphere cortical structures in right-handed, left-dominant individuals, which is not evident in nonright-handed subjects who show no consistent hemispheric dominance for language. In anterior insula, right-handed individuals displayed reciprocal activation of either hemisphere depending upon mood valence, whereas amygdala activation was predominantly left-sided regardless of mood valence. Nonright-handed individuals exhibited less consistent brain lateralization of affective processing regardless of language and motor dexterity lateralization. In contrast with traditional views on emotion processing lateralization, hemispheric specialization in affective responses is not a unitary process but is specific to the brain structure being activated. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Affective processing in positive schizotypy: Loose control of social-emotional information.

Science.gov (United States)

Papousek, Ilona; Weiss, Elisabeth M; Mosbacher, Jochen A; Reiser, Eva M; Schulter, Günter; Fink, Andreas

2014-10-30

Behavioral studies suggested heightened impact of emotionally laden perceptual input in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, in particular in patients with prominent positive symptoms. De-coupling of prefrontal and posterior cortices during stimulus processing, which is related to loosening of control of the prefrontal cortex over incoming affectively laden information, may underlie this abnormality. Pre-selected groups of individuals with low versus high positive schizotypy (lower and upper quartile of a large screening sample) were tested. During exposure to auditory displays of strong emotions (anger, sadness, cheerfulness), individuals with elevated levels of positive schizotypal symptoms showed lesser prefrontal-posterior coupling (EEG coherence) than their symptom-free counterparts (right hemisphere). This applied to negative emotions in particular and was most pronounced during confrontation with anger. The findings indicate a link between positive symptoms and a heightened impact particularly of threatening emotionally laden stimuli which might lead to exacerbation of positive symptoms and inappropriate behavior in interpersonal situations. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Did depressive symptoms affect recognition of emotional prosody in Parkinson’s disease?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adriana Vélez Feijó

2008-06-01

Full Text Available Adriana Vélez Feijó1, Carlos RM Rieder3, Márcia LF Chaves21Medical Sciences Post-Graduate Course; 2Internal Medicine Department, School of Medicine, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil; 3Movement Disorders Clinic Coordinator, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre, Porto Alegre, RS, BrazilObjective: Evaluate the influence of depressive symptoms on the recognition of emotional prosody in Parkinson’s disease (PD patients, and identify types of emotion on spoken sentences.Methods: Thirty-five PD patients and 65 normal participants were studied. Dementia was checked with the Mini Mental State Examination, Clinical Dementia Rating scale, and DSM IV. Recognition of emotional prosody was tested by asking subjects to listen to 12 recorded statements with neutral affective content that were read with a strong affective expression. Subjects had to recognize the correct emotion by one of four descriptors (angry, sad, cheerful, and neutral. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI was employed to rate depressive symptoms with the cutoff 14.Results: Total ratings of emotions correctly recognized by participants below and above the BDI cutoff were similar among PD patients and normal individuals. PD patients who correctly identified neutral and anger inflections presented higher rates of depressive symptoms (p = 0.011 and 0.044, respectively. No significant differences were observed in the normal group.Conclusions: Depression may modify some modalities of emotional prosody perception in PD, by increasing the perception of non-pleasant emotions or lack of affection, such as anger or indifference.Keywords: emotional prosody, Parkinson’s disease, depression, emotion

Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE: New Method of Classifying Emotional Stimuli.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Małgorzata Wierzba

Full Text Available The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotional categories. Since the two perspectives are recognized as complementary, the aim of the present study was to supplement the NAWL database by the addition of categories corresponding to basic emotions. Thus, 2902 Polish words from the NAWL were presented to 265 subjects, who were instructed to rate them according to the intensity of each of the five basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The general characteristics of the present word database, as well as the relationships between the studied variables are shown to be consistent with typical patterns found in previous studies using similar databases for different languages. Here we present the Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE as a database of verbal material suitable for highly controlled experimental research. To make the NAWL more convenient to use, we introduce a comprehensive method of classifying stimuli to basic emotion categories. We discuss the advantages of our method in comparison to other methods of classification. Additionally, we provide an interactive online tool (http://exp.lobi.nencki.gov.pl/nawl-analysis to help researchers browse and interactively generate classes of stimuli to meet their specific requirements.

Associations between Sadness and Anger Regulation Coping, Emotional Expression, and Physical and Relational Aggression among Urban Adolescents

Science.gov (United States)

Sullivan, Terri N.; Helms, Sarah W.; Kliewer, Wendy; Goodman, Kimberly L.

2010-01-01

This study examined associations between self-reports of sadness and anger regulation coping, reluctance to express emotion, and physical and relational aggression between two cohorts of predominantly African-American fifth (N = 191; 93 boys and 98 girls) and eighth (N = 167; 73 boys and 94 girls) graders. Multiple regression analyses indicated…

Individual differences in Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale (ANPS) primary emotional traits and depressive tendencies.

Science.gov (United States)

Montag, Christian; Widenhorn-Müller, Katharina; Panksepp, Jaak; Kiefer, Markus

2017-02-01

The present study investigated individual differences in the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS), representing measures of primary emotional systems, and depressive tendencies in two independent samples. In order to be able to find support for a continuum model with respect to the relation of strength in the cross-species "affective neuroscience" taxonomy of primary emotional systems, we investigated ANPS measured personality traits in a psychologically mostly healthy population (n=614 participants) as well as a sample of clinically depressed people (n=55 depressed patients). In both normal and depressed samples robust associations appeared between higher FEAR and SADNESS scores and depressive tendencies. A similar - albeit weaker - association was observed with lower SEEKING system scores and higher depressive tendencies, an effect again seen in both samples. The study is of cross-sectional nature and therefore only associations between primary emotional systems and depressive tendencies were evaluated. These results show that similar associations between ANPS monitored primary emotional systems and tendencies toward depression can be observed in both healthy and depressed participants. This lends support for a continuum of affective changes accompanying depression, potentially reflecting differences in specific brain emotional system activities in both affectively normal as well as clinically depressed individuals. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Selecting pure-emotion materials from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS by Chinese university students: A study based on intensity-ratings only

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Zhicha Xu

2017-08-01

Full Text Available There is a need to use selected pictures with pure emotion as stimulation or treatment media for basic and clinical research. Pictures from the widely-used International Affective Picture System (IAPS contain rich emotions, but no study has clearly stated that an emotion is exclusively expressed in its putative IAPS picture to date. We hypothesize that the IAPS images contain at least pure vectors of disgust, erotism (or erotica, fear, happiness, sadness and neutral emotions. Accordingly, we have selected 108 IAPS images, each with a specific emotion, and invited 219 male and 274 female university students to rate only the intensity of the emotion conveyed in each picture. Their answers were analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Four first-order factors manifested as disgust-fear, happiness-sadness, erotism, and neutral. Later, ten second-order sub-factors manifested as mutilation-disgust, vomit-disgust, food-disgust, violence-fear, happiness, sadness, couple- erotism, female-erotism, male- erotism, and neutral. Fifty-nine pictures for the ten sub-factors, which had established good model-fit indices, satisfactory sub-factor internal reliabilities, and prominent gender-differences in the picture intensity ratings were ultimately retained. We thus have selected a series of pure-emotion IAPS pictures, which together displayed both satisfactorily convergent and discriminant structure-validities. We did not intend to evaluate all IAPS items, but instead selected some pictures conveying pure emotions, which might help both basic and clinical researches in the future.

"I felt sad and did not enjoy life": Cultural context and the associations between anhedonia, depressed mood, and momentary emotions.

Science.gov (United States)

Chentsova-Dutton, Yulia E; Choi, Eunsoo; Ryder, Andrew G; Reyes, Jenny

2015-10-01

The meanings of "anhedonia" and "depressed mood," the cardinal emotional symptoms of major depression, may be shaped by cultural norms regarding pleasure and sadness. Thirty-two European Americans, 26 Hispanic Americans, 33 Asian Americans, and 20 Russian Americans provided reports of (a) depressive symptoms, (b) momentary emotions and pleasure, and (c) global subjective well-being. Momentary reports were collected over 10 days using handheld personal digital assistants. Reports of anhedonia were associated with heightened levels of momentary low arousal negative emotions (e.g., sadness), whereas reports of depressed mood were associated with dampened levels of momentary positive emotions (e.g., happiness). Symptoms of anhedonia and depressed mood interacted in their associations with momentary pleasure. In addition, the associations of anhedonia and depressed mood with positive emotions and life satisfaction differed across cultural groups. Specifically, these symptoms were associated with dampened positive emotions in the Asian American group only. Additionally, anhedonia was associated with dampened global life satisfaction in the European American group only. These results suggest that reports of anhedonia and depressed mood cannot be interpreted at face value as specific and culture-free indicators of emotional deficits. Instead, they appear to signal changes in the balance of positive and negative emotions, with the exact nature of these signals shaped at least in part by cultural context. This conclusion has important consequences for the clinical interpretation of depressive symptoms in multicultural societies. © The Author(s) 2015.

REM-Enriched Naps Are Associated with Memory Consolidation for Sad Stories and Enhance Mood-Related Reactivity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Médhi Gilson

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Emerging evidence suggests that emotion and affect modulate the relation between sleep and cognition. In the present study, we investigated the role of rapid-eye movement (REM sleep in mood regulation and memory consolidation for sad stories. In a counterbalanced design, participants (n = 24 listened to either a neutral or a sad story during two sessions, spaced one week apart. After listening to the story, half of the participants had a short (45 min morning nap. The other half had a long (90 min morning nap, richer in REM and N2 sleep. Story recall, mood evolution and changes in emotional response to the re-exposure to the story were assessed after the nap. Although recall performance was similar for sad and neutral stories irrespective of nap duration, sleep measures were correlated with recall performance in the sad story condition only. After the long nap, REM sleep density positively correlated with retrieval performance, while re-exposure to the sad story led to diminished mood and increased skin conductance levels. Our results suggest that REM sleep may not only be associated with the consolidation of intrinsically sad material, but also enhances mood reactivity, at least on the short term.

Music evokes vicarious emotions in listeners.

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Kawakami, Ai; Furukawa, Kiyoshi; Okanoya, Kazuo

2014-01-01

Why do we listen to sad music? We seek to answer this question using a psychological approach. It is possible to distinguish perceived emotions from those that are experienced. Therefore, we hypothesized that, although sad music is perceived as sad, listeners actually feel (experience) pleasant emotions concurrent with sadness. This hypothesis was supported, which led us to question whether sadness in the context of art is truly an unpleasant emotion. While experiencing sadness may be unpleasant, it may also be somewhat pleasant when experienced in the context of art, for example, when listening to sad music. We consider musically evoked emotion vicarious, as we are not threatened when we experience it, in the way that we can be during the course of experiencing emotion in daily life. When we listen to sad music, we experience vicarious sadness. In this review, we propose two sides to sadness by suggesting vicarious emotion.

The effect of emotions on risk perception: Experimental evaluation of the affective tendencies framework

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Drače Saša

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study was to assess the role of specific emotions on risk perception providing a more stringent experimental test of the Appraisal Tendencies Framework (ATF. Consistent with expectations, angry and happy participants made more optimistic risk estimates than participants who were made sad. As hypothesized by ATF, happiness and anger also led people to somewhat higher certainty appraisals than sadness. However, this change in perception did not mediate the impact of emotions on risk estimates. Taken together, our results provide the evidence for causal role of specific emotions in risk perception and contribute to literature showing that the effects of emotion on judgment are not solely due to the valence of the experienced emotion. However, they also suggest that the processes underlying emotion effects remain in need for further specifications.

Encoding conditions affect recognition of vocally expressed emotions across cultures.

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Jürgens, Rebecca; Drolet, Matthis; Pirow, Ralph; Scheiner, Elisabeth; Fischer, Julia

2013-01-01

Although the expression of emotions in humans is considered to be largely universal, cultural effects contribute to both emotion expression and recognition. To disentangle the interplay between these factors, play-acted and authentic (non-instructed) vocal expressions of emotions were used, on the assumption that cultural effects may contribute differentially to the recognition of staged and spontaneous emotions. Speech tokens depicting four emotions (anger, sadness, joy, fear) were obtained from German radio archives and re-enacted by professional actors, and presented to 120 participants from Germany, Romania, and Indonesia. Participants in all three countries were poor at distinguishing between play-acted and spontaneous emotional utterances (58.73% correct on average with only marginal cultural differences). Nevertheless, authenticity influenced emotion recognition: across cultures, anger was recognized more accurately when play-acted (z = 15.06, p emotions, indicating a moderate in-group advantage. There was no difference between Romanian and Indonesian subjects in the overall emotion recognition. Differential cultural effects became particularly apparent in terms of differential biases in emotion attribution. While all participants labeled play-acted expressions as anger more frequently than expected, German participants exhibited a further bias toward choosing anger for spontaneous stimuli. In contrast to the German sample, Romanian and Indonesian participants were biased toward choosing sadness. These results support the view that emotion recognition rests on a complex interaction of human universals and cultural specificities. Whether and in which way the observed biases are linked to cultural differences in self-construal remains an issue for further investigation.

The effects of happiness and sadness on Children's snack consumption.

Science.gov (United States)

Tan, Cin Cin; Holub, Shayla C

2018-04-01

Children appear to engage in emotional eating (i.e., eating in response to negative and positive emotions), but existing research has predominantly relied on parent-report and child-report, which may not necessarily reflect children's actual emotional eating behaviors. This study examined the effects of happiness and sadness on children's observed snack consumption and examined whether child characteristics (i.e., weight, gender, and age) interact with mood to predict snack consumption. To elicit mood, children (N = 91; M ages  = 6.8 years; 48 boys) were randomly assigned to one of the three mood induction conditions (happy, sad, or neutral); children's snack consumption was observed and measured after mood induction. Findings showed that children in the sad condition consumed more energy from chocolate, followed by children in the happy condition, and then the neutral condition. However, the reverse pattern was observed for goldfish crackers: children in the neutral condition consumed more energy from this savory snack than children in the happy condition, followed by children in sad condition. Child weight status and gender did not interact with mood to predict snack consumption. Child age did interact with mood: older children consumed more chocolates in the sad condition compared to younger children. Child age was not related to snack consumption in the happy and neutral conditions. This study suggests that emotional eating in response to positive and negative emotions is evident during early childhood, but that this is behavior is developing during this period. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Skin reactions to histamine of healthy subjects after hypnotically induced emotions of sadness, anger, and happiness.

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Zachariae, R; Jørgensen, M M; Egekvist, H; Bjerring, P

2001-08-01

The severity of symptoms in asthma and other hypersensitivity-related disorders has been associated with changes in mood but little is known about the mechanisms possibly mediating such a relationship. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of mood on skin reactivity to histamine by comparing the effects of hypnotically induced emotions on flare and wheal reactions to cutaneous histamine prick tests. Fifteen highly hypnotically susceptible volunteers had their cutaneous reactivity to histamine measured before hypnosis at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, and 15 min after the histamine prick. These measurements were repeated under three hypnotically induced emotions of sadness, anger, and happiness presented in a counterbalanced order. Skin reactions were measured as change in histamine flare and wheal area in mm2 per minute. The increase in flare reaction in the time interval from 1 to 3 min during happiness and anger was significantly smaller than flare reactions during sadness (P<0.05). No effect of emotion was found for wheal reactions. Hypnotic susceptibility scores were associated with increased flare reactions at baseline (r=0.56; P<0.05) and during the condition of happiness (r=0.56; P<0.05). Our results agree with previous studies showing mood to be a predictor of cutaneous immediate-type hypersensitivity and histamine skin reactions. The results are also in concordance with earlier findings of an association between hypnotic susceptibility and increased reactivity to an allergen.

Children can discriminate the authenticity of happy but not sad or fearful facial expressions, and use an immature intensity-only strategy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amy eDawel

2015-05-01

Full Text Available Much is known about development of the ability to label facial expressions of emotion (e.g., as happy or sad, but rather less is known about the emergence of more complex emotional face processing skills. The present study investigates one such advanced skill: the ability to tell if someone is genuinely feeling an emotion or just pretending (i.e., authenticity discrimination. Previous studies have shown that children can discriminate authenticity of happy faces, using expression intensity of the happy expressions as an important cue, but have not tested the negative emotions of sadness or fear. Here, children aged 8-12 years (n = 85 and adults (n = 57 viewed pairs of faces in which one face showed a genuinely-felt emotional expression (happy, sad, or scared and the other face showed a pretend version. For happy faces, children discriminated authenticity above chance, although they performed more poorly than adults. For sad faces, for which our pretend and genuine images were equal in intensity, adults could discriminate authenticity, but children could not. Neither age group could discriminate authenticity of the fear faces. Results also showed that children judged authenticity based on intensity information alone for all three expressions tested, while adults used a combination of intensity and other factor/s. In addition, novel results show that individual differences in empathy (both cognitive and affective correlated with authenticity discrimination for happy faces in adults, but not children. Overall, our results indicate late maturity of skills needed to accurately determine the authenticity of emotions from facial information alone, and raise questions about how this might affect social interactions in late childhood and the teenage years.

Children can discriminate the authenticity of happy but not sad or fearful facial expressions, and use an immature intensity-only strategy.

Science.gov (United States)

Dawel, Amy; Palermo, Romina; O'Kearney, Richard; McKone, Elinor

2015-01-01

Much is known about development of the ability to label facial expressions of emotion (e.g., as happy or sad), but rather less is known about the emergence of more complex emotional face processing skills. The present study investigates one such advanced skill: the ability to tell if someone is genuinely feeling an emotion or just pretending (i.e., authenticity discrimination). Previous studies have shown that children can discriminate authenticity of happy faces, using expression intensity as an important cue, but have not tested the negative emotions of sadness or fear. Here, children aged 8-12 years (n = 85) and adults (n = 57) viewed pairs of faces in which one face showed a genuinely-felt emotional expression (happy, sad, or scared) and the other face showed a pretend version. For happy faces, children discriminated authenticity above chance, although they performed more poorly than adults. For sad faces, for which our pretend and genuine images were equal in intensity, adults could discriminate authenticity, but children could not. Neither age group could discriminate authenticity of the fear faces. Results also showed that children judged authenticity based on intensity information alone for all three expressions tested, while adults used a combination of intensity and other factor/s. In addition, novel results show that individual differences in empathy (both cognitive and affective) correlated with authenticity discrimination for happy faces in adults, but not children. Overall, our results indicate late maturity of skills needed to accurately determine the authenticity of emotions from facial information alone, and raise questions about how this might affect social interactions in late childhood and the teenage years.

Short-term memory for emotional faces in dysphoria.

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Noreen, Saima; Ridout, Nathan

2010-07-01

The study aimed to determine if the memory bias for negative faces previously demonstrated in depression and dysphoria generalises from long- to short-term memory. A total of 29 dysphoric (DP) and 22 non-dysphoric (ND) participants were presented with a series of faces and asked to identify the emotion portrayed (happiness, sadness, anger, or neutral affect). Following a delay, four faces were presented (the original plus three distractors) and participants were asked to identify the target face. Half of the trials assessed memory for facial emotion, and the remaining trials examined memory for facial identity. At encoding, no group differences were apparent. At memory testing, relative to ND participants, DP participants exhibited impaired memory for all types of facial emotion and for facial identity when the faces featured happiness, anger, or neutral affect, but not sadness. DP participants exhibited impaired identity memory for happy faces relative to angry, sad, and neutral, whereas ND participants exhibited enhanced facial identity memory when faces were angry. In general, memory for faces was not related to performance at encoding. However, in DP participants only, memory for sad faces was related to sadness recognition at encoding. The results suggest that the negative memory bias for faces in dysphoria does not generalise from long- to short-term memory.

Negative affect varying in motivational intensity influences scope of memory.

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Threadgill, A Hunter; Gable, Philip A

2018-04-06

Emotions influence cognitive processes involved in memory. While some research has suggested that cognitive scope is determined by affective valence, recent models of emotion-cognition interactions suggest that motivational intensity, rather than valence, influences these processes. The present research was designed to clarify how negative affects differing in motivational intensity impact memory for centrally or peripherally presented information. Experiments 1 & 2 found that, relative to a neutral condition, high intensity negative affect (anger) enhances memory for centrally presented information. Experiment 3 replicated this effect using another high intensity negative affect (threat). Experiment 4 extended this by finding that, relative to a neutral condition, low intensity negative affect (sadness) enhanced memory for peripherally presented information. Finally, in Experiment 5, the effects of sadness and threat on scope of memory were directly compared, finding that threat narrowed scope of memory, while sadness broadened scope of memory. Together, these results provide additional support for the motivational dimensional model of cognitive scope, in that high intensity emotions narrow cognitive scope, while low intensity emotions broaden cognitive scope.

Mismatch negativity of sad syllables is absent in patients with major depressive disorder.

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Pang, Xiaomei; Xu, Jing; Chang, Yi; Tang, Di; Zheng, Ya; Liu, Yanhua; Sun, Yiming

2014-01-01

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is an important and highly prevalent mental disorder characterized by anhedonia and a lack of interest in everyday activities. Additionally, patients with MDD appear to have deficits in various cognitive abilities. Although a number of studies investigating the central auditory processing of low-level sound features in patients with MDD have demonstrated that this population exhibits impairments in automatic processing, the influence of emotional voice processing has yet to be addressed. To explore the automatic processing of emotional prosodies in patients with MDD, we analyzed the ability to detect automatic changes using event-related potentials (ERPs). This study included 18 patients with MDD and 22 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Subjects were instructed to watch a silent movie but to ignore the afferent acoustic emotional prosodies presented to both ears while continuous electroencephalographic activity was synchronously recorded. Prosodies included meaningless syllables, such as "dada" spoken with happy, angry, sad, or neutral tones. The mean amplitudes of the ERPs elicited by emotional stimuli and the peak latency of the emotional differential waveforms were analyzed. The sad MMN was absent in patients with MDD, whereas the happy and angry MMN components were similar across groups. The abnormal sad emotional MMN component was not significantly correlated with the HRSD-17 and HAMA scores, respectively. The data indicate that patients with MDD are impaired in their ability to automatically process sad prosody, whereas their ability to process happy and angry prosodies remains normal. The dysfunctional sad emotion-related MMN in patients with MDD were not correlated with depression symptoms. The blunted MMN of sad prosodies could be considered a trait of MDD.

Regulating Anger under Stress via Cognitive Reappraisal and Sadness.

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Zhan, Jun; Wu, Xiaofei; Fan, Jin; Guo, Jianyou; Zhou, Jianshe; Ren, Jun; Liu, Chang; Luo, Jing

2017-01-01

Previous studies have reported the failure of cognitive emotion regulation (CER), especially in regulating unpleasant emotions under stress. The underlying reason for this failure was the application of CER depends heavily on the executive function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), but this function can be impaired by stress-related neuroendocrine hormones. This observation highlights the necessity of developing self-regulatory strategies that require less top-down cognitive control. Based on traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine, which examine how different types of emotions promote or counteract one another, we have developed a novel emotion regulation strategy whereby one emotion is used to alter another. For example, our previous experiment showed that sadness induction (after watching a sad film) could reduce aggressive behavior associated with anger [i.e., "sadness counteracts anger" (SCA)] (Zhan et al., 2015). Relative to the CER strategy requiring someone to think about certain cognitive reappraisals to reinterpret the meaning of an unpleasant situation, watching a film or listening to music and experiencing the emotion contained therein seemingly requires less cognitive effort and control; therefore, this SCA strategy may be an alternative strategy that compensates for the limitations of cognitive regulation strategies, especially in stressful situations. The present study was designed to directly compare the effects of the CER and SCA strategy in regulating anger and anger-related aggression in stressful and non-stressful conditions. Participants' subjective feeling of anger, anger-related aggressive behavior, skin conductance, and salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase levels were measured. Our findings revealed that acute stress impaired one's ability to use CR to control angry responses provoked by others, whereas stress did not influence the efficiency of the SCA strategy. Compared with sadness or neutral emotion induction, CER induction was found to

Regulating Anger under Stress via Cognitive Reappraisal and Sadness

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Jun Zhan

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Previous studies have reported the failure of cognitive emotion regulation (CER, especially in regulating unpleasant emotions under stress. The underlying reason for this failure was the application of CER depends heavily on the executive function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC, but this function can be impaired by stress-related neuroendocrine hormones. This observation highlights the necessity of developing self-regulatory strategies that require less top-down cognitive control. Based on traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine, which examine how different types of emotions promote or counteract one another, we have developed a novel emotion regulation strategy whereby one emotion is used to alter another. For example, our previous experiment showed that sadness induction (after watching a sad film could reduce aggressive behavior associated with anger [i.e., “sadness counteracts anger” (SCA] (Zhan et al., 2015. Relative to the CER strategy requiring someone to think about certain cognitive reappraisals to reinterpret the meaning of an unpleasant situation, watching a film or listening to music and experiencing the emotion contained therein seemingly requires less cognitive effort and control; therefore, this SCA strategy may be an alternative strategy that compensates for the limitations of cognitive regulation strategies, especially in stressful situations. The present study was designed to directly compare the effects of the CER and SCA strategy in regulating anger and anger-related aggression in stressful and non-stressful conditions. Participants’ subjective feeling of anger, anger-related aggressive behavior, skin conductance, and salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase levels were measured. Our findings revealed that acute stress impaired one’s ability to use CR to control angry responses provoked by others, whereas stress did not influence the efficiency of the SCA strategy. Compared with sadness or neutral emotion induction, CER

The Effect of Sad Facial Expressions on Weight Judgment

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Trent D Weston

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Although the body weight evaluation (e.g., normal or overweight of others relies on perceptual impressions, it also can be influenced by other psychosocial factors. In this study, we explored the effect of task-irrelevant emotional facial expressions on judgments of body weight and the relationship between emotion-induced weight judgment bias and other psychosocial variables including attitudes towards obese person. Forty-four participants were asked to quickly make binary body weight decisions for 960 randomized sad and neutral faces of varying weight levels presented on a computer screen. The results showed that sad facial expressions systematically decreased the decision threshold of overweight judgments for male faces. This perceptual decision bias by emotional expressions was positively correlated with the belief that being overweight is not under the control of obese persons. Our results provide experimental evidence that task-irrelevant emotional expressions can systematically change the decision threshold for weight judgments, demonstrating that sad expressions can make faces appear more overweight than they would otherwise be judged.

Sad facial cues inhibit temporal attention: evidence from an event-related potential study.

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Kong, Xianxian; Chen, Xiaoqiang; Tan, Bo; Zhao, Dandan; Jin, Zhenlan; Li, Ling

2013-06-19

We examined the influence of different emotional cues (happy or sad) on temporal attention (short or long interval) using behavioral as well as event-related potential recordings during a Stroop task. Emotional stimuli cued short and long time intervals, inducing 'sad-short', 'sad-long', 'happy-short', and 'happy-long' conditions. Following the intervals, participants performed a numeric Stroop task. Behavioral results showed the temporal attention effects in the sad-long, happy-long, and happy-short conditions, in which valid cues quickened the reaction times, but not in the sad-short condition. N2 event-related potential components showed sad cues to have decreased activity for short intervals compared with long intervals, whereas happy cues did not. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for different modulation of sad and happy facial cues on temporal attention. Furthermore, sad cues inhibit temporal attention, resulting in longer reaction time and decreased neural activity in the short interval by diverting more attentional resources.

Happy faces are preferred regardless of familiarity--sad faces are preferred only when familiar.

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Liao, Hsin-I; Shimojo, Shinsuke; Yeh, Su-Ling

2013-06-01

Familiarity leads to preference (e.g., the mere exposure effect), yet it remains unknown whether it is objective familiarity, that is, repetitive exposure, or subjective familiarity that contributes to preference. In addition, it is unexplored whether and how different emotions influence familiarity-related preference. The authors investigated whether happy or sad faces are preferred or perceived as more familiar and whether this subjective familiarity judgment correlates with preference for different emotional faces. An emotional face--happy or sad--was paired with a neutral face, and participants rated the relative preference and familiarity of each of the paired faces. For preference judgment, happy faces were preferred and sad faces were less preferred, compared with neutral faces. For familiarity judgment, happy faces did not show any bias, but sad faces were perceived as less familiar than neutral faces. Item-by-item correlational analyses show preference for sad faces--but not happy faces--positively correlate with familiarity. These results suggest a direct link between positive emotion and preference, and argue at least partly against a common cause for familiarity and preference. Instead, facial expression of different emotional valence modulates the link between familiarity and preference.

Manipulating Greek musical modes and tempo affects perceived musical emotion in musicians and nonmusicians.

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Ramos, D; Bueno, J L O; Bigand, E

2011-02-01

The combined influence of tempo and mode on emotional responses to music was studied by crossing 7 changes in mode with 3 changes in tempo. Twenty-four musicians aged 19 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) and 24 nonmusicians aged 17 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) were required to perform two tasks: 1) listening to different musical excerpts, and 2) associating an emotion to them such as happiness, serenity, fear, anger, or sadness. ANOVA showed that increasing the tempo strongly affected the arousal (F(2,116) = 268.62, mean square error (MSE) = 0.6676, P effects were found between tempo and mode (F (1,58) = 115.6, MSE = 0.6428, P effects. This finding demonstrates that small changes in the pitch structures of modes modulate the emotions associated with the pieces, confirming the cognitive foundation of emotional responses to music.

Manipulating Greek musical modes and tempo affects perceived musical emotion in musicians and nonmusicians

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D. Ramos

2011-02-01

Full Text Available The combined influence of tempo and mode on emotional responses to music was studied by crossing 7 changes in mode with 3 changes in tempo. Twenty-four musicians aged 19 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females and 24 nonmusicians aged 17 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females were required to perform two tasks: 1 listening to different musical excerpts, and 2 associating an emotion to them such as happiness, serenity, fear, anger, or sadness. ANOVA showed that increasing the tempo strongly affected the arousal (F(2,116 = 268.62, mean square error (MSE = 0.6676, P < 0.001 and, to a lesser extent, the valence of emotional responses (F(6,348 = 8.71, MSE = 0.6196, P < 0.001. Changes in modes modulated the affective valence of the perceived emotions (F(6,348 = 4.24, MSE = 0.6764, P < 0.001. Some interactive effects were found between tempo and mode (F (1,58 = 115.6, MSE = 0.6428, P < 0.001, but, in most cases, the two parameters had additive effects. This finding demonstrates that small changes in the pitch structures of modes modulate the emotions associated with the pieces, confirming the cognitive foundation of emotional responses to music.

The Emotional Child Witness Effect Survives Presentation Mode.

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Melinder, Annika; Burrell, Lisa; Eriksen, Maria Olaussen; Magnussen, Svein; Wessel, Ellen

2016-01-01

The emotional witness effect - the phenomenon whereby people are affected by the emotional manner in which a witness presents testimony - constitutes a possible source of wrongful decisions in legal contexts. One stereotypical view of abused children is that they should be sad when talking about their experiences of maltreatment, whereas children may in fact express a variety of emotional expressions when talking about abusive events. This raises the question as to whether there is an optimal mode in which to present child victim testimony that could reduce the possible influence of displayed emotions. In the present study, mock police interviews were carried out with female child actors, role-playing the victims of physical abuse by their stepfather, telling the same story with four emotional expressions (neutral, sad, angry, or positive). Laypersons (N = 465) were presented with the interviews as transcripts with the emotional reactions of the child witness noted, audio recordings, or videotaped recordings. Participants then rated the credibility of the victim witness. Replicating previous results, the "sad" expression elicited the highest credibility ratings across all modes of presentations. Presentation mode affected ratings of credibility, with the transcript versions resulting in the highest ratings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Toward an implicit measure of emotions: ratings of abstract images reveal distinct emotional states.

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Bartoszek, Gregory; Cervone, Daniel

2017-11-01

Although implicit tests of positive and negative affect exist, implicit measures of distinct emotional states are scarce. Three experiments examined whether a novel implicit emotion-assessment task, the rating of emotion expressed in abstract images, would reveal distinct emotional states. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to a sadness-inducing story inferred more sadness, and less happiness, in abstract images. In Experiment 2, an anger-provoking interaction increased anger ratings. In Experiment 3, compared to neutral images, spider images increased fear ratings in spider-fearful participants but not in controls. In each experiment, the implicit task indicated elevated levels of the target emotion and did not indicate elevated levels of non-target negative emotions; the task thus differentiated among emotional states of the same valence. Correlations also supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the implicit task. Supporting the possibility that heuristic processes underlie the ratings, group differences were stronger among those who responded relatively quickly.

Emotional aging: a discrete emotions perspective.

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Kunzmann, Ute; Kappes, Cathleen; Wrosch, Carsten

2014-01-01

Perhaps the most important single finding in the field of emotional aging has been that the overall quality of affective experience steadily improves during adulthood and can be maintained into old age. Recent lifespan developmental theories have provided motivation- and experience-based explanations for this phenomenon. These theories suggest that, as individuals grow older, they become increasingly motivated and able to regulate their emotions, which could result in reduced negativity and enhanced positivity. The objective of this paper is to expand existing theories and empirical research on emotional aging by presenting a discrete emotions perspective. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach, we focus on a discussion of the literature examining age differences in anger and sadness. These two negative emotions have typically been subsumed under the singular concept of negative affect. From a discrete emotions perspective, however, they are highly distinct and show multidirectional age differences. We propose that such contrasting age differences in specific negative emotions have important implications for our understanding of long-term patterns of affective well-being across the adult lifespan.

Emotional Temperament in Food-Related Metaphors: A Cross-Cultural Account of the Conceptualizations of SADNESS

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Zahra Khajeh

2013-11-01

Full Text Available What people in a society and culture eat or the way they consume their food may become a source domain for emotional temperament and therefore an implication for portrayal of their specific cultural models. Adopting the basic assumptions of the Lakoffian School on ‘experiential realism’ and ‘universal embodiment’ this study is an attempt to delve into the conceptual system of Persian in order to explore its specific socio-cultural motivations for the construction and semantic changes in the use of metaphorical concepts of sadness. The metaphorical uses of food-related concepts in Persian manifest that, in spite of some correspondences to those in English, sadness metaphorical concepts are distinctive in Persian. The conceptual metaphor variations reveal many vestiges of Hippocratic notions of humoral doctrine and Avicennian Traditional Medicine, suggesting that the cultural models of humoralism and dietetics have left their traces deeply in the Persians’ belief systems. The effects, therefore, have been extended into Persian metaphoric language.

Not all sounds sound the same: Parkinson's disease affects differently emotion processing in music and in speech prosody.

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Lima, César F; Garrett, Carolina; Castro, São Luís

2013-01-01

Does emotion processing in music and speech prosody recruit common neurocognitive mechanisms? To examine this question, we implemented a cross-domain comparative design in Parkinson's disease (PD). Twenty-four patients and 25 controls performed emotion recognition tasks for music and spoken sentences. In music, patients had impaired recognition of happiness and peacefulness, and intact recognition of sadness and fear; this pattern was independent of general cognitive and perceptual abilities. In speech, patients had a small global impairment, which was significantly mediated by executive dysfunction. Hence, PD affected differently musical and prosodic emotions. This dissociation indicates that the mechanisms underlying the two domains are partly independent.

Beyond simple pessimism: effects of sadness and anger on social perception.

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Keltner, D; Ellsworth, P C; Edwards, K

1993-05-01

In keeping with cognitive appraisal models of emotion, it was hypothesized that sadness and anger would exert different influences on causal judgments. Two experiments provided initial support for this hypothesis. Sad Ss perceived situationally caused events as more likely (Experiment 1) and situational forces more responsible for an ambiguous event (Experiment 2) than angry Ss, who, in contrast, perceived events caused by humans as more likely and other people as more responsible. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 showed that the experience of these emotions, rather than their cognitive constituents, mediates these effects. The nonemotional exposure to situational or human agency information did not influence causal judgments (Experiment 3), whereas the induction of sadness and anger without explicit agency information did (Experiments 4 and 5). Discussion is focused on the influence of emotion on social judgment.

Sustained experience of emotion after loss of memory in patients with amnesia.

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Feinstein, Justin S; Duff, Melissa C; Tranel, Daniel

2010-04-27

Can the experience of an emotion persist once the memory for what induced the emotion has been forgotten? We capitalized on a rare opportunity to study this question directly using a select group of patients with severe amnesia following circumscribed bilateral damage to the hippocampus. The amnesic patients underwent a sadness induction procedure (using affectively-laden film clips) to ascertain whether their experience of sadness would persist beyond their memory for the sadness-inducing films. The experiment showed that the patients continued to experience elevated levels of sadness well beyond the point in time at which they had lost factual memory for the film clips. A second experiment using a happiness induction procedure yielded similar results, suggesting that both positive and negative emotional experiences can persist independent of explicit memory for the inducing event. These findings provide direct evidence that a feeling of emotion can endure beyond the conscious recollection for the events that initially triggered the emotion.

Maternal Socialization of Children's Anger, Sadness, and Physical Pain in Two Communities in Gujarat, India

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Raval, Vaishali Vidhatri; Martini, Tanya Susan

2009-01-01

Despite the recognition of cultural influences in child socialization, little is known about socialization of emotion in children from different cultures. This study examined (a) Gujarati Indian mothers' reports concerning their beliefs, affective and behavioral responses to their children's displays of anger, sadness, and physical pain, and (b)…

Together we cry: Social motives and preferences for group-based sadness.

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Porat, Roni; Halperin, Eran; Mannheim, Ittay; Tamir, Maya

2016-01-01

Group-based emotions play an important role in helping people feel that they belong to their group. People are motivated to belong, but does this mean that they actively try to experience group-based emotions to increase their sense of belonging? In this investigation, we propose that people may be motivated to experience even group-based emotions that are typically considered unpleasant to satisfy their need to belong. To test this hypothesis, we examined people's preferences for group-based sadness in the context of the Israeli National Memorial Day. In two correlational (Studies 1a and 1b) and two experimental (Studies 2 and 3) studies, we demonstrate that people with a stronger need to belong have a stronger preference to experience group-based sadness. This effect was mediated by the expectation that experiencing sadness would be socially beneficial (Studies 1 and 2). We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding motivated emotion regulation and intergroup relations.

Body Weight Can Change How Your Emotions Are Perceived.

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Yujung Oh

Full Text Available Accurately interpreting other's emotions through facial expressions has important adaptive values for social interactions. However, due to the stereotypical social perception of overweight individuals as carefree, humorous, and light-hearted, the body weight of those with whom we interact may have a systematic influence on our emotion judgment even though it has no relevance to the expressed emotion itself. In this experimental study, we examined the role of body weight in faces on the affective perception of facial expressions. We hypothesized that the weight perceived in a face would bias the assessment of an emotional expression, with overweight faces generally more likely to be perceived as having more positive and less negative expressions than healthy weight faces. Using two-alternative forced-choice perceptual decision tasks, participants were asked to sort the emotional expressions of overweight and healthy weight facial stimuli that had been gradually morphed across six emotional intensity levels into one of two categories-"neutral vs. happy" (Experiment 1 and "neutral vs. sad" (Experiment 2. As predicted, our results demonstrated that overweight faces were more likely to be categorized as happy (i.e., lower happy decision threshold and less likely to be categorized as sad (i.e., higher sad decision threshold compared to healthy weight faces that had the same levels of emotional intensity. The neutral-sad decision threshold shift was negatively correlated with participant's own fear of becoming fat, that is, those without a fear of becoming fat more strongly perceived overweight faces as sad relative to those with a higher fear. These findings demonstrate that the weight of the face systematically influences how its emotional expression is interpreted, suggesting that being overweight may make emotional expressions appear more happy and less sad than they really are.

The Feeling of the Story: Narrating to Regulate Anger and Sadness

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Pasupathi, Monisha; Wainryb, Cecilia; Mansfield, Cade D.; Bourne, Stacia

2017-01-01

Admonitions to tell one’s story in order to feel better reflect the belief that narrative is an effective emotion regulation tool. The present studies evaluate the effectiveness of narrative for regulating sadness and anger, and provide quantitative comparisons of narrative with distraction, reappraisal, and reexposure. The results for sadness (n = 93) and anger (n = 89) reveal that narrative is effective at down-regulating negative emotions, particularly when narratives place events in the past tense and include positive emotions. The results suggest that if people tell the “right” kind of story about their experiences, narrative reduces emotional distress linked to those experiences. PMID:26745208

Primary emotional traits in patients with personality disorders.

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Karterud, Sigmund; Pedersen, Geir; Johansen, Merete; Wilberg, Theresa; Davis, Ken; Panksepp, Jaak

2016-11-01

There is a longstanding tradition that connects temperament pathology and personality disorders. Emotions are the major constituents of temperament. In mammals, seven primary emotions have been identified: SEEKING, FEAR, CARE, RAGE, SADNESS/PANIC, LUST and PLAY. The study aimed at exploring the relationship between primary emotions and personality disorders (PDs). Five hundred forty-six patients with different degrees and qualities of personality pathology, admitted to treatment in specialized PD services, were diagnosed according to Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Personality Disorders, and their primary emotional profiles were assessed by the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales. The Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales explained 19% of the variance in borderline and avoidant criteria. The DSM-IV PD categories displayed different patterns of association to the primary emotions, e.g. the borderline PD profile suggested low thresholds for RAGE and SADNESS, but on the positive side a propensity for SEEKING. In contrast, the dependent PD profile suggested a low threshold for SADNESS but a high threshold for RAGE and SEEKING. The results are promising for a more coherent and evolution-based overall theory of PDs, and the correlations found in this study indicate testable causal pathways to PDs. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Influence of Music on Facial Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Neurotypical Children.

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Brown, Laura S

2017-03-01

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often struggle with social skills, including the ability to perceive emotions based on facial expressions. Research evidence suggests that many individuals with ASD can perceive emotion in music. Examining whether music can be used to enhance recognition of facial emotion by children with ASD would inform development of music therapy interventions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of music with a strong emotional valance (happy; sad) on children with ASD's ability to label emotions depicted in facial photographs, and their response time. Thirty neurotypical children and 20 children with high-functioning ASD rated expressions of happy, neutral, and sad in 30 photographs under two music listening conditions (sad music; happy music). During each music listening condition, participants rated the 30 images using a 7-point scale that ranged from very sad to very happy. Response time data were also collected across both conditions. A significant two-way interaction revealed that participants' ratings of happy and neutral faces were unaffected by music conditions, but sad faces were perceived to be sadder with sad music than with happy music. Across both conditions, neurotypical children rated the happy faces as happier and the sad faces as sadder than did participants with ASD. Response times of the neurotypical children were consistently shorter than response times of the children with ASD; both groups took longer to rate sad faces than happy faces. Response times of neurotypical children were generally unaffected by the valence of the music condition; however, children with ASD took longer to respond when listening to sad music. Music appears to affect perceptions of emotion in children with ASD, and perceptions of sad facial expressions seem to be more affected by emotionally congruent background music than are perceptions of happy or neutral faces. © the American Music Therapy Association 2016

The neural basis of attaining conscious awareness of sad mood.

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Smith, Ryan; Braden, B Blair; Chen, Kewei; Ponce, Francisco A; Lane, Richard D; Baxter, Leslie C

2015-09-01

The neural processes associated with becoming aware of sad mood are not fully understood. We examined the dynamic process of becoming aware of sad mood and recovery from sad mood. Sixteen healthy subjects underwent fMRI while participating in a sadness induction task designed to allow for variable mood induction times. Individualized regressors linearly modeled the time periods during the attainment of self-reported sad and baseline "neutral" mood states, and the validity of the linearity assumption was further tested using independent component analysis. During sadness induction the dorsomedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, and anterior insula exhibited a linear increase in the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal until subjects became aware of a sad mood and then a subsequent linear decrease as subjects transitioned from sadness back to the non-sadness baseline condition. These findings extend understanding of the neural basis of conscious emotional experience.

Perinatal sadness among Shuar women: support for an evolutionary theory of psychic pain.

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Hagen, Edward H; Barrett, H Clark

2007-03-01

Psychiatry faces an internal contradiction in that it regards mild sadness and low mood as normal emotions, yet when these emotions are directed toward a new infant, it regards them as abnormal. We apply parental investment theory, a widely used framework from evolutionary biology, to maternal perinatal emotions, arguing that negative emotions directed toward a new infant could serve an important evolved function. If so, then under some definitions of psychiatric disorder, these emotions are not disorders. We investigate the applicability of parental investment theory to maternal postpartum emotions among Shuar mothers. Shuar mothers' conceptions of perinatal sadness closely match predictions of parental investment theory.

Facial emotion processing in pediatric social anxiety disorder: Relevance of situational context.

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Schwab, Daniela; Schienle, Anne

2017-08-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) typically begins in childhood. Previous research has demonstrated that adult patients respond with elevated late positivity (LP) to negative facial expressions. In the present study on pediatric SAD, we investigated responses to negative facial expressions and the role of social context information. Fifteen children with SAD and 15 non-anxious controls were first presented with images of negative facial expressions with masked backgrounds. Following this, the complete images which included context information, were shown. The negative expressions were either a result of an emotion-relevant (e.g., social exclusion) or emotion-irrelevant elicitor (e.g., weight lifting). Relative to controls, the clinical group showed elevated parietal LP during face processing with and without context information. Both groups differed in their frontal LP depending on the type of context. In SAD patients, frontal LP was lower in emotion-relevant than emotion-irrelevant contexts. We conclude that SAD patients direct more automatic attention towards negative facial expressions (parietal effect) and are less capable in integrating affective context information (frontal effect). Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Lower body weight is associated with less negative emotions in sad autobiographical memories of patients with anorexia nervosa.

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Brockmeyer, Timo; Grosse Holtforth, Martin; Bents, Hinrich; Herzog, Wolfgang; Friederich, Hans-Christoph

2013-12-15

Food restriction and weight-loss have been proposed to represent pathogenic mechanisms of emotion regulation in anorexia nervosa (AN). However, there is a lack of studies empirically examining this hypothesis. Therefore, the present study compared 25 women with AN and 25 healthy control women (HC) regarding spontaneous emotional processing of autobiographic memories. Participants' idiographic memories of sad autobiographic events were analyzed using computerized, quantitative text analysis as an unobtrusive approach of nonreactive assessment. Compared to HC, AN patients retrieved more negative but a comparable number of positive emotions. Moreover, the lesser the body weight in AN patients, the lesser negative emotions they retrieved, irrespective of current levels of depressive symptoms and duration of illness. No such association was found in HC. These preliminary findings are in line with models of AN proposing that food restriction and weight-loss may be negatively reinforced by the alleviation of aversive emotional responses. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

A new look at emotion perception: Concepts speed and shape facial emotion recognition.

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Nook, Erik C; Lindquist, Kristen A; Zaki, Jamil

2015-10-01

Decades ago, the "New Look" movement challenged how scientists thought about vision by suggesting that conceptual processes shape visual perceptions. Currently, affective scientists are likewise debating the role of concepts in emotion perception. Here, we utilized a repetition-priming paradigm in conjunction with signal detection and individual difference analyses to examine how providing emotion labels-which correspond to discrete emotion concepts-affects emotion recognition. In Study 1, pairing emotional faces with emotion labels (e.g., "sad") increased individuals' speed and sensitivity in recognizing emotions. Additionally, individuals with alexithymia-who have difficulty labeling their own emotions-struggled to recognize emotions based on visual cues alone, but not when emotion labels were provided. Study 2 replicated these findings and further demonstrated that emotion concepts can shape perceptions of facial expressions. Together, these results suggest that emotion perception involves conceptual processing. We discuss the implications of these findings for affective, social, and clinical psychology. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Display rules for anger, sadness, and pain: it depends on who is watching.

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Zeman, J; Garber, J

1996-06-01

This study examined factors that may influence children's decisions to control or express their emotions including type of emotion (anger, sadness, physical pain), type of audience (mother, father, peer, alone), age, and sex. Children's reported use of display rules, reasons for their decisions, and reported method of expression were examined. Subjects were 32 boys and 32 girls in each of the first (M = 7.25 years old), third (M = 9.33 years old), and fifth grades (M = 11.75 years old). Regardless of the type of emotion experienced, children reported controlling their expression of emotion significantly more in the presence of peers than when they were with either their mother or father or when they were alone. Younger children reported expressing sadness and anger significantly more often than did older children, and girls were more likely than boys to report expressing sadness and pain. Children's primary reason for controlling their emotional expressions was the expectation of a negative interpersonal interaction following disclosure.

Emotional Expressivity and Emotion Regulation: Relation to Academic Functioning among Elementary School Children

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Kwon, Kyongboon; Hanrahan, Amanda R.; Kupzyk, Kevin A.

2017-01-01

We examined emotional expressivity (i.e., happiness, sadness, and anger) and emotion regulation (regulation of exuberance, sadness, and anger) as they relate to academic functioning (motivation, engagement, and achievement). Also, we tested the premise that emotional expressivity and emotion regulation are indirectly associated with achievement…

Infants' Temperament and Mothers', and Fathers' Depression Predict Infants' Attention to Objects Paired with Emotional Faces.

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Aktar, Evin; Mandell, Dorothy J; de Vente, Wieke; Majdandžić, Mirjana; Raijmakers, Maartje E J; Bögels, Susan M

2016-07-01

Between 10 and 14 months, infants gain the ability to learn about unfamiliar stimuli by observing others' emotional reactions to those stimuli, so called social referencing (SR). Joint processing of emotion and head/gaze direction is essential for SR. This study tested emotion and head/gaze direction effects on infants' attention via pupillometry in the period following the emergence of SR. Pupil responses of 14-to-17-month-old infants (N = 57) were measured during computerized presentations of unfamiliar objects alone, before-and-after being paired with emotional (happy, sad, fearful vs. neutral) faces gazing towards (vs. away) from objects. Additionally, the associations of infants' temperament, and parents' negative affect/depression/anxiety with infants' pupil responses were explored. Both mothers and fathers of participating infants completed questionnaires about their negative affect, depression and anxiety symptoms and their infants' negative temperament. Infants allocated more attention (larger pupils) to negative vs. neutral faces when the faces were presented alone, while they allocated less attention to objects paired with emotional vs. neutral faces independent of head/gaze direction. Sad (but not fearful) temperament predicted more attention to emotional faces. Infants' sad temperament moderated the associations of mothers' depression (but not anxiety) with infants' attention to objects. Maternal depression predicted more attention to objects paired with emotional expressions in infants low in sad temperament, while it predicted less attention in infants high in sad temperament. Fathers' depression (but not anxiety) predicted more attention to objects paired with emotional expressions independent of infants' temperament. We conclude that infants' own temperamental dispositions for sadness, and their exposure to mothers' and fathers' depressed moods may influence infants' attention to emotion-object associations in social learning contexts.

Emotional face processing and flat affect in schizophrenia: functional and structural neural correlates.

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Lepage, M; Sergerie, K; Benoit, A; Czechowska, Y; Dickie, E; Armony, J L

2011-09-01

There is a general consensus in the literature that schizophrenia causes difficulties with facial emotion perception and discrimination. Functional brain imaging studies have observed reduced limbic activity during facial emotion perception but few studies have examined the relation to flat affect severity. A total of 26 people with schizophrenia and 26 healthy controls took part in this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Sad, happy and neutral faces were presented in a pseudo-random order and participants indicated the gender of the face presented. Manual segmentation of the amygdala was performed on a structural T1 image. Both the schizophrenia group and the healthy control group rated the emotional valence of facial expressions similarly. Both groups exhibited increased brain activity during the perception of emotional faces relative to neutral ones in multiple brain regions, including multiple prefrontal regions bilaterally, the right amygdala, right cingulate cortex and cuneus. Group comparisons, however, revealed increased activity in the healthy group in the anterior cingulate, right parahippocampal gyrus and multiple visual areas. In schizophrenia, the severity of flat affect correlated significantly with neural activity in several brain areas including the amygdala and parahippocampal region bilaterally. These results suggest that many of the brain regions involved in emotional face perception, including the amygdala, are equally recruited in both schizophrenia and controls, but flat affect can also moderate activity in some other brain regions, notably in the left amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus bilaterally. There were no significant group differences in the volume of the amygdala.

Daily Emotional Labor, Negative Affect State, and Emotional Exhaustion: Cross-Level Moderators of Affective Commitment

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Hyewon Kong

2018-06-01

Full Text Available Employees’ emotional-labor strategies, experienced affects, and emotional exhaustion in the workplace may vary over time within individuals, even within the same day. However, previous studies on these relationships have not highlighted their dynamic properties of these relationships. In addition, although the effects of surface and deep acting on emotional exhaustion have been investigated in emotional-labor research, empirical studies on these relationships still report mixed results. Thus, we suggest that moderators may affect the relationship between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion. Also, this study examines the relationship between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion within individuals by repeated measurements, and verifies the mediating effect of a negative affect state. Finally, our study confirms the moderating effects that affective commitment has on the relationship between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion. Data was collected from tellers who had a high degree of interaction with clients at banks based in South Korea. A total of 56 tellers participated in the survey and responded for five working days. A total of 616 data entries were collected from the 56 respondents. We used a hierarchical linear model (HLM to examine our hypothesis. The results showed that surface-acting emotional labor increases emotional exhaustion; furthermore, the relationship between surface acting emotional labor and emotional exhaustion is mediated by a negative affect state within individuals. In addition, this study verified that affective commitment buffers the negative effects that surface acting emotional labor has on emotional exhaustion. These results suggest that emotional labor is a dynamic process within individuals, and that emotional exhaustion caused by emotional labor differs among individuals, and is dependent upon factors such as the individual’s level of affective commitment.

Dissociating maternal responses to sad and happy facial expressions of their own child: An fMRI study.

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Kluczniok, Dorothea; Hindi Attar, Catherine; Stein, Jenny; Poppinga, Sina; Fydrich, Thomas; Jaite, Charlotte; Kappel, Viola; Brunner, Romuald; Herpertz, Sabine C; Boedeker, Katja; Bermpohl, Felix

2017-01-01

Maternal sensitive behavior depends on recognizing one's own child's affective states. The present study investigated distinct and overlapping neural responses of mothers to sad and happy facial expressions of their own child (in comparison to facial expressions of an unfamiliar child). We used functional MRI to measure dissociable and overlapping activation patterns in 27 healthy mothers in response to happy, neutral and sad facial expressions of their own school-aged child and a gender- and age-matched unfamiliar child. To investigate differential activation to sad compared to happy faces of one's own child, we used interaction contrasts. During the scan, mothers had to indicate the affect of the presented face. After scanning, they were asked to rate the perceived emotional arousal and valence levels for each face using a 7-point Likert-scale (adapted SAM version). While viewing their own child's sad faces, mothers showed activation in the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex whereas happy facial expressions of the own child elicited activation in the hippocampus. Conjoint activation in response to one's own child happy and sad expressions was found in the insula and the superior temporal gyrus. Maternal brain activations differed depending on the child's affective state. Sad faces of the own child activated areas commonly associated with a threat detection network, whereas happy faces activated reward related brain areas. Overlapping activation was found in empathy related networks. These distinct neural activation patterns might facilitate sensitive maternal behavior.

Effect of Parkinson Disease on Emotion Perception Using the Persian Affective Voices Test.

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Saffarian, Arezoo; Shavaki, Yunes Amiri; Shahidi, Gholam Ali; Jafari, Zahra

2018-05-04

Emotion perception plays a major role in proper communication with people in different social interactions. Nonverbal affect bursts can be used to evaluate vocal emotion perception. The present study was a preliminary step to establishing the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the Montreal Affective Voices (MAV) test, as well as to investigate the effect of Parkinson disease (PD) on vocal emotion perception. The short, emotional sound made by pronouncing the vowel "a" in Persian was recorded by 22 actors and actresses to develop the Persian version of the MAV, the Persian Affective Voices (PAV), for emotions of happiness, sadness, pleasure, pain, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and neutrality. The results of the recordings of five of the actresses and five of the actors who obtained the highest score were used to generate the test. For convergent validity assessment, the correlation between the PAV and a speech prosody comprehension test was examined using a gender- and age-matched control group. To investigate the effect of the PD on emotion perception, the PAV test was performed on 28 patients with mild PD between ages 50 and 70 years. The PAV showed a high internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.80). A significant positive correlation was observed between the PAV and the speech prosody comprehension test. The test-retest reliability also showed the high repeatability of the PAV (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.815, P ≤ 0.001). A significant difference was observed between the patients with PD and the controls in all subtests. The PAV test is a useful psychometric tool for examining vocal emotion perception that can be used in both behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Copyright © 2018 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Facial and prosodic emotion recognition in social anxiety disorder.

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Tseng, Huai-Hsuan; Huang, Yu-Lien; Chen, Jian-Ting; Liang, Kuei-Yu; Lin, Chao-Cheng; Chen, Sue-Huei

2017-07-01

Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have a cognitive preference to negatively evaluate emotional information. In particular, the preferential biases in prosodic emotion recognition in SAD have been much less explored. The present study aims to investigate whether SAD patients retain negative evaluation biases across visual and auditory modalities when given sufficient response time to recognise emotions. Thirty-one SAD patients and 31 age- and gender-matched healthy participants completed a culturally suitable non-verbal emotion recognition task and received clinical assessments for social anxiety and depressive symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine group differences in emotion recognition. Compared to healthy participants, SAD patients were significantly less accurate at recognising facial and prosodic emotions, and spent more time on emotion recognition. The differences were mainly driven by the lower accuracy and longer reaction times for recognising fearful emotions in SAD patients. Within the SAD patients, lower accuracy of sad face recognition was associated with higher severity of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, particularly with avoidance symptoms. These findings may represent a cross-modality pattern of avoidance in the later stage of identifying negative emotions in SAD. This pattern may be linked to clinical symptom severity.

Mapping aesthetic musical emotions in the brain.

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Trost, Wiebke; Ethofer, Thomas; Zentner, Marcel; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2012-12-01

Music evokes complex emotions beyond pleasant/unpleasant or happy/sad dichotomies usually investigated in neuroscience. Here, we used functional neuroimaging with parametric analyses based on the intensity of felt emotions to explore a wider spectrum of affective responses reported during music listening. Positive emotions correlated with activation of left striatum and insula when high-arousing (Wonder, Joy) but right striatum and orbitofrontal cortex when low-arousing (Nostalgia, Tenderness). Irrespective of their positive/negative valence, high-arousal emotions (Tension, Power, and Joy) also correlated with activations in sensory and motor areas, whereas low-arousal categories (Peacefulness, Nostalgia, and Sadness) selectively engaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. The right parahippocampal cortex activated in all but positive high-arousal conditions. Results also suggested some blends between activation patterns associated with different classes of emotions, particularly for feelings of Wonder or Transcendence. These data reveal a differentiated recruitment across emotions of networks involved in reward, memory, self-reflective, and sensorimotor processes, which may account for the unique richness of musical emotions.

Diagnostic Accuracy of the Primary Care Screener for Affective Disorder (PC-SAD) in Primary Care.

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Picardi, Angelo; Adler, D A; Rogers, W H; Lega, I; Zerella, M P; Matteucci, G; Tarsitani, L; Caredda, M; Gigantesco, A; Biondi, M

2013-01-01

Depression goes often unrecognised and untreated in non-psychiatric medical settings. Screening has recently gained acceptance as a first step towards improving depression recognition and management. The Primary Care Screener for Affective Disorders (PC-SAD) is a self-administered questionnaire to screen for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Dysthymic Disorder (Dys) which has a sophisticated scoring algorithm that confers several advantages. This study tested its performance against a 'gold standard' diagnostic interview in primary care. A total of 416 adults attending 13 urban general internal medicine primary care practices completed the PC-SAD. Of 409 who returned a valid PC-SAD, all those scoring positive (N=151) and a random sample (N=106) of those scoring negative were selected for a 3-month telephone follow-up assessment including the administration of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR Axis I Disorders (SCID-I) by a psychiatrist who was masked to PC-SAD results. Most selected patients (N=212) took part in the follow-up assessment. After adjustment for partial verification bias the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value for MDD were 90%, 83%, 51%, and 98%. For Dys, the corresponding figures were 78%, 79%, 8%, and 88%. While some study limitations suggest caution in interpreting our results, this study corroborated the diagnostic validity of the PC-SAD, although the low PPV may limit its usefulness with regard to Dys. Given its good psychometric properties and the short average administration time, the PC-SAD might be the screening instrument of choice in settings where the technology for computer automated scoring is available.

The Discrete Emotions Questionnaire: A New Tool for Measuring State Self-Reported Emotions.

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Harmon-Jones, Cindy; Bastian, Brock; Harmon-Jones, Eddie

2016-01-01

Several discrete emotions have broad theoretical and empirical importance, as shown by converging evidence from diverse areas of psychology, including facial displays, developmental behaviors, and neuroscience. However, the measurement of these states has not progressed along with theory, such that when researchers measure subjectively experienced emotions, they commonly rely on scales assessing broad dimensions of affect (positivity and negativity), rather than discrete emotions. The current manuscript presents four studies that validate a new instrument, the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire (DEQ), that is sensitive to eight distinct state emotions: anger, disgust, fear, anxiety, sadness, happiness, relaxation, and desire. Emotion theory supporting the importance of distinguishing these specific emotions is reviewed.

Intranasal oxytocin impedes the ability to ignore task-irrelevant facial expressions of sadness in students with depressive symptoms.

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Ellenbogen, Mark A; Linnen, Anne-Marie; Cardoso, Christopher; Joober, Ridha

2013-03-01

The administration of oxytocin promotes prosocial behavior in humans. The mechanism by which this occurs is unknown, but it likely involves changes in social information processing. In a randomized placebo-controlled study, we examined the influence of intranasal oxytocin and placebo on the interference control component of inhibition (i.e. ability to ignore task-irrelevant information) in 102 participants using a negative affective priming task with sad, angry, and happy faces. In this task, participants are instructed to respond to a facial expression of emotion while simultaneously ignoring another emotional face. On the subsequent trial, the previously-ignored emotional valence may become the emotional valence of the target face. Inhibition is operationalized as the differential delay between responding to a previously-ignored emotional valence and responding to an emotional valence unrelated to the previous one. Although no main effect of drug administration on inhibition was observed, a drug × depressive symptom interaction (β = -0.25; t = -2.6, p < 0.05) predicted the inhibition of sad faces. Relative to placebo, participants with high depression scores who were administered oxytocin were unable to inhibit the processing of sad faces. There was no relationship between drug administration and inhibition among those with low depression scores. These findings are consistent with increasing evidence that oxytocin alters social information processing in ways that have both positive and negative social outcomes. Because elevated depression scores are associated with an increased risk for major depressive disorder, difficulties inhibiting mood-congruent stimuli following oxytocin administration may be associated with risk for depression. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Daydreams and trait affect: The role of the listener's state of mind in the emotional response to music.

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Martarelli, Corinna S; Mayer, Boris; Mast, Fred W

2016-11-01

Music creates room for the mind to wander, mental time travel, and departures into more fantastical worlds. We examined the mediating role of daydreams and the moderating function of personality differences for the emotional response to music by using a moderated mediation approach. The results showed that the valence of daydreams played a mediating role in the reaction to the musical experience: happy music was related to more positive daydreams, which were associated with greater relaxation with the happy music and to greater liking of the happy music. Furthermore, negative affect (trait) moderated the direct effect of sad vs. happy music on the liking of the music: individuals with high scores on negative affect preferred sad music. The results are discussed with regard to the interplay of general and personality-specific processes as it is relevant to better understand the effects music can have on the listeners. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotion modelling towards affective pathogenesis.

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Bas, James Le

2009-12-01

Objective: There is a need in psychiatry for models that integrate pathological states with normal systems. The interaction of arousal and emotion is the focus of an exploration of affective pathogenesis. Method: Given that the explicit causes of affective disorder remain nascent, methods of linking emotion and disorder are evaluated. Results: A network model of emotional families is presented, in which emotions exist as quantal gradients. Morbid emotional states are seen as the activation of distal emotion sites. The phenomenology of affective disorders is described with reference to this model. Recourse is made to non-linear dynamic theory. Conclusions: Metaphoric emotion models have face validity and may prove a useful heuristic.

Intact brain processing of musical emotions in autism spectrum disorder, but more cognitive load and arousal in happy versus sad music

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Line eGebauer

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD show difficulties with social and emotional cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional expressions in faces and speech. Whether these impairments and atypical brain responses generalize to other domains, such as emotional processing of music, is less clear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural correlates of emotion recognition in music in high-functioning adults with ASD and neurotypical adults. Both groups engaged similar neural networks during processing of emotional music, and individuals with ASD rated emotional music comparable to the group of neurotypical individuals. However, in the ASD group, increased activity in response to happy compared to sad music was observed in dorsolateral prefrontal regions and in the rolandic operculum/insula, and we propose that this reflects increased cognitive processing in response to emotional musical stimuli in this group.

Emotional Variability and Clarity in Depression and Social Anxiety

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Thompson, Renee J.; Boden, Matthew Tyler; Gotlib, Ian H.

2016-01-01

Recent research has underscored the importance of elucidating specific patterns of emotion that characterize mental disorders. We examined two emotion traits, emotional variability and emotional clarity, in relation to both categorical (diagnostic interview) and dimensional (self-report) measures of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) in women diagnosed with MDD only (n=35), SAD only (n=31), MDD and SAD (n=26), or no psychiatric disorder (n=38). Results of the categorical analyses suggest that elevated emotional variability and diminished emotional clarity are transdiagnostic of MDD and SAD. More specifically, emotional variability was elevated for MDD and SAD diagnoses compared to no diagnosis, showing an additive effect for co-occurring MDD and SAD. Similarly diminished levels of emotional clarity characterized all three clinical groups compared to the healthy control group. Dimensional findings suggest that whereas emotional variability is associated more consistently with depression than with social anxiety, emotional clarity is associated more consistently with social anxiety than with depression. Results are interpreted using a threshold- and dose-response framework. PMID:26371579

Further evidence of emotional allodynia in unmedicated young adults with major depressive disorder.

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Alexander Ushinsky

Full Text Available Recent evidence suggests that sensitivity to the emotional sequela of experimental thermal pain(measured by emotional unpleasantness is heightened in individuals with major depressive disorder(MDD, a phenomenon we termed "emotional allodynia". The aim of this study was to examine whether acute happy and sad mood induction alters emotional allodynia in MDD. We hypothesized that emotional allodynia will be a robust characteristic of individuals with MDD compared to healthy controls. Thus, it would remain following acute mood induction, independent of valence.Twenty-one subjects with current MDD and 21 well-matched healthy subjects(HC received graded brief temperature stimuli following happy and sad mood inductions procedures(MIP. All subjects rated the intensity and affect(pleasantness/unpleasantness of each stimulus. Sensory(pain intensity and affective(pain unpleasantness thresholds were determined by methods of constant stimuli.The MIPs reliably induced happy and sad mood and the resulting induced mood and subjective arousal were not different between the groups at the time of temperature stimulation. Compared to HC, MDD individuals demonstrated emotional allodynia. We found significantly decreased affective pain thresholds whereby significantly lower temperatures became unpleasant in the MDD compared to the HC group. This was not observed for the sensory pain thresholds. Within the MDD, the affective pain thresholds were significantly lower than the corresponding pain intensity thresholds, whereby non-painful temperatures were already unpleasant for the MDD irrespective of the induced mood. This was not observed for the HC groups where the affective and pain intensity thresholds were comparable.These findings suggest that emotional allodynia may be a chronic characteristic of current MDD. Future studies should determine if emotional allodynia persists after psychological or pharmacological interventions. Finally, longitudinal work should

Interrater agreement for the schedule for affective disorders and schizophrenia epidemiological version for school-age children (K-SADS-E

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Polanczyk Guilherme V

2003-01-01

Full Text Available OBJETIVE: The main objective of this study was to assess the interrater agreement for the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia Epidemiological version for School-Age Children (K-SADS-E. METHODS: Four interviewers being trained with the K-SADS-E scored independently 29 videotaped interviews performed with psychiatric outpatients in the ADHD Outpatient Clinic at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre. Interrater agreement analysis was performed using the kappa coefficient (k. RESULTS: Kappa coefficients were .93 (p<.001 for affective disorders, .9 (p<.001 for anxiety disorders, .94 (p<.001 for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders and disruptive behavior disorders. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest an excellent interrater agreement for the diagnosis of several mental disorders in childhood and adolescence by the Brazilian Portuguese version of the K-SADS-E.

Moved through Music: The Effect of Experienced Emotions on Performers' Movement Characteristics

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Van Zijl, Anemone G. W.; Luck, Geoff

2013-01-01

Do performers who feel sad move differently compared to those who express sadness? Although performers' expressive movements have been widely studied, little is known about how performers' experienced emotions affect such movements. To investigate this, we made 72 motion-capture recordings of eight violinists playing a melodic phrase in response…

Mapping aesthetic musical emotions in the brain

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Trost, Johanna Wiebke; Ethofer, Thomas Stefan; Zentner, Marcel Robert; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2012-01-01

Music evokes complex emotions beyond pleasant/unpleasant or happy/sad dichotomies usually investigated in neuroscience. Here, we used functional neuroimaging with parametric analyses based on the intensity of felt emotions to explore a wider spectrum of affective responses reported during music listening. Positive emotions correlated with activation of left striatum and insula when high-arousing (Wonder, Joy) but right striatum and orbitofrontal cortex when low-arousing (Nostalgia, Tenderness...

Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context.

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Sherman, Aleksandra; Sweeny, Timothy D; Grabowecky, Marcia; Suzuki, Satoru

2012-04-01

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how laughter influenced the perceived intensity of the happy, neutral, and sad expressions. For a single face, laughter increased the perceived intensity of a happy expression. Surprisingly, for a crowd of faces, laughter produced an opposite effect, increasing the perceived intensity of a sad expression in a crowd. A follow-up experiment revealed that this contrast effect may have occurred because laughter made the neutral distractor faces appear slightly happy, thereby making the deviant sad expression stand out in contrast. A control experiment ruled out semantic mediation of the laughter effects. Our demonstration of the strong context dependence of laughter effects on facial expression perception encourages a reexamination of the previously demonstrated effects of prosody, speech content, and mood on face perception, as they may be similarly context dependent.

Emotional clarity and attention to emotions in cognitive behavioral group therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction for social anxiety disorder.

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Butler, Rachel M; Boden, Matthew T; Olino, Thomas M; Morrison, Amanda S; Goldin, Philippe R; Gross, James J; Heimberg, Richard G

2018-04-01

We examined (1) differences between controls and patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) in emotional clarity and attention to emotions; (2) changes in emotional clarity and attention to emotions associated with cognitive-behavioral group therapy (CBGT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), or a waitlist (WL) condition; and (3) whether emotional clarity and attention to emotions moderated changes in social anxiety across treatment. Participants were healthy controls (n = 37) and patients with SAD (n = 108) who were assigned to CBGT, MBSR, or WL in a randomized controlled trial. At pretreatment, posttreatment, and 12-month follow-up, patients with SAD completed measures of social anxiety, emotional clarity, and attention to emotions. Controls completed measures at baseline only. At pretreatment, patients with SAD had lower levels of emotional clarity than controls. Emotional clarity increased significantly among patients receiving CBGT, and changes were maintained at 12-month follow-up. Emotional clarity at posttreatment did not differ between CBGT and MBSR or between MBSR and WL. Changes in emotional clarity predicted changes in social anxiety, but emotional clarity did not moderate treatment outcome. Analyses of attention to emotions were not significant. Implications for the role of emotional clarity in the treatment of SAD are discussed. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural Substrates for Processing Task-Irrelevant Sad Images in Adolescents

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Wang, Lihong; Huettel, Scott; De Bellis, Michael D.

2008-01-01

Neural systems related to cognitive and emotional processing were examined in adolescents using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten healthy adolescents performed an emotional oddball task. Subjects detected infrequent circles (targets) within a continual stream of phase-scrambled images (standards). Sad and neutral…

Mapping correspondence between facial mimicry and emotion recognition in healthy subjects.

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Ponari, Marta; Conson, Massimiliano; D'Amico, Nunzia Pina; Grossi, Dario; Trojano, Luigi

2012-12-01

We aimed at verifying the hypothesis that facial mimicry is causally and selectively involved in emotion recognition. For this purpose, in Experiment 1, we explored the effect of tonic contraction of muscles in upper or lower half of participants' face on their ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. We found that the "lower" manipulation specifically impaired recognition of happiness and disgust, the "upper" manipulation impaired recognition of anger, while both manipulations affected recognition of fear; recognition of surprise and sadness were not affected by either blocking manipulations. In Experiment 2, we verified whether emotion recognition is hampered by stimuli in which an upper or lower half-face showing an emotional expression is combined with a neutral half-face. We found that the neutral lower half-face interfered with recognition of happiness and disgust, whereas the neutral upper half impaired recognition of anger; recognition of fear and sadness was impaired by both manipulations, whereas recognition of surprise was not affected by either manipulation. Taken together, the present findings support simulation models of emotion recognition and provide insight into the role of mimicry in comprehension of others' emotional facial expressions. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.

Two Sides of Emotion: Exploring Positivity and Negativity in Six Basic Emotions across Cultures

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Sieun An

2017-04-01

Full Text Available We employ a novel paradigm to test whether six basic emotions (sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and happiness; Ekman, 1992 contain both negativity and positivity, as opposed to consisting of a single continuum between negative and positive. We examined the perceived negativity and positivity of these emotions in terms of their affective and cognitive components among Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and American students. Assessing each emotion at the cognitive and affective levels cross-culturally provides a fairly comprehensive picture of the positivity and negativity of emotions. Affective components were rated as more divergent than cognitive components. Cross-culturally, Americans and Canadians gave higher valence ratings to the salient valence of each emotion, and lower ratings to the non-salient valence of an emotion, compared to Chinese and Koreans. The results suggest that emotions encompass both positivity and negativity, and there were cross-cultural differences in reported emotions. This paradigm complements existing emotion theories, building on past research and allowing for more parsimonious explanations of cross-cultural research on emotion.

Two Sides of Emotion: Exploring Positivity and Negativity in Six Basic Emotions across Cultures

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An, Sieun; Ji, Li-Jun; Marks, Michael; Zhang, Zhiyong

2017-01-01

We employ a novel paradigm to test whether six basic emotions (sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and happiness; Ekman, 1992) contain both negativity and positivity, as opposed to consisting of a single continuum between negative and positive. We examined the perceived negativity and positivity of these emotions in terms of their affective and cognitive components among Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and American students. Assessing each emotion at the cognitive and affective levels cross-culturally provides a fairly comprehensive picture of the positivity and negativity of emotions. Affective components were rated as more divergent than cognitive components. Cross-culturally, Americans and Canadians gave higher valence ratings to the salient valence of each emotion, and lower ratings to the non-salient valence of an emotion, compared to Chinese and Koreans. The results suggest that emotions encompass both positivity and negativity, and there were cross-cultural differences in reported emotions. This paradigm complements existing emotion theories, building on past research and allowing for more parsimonious explanations of cross-cultural research on emotion. PMID:28473791

Two Sides of Emotion: Exploring Positivity and Negativity in Six Basic Emotions across Cultures.

Science.gov (United States)

An, Sieun; Ji, Li-Jun; Marks, Michael; Zhang, Zhiyong

2017-01-01

We employ a novel paradigm to test whether six basic emotions (sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and happiness; Ekman, 1992) contain both negativity and positivity, as opposed to consisting of a single continuum between negative and positive. We examined the perceived negativity and positivity of these emotions in terms of their affective and cognitive components among Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and American students. Assessing each emotion at the cognitive and affective levels cross-culturally provides a fairly comprehensive picture of the positivity and negativity of emotions. Affective components were rated as more divergent than cognitive components. Cross-culturally, Americans and Canadians gave higher valence ratings to the salient valence of each emotion, and lower ratings to the non-salient valence of an emotion, compared to Chinese and Koreans. The results suggest that emotions encompass both positivity and negativity, and there were cross-cultural differences in reported emotions. This paradigm complements existing emotion theories, building on past research and allowing for more parsimonious explanations of cross-cultural research on emotion.

Mapping Aesthetic Musical Emotions in the Brain

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Ethofer, Thomas; Zentner, Marcel; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2012-01-01

Music evokes complex emotions beyond pleasant/unpleasant or happy/sad dichotomies usually investigated in neuroscience. Here, we used functional neuroimaging with parametric analyses based on the intensity of felt emotions to explore a wider spectrum of affective responses reported during music listening. Positive emotions correlated with activation of left striatum and insula when high-arousing (Wonder, Joy) but right striatum and orbitofrontal cortex when low-arousing (Nostalgia, Tenderness). Irrespective of their positive/negative valence, high-arousal emotions (Tension, Power, and Joy) also correlated with activations in sensory and motor areas, whereas low-arousal categories (Peacefulness, Nostalgia, and Sadness) selectively engaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. The right parahippocampal cortex activated in all but positive high-arousal conditions. Results also suggested some blends between activation patterns associated with different classes of emotions, particularly for feelings of Wonder or Transcendence. These data reveal a differentiated recruitment across emotions of networks involved in reward, memory, self-reflective, and sensorimotor processes, which may account for the unique richness of musical emotions. PMID:22178712

On the validity of the autobiographical emotional memory task for emotion induction.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caitlin Mills

Full Text Available The Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT, which involves recalling and writing about intense emotional experiences, is a widely used method to experimentally induce emotions. The validity of this method depends upon the extent to which it can induce specific desired emotions (intended emotions, while not inducing any other (incidental emotions at different levels across one (or more conditions. A review of recent studies that used this method indicated that most studies exclusively monitor post-writing ratings of the intended emotions, without assessing the possibility that the method may have differentially induced other incidental emotions as well. We investigated the extent of this issue by collecting both pre- and post-writing ratings of incidental emotions in addition to the intended emotions. Using methods largely adapted from previous studies, participants were assigned to write about a profound experience of anger or fear (Experiment 1 or happiness or sadness (Experiment 2. In line with previous research, results indicated that intended emotions (anger and fear were successfully induced in the respective conditions in Experiment 1. However, disgust and sadness were also induced while writing about an angry experience compared to a fearful experience. Similarly, although happiness and sadness were induced in the appropriate conditions, Experiment 2 indicated that writing about a sad experience also induced disgust, fear, and anger, compared to writing about a happy experience. Possible resolutions to avoid the limitations of the AEMT to induce specific discrete emotions are discussed.

On the Validity of the Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task for Emotion Induction

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Mills, Caitlin; D'Mello, Sidney

2014-01-01

The Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT), which involves recalling and writing about intense emotional experiences, is a widely used method to experimentally induce emotions. The validity of this method depends upon the extent to which it can induce specific desired emotions (intended emotions), while not inducing any other (incidental) emotions at different levels across one (or more) conditions. A review of recent studies that used this method indicated that most studies exclusively monitor post-writing ratings of the intended emotions, without assessing the possibility that the method may have differentially induced other incidental emotions as well. We investigated the extent of this issue by collecting both pre- and post-writing ratings of incidental emotions in addition to the intended emotions. Using methods largely adapted from previous studies, participants were assigned to write about a profound experience of anger or fear (Experiment 1) or happiness or sadness (Experiment 2). In line with previous research, results indicated that intended emotions (anger and fear) were successfully induced in the respective conditions in Experiment 1. However, disgust and sadness were also induced while writing about an angry experience compared to a fearful experience. Similarly, although happiness and sadness were induced in the appropriate conditions, Experiment 2 indicated that writing about a sad experience also induced disgust, fear, and anger, compared to writing about a happy experience. Possible resolutions to avoid the limitations of the AEMT to induce specific discrete emotions are discussed. PMID:24776697

The effects of anger and sadness on clinical pain reports and experimentally-induced pain thresholds in women with and without fibromyalgia.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Middendorp, H. van; Lumley, M.A.; Jacobs, J.W.G.; Bijlsma, J.W.J.; Geenen, R.

2010-01-01

OBJECTIVE: Negative emotions are commonly experienced in fibromyalgia and may affect pain. This study examined the effects of anger and sadness on clinical pain reports and on pain threshold and tolerance in response to electrical stimulation in women with and without fibromyalgia. METHODS: In an

Implicit motives predict affective responses to emotional expressions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andreas G. Rösch

2013-12-01

Full Text Available We explored the influence of implicit motives and activity inhibition on subjectively experienced affect in response to the presentation of six different facial expressions of emotion (FEEs; anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise and neutral faces from the NimStim set of facial expressions (Tottenham et al., 2009. Implicit motives and activity inhibition were assessed using a Picture Story Exercise (Schultheiss et al., 2009b. Ratings of subjectively experienced affect (arousal and valence were assessed using Self-Assessment Manikins (Bradley and Lang, 1994 in a sample of 84 participants. We found that people with either a strong implicit power or achievement motive experienced stronger arousal, while people with a strong affiliation motive experienced less aroused and felt more unpleasant across emotions. Additionally, we obtained significant power motive × activity inhibition interactions for arousal ratings in response to FEEs and neutral faces. Participants with a strong power motive and weak activity inhibition experienced stronger arousal after the presentation of neutral faces but no additional increase in arousal after the presentation of FEEs. Participants with a strong power motive and strong activity inhibition (inhibited power motive did not feel aroused by neutral faces. However, their arousal increased in response to all FEEs with the exception of happy faces, for which their subjective arousal decreased. These more differentiated reaction pattern of individuals with an inhibited power motive suggest that they engage in a more socially adaptive manner of responding to different FEEs. Our findings extend established links between implicit motives and affective processes found at the procedural level to declarative reactions to FEEs. Implications are discussed with respect to dual-process models of motivation and research in motive congruence.

[The expression of sadness in a working class bairro in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil].

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Costa, L A; Pereira, A M

1995-01-01

This paper examines the peculiarities of the expression of emotion in a poor neighborhood from Northeastern Brazil, the bairro of Nordeste de Amaralina, in Salvador, Bahia. Focusing on the expression of sadness, we built a scheme in which to understand how the informants perceive, identify, and deal with this emotion in the course of their daily lives. We attempted to reach an understanding of the wavs people in the bairro interpret sadness. In order to accomplish this goal. we built a semantic network which revealed three main clusters of emotional expression: the inner set, the bodily set, and the interactional set. We came to realize the various superpositions benween the universe of emotional expression and the local concept of person.

Memorable Experiences with Sad Music—Reasons, Reactions and Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences

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Peltola, Henna-Riikka

2016-01-01

Reactions to memorable experiences of sad music were studied by means of a survey administered to a convenience (N = 1577), representative (N = 445), and quota sample (N = 414). The survey explored the reasons, mechanisms, and emotions of such experiences. Memorable experiences linked with sad music typically occurred in relation to extremely familiar music, caused intense and pleasurable experiences, which were accompanied by physiological reactions and positive mood changes in about a third of the participants. A consistent structure of reasons and emotions for these experiences was identified through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across the samples. Three types of sadness experiences were established, one that was genuinely negative (Grief-Stricken Sorrow) and two that were positive (Comforting Sorrow and Sweet Sorrow). Each type of emotion exhibited certain individual differences and had distinct profiles in terms of the underlying reasons, mechanisms, and elicited reactions. The prevalence of these broad types of emotional experiences suggested that positive experiences are the most frequent, but negative experiences were not uncommon in any of the samples. The findings have implications for measuring emotions induced by music and fiction in general, and call attention to the non-pleasurable aspects of these experiences. PMID:27300268

Clinicians' recognition and management of emotions during difficult healthcare conversations.

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Martin, Elliott B; Mazzola, Natalia M; Brandano, Jessica; Luff, Donna; Zurakowski, David; Meyer, Elaine C

2015-10-01

To examine the most commonly reported emotions encountered among healthcare practitioners when holding difficult conversations, including frequency and impact on care delivery. Interprofessional learners from a range of experience levels and specialties completed self-report questionnaires prior to simulation-based communication workshops. Clinicians were asked to describe up to three emotions they experienced when having difficult healthcare conversations; subsequent questions used Likert-scales to measure frequency of each emotion, and whether care was affected. 152 participants completed questionnaires, including physicians, nurses, and psychosocial professionals. Most commonly reported emotions were anxiety, sadness, empathy, frustration, and insecurity. There were significant differences in how clinicians perceived these different emotions affecting care. Empathy and anxiety were emotions perceived to influence care more than sadness, frustration, and insecurity. Most clinicians, regardless of clinical experience and discipline, find their emotional state influences the quality of their care delivery. Most clinicians rate themselves as somewhat to quite capable of recognizing and managing their emotions, acknowledging significant room to grow. Further education designed to increase clinicians' recognition of, reflection on, and management of emotion would likely prove helpful in improving their ability to navigate difficult healthcare conversations. Interventions aimed at anxiety management are particularly needed. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Time course of brain activation elicited by basic emotions.

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Hot, Pascal; Sequeira, Henrique

2013-11-13

Whereas facial emotion recognition protocols have shown that each discrete emotion has a specific time course of brain activation, there is no electrophysiological evidence to support these findings for emotional induction by complex pictures. Our objective was to specify the differences between the time courses of brain activation elicited by feelings of happiness and, with unpleasant pictures, by feelings of disgust and sadness. We compared event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the watching of high-arousing pictures from the International Affective Picture System, selected to induce specific emotions. In addition to a classical arousal effect on late positive components, we found specific ERP patterns for each emotion in early temporal windows (emotion to be associated with different brain processing after 140 ms, whereas happiness and sadness differed in ERPs elicited at the frontal and central sites after 160 ms. Our findings highlight the limits of the classical averaging of ERPs elicited by different emotions inside the same valence and suggest that each emotion could elicit a specific temporal pattern of brain activation, similar to those observed with emotional face recognition.

Emotion socialization in the context of risk and psychopathology: Mother and father socialization of anger and sadness in adolescents with depressive disorder.

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Shortt, Joann Wu; Katz, Lynn Fainsilber; Allen, Nicholas; Leve, Craig; Davis, Betsy; Sheeber, Lisa

2016-02-01

This study examined parental emotion socialization processes associated with adolescent unipolar depressive disorder. Adolescent participants (N=107; 42 boys) were selected either to meet criteria for current unipolar depressive disorder or to be psychologically healthy as defined by no lifetime history of psychopathology or mental health treatment and low levels of current depressive symptomatology. A multisource/method measurement strategy was used to assess mothers' and fathers' responses to adolescent sad and angry emotion. Each parent and the adolescents completed questionnaire measures of parental emotion socialization behavior, and participated in meta-emotion interviews and parent-adolescent interactions. As hypothesized, parents of adolescents with depressive disorder engaged in fewer supportive responses and more unsupportive responses overall relative to parents of nondepressed adolescents. Between group differences were more pronounced for families of boys, and for fathers relative to mothers. The findings indicate that parent emotion socialization is associated with adolescent depression and highlight the importance of including fathers in studies of emotion socialization, especially as it relates to depression.

Effects of Sad and Happy Music on Mind-Wandering and the Default Mode Network.

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Taruffi, Liila; Pehrs, Corinna; Skouras, Stavros; Koelsch, Stefan

2017-10-31

Music is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human cultures, mostly due to its power to evoke and regulate emotions. However, effects of music evoking different emotional experiences such as sadness and happiness on cognition, and in particular on self-generated thought, are unknown. Here we use probe-caught thought sampling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the influence of sad and happy music on mind-wandering and its underlying neuronal mechanisms. In three experiments we found that sad music, compared with happy music, is associated with stronger mind-wandering (Experiments 1A and 1B) and greater centrality of the nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN) (Experiment 2). Thus, our results demonstrate that, when listening to sad vs. happy music, people withdraw their attention inwards and engage in spontaneous, self-referential cognitive processes. Importantly, our results also underscore that DMN activity can be modulated as a function of sad and happy music. These findings call for a systematic investigation of the relation between music and thought, having broad implications for the use of music in education and clinical settings.

Autobiographically recalled emotional states impact forward gait initiation as a function of motivational direction.

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Fawver, Bradley; Hass, Chris J; Park, Kyoungshin D; Janelle, Christopher M

2014-12-01

The impact of self-generated affective states on self-initiated motor behavior remains unspecified. The purpose of the current study was to determine how self-generated emotional states impact forward gait initiation. Participants recalled past emotional experiences (anger, fear, happy, sad, and neutral), "relived" those emotional memories before gait initiation (GI), and then walked ∼4 m across the laboratory floor. Kinetic and kinematic data revealed GI characteristics consistent with a motivational direction hypothesis. Specifically, participants produced greater posterior-lateral displacement and velocity of their center of pressure (COP) during the initial phase of GI after self-generation of happy and anger emotional states relative to sad ones. During the second phase of GI, greater medial displacement of COP was found during the happy condition compared with sad, greater velocity was occasioned during happy and angry trials compared with sad, and greater velocity was exhibited after happy compared with fear memories. Finally, greater anterior velocity was produced by participants during the final phase of GI for happy and angry memories compared with sad ones. Steady state kinetic and kinematic data when recalling happy and angry memories (longer, faster, and more forceful stepping behavior) followed the anticipatory postural adjustments noted during GI. Together the results from GI and steady state gait provide robust evidence that self-generated emotional states impact forward gait behavior based on motivational direction. Endogenous manipulations of emotional states hold promise for clinical and performance interventions aimed at improving self-initiated movement.

General emotion processing in social anxiety disorder: neural issues of cognitive control.

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Brühl, Annette Beatrix; Herwig, Uwe; Delsignore, Aba; Jäncke, Lutz; Rufer, Michael

2013-05-30

Anxiety disorders are characterized by deficient emotion regulation prior to and in anxiety-evoking situations. Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have increased brain activation also during the anticipation and perception of non-specific emotional stimuli pointing to biased general emotion processing. In the current study we addressed the neural correlates of emotion regulation by cognitive control during the anticipation and perception of non-specific emotional stimuli in patients with SAD. Thirty-two patients with SAD underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the announced anticipation and perception of emotional stimuli. Half of them were trained and instructed to apply reality-checking as a control strategy, the others anticipated and perceived the stimuli. Reality checking significantly (pperception of negative emotional stimuli. The medial prefrontal cortex was comparably active in both groups (p>0.50). The results suggest that cognitive control in patients with SAD influences emotion processing structures, supporting the usefulness of emotion regulation training in the psychotherapy of SAD. In contrast to studies in healthy subjects, cognitive control was not associated with increased activation of prefrontal regions in SAD. This points to possibly disturbed general emotion regulating circuits in SAD. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

How leader displays of happiness and sadness influence follower performance: Emotional contagion and creative versus analytical performance

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Visser, V.A.; van Knippenberg, D.; van Kleef, G.A.; Wisse, B.

2013-01-01

Previous studies have found mixed results regarding the influence of positive and negative leader affect on follower performance. We propose that both leader happiness and leader sadness can be beneficial for follower performance contingent on whether the task concerns creative or analytical

How leader displays of happiness and sadness influence follower performance : Emotional contagion and creative versus analytical performance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Visser, Victoria A.; van Knippenberg, Daan; van Kleef, Gerben A.; Wisse, Barbara

Previous studies have found mixed results regarding the influence of positive and negative leader affect on follower performance. We propose that both leader happiness and leader sadness can be beneficial for follower performance contingent on whether the task concerns creative or analytical

Opioid system and human emotions.

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Nummenmaa, Lauri; Tuominen, Lauri

2017-04-10

Emotions are states of vigilant readiness that guide human and animal behaviour during survival-salient situations. Categorical models of emotions posit neurally and physiologically distinct basic human emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness and surprise) that govern different survival functions. Opioid receptors are expressed abundantly in the mammalian emotion circuit, and the opioid system modulates a variety of functions related to arousal and motivation. Yet, its specific contribution to different basic emotions has remained poorly understood. Here, we review how the endogenous opioid system and particularly the μ receptor contribute to emotional processing in humans. Activation of the endogenous opioid system is consistently associated with both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. In general, exogenous opioid agonists facilitate approach-oriented emotions (anger, pleasure) and inhibit avoidance-oriented emotions (fear, sadness). Opioids also modulate social bonding and affiliative behaviour, and prolonged opioid abuse may render both social bonding and emotion recognition circuits dysfunctional. However, there is no clear evidence that the opioid system is able to affect the emotions associated with surprise and disgust. Taken together, the opioid systems contribute to a wide array of positive and negative emotions through their general ability to modulate the approach versus avoidance motivation associated with specific emotions. Because of the protective effects of opioid system-mediated prosociality and positive mood, the opioid system may constitute an important factor contributing to psychological and psychosomatic resilience. © 2017 The British Pharmacological Society.

Quantification of vascular function changes under different emotion states: A pilot study.

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Xia, Yirong; Yang, Licai; Mao, Xueqin; Zheng, Dingchang; Liu, Chengyu

2017-01-01

Recent studies have indicated that physiological parameters change with different emotion states. This study aimed to quantify the changes of vascular function at different emotion and sub-emotion states. Twenty young subjects were studied with their finger photoplethysmographic (PPG) pulses recorded at three distinct emotion states: natural (1 minute), happiness and sadness (10 minutes for each). Within the period of happiness and sadness emotion states, two sub-emotion states (calmness and outburst) were identified with the synchronously recorded videos. Reflection index (RI) and stiffness index (SI), two widely used indices of vascular function, were derived from the PPG pulses to quantify their differences between three emotion states, as well as between two sub-emotion states. The results showed that, when compared with the natural emotion, RI and SI decreased in both happiness and sadness emotions. The decreases in RI were significant for both happiness and sadness emotions (both Pemotion (Pemotions, there was significant difference in RI (Pemotion in comparison with the calmness one for both happiness and sadness emotions (both Pemotion only in sadness emotion (Pemotion measurements. This pilot study confirmed that vascular function changes with diffenrt emotion states could be quantified by the simple PPG measurement.

Misery loves company: when sadness increases the desire for social connectedness.

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Gray, Heather M; Ishii, Keiko; Ambady, Nalini

2011-11-01

In three experiments, the authors investigated the effects of sadness on the desire for social connectedness. They hypothesized that sadness serves an adaptive function by motivating people to reach out to others and preferentially attend to information related to one's current level of social connectedness, but only when it is instigated by social loss. Consistent with this hypothesis, the authors observed that sadness induced by an emotional depiction of social loss enhanced (a) attention to nonverbal cues, an important source of information concerning an individual's current level of social connectedness (Experiment 1), and (b) the desire to engage in social behaviors (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3 the authors found that sadness that results from imagined social loss uniquely produced this pattern of effects. Sadness that resulted from imagined failure had different effects on motivation and no effect on sensitivity to nonverbal cues. These results support and refine functional explanations for the universality of sadness.

The impact of negative emotions on self-concept abstraction depends on accessible information processing styles.

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Isbell, Linda M; Rovenpor, Daniel R; Lair, Elicia C

2016-10-01

Research suggests that anger promotes global, abstract processing whereas sadness and fear promote local, concrete processing (see Schwarz & Clore, 2007 for a review). Contrary to a large and influential body of work suggesting that specific affective experiences are tethered to specific cognitive outcomes, the affect-as-cognitive-feedback account maintains that affective experiences confer positive or negative value on currently dominant processing styles, and thus can lead to either global or local processing (Huntsinger, Isbell, & Clore, 2014). The current work extends this theoretical perspective by investigating the impact of discrete negative emotions on the self-concept. By experimentally manipulating information processing styles and discrete negative emotions that vary in appraisals of certainty, we demonstrate that the impact of discrete negative emotions on the spontaneous self-concept depends on accessible processing styles. When global processing was accessible, individuals in angry (negative, high certainty) states generated more abstract statements about themselves than individuals in either sad (Experiment 1) or fearful (Experiment 2; negative, low certainty) states. When local processing was made accessible, however, the opposite pattern emerged, whereby individuals in angry states generated fewer abstract statements than individuals in sad or fearful states. Together these studies provide new insights into the mechanisms through which discrete emotions influence cognition. In contrast to theories assuming a dedicated link between emotions and processing styles, these results suggest that discrete emotions provide feedback about accessible ways of thinking, and are consistent with recent evidence suggesting that the impact of affect on cognition is highly context-dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Parental Personality and Its Relationship to Socialization of Sadness in Children.

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Race, Eleanor; Brand, Ann E.

The relationship between parental personality traits and how parents socialize their children's emotions is largely unexplored. This study examined the association of personality traits such as Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and emotion traits such as Anxiety and Trait Depression to the strategies parents use to socialize their children's sadness,…

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories.

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Ferré, Pilar; Guasch, Marc; Martínez-García, Natalia; Fraga, Isabel; Hinojosa, José Antonio

2017-06-01

The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approach is much lower. There is a need to fill this gap, considering that discrete emotions have an effect on word processing above and beyond those of valence and arousal. In the present study, we present ratings from 1,380 participants for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. This will be the largest dataset published to date containing ratings for discrete emotions. We also present, for the first time, a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of words into the five emotion categories. This analysis reveals that happiness words are the most consistently related to a single, discrete emotion category. In contrast, there is a tendency for many negative words to belong to more than one discrete emotion. The only exception is disgust words, which overlap least with the other negative emotions. Normative valence and arousal data already exist for all of the words included in this corpus. Thus, the present database will allow researchers to design studies to contrast the predictions of the two most influential theoretical perspectives in this field. These studies will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of emotion on word processing.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task.

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Qiao-Tasserit, Emilie; Garcia Quesada, Maria; Antico, Lia; Bavelier, Daphne; Vuilleumier, Patrik; Pichon, Swann

2017-01-01

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emilie Qiao-Tasserit

Full Text Available Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task

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Garcia Quesada, Maria; Antico, Lia; Bavelier, Daphne; Vuilleumier, Patrik; Pichon, Swann

2017-01-01

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants’ propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions. PMID:28151976

Dissociation of sad facial expressions and autonomic nervous system responding in boys with disruptive behavior disorders

OpenAIRE

Marsh, Penny; Beauchaine, Theodore P.; Williams, Bailey

2007-01-01

Although deficiencies in emotional responding have been linked to externalizing behaviors in children, little is known about how discrete response systems (e.g., expressive, physiological) are coordinated during emotional challenge among these youth. We examined time-linked correspondence of sad facial expressions and autonomic reactivity during an empathy-eliciting task among boys with disruptive behavior disorders (n = 31) and controls (n = 23). For controls, sad facial expressions were ass...

"Cycling around an emotional core of sadness": emotion regulation in a couple after the loss of a child.

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Hooghe, An; Neimeyer, Robert A; Rober, Peter

2012-09-01

In contrast to the traditional view of working through grief by confronting it, recent theories have emphasized an oscillating process of confronting and avoiding the pain of loss. In this qualitative study, we sought a better understanding of this process by conducting a detailed case study of a bereaved couple after the loss of their infant daughter. We employed multiple data collection methods (using interviews and written feedback) and an intensive auditing process in our thematic analysis, with special attention to a recurrent metaphor used by this bereaved couple in describing their personal and relational experience. The findings suggest the presence of a dialectic tension between the need to be close to the deceased child and the need for distance from the pain of the loss, which was evidenced on both individual and relational levels. For this couple, the image of "cycling around an emotional core of sadness" captured their dynamic way of dealing with this dialectic of closeness and distance.

Attention and multisensory integration of emotions in schizophrenia

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Mikhail eZvyagintsev

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The impairment of multisensory integration in schizophrenia is often explained by deficits of attentional selection. Emotion perception, however, does not always depend on attention because affective stimuli can capture attention automatically. In our study, we specify the role of attention in the multisensory perception of emotional stimuli in schizophrenia. We evaluated attention by interference between conflicting auditory and visual information in two multisensory paradigms in patients with schizophrenia and healthy participants. In the first paradigm, interference occurred between physical features of the dynamic auditory and visual stimuli. In the second paradigm, interference occurred between the emotional content of the auditory and visual stimuli, namely fearful and sad emotions. In patients with schizophrenia, the interference effect was observed in both paradigms. In contrast, in healthy participants, the interference occurred in the emotional paradigm only. These findings indicate that the information leakage between different modalities in patients with schizophrenia occurs at the perceptual level, which is intact in healthy participants. However, healthy participants can have problems with the separation of fearful and sad emotions similar to those of patients with schizophrenia.

Feeling sad makes us feel older: Effects of a sad-mood induction on subjective age.

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Dutt, Anne J; Wahl, Hans-Werner

2017-08-01

A mood-induction paradigm was implemented in a sample of 144 adults covering midlife and old age (40-80 years) to investigate associations between mood and subjective age. Sad or neutral mood was induced by texts and music pieces. Subjective age was operationalized as felt age relative to chronological age. Participants receiving the sad-mood induction reported changes toward older felt ages from pre- to postinduction. Participants receiving the neutral-mood induction reported comparable levels of subjective age at pre- and postinduction. Effects were comparable across middle- and older aged participants. Results suggest that sad affective states might dampen subjective age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

It's not what you play, it's how you play it: timbre affects perception of emotion in music.

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Hailstone, Julia C; Omar, Rohani; Henley, Susie M D; Frost, Chris; Kenward, Michael G; Warren, Jason D

2009-11-01

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18-30 years, 24 older adults aged 58-75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.

Affective match: Leader emotions, follower positive affect, and follower performance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Damen, F.; van Knippenberg, B.M.; van Knippenberg, D.

2008-01-01

Leader emotions may play an important role in leadership effectiveness. Extending earlier research on leader emotional displays and leadership effectiveness, we propose that the affective match between follower positive affect (PA) and leaders' emotional displays moderates the effectiveness of

Introduction: Analysing Emotion and Theorising Affect

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peta Tait

2016-08-01

Full Text Available This discussion introduces ideas of emotion and affect for a volume of articles demonstrating the scope of approaches used in their study within the humanities and creative arts. The volume offers multiple perspectives on emotion and affect within 20th-century and 21st-century texts, arts and organisations and their histories. The discussion explains how emotion encompasses the emotions, emotional feeling, sensation and mood and how these can be analysed particularly in relation to literature, art and performance. It briefly summarises concepts of affect theory within recent approaches before introducing the articles.

Comparison of Sadness, Anger, and Fear Facial Expressions When Toddlers Look at Their Mothers

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Buss, Kristin A.; Kiel, Elizabeth J.

2004-01-01

Research suggests that sadness expressions may be more beneficial to children than other emotions when eliciting support from caregivers. It is unclear, however, when children develop the ability to regulate their displays of distress. The current study addressed this question. Distress facial expressions (e.g., fear, anger, and sadness) were…

Emotions during sexual activity: differences between sexually functional and dysfunctional men and women.

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Nobre, Pedro J; Pinto-Gouveia, José

2006-08-01

The present study investigated the differences in emotional response to automatic thoughts presented during sexual activity between sexually functional and dysfunctional men and women. A total of 376 participants (160 women and 120 men without sexual problems and 47 women and 49 men with a DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of sexual dysfunction) completed the Sexual Modes Questionnaire (SMQ male and female versions; P. J. Nobre & J. Pinto-Gouveia, 2000) and measures of sexual functioning: The International Index of Sexual Function (IIEF; R. C. Rosen et al., 1997), and The Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI; R. C. Rosen et al., 2000). The SMQ is a combined measure constituted by three interdependent subscales: Automatic Thought subscale (AT), Emotional Response subscale (ER), and Sexual Response subscale (SR). Emotions were assessed by the ER subscale, where participants endorsed emotional reactions (worry, sadness, disillusion, fear, guilt, shame, anger, hurt, pleasure, satisfaction) to a list of automatic thoughts (AT subscale) that may occur during sexual activity. Results showed that both men and women with sexual dysfunction had significantly less positive emotional reactions to automatic thoughts during sexual activity. Sexually dysfunctional men had significantly more emotions of sadness, disillusion, and fear, and less pleasure and satisfaction, compared to men without sexual problems. Women with sexual dysfunction had significantly less pleasure and satisfaction, and more sadness, disillusion, guilt, and anger. Findings were congruent with recent studies indicating that emotions related to depressed affect (sadness, disillusion, lack of pleasure) as opposed to negative emotions (mostly related to anxiety) were stronger correlates of sexual dysfunction.

Improvement of autobiographic memory recovery by means of sad music in Alzheimer's Disease type dementia.

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Meilán García, Juan José; Iodice, Rosario; Carro, Juan; Sánchez, José Antonio; Palmero, Francisco; Mateos, Ana María

2012-06-01

Autobiographic memory undergoes progressive deterioration during the evolution of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The aim of this study was to analyze mechanisms which facilitate recovery of autobiographic memories. We used a repeatedly employed mechanism, music, with the addition of an emotional factor. Autobiographic memory provoked by a variety of sounds (music which was happy, sad, lacking emotion, ambient noise in a coffee bar and no sound) was analyzed in a sample of 25 patients with AD. Emotional music, especially sad music for remote memories, was found to be the most effective kind for recall of autobiographic experiences. The factor evoking the memory is not the music itself, but rather the emotion associated with it, and is useful for semantic rather than episodic memory.

Mixed emotions across the adult life span in the United States

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Schneider, Stefan; Stone, Arthur A.

2015-01-01

Mixed emotions involve the co-occurrence of positive and negative affect, such that people feel happy and sad at the same time. The purpose of the present study was to investigate age-related differences in the experience of mixed emotions across the adult life span in two nationally representative samples of U.S. residents. Data collected by the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS, n = 3,948) and by the 2010 Wellbeing Module of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS, n = 12,828) were analyzed. In both surveys, respondents (aged 15 years or older) provided a detailed time diary about the preceding day and rated their happiness and sadness for three of the day's episodes. From these reports, three different indices of mixed emotions were derived. Results indicated small, but robust, increases in mixed emotions with age. Linear age increases were consistently evident in both PATS and ATUS, and replicated across the different indices of mixed emotions. There was no significant evidence for curvilinear age trends in either study. Several sociodemographic factors that could plausibly explain age-differences in mixed emotions (e.g., retirement, disability) did not alter the age-effects. The present study adds to the growing literature documenting vital changes in the complexity of emotional experience over the lifespan. PMID:25894487

Affective bias in visual working memory is associated with capacity.

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Xie, Weizhen; Li, Huanhuan; Ying, Xiangyu; Zhu, Shiyou; Fu, Rong; Zou, Yingmin; Cui, Yanyan

2017-11-01

How does the affective nature of task stimuli modulate working memory (WM)? This study investigates whether WM maintains emotional information in a biased manner to meet the motivational principle of approaching positivity and avoiding negativity by retaining more approach-related positive content over avoidance-related negative content. This bias may exist regardless of individual differences in WM functionality, as indexed by WM capacity (overall bias hypothesis). Alternatively, this bias may be contingent on WM capacity (capacity-based hypothesis), in which a better WM system may be more likely to reveal an adaptive bias. In two experiments, participants performed change localisation tasks with emotional and non-emotional stimuli to estimate the number of items that they could retain for each of those stimuli. Although participants did not seem to remember one type of emotional content (e.g. happy faces) better than the other type of emotional content (e.g. sad faces), there was a significant correlation between WM capacity and affective bias. Specifically, participants with higher WM capacity for non-emotional stimuli (colours or line-drawing symbols) tended to maintain more happy faces over sad faces. These findings demonstrated the presence of a "built-in" affective bias in WM as a function of its systematic limitations, favouring the capacity-based hypothesis.

The persuasive power of emotions: Effects of emotional expressions on attitude formation and change.

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Van Kleef, Gerben A; van den Berg, Helma; Heerdink, Marc W

2015-07-01

Despite a long-standing interest in the intrapersonal role of affect in persuasion, the interpersonal effects of emotions on persuasion remain poorly understood-how do one person's emotional expressions shape others' attitudes? Drawing on emotions as social information (EASI) theory (Van Kleef, 2009), we hypothesized that people use the emotional expressions of others to inform their own attitudes, but only when they are sufficiently motivated and able to process those expressions. Five experiments support these ideas. Participants reported more positive attitudes about various topics after seeing a source's sad (rather than happy) expressions when topics were negatively framed (e.g., abandoning bobsleighing from the Olympics). Conversely, participants reported more positive attitudes after seeing happy (rather than sad) expressions when topics were positively framed (e.g., introducing kite surfing at the Olympics). This suggests that participants used the source's emotional expressions as information when forming their own attitudes. Supporting this interpretation, effects were mitigated when participants' information processing was undermined by cognitive load or was chronically low. Moreover, a source's anger expressions engendered negative attitude change when directed at the attitude object and positive change when directed at the recipient's attitude. Effects occurred regardless of whether emotional expressions were manipulated through written words, pictures of facial expressions, film clips containing both facial and vocal emotional expressions, or emoticons. The findings support EASI theory and indicate that emotional expressions are a powerful source of social influence. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Proactive and reactive control depends on emotional valence: a Stroop study with emotional expressions and words.

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Kar, Bhoomika Rastogi; Srinivasan, Narayanan; Nehabala, Yagyima; Nigam, Richa

2018-03-01

We examined proactive and reactive control effects in the context of task-relevant happy, sad, and angry facial expressions on a face-word Stroop task. Participants identified the emotion expressed by a face that contained a congruent or incongruent emotional word (happy/sad/angry). Proactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference (difference between incongruent and congruent trials) as a function of previous trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Reactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction in Stroop interference as a function of current trial emotion and previous trial congruence. Previous trial negative emotions exert greater influence on proactive control than the positive emotion. Sad faces in the previous trial resulted in greater reduction in the Stroop interference for happy faces in the current trial. However, current trial angry faces showed stronger adaptation effects compared to happy faces. Thus, both proactive and reactive control mechanisms are dependent on emotional valence of task-relevant stimuli.

The Pleasure Evoked by Sad Music Is Mediated by Feelings of Being Moved.

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Vuoskoski, Jonna K; Eerola, Tuomas

2017-01-01

Why do we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad? This question has puzzled music psychologists for decades, but the paradox of "pleasurable sadness" remains to be solved. Recent findings from a study investigating the enjoyment of sad films suggest that the positive relationship between felt sadness and enjoyment might be explained by feelings of being moved (Hanich et al., 2014). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether feelings of being moved also mediated the enjoyment of sad music. In Experiment 1, 308 participants listened to five sad music excerpts and rated their liking and felt emotions. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the initial positive relationship between liking and felt sadness ( r = 0.22) was fully mediated by feelings of being moved. Experiment 2 explored the interconnections of perceived sadness, beauty, and movingness in 27 short music excerpts that represented independently varying levels of sadness and beauty. Two multilevel mediation analyses were carried out to test competing hypotheses: (A) that movingness mediates the effect of perceived sadness on liking, or (B) that perceived beauty mediates the effect of sadness on liking. Stronger support was obtained for Hypothesis A. Our findings suggest that - similarly to the enjoyment of sad films - the aesthetic appreciation of sad music is mediated by being moved. We argue that felt sadness may contribute to the enjoyment of sad music by intensifying feelings of being moved.

Distinctive mood induction effects of fear or sadness on anger and aggressive behavior

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Jun eZhan

2015-06-01

Full Text Available A recent study has reported that the successful implementation of cognitive regulation of emotion depends on higher-level cognitive functions, such as top-down control, which may be impaired in stressful situations. This calls for a need of cognition free self-regulatory strategies that do not require top-down control. In contrast to the cognitive regulation of emotion that emphasizes the role of cognition, traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine views the relationship among different types of emotions as promoting or counteracting each other, without the involvement of cognition, which provides an insightful perspective for developing cognition free regulatory strategies. In this study, we examined two hypotheses regarding the modulation of anger and aggressive behavior: sadness counteracts anger or aggressive behavior, whereas fear promotes anger or aggressive behavior. Participants were first provoked by reading the extremely negative feedback on their viewpoints (Study 1 or by watching anger-inducing movie clips (Study 2; then, these angry participants were assigned to three equivalent groups and view sad, fear, or neutral materials respectively to evoke the corresponding emotions. The results found participants yielded a lower level of aggressive behavior when sadness was induced afterward, and a higher level of anger when fear was induced afterward. These results provided evidence supporting the hypothesis of mutual promotion or counteraction relationships among these types of emotion and implied a cognition free approach for regulating anger and aggressive behavior.

Effects of worry on physiological and subjective reactivity to emotional stimuli in generalized anxiety disorder and nonanxious control participants.

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Llera, Sandra J; Newman, Michelle G

2010-10-01

The present study examined the effect of worry versus relaxation and neutral thought activity on both physiological and subjective responding to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Thirty-eight participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and 35 nonanxious control participants were randomly assigned to engage in worry, relaxation, or neutral inductions prior to sequential exposure to each of four emotion-inducing film clips. The clips were designed to elicit fear, sadness, happiness, and calm emotions. Self reported negative and positive affect was assessed following each induction and exposure, and vagal activity was measured throughout. Results indicate that worry (vs. relaxation) led to reduced vagal tone for the GAD group, as well as higher negative affect levels for both groups. Additionally, prior worry resulted in less physiological and subjective responding to the fearful film clip, and reduced negative affect in response to the sad clip. This suggests that worry may facilitate avoidance of processing negative emotions by way of preventing a negative emotional contrast. Implications for the role of worry in emotion avoidance are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

The emotional body and time perception.

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Droit-Volet, Sylvie; Gil, Sandrine

2016-01-01

We examined the effects of emotional bodily expressions on the perception of time. Participants were shown bodily expressions of fear, happiness and sadness in a temporal bisection task featuring different stimulus duration ranges. Stimulus durations were judged to be longer for bodily expressions of fear than for those of sadness, whereas no significant difference was observed between sad and happy postures. In addition, the magnitude of the lengthening effect of fearful versus sad postures increased with duration range. These results suggest that the perception of fearful bodily expressions increases the level of arousal which, in turn, speeds up the internal clock system underlying the representation of time. The effect of bodily expressions on time perception is thus consistent with findings for other highly arousing emotional stimuli, such as emotional facial expressions.

'I ate too much so I must have been sad': Emotions as a confabulated reason for overeating.

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Adriaanse, Marieke A; Prinsen, Sosja; de Witt Huberts, Jessie C; de Ridder, Denise T D; Evers, Catharine

2016-08-01

Emotional eating (i.e., overeating in response to negative affect) is a commonly accepted explanation for eating behaviors that are not in line with personal eating-norms. However, the empirical evidence for a causal link between self-reported emotional eating and overeating is mixed. The present study tested an alternative hypothesis stating that high emotional eating scores are indicative of a susceptibility to use negative affect as a confabulated, post-hoc reason to explain overeating. Female students (N = 46) participated in a 'taste-test' and came back to the lab a day later to receive feedback that they either ate too much (norm-violation condition) or an acceptable amount of food (control condition), whereafter emotional eating was assessed. Negative affect was measured several times throughout the study. In the norm-violation condition, participants with high emotional eating scores retrospectively rated their affect prior to eating as more negative than participants with low emotional eating scores. In the control condition, no effect of emotional score on affect ratings was found. For some individuals emotional eating scores may represent a tendency to retrospectively attribute overeating to negative affect. This could explain the lack of consistent findings for a link between self-reported emotional eating and overeating. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Pleasure Evoked by Sad Music Is Mediated by Feelings of Being Moved

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Vuoskoski, Jonna K.; Eerola, Tuomas

2017-01-01

Why do we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad? This question has puzzled music psychologists for decades, but the paradox of “pleasurable sadness” remains to be solved. Recent findings from a study investigating the enjoyment of sad films suggest that the positive relationship between felt sadness and enjoyment might be explained by feelings of being moved (Hanich et al., 2014). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether feelings of being moved also mediated the enjoyment of sad music. In Experiment 1, 308 participants listened to five sad music excerpts and rated their liking and felt emotions. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the initial positive relationship between liking and felt sadness (r = 0.22) was fully mediated by feelings of being moved. Experiment 2 explored the interconnections of perceived sadness, beauty, and movingness in 27 short music excerpts that represented independently varying levels of sadness and beauty. Two multilevel mediation analyses were carried out to test competing hypotheses: (A) that movingness mediates the effect of perceived sadness on liking, or (B) that perceived beauty mediates the effect of sadness on liking. Stronger support was obtained for Hypothesis A. Our findings suggest that – similarly to the enjoyment of sad films – the aesthetic appreciation of sad music is mediated by being moved. We argue that felt sadness may contribute to the enjoyment of sad music by intensifying feelings of being moved. PMID:28377740

Recognition of Facial Expressions of Different Emotional Intensities in Patients with Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration

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Roy P. C. Kessels

2007-01-01

Full Text Available Behavioural problems are a key feature of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD. Also, FTLD patients show impairments in emotion processing. Specifically, the perception of negative emotional facial expressions is affected. Generally, however, negative emotional expressions are regarded as more difficult to recognize than positive ones, which thus may have been a confounding factor in previous studies. Also, ceiling effects are often present on emotion recognition tasks using full-blown emotional facial expressions. In the present study with FTLD patients, we examined the perception of sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and disgust at different emotional intensities on morphed facial expressions to take task difficulty into account. Results showed that our FTLD patients were specifically impaired at the recognition of the emotion anger. Also, the patients performed worse than the controls on recognition of surprise, but performed at control levels on disgust, happiness, sadness and fear. These findings corroborate and extend previous results showing deficits in emotion perception in FTLD.

A controlled trial of the Litebook light-emitting diode (LED light therapy device for treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD

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Telner John

2007-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Recent research has emphasized that the human circadian rhythm system is differentially sensitive to short wavelength light. Light treatment devices using efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs whose output is relatively concentrated in short wavelengths may enable a more convenient effective therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD. Methods The efficacy of a LED light therapy device in the treatment of SAD was tested in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-center trial. Participants aged 18 to 65 with SAD (DSM-IV major depression with seasonal pattern were seen at Baseline and Randomization visits separated by 1 week, and after 1, 2, 3 and 4 weeks of treatment. Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores (SIGH-SAD were obtained at each visit. Participants with SIGH-SAD of 20 or greater at Baseline and Randomization visits were randomized to active or control treatment: exposure to the Litebook LED treatment device (The Litebook Company Ltd., Alberta, Canada which delivers 1,350 lux white light (with spectral emission peaks at 464 nm and 564 nm at a distance of 20 inches or to an inactivated negative ion generator at a distance of 20 inches, for 30 minutes a day upon awakening and prior to 8 A.M. Results Of the 26 participants randomized, 23 completed the trial. Mean group SIGH-SAD scores did not differ significantly at randomization. At trial end, the proportions of participants in remission (SIGH-SAD less than 9 were significantly greater (Fisher's exact test, and SIGH-SAD scores, as percent individual score at randomization, were significantly lower (t-test, with active treatment than with control, both in an intent-to-treat analysis and an observed cases analysis. A longitudinal repeated measures ANOVA analysis of SIGH-SAD scores also indicated a significant interaction of time and treatment, showing superiority of the Litebook over the placebo condition. Conclusion The results of this pilot study support

Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) at Behavioural and Brain Metabolic Level.

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Aho-Özhan, Helena E A; Keller, Jürgen; Heimrath, Johanna; Uttner, Ingo; Kassubek, Jan; Birbaumer, Niels; Ludolph, Albert C; Lulé, Dorothée

2016-01-01

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) primarily impairs motor abilities but also affects cognition and emotional processing. We hypothesise that subjective ratings of emotional stimuli depicting social interactions and facial expressions is changed in ALS. It was found that recognition of negative emotions and ability to mentalize other's intentions is reduced. Processing of emotions in faces was investigated. A behavioural test of Ekman faces expressing six basic emotions was presented to 30 ALS patients and 29 age-, gender and education matched healthy controls. Additionally, a subgroup of 15 ALS patients that were able to lie supine in the scanner and 14 matched healthy controls viewed the Ekman faces during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Affective state and a number of daily social contacts were measured. ALS patients recognized disgust and fear less accurately than healthy controls. In fMRI, reduced brain activity was seen in areas involved in processing of negative emotions replicating our previous results. During processing of sad faces, increased brain activity was seen in areas associated with social emotions in right inferior frontal gyrus and reduced activity in hippocampus bilaterally. No differences in brain activity were seen for any of the other emotional expressions. Inferior frontal gyrus activity for sad faces was associated with increased amount of social contacts of ALS patients. ALS patients showed decreased brain and behavioural responses in processing of disgust and fear and an altered brain response pattern for sadness. The negative consequences of neurodegenerative processes in the course of ALS might be counteracted by positive emotional activity and positive social interactions.

The emotional impact of national music on young and older adults differing in posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms.

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Bensimon, Moshe; Bodner, Ehud; Shrira, Amit

2017-10-01

In spite of previous evidence regarding the function of national songs as a contextual stimulus, their effect on the emotional state of older adults living with different levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms has not be been examined. Following the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, we examined the emotional effects of listening to happy national songs (songs of Independence Day) and sad national songs (Memorial Day songs) on young (N = 144, mean age = 29.4) and older adults (N = 132, mean age = 68.5). Respondents were exposed to happy or sad national songs, and completed measures of exposure to missile attacks, related PTSD symptoms, and positive and negative emotions. Sad national songs were related to higher negative affect among young adults who were lower on PTSD symptoms, but not among their older counterparts. In contrast, sad national songs were related to higher negative affect among older adults who were higher on PTSD symptoms, but not among their young counterparts. These findings support the strength and vulnerability model, as they demonstrate that relative to young adults, older adults are generally more capable to withstand negative stimuli, yet are more sensitive to negative stimuli when they suffer from chronic vulnerability, as in the case of higher level of PTSD symptoms.

Gender differences in emotion experience perception under different facial muscle manipulations.

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Wang, Yufeng; Zhang, Dongjun; Zou, Feng; Li, Hao; Luo, Yanyan; Zhang, Meng; Liu, Yijun

2016-04-01

According to embodied emotion theory, facial manipulations should modulate and initiate particular emotions. However, whether there are gender differences in emotion experience perception under different facial muscle manipulations is not clear. Therefore, we conducted two behavioral experiments to examine gender differences in emotional perception in response to facial expressions (sad, neutral, and happy) under three conditions: (1) holding a pen using only the teeth (HPT), which facilitates the muscles typically associated with smiling; (2) holding a pen using only the lips (HPL), which inhibits the muscles typically associated with smiling; and (3) a control condition--hold no pen (HNP). We found that HPT made the emotional feelings more positive, and that the change degree of female's ratings of sad facial expressions between conditions (HPL to HPT) was larger than males'. These results suggested cognition can be affected by the interaction of the stimuli and the body, especially the female. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Selective attention to emotional cues and emotion recognition in healthy subjects: the role of mineralocorticoid receptor stimulation.

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Schultebraucks, Katharina; Deuter, Christian E; Duesenberg, Moritz; Schulze, Lars; Hellmann-Regen, Julian; Domke, Antonia; Lockenvitz, Lisa; Kuehl, Linn K; Otte, Christian; Wingenfeld, Katja

2016-09-01

Selective attention toward emotional cues and emotion recognition of facial expressions are important aspects of social cognition. Stress modulates social cognition through cortisol, which acts on glucocorticoid (GR) and mineralocorticoid receptors (MR) in the brain. We examined the role of MR activation on attentional bias toward emotional cues and on emotion recognition. We included 40 healthy young women and 40 healthy young men (mean age 23.9 ± 3.3), who either received 0.4 mg of the MR agonist fludrocortisone or placebo. A dot-probe paradigm was used to test for attentional biases toward emotional cues (happy and sad faces). Moreover, we used a facial emotion recognition task to investigate the ability to recognize emotional valence (anger and sadness) from facial expression in four graded categories of emotional intensity (20, 30, 40, and 80 %). In the emotional dot-probe task, we found a main effect of treatment and a treatment × valence interaction. Post hoc analyses revealed an attentional bias away from sad faces after placebo intake and a shift in selective attention toward sad faces compared to placebo. We found no attentional bias toward happy faces after fludrocortisone or placebo intake. In the facial emotion recognition task, there was no main effect of treatment. MR stimulation seems to be important in modulating quick, automatic emotional processing, i.e., a shift in selective attention toward negative emotional cues. Our results confirm and extend previous findings of MR function. However, we did not find an effect of MR stimulation on emotion recognition.

The effective comparison between emotion-focused cognitive behavioral group therapy and cognitive behavioral group therapy in children with separation anxiety disorder

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Afrooz Afshari

2014-01-01

in posttest. None of treatments affected on anger and sadness inhibition and positive cognitive coping in separation anxious children. Conclusion: ECBT, in comparison with CBT; effectively improved emotion regulation strategies in children with separation anxiety.

Children's understanding of facial expression of emotion: II. Drawing of emotion-faces.

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Missaghi-Lakshman, M; Whissell, C

1991-06-01

67 children from Grades 2, 4, and 7 drew faces representing the emotional expressions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, happiness, and sadness. The children themselves and 29 adults later decoded the drawings in an emotion-recognition task. Children were the more accurate decoders, and their accuracy and the accuracy of adults increased significantly for judgments of 7th-grade drawings. The emotions happy and sad were most accurately decoded. There were no significant differences associated with sex. In their drawings, children utilized a symbol system that seems to be based on a highlighting or exaggeration of features of the innately governed facial expression of emotion.

ERP evidence for own-age effects on late stages of processing sad faces.

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Fölster, Mara; Werheid, Katja

2016-08-01

Faces convey important information on interaction partners, such as their emotional state and age. Faces of the same age are, according to recent research, preferentially processed. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the neural processes underlying this own-age effect are influenced by the emotional expression of the face, and to explore possible explanations such as the frequency or quality of contact to own-age versus other-age groups. Event-related potentials were recorded while 19 younger (18-30 years) and 19 older (64-86 years) observers watched younger and older sad and happy faces. Sad but not happy faces elicited higher late positive potential amplitudes for own-age than for other-age faces. This own-age effect was significant for older, but not for younger, observers, and correlated with the quality of contact with the own-age versus the other-age group. This pattern suggests that sad own-age faces are motivationally more relevant.

Visual Scanning Patterns and Executive Function in Relation to Facial Emotion Recognition in Aging

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Circelli, Karishma S.; Clark, Uraina S.; Cronin-Golomb, Alice

2012-01-01

Objective The ability to perceive facial emotion varies with age. Relative to younger adults (YA), older adults (OA) are less accurate at identifying fear, anger, and sadness, and more accurate at identifying disgust. Because different emotions are conveyed by different parts of the face, changes in visual scanning patterns may account for age-related variability. We investigated the relation between scanning patterns and recognition of facial emotions. Additionally, as frontal-lobe changes with age may affect scanning patterns and emotion recognition, we examined correlations between scanning parameters and performance on executive function tests. Methods We recorded eye movements from 16 OA (mean age 68.9) and 16 YA (mean age 19.2) while they categorized facial expressions and non-face control images (landscapes), and administered standard tests of executive function. Results OA were less accurate than YA at identifying fear (precognition of sad expressions and with scanning patterns for fearful, sad, and surprised expressions. Conclusion We report significant age-related differences in visual scanning that are specific to faces. The observed relation between scanning patterns and executive function supports the hypothesis that frontal-lobe changes with age may underlie some changes in emotion recognition. PMID:22616800

Recalling happy memories in remitted depression: a neuroimaging investigation of the repair of sad mood.

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Foland-Ross, Lara C; Cooney, Rebecca E; Joormann, Jutta; Henry, Melissa L; Gotlib, Ian H

2014-06-01

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a recurrent mood disorder. The high rate of recurrence of MDD suggests the presence of stable vulnerability factors that place individuals with a history of major depression at an increased risk for the onset of another episode. Previous research has linked the remitted state, and therefore increased vulnerability for depressive relapse, with difficulties in the use of pleasant autobiographical memories to repair sad mood. In the present study, we examined the neural correlates of these difficulties. Groups of 16 currently euthymic, remitted depressed individuals and 16 healthy (control) women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during sad mood induction and during recovery from a sad mood state through recall of mood-incongruent positive autobiographical memories. Sad mood was induced in participants by using film clips; participants then recalled positive autobiographical memories, a procedure previously shown to repair negative affect. During both the sad mood induction and automatic mood regulation, control participants exhibited activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) and cuneus; in contrast, remitted participants exhibited a decrease in activation in these regions. Furthermore, exploratory analyses revealed that reduced activation levels during mood regulation predicted a worsening of depressive symptoms at a 20-month follow-up assessment. These findings highlight a dynamic role of the vlPFC and cuneus in the experience and modulation of emotional states and suggest that functional anomalies of these brain regions are associated with a history of, and vulnerability to, depression.

Sadness and Depression

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... Videos for Educators Search English Español Sadness and Depression KidsHealth / For Kids / Sadness and Depression Print en ... big difference in your life. When Sadness Is Depression When you're in a sad mood, it ...

Human Empathy, Personality and Experience Affect the Emotion Ratings of Dog and Human Facial Expressions

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Kujala, Miiamaaria V.; Somppi, Sanni; Jokela, Markus; Vainio, Outi; Parkkonen, Lauri

2017-01-01

Facial expressions are important for humans in communicating emotions to the conspecifics and enhancing interpersonal understanding. Many muscles producing facial expressions in humans are also found in domestic dogs, but little is known about how humans perceive dog facial expressions, and which psychological factors influence people’s perceptions. Here, we asked 34 observers to rate the valence, arousal, and the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear, and anger/aggressiveness) from images of human and dog faces with Pleasant, Neutral and Threatening expressions. We investigated how the subjects’ personality (the Big Five Inventory), empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and experience of dog behavior affect the ratings of dog and human faces. Ratings of both species followed similar general patterns: human subjects classified dog facial expressions from pleasant to threatening very similarly to human facial expressions. Subjects with higher emotional empathy evaluated Threatening faces of both species as more negative in valence and higher in anger/aggressiveness. More empathetic subjects also rated the happiness of Pleasant humans but not dogs higher, and they were quicker in their valence judgments of Pleasant human, Threatening human and Threatening dog faces. Experience with dogs correlated positively with ratings of Pleasant and Neutral dog faces. Personality also had a minor effect on the ratings of Pleasant and Neutral faces in both species. The results imply that humans perceive human and dog facial expression in a similar manner, and the perception of both species is influenced by psychological factors of the evaluators. Especially empathy affects both the speed and intensity of rating dogs’ emotional facial expressions. PMID:28114335

Human Empathy, Personality and Experience Affect the Emotion Ratings of Dog and Human Facial Expressions.

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Miiamaaria V Kujala

Full Text Available Facial expressions are important for humans in communicating emotions to the conspecifics and enhancing interpersonal understanding. Many muscles producing facial expressions in humans are also found in domestic dogs, but little is known about how humans perceive dog facial expressions, and which psychological factors influence people's perceptions. Here, we asked 34 observers to rate the valence, arousal, and the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear, and anger/aggressiveness from images of human and dog faces with Pleasant, Neutral and Threatening expressions. We investigated how the subjects' personality (the Big Five Inventory, empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index and experience of dog behavior affect the ratings of dog and human faces. Ratings of both species followed similar general patterns: human subjects classified dog facial expressions from pleasant to threatening very similarly to human facial expressions. Subjects with higher emotional empathy evaluated Threatening faces of both species as more negative in valence and higher in anger/aggressiveness. More empathetic subjects also rated the happiness of Pleasant humans but not dogs higher, and they were quicker in their valence judgments of Pleasant human, Threatening human and Threatening dog faces. Experience with dogs correlated positively with ratings of Pleasant and Neutral dog faces. Personality also had a minor effect on the ratings of Pleasant and Neutral faces in both species. The results imply that humans perceive human and dog facial expression in a similar manner, and the perception of both species is influenced by psychological factors of the evaluators. Especially empathy affects both the speed and intensity of rating dogs' emotional facial expressions.

Brief report Effects of spinal cord injuries on the subjective component of emotions.

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Cobos, Pilar; Sánchez, María; Pérez, Nieves; Vila, Jaime

2004-02-01

Responses to a structured interview by 19 patients with spinal cord injuries (SCI) (7 women and 12 men) concerning their past (pre-injury) and present emotions were analysed and compared with responses by 19 SCI-free controls matched for sex, age, and education. In addition, subjects assessed the valence and arousal of 10 pleasant, 10 neutral, and 10 unpleasant pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System. The results indicate that there is no decrease in emotional experience among individuals with SCI compared with those without. For all the emotional scales (joy, love, sentimentalism, positive emotions as a whole, fear, anger, sadness, and negative emotions as a whole) the SCI group always showed either no change or an increase; this increase was significantly higher in SCI than in control subjects for sadness. No differences were observed between the two groups in the subjective assessment of the pictures. The implications of the results for the James versus Cannon controversy on the theory of emotions are discussed.

Affective privilege: Asymmetric interference by emotional distracters

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Crystal eReeck

2011-09-01

Full Text Available Numerous theories posit that affectively salient stimuli are privileged in their capacity to capture attention and disrupt ongoing cognition. Two underlying assumptions in this theoretical position are that the potency of affective stimuli transcends task boundaries (i.e., emotional distracters do not have to belong to a current task-set to disrupt processing and that there is an asymmetry between emotional and cognitive processing (i.e., emotional distracters disrupt cognitive processing, but not vice versa. These assumptions have remained largely untested, as common experimental probes of emotion-cognition interaction rarely manipulate task-relevance and only examine one side of the presumed asymmetry of interference. To test these propositions directly, a face-word Stroop protocol was adapted to independently manipulate (a the congruency between target and distracter stimulus features, (b the affective salience of distracter features, and (c the task-relevance of emotional compared to non-emotional target features. A three-way interaction revealed interdependent effects of distracter relevance, congruence, and affective salience. Compared to task-irrelevant distracters, task-relevant congruent distracters facilitated performance and task-relevant incongruent distracters impaired performance, but the latter effect depended on the nature of the target feature and task. Specifically, task-irrelevant emotional distracters resulted in equivalent performance costs as task-relevant non-emotional distracters, whereas task-irrelevant non-emotional distracters did not produce performance costs comparable to those generated by task-relevant emotional distracters. These results document asymmetric cross-task interference effects for affectively salient stimuli, supporting the notion of affective prioritization in human information processing.

Risk, Affect and Emotion

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Jens O. Zinn

2006-01-01

Full Text Available For a long time theorising has underestimated the importance of affect and emotion in decision making and the management of risk and uncertainty. In relatively one-sided interpretations emotions were often interpreted as threats for rational decision making, and could be triggered by uncertainties, which would go along with social change. Recent interdisciplinary research has shown the importance to acknowledge the more complex link between reasoning and emotions. The article outlines different perspectives on emotion in risk research of economics, psychology and sociology and argues for further research. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0601293

Emotion-prints: interaction-driven emotion visualization on multi-touch interfaces

Science.gov (United States)

Cernea, Daniel; Weber, Christopher; Ebert, Achim; Kerren, Andreas

2015-01-01

Emotions are one of the unique aspects of human nature, and sadly at the same time one of the elements that our technological world is failing to capture and consider due to their subtlety and inherent complexity. But with the current dawn of new technologies that enable the interpretation of emotional states based on techniques involving facial expressions, speech and intonation, electrodermal response (EDS) and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), we are finally able to access real-time user emotions in various system interfaces. In this paper we introduce emotion-prints, an approach for visualizing user emotional valence and arousal in the context of multi-touch systems. Our goal is to offer a standardized technique for representing user affective states in the moment when and at the location where the interaction occurs in order to increase affective self-awareness, support awareness in collaborative and competitive scenarios, and offer a framework for aiding the evaluation of touch applications through emotion visualization. We show that emotion-prints are not only independent of the shape of the graphical objects on the touch display, but also that they can be applied regardless of the acquisition technique used for detecting and interpreting user emotions. Moreover, our representation can encode any affective information that can be decomposed or reduced to Russell's two-dimensional space of valence and arousal. Our approach is enforced by a BCI-based user study and a follow-up discussion of advantages and limitations.

The effects of tempo and familiarity on children's affective interpretation of music.

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Mote, Jasmine

2011-06-01

When and how does one learn to associate emotion with music? This study attempted to address this issue by examining whether preschool children use tempo as a cue in determining whether a song is happy or sad. Instrumental versions of children's songs were played at different tempos to adults and children ages 3 to 5 years. Familiar and unfamiliar songs were used to examine whether familiarity affected children's identification of emotion in music. The results indicated that adults, 4 year olds and 5 year olds rated fast songs as significantly happier than slow songs. However, 3 year olds failed to rate fast songs differently than slow songs at above-chance levels. Familiarity did not significantly affect children's identification of happiness and sadness in music.

An investigation on the effect of emotional management problems on children's anxiety

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Afrooz Afshari

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Today’s research on emotion regulation reveals its importance on many mental and physical heath related issues. One of the problems to deregulation of emotions is anxiety disorders subject. The aim of this research is to identify the relationship between emotional management problems including emotional inhibition, emotional deregulation and emotional coping on children’s anxiety symptoms, where it includes separation anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder, school phobia and generalized anxiety symptoms. The sample was consisted of 307 primary students including boy and girl aged between 9-13 years old in city of Isfahan selected by simple random sampling. The instruments were Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED, child Sadness Management Scale (CSMS and child Anger Management Scale (CAMS. The results shows that problems of children in management of anger and sadness consist of anger and sadness inhibition; anger and sadness deregulation predicts anxiety symptoms in children (p<0.0001. However, emotional coping could not predict children's anxiety symptoms, significantly. In addition, deregulation and inhibition of sadness and anger predicts anxiety in children.

Emotion Eliciting in Affective Design

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lai, Yoke Chin

2014-01-01

A successful product needs the designer’s conceptual model congruent with the user’s mental model. The fundamental affective design principle also applies to assistive product design. Eliciting effectively the user’s mental model has been a big challenge for most novice designers. This paper outl...... with 3D digital prototype as emotion stimulus. To form a closed loop reflective model, the emotion response from the user is assessed with an emotion assessment tool. Emotion ontology is established to form the backbone of the emotion assessment tool....

Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion.

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Russell, James A

2003-01-01

At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.

Persistent pseudobulbar affect secondary to acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

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Zhendong Li

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Pseudobulbar affect (PBA is a common complication of central nervous system diseases such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, and other neurological diseases, but it remains under-recognized and under-treated in the clinic. PBA caused by acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM has rarely been reported. Here, we report a 30-year-old Chinese woman who has experienced PBA from ADEM for 7 years. The patient's principal manifestations were extreme emotions or tears when she saw, heard, or spoke about sad news or other sad things; the durations of these unmanageable emotions were often less than 30 sec, and they occurred at frequencies that ranged from one to several times a day. Occasionally, she laughed uncontrollably while people were talking despite a lack of funny or sad stimuli in the conversation or the surrounding environment. Thus, her social functioning was impaired. This case indicates that the long-term PBA can occur secondarily to ADEM, and this possibility should be considered clinically to ensure timely identification and treatment.

Emotion Regulation through Movement: Unique Sets of Movement Characteristics are Associated with and Enhance Basic Emotions.

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Shafir, Tal; Tsachor, Rachelle P; Welch, Kathleen B

2015-01-01

We have recently demonstrated that motor execution, observation, and imagery of movements expressing certain emotions can enhance corresponding affective states and therefore could be used for emotion regulation. But which specific movement(s) should one use in order to enhance each emotion? This study aimed to identify, using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), the Laban motor elements (motor characteristics) that characterize movements whose execution enhances each of the basic emotions: anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. LMA provides a system of symbols describing its motor elements, which gives a written instruction (motif) for the execution of a movement or movement-sequence over time. Six senior LMA experts analyzed a validated set of video clips showing whole body dynamic expressions of anger, fear, happiness and sadness, and identified the motor elements that were common to (appeared in) all clips expressing the same emotion. For each emotion, we created motifs of different combinations of the motor elements common to all clips of the same emotion. Eighty subjects from around the world read and moved those motifs, to identify the emotion evoked when moving each motif and to rate the intensity of the evoked emotion. All subjects together moved and rated 1241 motifs, which were produced from 29 different motor elements. Using logistic regression, we found a set of motor elements associated with each emotion which, when moved, predicted the feeling of that emotion. Each emotion was predicted by a unique set of motor elements and each motor element predicted only one emotion. Knowledge of which specific motor elements enhance specific emotions can enable emotional self-regulation through adding some desired motor qualities to one's personal everyday movements (rather than mimicking others' specific movements) and through decreasing motor behaviors which include elements that enhance negative emotions.

Emotion regulation through movement: Unique sets of movement characteristics are associated with and enhance basic emotions

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Tal eShafir

2016-01-01

Full Text Available We have recently demonstrated that motor execution, observation and imagery of movements expressing certain emotions can enhance corresponding affective states and therefore could be used for emotion regulation. But which specific movement(s should one use in order to enhance each emotion? This study aimed to identify, using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA, the Laban motor elements (motor characteristics that characterize movements whose execution enhances each of the basic emotions: anger, fear happiness, and sadness. LMA provides a system of symbols describing its motor elements, which gives a written instruction (motif for the execution of a movement or movement-sequence over time. Six senior LMA experts analyzed a validated set of video clips showing whole body dynamic expressions of anger, fear, happiness and sadness, and identified the motor elements that were common to (appeared in all clips expressing the same emotion. For each emotion, we created motifs of different combinations of the motor elements common to all clips of the same emotion. Eighty subjects from around the world read and moved those motifs, to identify the emotion evoked when moving each motif and to rate the intensity of the evoked emotion. All subjects together moved and rated 1241 motifs, which were produced from 29 different motor elements. Using logistic regression, we found a set of motor elements associated with each emotion which, when moved, predicted the feeling of that emotion. Each emotion was predicted by a unique set of motor elements and each motor element predicted only one emotion. Knowledge of which specific motor elements enhance specific emotions can enable emotional self-regulation through adding some desired motor qualities to one’s personal everyday movements (rather than mimicking others’ specific movements and through decreasing motor behaviors which include elements that enhance negative emotions.

Discrete Emotion Effects on Lexical Decision Response Times

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Briesemeister, Benny B.; Kuchinke, Lars; Jacobs, Arthur M.

2011-01-01

Our knowledge about affective processes, especially concerning effects on cognitive demands like word processing, is increasing steadily. Several studies consistently document valence and arousal effects, and although there is some debate on possible interactions and different notions of valence, broad agreement on a two dimensional model of affective space has been achieved. Alternative models like the discrete emotion theory have received little interest in word recognition research so far. Using backward elimination and multiple regression analyses, we show that five discrete emotions (i.e., happiness, disgust, fear, anger and sadness) explain as much variance as two published dimensional models assuming continuous or categorical valence, with the variables happiness, disgust and fear significantly contributing to this account. Moreover, these effects even persist in an experiment with discrete emotion conditions when the stimuli are controlled for emotional valence and arousal levels. We interpret this result as evidence for discrete emotion effects in visual word recognition that cannot be explained by the two dimensional affective space account. PMID:21887307

Discrete emotion effects on lexical decision response times.

Science.gov (United States)

Briesemeister, Benny B; Kuchinke, Lars; Jacobs, Arthur M

2011-01-01

Our knowledge about affective processes, especially concerning effects on cognitive demands like word processing, is increasing steadily. Several studies consistently document valence and arousal effects, and although there is some debate on possible interactions and different notions of valence, broad agreement on a two dimensional model of affective space has been achieved. Alternative models like the discrete emotion theory have received little interest in word recognition research so far. Using backward elimination and multiple regression analyses, we show that five discrete emotions (i.e., happiness, disgust, fear, anger and sadness) explain as much variance as two published dimensional models assuming continuous or categorical valence, with the variables happiness, disgust and fear significantly contributing to this account. Moreover, these effects even persist in an experiment with discrete emotion conditions when the stimuli are controlled for emotional valence and arousal levels. We interpret this result as evidence for discrete emotion effects in visual word recognition that cannot be explained by the two dimensional affective space account.

Discrete emotion effects on lexical decision response times.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Benny B Briesemeister

Full Text Available Our knowledge about affective processes, especially concerning effects on cognitive demands like word processing, is increasing steadily. Several studies consistently document valence and arousal effects, and although there is some debate on possible interactions and different notions of valence, broad agreement on a two dimensional model of affective space has been achieved. Alternative models like the discrete emotion theory have received little interest in word recognition research so far. Using backward elimination and multiple regression analyses, we show that five discrete emotions (i.e., happiness, disgust, fear, anger and sadness explain as much variance as two published dimensional models assuming continuous or categorical valence, with the variables happiness, disgust and fear significantly contributing to this account. Moreover, these effects even persist in an experiment with discrete emotion conditions when the stimuli are controlled for emotional valence and arousal levels. We interpret this result as evidence for discrete emotion effects in visual word recognition that cannot be explained by the two dimensional affective space account.

Perception of emotion in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer disease.

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Lavenu, I; Pasquier, F; Lebert, F; Petit, H; Van der Linden, M

1999-01-01

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is the second cause of degenerative dementia. Behavioral changes occur before the cognitive decline and remain the major feature. A poor perception of emotion could account for some behavioral symptoms. The aim of this study was to assess the perception of emotion in patients with FTD and to compare it with that of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD). Fifty subjects performed the tests: 20 patients with probable AD, 18 patients with FTD, and 12 matched controls. The two patient groups did not differ in age, sex, severity of dementia, duration of the disease, and language tests. Subjects had to recognize and point out the name of one of seven basic emotions (anger, disgust, happiness, fear, sadness, surprise, and contempt) on a set of 28 faces presented on slides. The three groups were equally able to distinguish a face displaying affect from one not displaying affect. Naming of emotion was worse in patients with FTD than in patients with AD (correct answers 46% vs. 62%; p = 0.0006) who did not differ significantly from controls (72%). Anger, sadness, and disgust were less recognized in FTD than in AD patients who did not differ from controls, whereas fear and contempt were poorly recognized in both groups of patients compared with controls. These findings argue for different neural substrates underlying the recognition of various basic emotions. Behavioral disorders in FTD may be partly due to an impaired interpretation of the emotional environment.

The affective structure of supportive parenting: depressive symptoms, immediate emotions, and child-oriented motivation.

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Dix, Theodore; Gershoff, Elizabeth T; Meunier, Leah N; Miller, Pamela C

2004-11-01

This study investigated the maternal concerns and emotions that may regulate one form of sensitive parenting, support for children's immediate desires or intentions. While reviewing a videotape of interactions with their 1-year-olds, mothers who varied on depressive symptoms reported concerns and emotions they had during the interaction. Emotions reflected outcomes either to children (child-oriented concerns) or to mothers themselves (parent-oriented concerns). Child-oriented concerns were associated with fewer negative emotions and more supportive behavior. Supportive parenting was high among mothers who experienced high joy and worry and low anger, sadness, and guilt. However, relations depended on whether emotions were child or parent oriented: Supportive behavior occurred more when emotions were child oriented. In addition, as depressive symptoms increased, mothers reported fewer child-oriented concerns, fewer child-oriented positive emotions, and more parent-oriented negative emotions. They also displayed less supportive behavior. Findings suggest that support for children's immediate intentions may be regulated by parents' concerns, immediate emotions, and depressive symptoms. (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved

Music and emotions: from enchantment to entrainment.

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Vuilleumier, Patrik; Trost, Wiebke

2015-03-01

Producing and perceiving music engage a wide range of sensorimotor, cognitive, and emotional processes. Emotions are a central feature of the enjoyment of music, with a large variety of affective states consistently reported by people while listening to music. However, besides joy or sadness, music often elicits feelings of wonder, nostalgia, or tenderness, which do not correspond to emotion categories typically studied in neuroscience and whose neural substrates remain largely unknown. Here we review the similarities and differences in the neural substrates underlying these "complex" music-evoked emotions relative to other more "basic" emotional experiences. We suggest that these emotions emerge through a combination of activation in emotional and motivational brain systems (e.g., including reward pathways) that confer its valence to music, with activation in several other areas outside emotional systems, including motor, attention, or memory-related regions. We then discuss the neural substrates underlying the entrainment of cognitive and motor processes by music and their relation to affective experience. These effects have important implications for the potential therapeutic use of music in neurological or psychiatric diseases, particularly those associated with motor, attention, or affective disturbances. © 2015 New York Academy of Sciences.

Effects of anger and sadness on attentional patterns in decision making: an eye-tracking study.

Science.gov (United States)

Xing, Cai

2014-02-01

Past research examining the effect of anger and sadness on decision making has associated anger with a relatively more heuristic decision-making approach. However, it is unclear whether angry and sad individuals differ while attending to decision-relevant information. An eye-tracking experiment (N=87) was conducted to examine the role of attention in links between emotion and decision making. Angry individuals looked more and earlier toward heuristic cues while making decisions, whereas sad individuals did not show such bias. Implications for designing persuasive messages and studying motivated visual processing were discussed.

The neural mechanisms of affect infusion in social economic decision-making: a mediating role of the anterior insula.

Science.gov (United States)

Harlé, Katia M; Chang, Luke J; van 't Wout, Mascha; Sanfey, Alan G

2012-05-15

Though emotions have been shown to have sometimes dramatic effects on decision-making, the neural mechanisms mediating these biases are relatively unexplored. Here, we investigated how incidental affect (i.e. emotional states unrelated to the decision at hand) may influence decisions, and how these biases are implemented in the brain. Nineteen adult participants made decisions which involved accepting or rejecting monetary offers from others in an Ultimatum Game while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Prior to each set of decisions, participants watched a short video clip aimed at inducing either a sad or neutral emotional state. Results demonstrated that, as expected, sad participants rejected more unfair offers than those in the neutral condition. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that receiving unfair offers while in a sad mood elicited activity in brain areas related to aversive emotional states and somatosensory integration (anterior insula) and to cognitive conflict (anterior cingulate cortex). Sad participants also showed a diminished sensitivity in neural regions associated with reward processing (ventral striatum). Importantly, insular activation uniquely mediated the relationship between sadness and decision bias. This study is the first to reveal how subtle mood states can be integrated at the neural level to influence decision-making. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotional Communication in Finger Braille

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Yasuhiro Matsuda

2010-01-01

Full Text Available We describe analyses of the features of emotions (neutral, joy, sadness, and anger expressed by Finger Braille interpreters and subsequently examine the effectiveness of emotional expression and emotional communication between people unskilled in Finger Braille. The goal is to develop a Finger Braille system to teach emotional expression and a system to recognize emotion. The results indicate the following features of emotional expression by interpreters. The durations of the code of joy were significantly shorter than the durations of the other emotions, the durations of the code of sadness were significantly longer, and the finger loads of anger were significantly larger. The features of emotional expression by unskilled subjects were very similar to those of the interpreters, and the coincidence ratio of emotional communication was 75.1%. Therefore, it was confirmed that people unskilled in Finger Braille can express and communicate emotions using this communication medium.

Emotions, affects and the production of social life.

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Fox, Nick J

2015-06-01

While many aspects of social life possess an emotional component, sociology needs to explore explicitly the part emotions play in producing the social world and human history. This paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases upon the experience of feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of 'affect' (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. It establishes a materialist sociology of affects that acknowledges emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalized affective flow that produces bodies and the social world. From this perspective, emotions are not a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. This enhances sociological understanding of the part emotions play in shaping actions and capacities in many settings of sociological concern. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015.

The effects of DAT1 genotype on fMRI activation in an emotional go/no-go task.

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Brown, Brenna K; Murrell, Jill; Karne, Harish; Anand, Amit

2017-02-01

Dopaminergic brain circuits participate in emotional processing and impulsivity. The dopamine transporter (DAT) modulates dopamine reuptake. A variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) in the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1) affects DAT expression. The influence of DAT1 genotype on neural activation during emotional processing and impulse inhibition has not been examined. Forty-two healthy subjects were classified as 9DAT (n = 17) or 10DAT (n = 25) based on DAT1 genotype (9DAT = 9R/9R and 9R/10R; 10DAT = 10R/10R). Subjects underwent fMRI during non-emotional and emotional go/no-go tasks. Subjects were instructed to inhibit responses to letters, happy faces, or sad faces in separate blocks. Accuracy and reaction time did not differ between groups. Within group results showed activation in regions previously implicated in emotional processing and response inhibition. Between groups results showed increased activation in 9DAT individuals during inhibition. During letter inhibition, 9DAT individuals exhibited greater activation in right inferior parietal regions. During sad inhibition, 9DAT Individuals exhibited greater activation in frontal, posterior cingulate, precuneus, right cerebellar, left paracentral, and right occipital brain regions. The interaction between DAT genotype and response type in sad versus letter stimuli showed increased activation in 9DAT individuals during sad no-go responses in the anterior cingulate cortex, extending into frontal-orbital regions. 9DAT individuals have greater activation than 10DAT individuals during neutral and sad inhibition, showing that genotypic variation influencing basal dopamine levels can alter the neural basis of emotional processing and response inhibition. This may indicate that 9R carriers exert more effort to overcome increased basal dopamine activation when inhibiting responses in emotional contexts.

Speech-based emotion detection in a resource-scarce environment

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Martirosian, O

2007-11-01

Full Text Available , happiness and frustration; passive emotion encompasses sadness and dis- appointment, and neutral encompasses speech with a negligible amount of emotional content. Because a study on the expression of emotion in speech has not been done in the South... seconds long and the segments labelled with the dominant emotion of the speech contained in them. The fine emotional labels used were angry, frustrated, happy, friendly, neutral, sad and depressed. These fine labels were combined into three broad...

Mass-induced instability of SAdS black hole in Einstein-Ricci cubic gravity

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Myung, Yun Soo

2018-05-01

We perform the stability analysis of Schwarzschild-AdS (SAdS) black hole in the Einstein-Ricci cubic gravity. It shows that the Ricci tensor perturbations exhibit unstable modes for small black holes. We call this the mass-induced instability of SAdS black hole because the instability of small black holes arises from the massiveness in the linearized Einstein-Ricci cubic gravity, but not a feature of higher-order derivative theory giving ghost states. Also, we point out that the correlated stability conjecture holds for the SAdS black hole by computing the Wald entropy of SAdS black hole in Einstein-Ricci cubic gravity.

Prefrontal mediation of emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder during laughter perception.

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Kreifelts, Benjamin; Brück, Carolin; Ethofer, Thomas; Ritter, Jan; Weigel, Lena; Erb, Michael; Wildgruber, Dirk

2017-02-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by negatively biased perception of social cues and deficits in emotion regulation. While negatively biased perception is thought to maintain social anxiety, emotion regulation represents an ability necessary to overcome both biased perception and social anxiety. Here, we used laughter as a social threat in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to identify cerebral mediators linking SAD with attention and interpretation biases and their modification through cognitive emotion regulation in the form of reappraisal. We found that reappraisal abolished the negative laughter interpretation bias in SAD and that this process was directly mediated through activation patterns of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) serving as a cerebral pivot between biased social perception and its normalization through reappraisal. Connectivity analyses revealed reduced prefrontal control over threat-processing sensory cortices (here: the temporal voice area) during cognitive emotion regulation in SAD. Our results indicate a central role for the left DLPFC in SAD which might represent a valuable target for future research on interventions either aiming to directly modulate cognitive emotion regulation in SAD or to evaluate its potential as physiological marker for psychotherapeutic interventions relying on emotion regulation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Do Preschoolers Recognize The Emotional Expressiveness of Colors in Realistic and Abstract Art Paintings?

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Pouliou, Dimitra; Bonoti, Fotini; Nikonanou, Niki

2018-01-01

The present study was designed to examine preschoolers' ability to recognize the emotional expressiveness of an art painting, through its colors. To attain this aim 78 children, 3-5 years old were presented with realistic and abstract paintings conveying either happiness or sadness and were asked to choose those which matched the appropriate emotion. In total 16 paintings were used, which varied in color, while their subject matter was held as constant as possible after they had been previously rated by a group of adults to ensure that they conveyed the two emotions under investigation. Results showed that children's ability to recognize the emotional expressiveness of a painting through its colors appears at 3 years old and increases significantly at 4 and 5 years old. It was also found that the mood of happiness was more easily recognized than that of sadness, while the style of art paintings (realistic vs. abstract) did not affect children's ability to recognize emotions.

Emotion perception after moderate-severe traumatic brain injury: The valence effect and the role of working memory, processing speed, and nonverbal reasoning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rosenberg, H.; Dethier, M.; Kessels, R.P.C.; Westbrook, R.F.; McDonald, S.

2015-01-01

OBJECTIVE: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) impairs emotion perception. Perception of negative emotions (sadness, disgust, fear, and anger) is reportedly affected more than positive (happiness and surprise) ones. It has been argued that this reflects a specialized neural network underpinning negative

Emotion perception after moderate–severe traumatic brain injury: The valence effect and the role of working memory, processing speed, and nonverbal reasoning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rosenberg, H.; Dethier, M.; Kessels, R.P.C.; Westbrook, R.F.; McDonald, S.

2015-01-01

Objective: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) impairs emotion perception. Perception of negative emotions (sadness, disgust, fear, and anger) is reportedly affected more than positive (happiness and surprise) ones. It has been argued that this reflects a specialized neural network underpinning negative

Happiness takes you right: the effect of emotional stimuli on line bisection.

Science.gov (United States)

Cattaneo, Zaira; Lega, Carlotta; Boehringer, Jana; Gallucci, Marcello; Girelli, Luisa; Carbon, Claus-Christian

2014-01-01

Emotion recognition is mediated by a complex network of cortical and subcortical areas, with the two hemispheres likely being differently involved in processing positive and negative emotions. As results on valence-dependent hemispheric specialisation are quite inconsistent, we carried out three experiments with emotional stimuli with a task being sensitive to measure specific hemispheric processing. Participants were required to bisect visual lines that were delimited by emotional face flankers, or to haptically bisect rods while concurrently listening to emotional vocal expressions. We found that prolonged (but not transient) exposition to concurrent happy stimuli significantly shifted the bisection bias to the right compared to both sad and neutral stimuli, indexing a greater involvement of the left hemisphere in processing of positively connoted stimuli. No differences between sad and neutral stimuli were observed across the experiments. In sum, our data provide consistent evidence in favour of a greater involvement of the left hemisphere in processing positive emotions and suggest that (prolonged) exposure to stimuli expressing happiness significantly affects allocation of (spatial) attentional resources, regardless of the sensory (visual/auditory) modality in which the emotion is perceived and space is explored (visual/haptic).

Why We Like to Watch Sad Films : The Pleasure of Being Moved in Aesthetic Experiences

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hanich, Julian; Wagner, Valentin; Shah, Mira; Jacobsen, Thomas; Menninghaus, Winfried

This article investigates an age-old, puzzling question: how can a negatively valenced emotion such as sadness go together with aesthetic liking and even pleasure? We propose that an answer to this question must take into account the feeling of being moved, a complex emotional state that plays a

Children's developing ability to depict emotions in their drawings.

Science.gov (United States)

Bonoti, F; Misailidi, P

2006-10-01

55 children aged 5 to 9 years were asked to draw pictures depicting happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and fear as well as pictures that did not express any emotion. These pictures were then scored by nonexpert adults for their overall emotional expressiveness, that is, how well they depicted the intended emotion. The results showed that drawings were generally regarded by adults as emotionally expressive. Happiness was the emotion most easily recognized in children's drawings, closely followed by sadness. The results also showed a linear increase in ratings of emotional expressiveness with age.

Science 101: Can Electromagnetic Waves Affect Emotions?

Science.gov (United States)

Robertson, Bill

2017-01-01

The answer to this month's question, "Can electromagnetic waves affect emotions," is yes. Wherever there are electromagnetic (EM) waves (basically everywhere!), there is the potential for them directly or indirectly to affect the emotions. But what about the likely motivation behind the originally-posed question? Can EM waves affect your…

SAD-B kinase regulates pre-synaptic vesicular dynamics at hippocampal Schaffer collateral synapses and affects contextual fear memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Watabe, Ayako M; Nagase, Masashi; Hagiwara, Akari; Hida, Yamato; Tsuji, Megumi; Ochiai, Toshitaka; Kato, Fusao; Ohtsuka, Toshihisa

2016-01-01

Synapses of amphids defective (SAD)-A/B kinases control various steps in neuronal development and differentiation, such as axon specifications and maturation in central and peripheral nervous systems. At mature pre-synaptic terminals, SAD-B is associated with synaptic vesicles and the active zone cytomatrix; however, how SAD-B regulates neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity in vivo remains unclear. Thus, we used SAD-B knockout (KO) mice to study the function of this pre-synaptic kinase in the brain. We found that the paired-pulse ratio was significantly enhanced at Shaffer collateral synapses in the hippocampal CA1 region in SAD-B KO mice compared with wild-type littermates. We also found that the frequency of the miniature excitatory post-synaptic current was decreased in SAD-B KO mice. Moreover, synaptic depression following prolonged low-frequency synaptic stimulation was significantly enhanced in SAD-B KO mice. These results suggest that SAD-B kinase regulates vesicular release probability at pre-synaptic terminals and is involved in vesicular trafficking and/or regulation of the readily releasable pool size. Finally, we found that hippocampus-dependent contextual fear learning was significantly impaired in SAD-B KO mice. These observations suggest that SAD-B kinase plays pivotal roles in controlling vesicular release properties and regulating hippocampal function in the mature brain. Synapses of amphids defective (SAD)-A/B kinases control various steps in neuronal development and differentiation, but their roles in mature brains were only partially known. Here, we demonstrated, at mature pre-synaptic terminals, that SAD-B regulates vesicular release probability and synaptic plasticity. Moreover, hippocampus-dependent contextual fear learning was significantly impaired in SAD-B KO mice, suggesting that SAD-B kinase plays pivotal roles in controlling vesicular release properties and regulating hippocampal function in the mature brain. © 2015 International

PERCEIVED EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AS A MODERATOR VARIABLE BETWEEN CYBERVICTIMIZATION AND ITS EMOTIONAL IMPACT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paz eElipe

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The negative effects of traditional bullying and, recently, cyberbullying on victims are well documented, and abundant empirical evidence for it exists. Cybervictimization affects areas such as academic performance, social integration and self-esteem, and causes emotions ranging from anger and sadness to more complex problems such as depression. However, not all victims are equally affected, and the differences seem to be due to certain situational and personal characteristics. The objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence and the emotional impact of cybervictimization. We hypothesize that emotional intelligence, which has previously been found to play a role in traditional bullying and cyberbullying, may also affect the emotional impact of cyberbullying.The participants in our study were 636 university students from two universities in the south of Spain. Three self-report questionnaires were used: the European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire, the Cyberbullying Emotional Impact Scale; and Trait Meta-Mood Scale-24. Structural Equation Models were used to test the relationships between the analyzed variables.The results support the idea that perceived emotional intelligence, by way of a moderator effect, affects the relationship between cybervictimization and emotional impact. Taken together, cybervictimization and perceived emotional intelligence explain much of the variance observed in the emotional impact in general and in the negative dimensions of that impact in particular. Attention and Repair were found to be inversely related to Annoyance and Dejection, and positively related to Invigoration. Clarity has the opposite pattern; a positive relationship with Annoyance and Dejection and an inverse relationship with Invigoration. Various hypothetical explanations of these patterns are discussed.

Gender Differences in Affective Reactions to First Coitus.

Science.gov (United States)

Guggino, Julie M.; Ponzetti, James J., Jr.

1997-01-01

Examined 87 college men's and 122 college women's affective reactions to first sexual intercourse. Results show that women were significantly more likely to report less pleasure, satisfaction, and excitement than men, and more sadness, guilt, nervousness, tension, embarrassment, and fear. Used factor analysis to group emotions into coherent…

Emotion-affected decision making in human simulation.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhao, Y; Kang, J; Wright, D K

2006-01-01

Human modelling is an interdisciplinary research field. The topic, emotion-affected decision making, was originally a cognitive psychology issue, but is now recognized as an important research direction for both computer science and biomedical modelling. The main aim of this paper is to attempt to bridge the gap between psychology and bioengineering in emotion-affected decision making. The work is based on Ortony's theory of emotions and bounded rationality theory, and attempts to connect the emotion process with decision making. A computational emotion model is proposed, and the initial framework of this model in virtual human simulation within the platform of Virtools is presented.

[Measuring impairment of facial affects recognition in schizophrenia. Preliminary study of the facial emotions recognition task (TREF)].

Science.gov (United States)

Gaudelus, B; Virgile, J; Peyroux, E; Leleu, A; Baudouin, J-Y; Franck, N

2015-06-01

The impairment of social cognition, including facial affects recognition, is a well-established trait in schizophrenia, and specific cognitive remediation programs focusing on facial affects recognition have been developed by different teams worldwide. However, even though social cognitive impairments have been confirmed, previous studies have also shown heterogeneity of the results between different subjects. Therefore, assessment of personal abilities should be measured individually before proposing such programs. Most research teams apply tasks based on facial affects recognition by Ekman et al. or Gur et al. However, these tasks are not easily applicable in a clinical exercise. Here, we present the Facial Emotions Recognition Test (TREF), which is designed to identify facial affects recognition impairments in a clinical practice. The test is composed of 54 photos and evaluates abilities in the recognition of six universal emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust and contempt). Each of these emotions is represented with colored photos of 4 different models (two men and two women) at nine intensity levels from 20 to 100%. Each photo is presented during 10 seconds; no time limit for responding is applied. The present study compared the scores of the TREF test in a sample of healthy controls (64 subjects) and people with stabilized schizophrenia (45 subjects) according to the DSM IV-TR criteria. We analysed global scores for all emotions, as well as sub scores for each emotion between these two groups, taking into account gender differences. Our results were coherent with previous findings. Applying TREF, we confirmed an impairment in facial affects recognition in schizophrenia by showing significant differences between the two groups in their global results (76.45% for healthy controls versus 61.28% for people with schizophrenia), as well as in sub scores for each emotion except for joy. Scores for women were significantly higher than for men in the population

Preattentive processing of emotional musical tones: a multidimensional scaling and ERP study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thomas F Münte

2013-09-01

Full Text Available Musical emotion can be conveyed by subtle variations in timbre. Here, we investigated whether the brain is capable to discriminate tones differing in emotional expression by recording event-related potentials (ERPs in an oddball paradigm under preattentive listening conditions. First, using multidimensional Fechnerian scaling, pairs of violin tones played with a happy or sad intonation were rated same or different by a group of non-musicians. Three happy and three sad tones were selected for the ERP experiment. The Fechnerian distances between tones within an emotion were in the same range as the distances between tones of different emotions. In two conditions, either 3 happy and 1 sad or 3 sad and 1 happy tone were presented in pseudo-random order. A mismatch negativity for the emotional deviant was observed, indicating that in spite of considerable perceptual differences between the three equiprobable tones of the standard emotion, a template was formed based on timbral cues against which the emotional deviant was compared. Based on Juslin’s assumption of redundant code usage, we propose that tones were grouped together, because they were identified as belonging to one emotional category based on different emotion-specific cues. These results indicate that the brain forms an emotional memory trace at a preattentive level and thus extends previous investigations in which emotional deviance was confounded with physical dissimilarity. Differences between sad and happy tones were observed which might be due to the fact that the happy emotion is mostly communicated by suprasegmental features.

Negative incidental emotions augment fairness sensitivity.

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Liu, Cuizhen; Chai, Jing Wen; Yu, Rongjun

2016-04-22

Previous studies have shown that task-unrelated emotions induced incidentally exert carryover effects on individuals' subsequent decisions in financial negotiations. However, the specificity of these emotion effects are not clear. In three experiments, we systematically investigated the role of seven transiently induced basic emotions (disgust, sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and neutral) on rejection of unfair offers using the ultimatum game. We found that all negative emotions (disgust, sadness, anger and fear), but not happiness or surprise, significantly increased rejection rates, suggesting that the effect of incidental negative emotions on fairness is not specific to the type of negative emotion. Our findings highlight the role of fleeting emotions in biasing decision-making processes and suggest that all incidental negative emotions exert similar effects on fairness sensitivity, possibly by potentiating attention towards negative aspects of the situation.

Empathy costs: Negative emotional bias in high empathisers.

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Chikovani, George; Babuadze, Lasha; Iashvili, Nino; Gvalia, Tamar; Surguladze, Simon

2015-09-30

Excessive empathy has been associated with compassion fatigue in health professionals and caregivers. We investigated an effect of empathy on emotion processing in 137 healthy individuals of both sexes. We tested a hypothesis that high empathy may underlie increased sensitivity to negative emotion recognition which may interact with gender. Facial emotion stimuli comprised happy, angry, fearful, and sad faces presented at different intensities (mild and prototypical) and different durations (500ms and 2000ms). The parameters of emotion processing were represented by discrimination accuracy, response bias and reaction time. We found that higher empathy was associated with better recognition of all emotions. We also demonstrated that higher empathy was associated with response bias towards sad and fearful faces. The reaction time analysis revealed that higher empathy in females was associated with faster (compared with males) recognition of mildly sad faces of brief duration. We conclude that although empathic abilities were providing for advantages in recognition of all facial emotional expressions, the bias towards emotional negativity may potentially carry a risk for empathic distress. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Children's understanding of facial expression of emotion: III. Adults' categorical and dimensional responses to children's drawings.

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Moland, M; Whissell, C M

1993-08-01

49 adult subjects responded to 37 children's drawings of six emotions (happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprised, and disgusted) by naming the emotion depicted and by identifying the pleasantness and arousal status of each drawing. Various analyses indicated that assignment to categories could be predicted on the basis of ratings of pleasantness and arousal (the two key dimensions of a bipolar affect space). Data support the contention that emotional responses should not be assessed solely on the basis of literal accuracy but should rather be described in terms of their location in affect space.

How emotions affect eating: a five-way model.

Science.gov (United States)

Macht, Michael

2008-01-01

Despite the importance of affective processes in eating behaviour, it remains difficult to predict how emotions affect eating. Emphasizing individual differences, previous research did not pay full attention to the twofold variability of emotion-induced changes of eating (variability across both individuals and emotions). By contrast, the present paper takes into account both individual characteristics and emotion features, and specifies five classes of emotion-induced changes of eating: (1) emotional control of food choice, (2) emotional suppression of food intake, (3) impairment of cognitive eating controls, (4) eating to regulate emotions, and (5) emotion-congruent modulation of eating. These classes are distinguished by antecedent conditions, eating responses and mediating mechanisms. They point to basic functional principles underlying the relations between emotions and biologically based motives: interference, concomitance and regulation. Thus, emotion-induced changes of eating can be a result of interference of eating by emotions, a by-product of emotions, and a consequence of regulatory processes (i.e., emotions may regulate eating, and eating may regulate emotions).

A model for self-treatment of four sub-types of symptomatic 'depression' using non-prescription agents: neuroticism (anxiety and emotional instability); malaise (fatigue and painful symptoms); demotivation (anhedonia) and seasonal affective disorder 'SAD'.

Science.gov (United States)

Charlton, Bruce G

2009-01-01

This article will present a model for how 'depression' (i.e. depressive symptoms) can be divided into four self-diagnosed sub-types or causes which might then be self-treated using agents available without prescription. (Another, much rarer, cause of depressed symptoms is the classical illness of 'melancholia', which when severe cannot be self-treated and typically requires hospitalization.) A self-management option and alternative is now needed due to the an inappropriate emphasis of modern psychiatry on treatment of imprecise syndromal 'disorders' which may entail treating 'depression' at the cost of making the patient feel and function worse. By contrast, the basic theoretical stance of self-management is that depressed mood should be seen as a result of unpleasant symptoms - and it is the symptoms that require treatment, not the mood itself. Furthermore, drugs (or other interventions) need to be classified in terms of their potential therapeutic effects on these symptoms that may cause depressed mood. The four common causes of depressed mood considered here are the personality trait of Neuroticism; the state of malaise (fatigue, aching etc) which accompanies an illness with an activated immune system; demotivation due to lack of positive emotions (anhedonia); and the syndrome of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Each of the four sub-types is then 'matched' with a first-line non-prescription agent. The 'stabilizing' agents such as St John's Wort and the antihistamines chlorpheniramine and diphenhydramine are used for treatment of Neuroticism; analgesics/pain killers such as aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol/acetaminophen and the opiates are used to treat malaise; energizing agents such as caffeine and nicotine are used for the treatment of demotivation; and bright light used in the early morning to treat SAD. Self-treatments are intended to be used after research and experimentally, on a trial-and-error basis; with self-monitoring of beneficial and harmful

Mood-dependent integration in discourse comprehension: happy and sad moods affect consistency processing via different brain networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Egidi, Giovanna; Caramazza, Alfonso

2014-12-01

According to recent research on language comprehension, the semantic features of a text are not the only determinants of whether incoming information is understood as consistent. Listeners' pre-existing affective states play a crucial role as well. The current fMRI experiment examines the effects of happy and sad moods during comprehension of consistent and inconsistent story endings, focusing on brain regions previously linked to two integration processes: inconsistency detection, evident in stronger responses to inconsistent endings, and fluent processing (accumulation), evident in stronger responses to consistent endings. The analysis evaluated whether differences in the BOLD response for consistent and inconsistent story endings correlated with self-reported mood scores after a mood induction procedure. Mood strongly affected regions previously associated with inconsistency detection. Happy mood increased sensitivity to inconsistency in regions specific for inconsistency detection (e.g., left IFG, left STS), whereas sad mood increased sensitivity to inconsistency in regions less specific for language processing (e.g., right med FG, right SFG). Mood affected more weakly regions involved in accumulation of information. These results show that mood can influence activity in areas mediating well-defined language processes, and highlight that integration is the result of context-dependent mechanisms. The finding that language comprehension can involve different networks depending on people's mood highlights the brain's ability to reorganize its functions. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Effect of Self-Referential Expectation on Emotional Face Processing.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mel McKendrick

Full Text Available The role of self-relevance has been somewhat neglected in static face processing paradigms but may be important in understanding how emotional faces impact on attention, cognition and affect. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of self-relevant primes on processing emotional composite faces. Sentence primes created an expectation of the emotion of the face before sad, happy, neutral or composite face photos were viewed. Eye movements were recorded and subsequent responses measured the cognitive and affective impact of the emotion expressed. Results indicated that primes did not guide attention, but impacted on judgments of valence intensity and self-esteem ratings. Negative self-relevant primes led to the most negative self-esteem ratings, although the effect of the prime was qualified by salient facial features. Self-relevant expectations about the emotion of a face and subsequent attention to a face that is congruent with these expectations strengthened the affective impact of viewing the face.

Perceived emotional intelligence as a moderator variable between cybervictimization and its emotional impact.

Science.gov (United States)

Elipe, Paz; Mora-Merchán, Joaquín A; Ortega-Ruiz, Rosario; Casas, José A

2015-01-01

The negative effects of traditional bullying and, recently, cyberbullying on victims are well-documented, and abundant empirical evidence for it exists. Cybervictimization affects areas such as academic performance, social integration and self-esteem, and causes emotions ranging from anger and sadness to more complex problems such as depression. However, not all victims are equally affected, and the differences seem to be due to certain situational and personal characteristics. The objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence (PEI) and the emotional impact of cybervictimization. We hypothesize that EI, which has previously been found to play a role in traditional bullying and cyberbullying, may also affect the emotional impact of cyberbullying. The participants in our study were 636 university students from two universities in the south of Spain. Three self-report questionnaires were used: the "European Cyberbullying Intervention Project Questionnaire," the "Cyberbullying Emotional Impact Scale"; and "Trait Meta-Mood Scale-24." Structural Equation Models were used to test the relationships between the analyzed variables. The results support the idea that PEI, by way of a moderator effect, affects the relationship between cybervictimization and emotional impact. Taken together, cybervictimization and PEI explain much of the variance observed in the emotional impact in general and in the negative dimensions of that impact in particular. Attention and Repair were found to be inversely related to Annoyance and Dejection, and positively related to Invigoration. Clarity has the opposite pattern; a positive relationship with Annoyance and Dejection and an inverse relationship with Invigoration. Various hypothetical explanations of these patterns are discussed.

Impact of BDNF Val66Met and 5-HTTLPR polymorphism variants on neural substrates related to sadness and executive function.

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Wang, L; Ashley-Koch, A; Steffens, D C; Krishnan, K R R; Taylor, W D

2012-04-01

The brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val(66) Met allelic variation is linked to both the occurrence of mood disorders and antidepressant response. These findings are not universally observed, and the mechanism by which this variation results in increased risk for mood disorders is unclear. One possible explanation is an epistatic relationship with other neurotransmitter genes associated with depression risk, such as the serotonin-transporter-linked promotor region (5-HTTLPR). Further, it is unclear how the coexistence of the BDNF Met and 5-HTTLPR S variants affects the function of the affective and cognitive control systems. To address this question, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in 38 older adults (20 healthy and 18 remitted from major depressive disorder). Subjects performed an emotional oddball task during the fMRI scan and provided blood samples for genotyping. Our analyses examined the relationship between genotypes and brain activation to sad distractors and attentional targets. We found that 5-HTTLPR S allele carriers exhibited stronger activation in the amygdala in response to sad distractors, whereas BDNF Met carriers exhibited increased activation to sad stimuli but decreased activation to attentional targets in the dorsolateral prefrontal and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices. In addition, subjects with both the S allele and Met allele genes exhibited increased activation to sad stimuli in the subgenual cingulate and posterior cingulate. Our results indicate that the Met allele alone or in combination with 5-HTTLPR S allele may increase reactivity to sad stimuli, which might represent a neural mechanism underlying increased depression vulnerability. © 2012 The Authors. Genes, Brain and Behavior © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society.

Music-evoked nostalgia: affect, memory, and personality.

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Barrett, Frederick S; Grimm, Kevin J; Robins, Richard W; Wildschut, Tim; Sedikides, Constantine; Janata, Petr

2010-06-01

Participants listened to randomly selected excerpts of popular music and rated how nostalgic each song made them feel. Nostalgia was stronger to the extent that a song was autobiographically salient, arousing, familiar, and elicited a greater number of positive, negative, and mixed emotions. These effects were moderated by individual differences (nostalgia proneness, mood state, dimensions of the Affective Neurosciences Personality Scale, and factors of the Big Five Inventory). Nostalgia proneness predicted stronger nostalgic experiences, even after controlling for other individual difference measures. Nostalgia proneness was predicted by the Sadness dimension of the Affective Neurosciences Personality Scale and Neuroticism of the Big Five Inventory. Nostalgia was associated with both joy and sadness, whereas nonnostalgic and nonautobiographical experiences were associated with irritation.

Emotion-affected decision making in human simulation

OpenAIRE

Zhao, Y; Kang, J; Wright, D K

2006-01-01

Human modelling is an interdisciplinary research field. The topic, emotion-affected decision making, was originally a cognitive psychology issue, but is now recognized as an important research direction for both computer science and biomedical modelling. The main aim of this paper is to attempt to bridge the gap between psychology and bioengineering in emotion-affected decision making. The work is based on Ortony's theory of emotions and bounded rationality theory, and attempts to connect the...

Affinity for Poetry and Aesthetic Appreciation of Joyful and Sad Poems.

Science.gov (United States)

Kraxenberger, Maria; Menninghaus, Winfried

2016-01-01

Artworks with sad and affectively negative content have repeatedly been reported to elicit positive aesthetic appreciation. This topic has received much attention both in the history of poetics and aesthetics as well as in recent studies on sad films and sad music. However, poetry and aesthetic evaluations of joyful and sad poetry have received only little attention in empirical studies to date. We collected beauty and liking ratings for 24 sad and 24 joyful poems from 128 participants. Following previous studies, we computed an integrated measure for overall aesthetic appreciation based on the beauty and liking ratings to test for differences in appreciation between joyful and sad poems. Further, we tested whether readers' judgments are related to their affinity for poetry. Results show that sad poems are rated significantly higher for aesthetic appreciation than joyful poems, and that aesthetic appreciation is influenced by the participants' affinity for poetry.

Realistic Affective Forecasting: The Role of Personality

Science.gov (United States)

Hoerger, Michael; Chapman, Ben; Duberstein, Paul

2016-01-01

Affective forecasting often drives decision making. Although affective forecasting research has often focused on identifying sources of error at the event level, the present investigation draws upon the ‘realistic paradigm’ in seeking to identify factors that similarly influence predicted and actual emotions, explaining their concordance across individuals. We hypothesized that the personality traits neuroticism and extraversion would account for variation in both predicted and actual emotional reactions to a wide array of stimuli and events (football games, an election, Valentine’s Day, birthdays, happy/sad film clips, and an intrusive interview). As hypothesized, individuals who were more introverted and neurotic anticipated, correctly, that they would experience relatively more unpleasant emotional reactions, and those who were more extraverted and less neurotic anticipated, correctly, that they would experience relatively more pleasant emotional reactions. Personality explained 30% of the concordance between predicted and actual emotional reactions. Findings suggest three purported personality processes implicated in affective forecasting, highlight the importance of individual-differences research in this domain, and call for more research on realistic affective forecasts. PMID:26212463

Affective cognition: Exploring lay theories of emotion.

Science.gov (United States)

Ong, Desmond C; Zaki, Jamil; Goodman, Noah D

2015-10-01

Humans skillfully reason about others' emotions, a phenomenon we term affective cognition. Despite its importance, few formal, quantitative theories have described the mechanisms supporting this phenomenon. We propose that affective cognition involves applying domain-general reasoning processes to domain-specific content knowledge. Observers' knowledge about emotions is represented in rich and coherent lay theories, which comprise consistent relationships between situations, emotions, and behaviors. Observers utilize this knowledge in deciphering social agents' behavior and signals (e.g., facial expressions), in a manner similar to rational inference in other domains. We construct a computational model of a lay theory of emotion, drawing on tools from Bayesian statistics, and test this model across four experiments in which observers drew inferences about others' emotions in a simple gambling paradigm. This work makes two main contributions. First, the model accurately captures observers' flexible but consistent reasoning about the ways that events and others' emotional responses to those events relate to each other. Second, our work models the problem of emotional cue integration-reasoning about others' emotion from multiple emotional cues-as rational inference via Bayes' rule, and we show that this model tightly tracks human observers' empirical judgments. Our results reveal a deep structural relationship between affective cognition and other forms of inference, and suggest wide-ranging applications to basic psychological theory and psychiatry. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Elevated amygdala activity to sad facial expressions: a state marker of bipolar but not unipolar depression.

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Almeida, Jorge R C; Versace, Amelia; Hassel, Stefanie; Kupfer, David J; Phillips, Mary L

2010-03-01

Difficulties in emotion processing and poor social function are common to bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) depression, resulting in many BD depressed individuals being misdiagnosed with MDD. The amygdala is a key region implicated in processing emotionally salient stimuli, including emotional facial expressions. It is unclear, however, whether abnormal amygdala activity during positive and negative emotion processing represents a persistent marker of BD regardless of illness phase or a state marker of depression common or specific to BD and MDD depression. Sixty adults were recruited: 15 depressed with BD type 1 (BDd), 15 depressed with recurrent MDD, 15 with BD in remission (BDr), diagnosed with DSM-IV and Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Research Version criteria; and 15 healthy control subjects (HC). Groups were age- and gender ratio-matched; patient groups were matched for age of illness onset and illness duration; depressed groups were matched for depression severity. The BDd were taking more psychotropic medication than other patient groups. All individuals participated in three separate 3T neuroimaging event-related experiments, where they viewed mild and intense emotional and neutral faces of fear, happiness, or sadness from a standardized series. The BDd-relative to HC, BDr, and MDD-showed elevated left amygdala activity to mild and neutral facial expressions in the sad (p sad and neutral faces might be a depression-specific marker in BD but not MDD, suggesting different pathophysiologic processes for BD versus MDD depression. Copyright 2010 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Negative emotions in cancer care: do oncologists' responses depend on severity and type of emotion?

Science.gov (United States)

Kennifer, Sarah L; Alexander, Stewart C; Pollak, Kathryn I; Jeffreys, Amy S; Olsen, Maren K; Rodriguez, Keri L; Arnold, Robert M; Tulsky, James A

2009-07-01

To examine how type and severity of patients' negative emotions influence oncologists' responses and subsequent conversations. We analyzed 264 audio-recorded conversations between advanced cancer patients and their oncologists. Conversations were coded for patients' expressions of negative emotion, which were categorized by type of emotion and severity. Oncologists' responses were coded as using either empathic language or blocking and distancing approaches. Patients presented fear more often than anger or sadness; severity of disclosures was most often moderate. Oncologists responded to 35% of these negative emotional disclosures with empathic language. They were most empathic when patients presented intense emotions. Responding empathically to patients' emotional disclosures lengthened discussions by an average of only 21s. Greater response rates to severe emotions suggest oncologists may recognize negative emotions better when patients express them more intensely. Oncologists were least responsive to patient fear and responded with greatest empathy to sadness. Oncologists may benefit from additional training to recognize negative emotions, even when displayed without intensity. Teaching cancer patients to better articulate their emotional concerns may also enhance patient-oncologist communication.

High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being

OpenAIRE

Kahneman, Daniel; Deaton, Angus

2010-01-01

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of we...

Cognitive and Emotion Regulation Change Processes in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

O'Toole, Mia S; Mennin, Douglas S; Hougaard, Esben; Zachariae, Robert; Rosenberg, Nicole K

2015-01-01

The objective of the study was to investigate variables, derived from both cognitive and emotion regulation conceptualizations of social anxiety disorder (SAD), as possible change processes in cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for SAD. Several proposed change processes were investigated: estimated probability, estimated cost, safety behaviours, acceptance of emotions, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Participants were 50 patients with SAD, receiving a standard manualized CBT program, conducted in groups or individually. All variables were measured pre-therapy, mid-therapy and post-therapy. Lower level mediation models revealed that while a change in most process measures significantly predicted clinical improvement, only changes in estimated probability and cost and acceptance of emotions showed significant indirect effects of CBT for SAD. The results are in accordance with previous studies supporting the mediating role of changes in cognitive distortions in CBT for SAD. In addition, acceptance of emotions may also be a critical component to clinical improvement in SAD during CBT, although more research is needed on which elements of acceptance are most helpful for individuals with SAD. The study's lack of a control condition limits any conclusion regarding the specificity of the findings to CBT. Change in estimated probability and cost, and acceptance of emotions showed an indirect effect of CBT for SAD. Cognitive distortions appear relevant to target with cognitive restructuring techniques. Finding acceptance to have an indirect effect could be interpreted as support for contemporary CBT approaches that include acceptance-based strategies. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Emotions, Mood and Decision Making

OpenAIRE

Agnes Virlics

2014-01-01

Decisions are made according to a complex cognitive and emotional evaluation of the situation. The aim of the paper is to examine the effect of mood on risky investment decision making by using a mood induction procedure. The paper investigates how happy and sad mood affects risky investment decision making and whether there is a difference between the perception of fix investments and monetary investments. The analysis has been conducted focusing on individual investment decisions. Data for ...

A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music.

Science.gov (United States)

Dalla Bella, S; Peretz, I; Rousseau, L; Gosselin, N

2001-07-01

Do children use the same properties as adults in determining whether music sounds happy or sad? We addressed this question with a set of 32 excerpts (16 happy and 16 sad) taken from pre-existing music. The tempo (i.e. the number of beats per minute) and the mode (i.e. the specific subset of pitches used to write a given musical excerpt) of these excerpts were modified independently and jointly in order to measure their effects on happy-sad judgments. Adults and children from 3 to 8 years old were required to judge whether the excerpts were happy or sad. The results show that as adults, 6--8-year-old children are affected by mode and tempo manipulations. In contrast, 5-year-olds' responses are only affected by a change of tempo. The youngest children (3--4-year-olds) failed to distinguish the happy from the sad tone of the music above chance. The results indicate that tempo is mastered earlier than mode to infer the emotional tone conveyed by music.

Emotions, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership: A Brief, Pragmatic Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Ingram, Jay; Cangemi, Joseph

2012-01-01

When people think of emotions, usually they think of different states of being, such as happiness, sadness, or anger. However, emotions generate very powerful chemicals that can create positive feelings, such as motivation and enthusiasm, or they can create more negative responses, such as offending and even attacking others. When an emotionally…

Emotional cues, emotional signals, and their contrasting effects on listener valence

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Christensen, Justin

2015-01-01

that are mimetic of emotional cues interact in less clear and less cohesive manners with their corresponding haptic signals. For my investigations, subjects listen to samples from the International Affective Digital Sounds Library[2] and selected musical works on speakers in combination with a tactile transducer...... and of benefit to both the sender and the receiver of the signal, otherwise they would cease to have the intended effect of communication. In contrast with signals, animal cues are much more commonly unimodal as they are unintentional by the sender. In my research, I investigate whether subjects exhibit...... are more emotional cues (e.g. sadness or calmness). My hypothesis is that musical and sound stimuli that are mimetic of emotional signals should combine to elicit a stronger response when presented as a multimodal stimulus as opposed to as a unimodal stimulus, whereas musical or sound stimuli...

Altered insular activation and increased insular functional connectivity during sad and happy face processing in adolescent major depressive disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Henje Blom, Eva; Connolly, Colm G; Ho, Tiffany C; LeWinn, Kaja Z; Mobayed, Nisreen; Han, Laura; Paulus, Martin P; Wu, Jing; Simmons, Alan N; Yang, Tony T

2015-06-01

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide and occurs commonly first during adolescence. The insular cortex (IC) plays an important role in integrating emotion processing with interoception and has been implicated recently in the pathophysiology of adult and adolescent MDD. However, no studies have yet specifically examined the IC in adolescent MDD during processing of faces in the sad-happy continuum. Thus, the aim of the present study is to investigate the IC during sad and happy face processing in adolescents with MDD compared to healthy controls (HCL). Thirty-one adolescents (22 female) with MDD and 36 (23 female) HCL underwent a well-validated emotional processing fMRI paradigm that included sad and happy face stimuli. The MDD group showed significantly less differential activation of the anterior/middle insular cortex (AMIC) in response to sad versus happy faces compared to the HCL group. AMIC also showed greater functional connectivity with right fusiform gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, and right amygdala/parahippocampal gyrus in the MDD compared to HCL group. Moreover, differential activation to sad and happy faces in AMIC correlated negatively with depression severity within the MDD group. Small age-range and cross-sectional nature precluded assessment of development of the AMIC in adolescent depression. Given the role of the IC in integrating bodily stimuli with conscious cognitive and emotional processes, our findings of aberrant AMIC function in adolescent MDD provide a neuroscientific rationale for targeting the AMIC in the development of new treatment modalities. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Gender Differences in Emotional Response: Inconsistency between Experience and Expressivity

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Deng, Yaling; Chang, Lei; Yang, Meng; Huo, Meng

2016-01-01

The present study investigated gender differences in both emotional experience and expressivity. Heart rate (HR) was recorded as an indicator of emotional experience while the participants watched 16 video clips that induced eight types of emotion (sadness, anger, horror, disgust, neutrality, amusement, surprise, and pleasure). We also asked the participants to report valence, arousal, and motivation as indicators of emotional expressivity. Overall, the results revealed gender differences in emotional experience and emotional expressivity. When watching videos that induced anger, amusement, and pleasure, men showed larger decreases in HR, whereas women reported higher levels of arousal. There was no gender difference in HR when the participants watched videos that induced horror and disgust, but women reported lower valence, higher arousal, and stronger avoidance motivation than did men. Finally, no gender difference was observed in sadness or surprise, although there was one exception—women reported higher arousal when watching videos that induced sadness. The findings suggest that, when watching videos that induce an emotional response, men often have more intense emotional experiences, whereas women have higher emotional expressivity, particularly for negative emotions. In addition, gender differences depend on the specific emotion type but not the valence. PMID:27362361

Gender Differences in Emotional Response: Inconsistency between Experience and Expressivity.

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Deng, Yaling; Chang, Lei; Yang, Meng; Huo, Meng; Zhou, Renlai

2016-01-01

The present study investigated gender differences in both emotional experience and expressivity. Heart rate (HR) was recorded as an indicator of emotional experience while the participants watched 16 video clips that induced eight types of emotion (sadness, anger, horror, disgust, neutrality, amusement, surprise, and pleasure). We also asked the participants to report valence, arousal, and motivation as indicators of emotional expressivity. Overall, the results revealed gender differences in emotional experience and emotional expressivity. When watching videos that induced anger, amusement, and pleasure, men showed larger decreases in HR, whereas women reported higher levels of arousal. There was no gender difference in HR when the participants watched videos that induced horror and disgust, but women reported lower valence, higher arousal, and stronger avoidance motivation than did men. Finally, no gender difference was observed in sadness or surprise, although there was one exception-women reported higher arousal when watching videos that induced sadness. The findings suggest that, when watching videos that induce an emotional response, men often have more intense emotional experiences, whereas women have higher emotional expressivity, particularly for negative emotions. In addition, gender differences depend on the specific emotion type but not the valence.

Gender Differences in Emotional Response: Inconsistency between Experience and Expressivity.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yaling Deng

Full Text Available The present study investigated gender differences in both emotional experience and expressivity. Heart rate (HR was recorded as an indicator of emotional experience while the participants watched 16 video clips that induced eight types of emotion (sadness, anger, horror, disgust, neutrality, amusement, surprise, and pleasure. We also asked the participants to report valence, arousal, and motivation as indicators of emotional expressivity. Overall, the results revealed gender differences in emotional experience and emotional expressivity. When watching videos that induced anger, amusement, and pleasure, men showed larger decreases in HR, whereas women reported higher levels of arousal. There was no gender difference in HR when the participants watched videos that induced horror and disgust, but women reported lower valence, higher arousal, and stronger avoidance motivation than did men. Finally, no gender difference was observed in sadness or surprise, although there was one exception-women reported higher arousal when watching videos that induced sadness. The findings suggest that, when watching videos that induce an emotional response, men often have more intense emotional experiences, whereas women have higher emotional expressivity, particularly for negative emotions. In addition, gender differences depend on the specific emotion type but not the valence.

Improvement in Fatigue, Sleepiness, and Health-Related Quality of Life with Bright Light Treatment in Persons with Seasonal Affective Disorder and Subsyndromal SAD

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Cecilia Rastad

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Objective. To investigate the effects of bright light treatment for secondary outcome measures and to explore and validate empirically derived subgroups and treatment effects in subgroups. Methods. A descriptive design. A sample of forty-nine persons (mean age of 45.8 with clinically assessed seasonal affective disorder (SAD or subsyndromal SAD (S-SAD participated in a two-group clinical trial evaluating the effects of treatment with bright light therapy. A person-oriented cluster analysis was applied to study treatment effects in subgroups. Results. For the merged group, sleepiness (Epworth Sleepiness Scale, fatigue (fatigue questionnaire, and health-related quality of life (SF-36 were improved at posttreatment, and results were maintained at the one-month followup. Three distinct subgroups had a high level of fatigue in common, while the level of excessive daytime sleepiness and depressed mood differed between the subgroups. Over time, all subgroups improved following ten days treatment in a light room. Conclusion. Fatigue, excessive daytime sleepiness, and health-related quality of life improve in a similar way as depressed mood following treatment with bright light. The treatment was effective irrespective of the severity of the disorder, that is, for persons with SAD and subsyndromal SAD.

Affective mapping: An activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis.

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Kirby, Lauren A J; Robinson, Jennifer L

2017-11-01

Functional neuroimaging has the spatial resolution to explain the neural basis of emotions. Activation likelihood estimation (ALE), as opposed to traditional qualitative meta-analysis, quantifies convergence of activation across studies within affective categories. Others have used ALE to investigate a broad range of emotions, but without the convenience of the BrainMap database. We used the BrainMap database and analysis resources to run separate meta-analyses on coordinates reported for anger, anxiety, disgust, fear, happiness, humor, and sadness. Resultant ALE maps were compared to determine areas of convergence between emotions, as well as to identify affect-specific networks. Five out of the seven emotions demonstrated consistent activation within the amygdala, whereas all emotions consistently activated the right inferior frontal gyrus, which has been implicated as an integration hub for affective and cognitive processes. These data provide the framework for models of affect-specific networks, as well as emotional processing hubs, which can be used for future studies of functional or effective connectivity. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotions and clinical ethics support. A moral inquiry into emotions in moral case deliberation.

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Molewijk, Bert; Kleinlugtenbelt, Dick; Pugh, Scott M; Widdershoven, Guy

2011-12-01

Emotions play an important part in moral life. Within clinical ethics support (CES), one should take into account the crucial role of emotions in moral cases in clinical practice. In this paper, we present an Aristotelian approach to emotions. We argue that CES can help participants deal with emotions by fostering a joint process of investigation of the role of emotions in a case. This investigation goes beyond empathy with and moral judgment of the emotions of the case presenter. In a moral case deliberation, the participants are invited to place themselves in the position of the case presenter and to investigate their own emotions in the situation. It is about critically assessing the facts in the case that cause the emotion and the related (moral) thoughts that accompany the emotion. It is also about finding the right emotion in a given situation and finding the right balance in dealing with that emotion. These steps in the moral inquiry give rise to group learning. It is a process of becoming open towards the perspectives of others, leading to new insights into what is an appropriate emotion in the specific situation. We show how this approach works in moral case deliberation. A physician presents a situation in which he is faced with a pregnant woman who is about to deliver multiple extremely premature infants at the threshold of viability. The moral deliberation of the case and the emotions therein leads to the participants' conclusion that "compassion" is a more adequate emotion than "sadness". The emotion "sadness" is pointed towards the tragedy that is happening to the woman. The emotion "compassion" is pointed towards the woman; it combines consideration and professional responsibility. Through the shift towards compassion, participants experienced more creativity and freedom to deal with the sad situation and to support the woman. The paper ends with an analysis and reflection on the deliberation process. In the conclusion we argue for more attention to

More than words (and faces): evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing.

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Filippi, Piera; Ocklenburg, Sebastian; Bowling, Daniel L; Heege, Larissa; Güntürkün, Onur; Newen, Albert; de Boer, Bart

2017-08-01

Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. Accuracy was lower when two channels expressed an emotion that was incongruent with the channel participants had to focus on, compared with the cross-channel congruence condition. When participants were required to focus on verbal content, accuracy was significantly lower also when prosody was incongruent with verbal content and face. This suggests that prosody biases emotional verbal content processing, even when conflicting with verbal content and face simultaneously. Implications for multimodal communication and language evolution studies are discussed.

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity to a sad film predicts depression symptom improvement and symptomatic trajectory.

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Panaite, Vanessa; Hindash, Alexandra Cowden; Bylsma, Lauren M; Small, Brent J; Salomon, Kristen; Rottenberg, Jonathan

2016-01-01

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity, an index of cardiac vagal tone, has been linked to self-regulation and the severity and course of depression (Rottenberg, 2007). Although initial data supports the proposition that RSA withdrawal during a sad film is a specific predictor of depression course (Fraguas, 2007; Rottenberg, 2005), the robustness and specificity of this finding are unclear. To provide a stronger test, RSA reactivity to three emotion films (happy, sad, fear) and to a more robust stressor, a speech task, were examined in currently depressed individuals (n=37), who were assessed for their degree of symptomatic improvement over 30weeks. Robust RSA reactivity to the sad film uniquely predicted overall symptom improvement over 30weeks. RSA reactivity to both sad and stressful stimuli predicted the speed and maintenance of symptomatic improvement. The current analyses provide the most robust support to date that RSA withdrawal to sad stimuli (but not stressful) has specificity in predicting the overall symptomatic improvement. In contrast, RSA reactivity to negative stimuli (both sad and stressful) predicted the trajectory of depression course. Patients' engagement with sad stimuli may be an important sign to attend to in therapeutic settings. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Does cortisol modulate emotion recognition and empathy?

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Duesenberg, Moritz; Weber, Juliane; Schulze, Lars; Schaeuffele, Carmen; Roepke, Stefan; Hellmann-Regen, Julian; Otte, Christian; Wingenfeld, Katja

2016-04-01

Emotion recognition and empathy are important aspects in the interaction and understanding of other people's behaviors and feelings. The Human environment comprises of stressful situations that impact social interactions on a daily basis. Aim of the study was to examine the effects of the stress hormone cortisol on emotion recognition and empathy. In this placebo-controlled study, 40 healthy men and 40 healthy women (mean age 24.5 years) received either 10mg of hydrocortisone or placebo. We used the Multifaceted Empathy Test to measure emotional and cognitive empathy. Furthermore, we examined emotion recognition from facial expressions, which contained two emotions (anger and sadness) and two emotion intensities (40% and 80%). We did not find a main effect for treatment or sex on either empathy or emotion recognition but a sex × emotion interaction on emotion recognition. The main result was a four-way-interaction on emotion recognition including treatment, sex, emotion and task difficulty. At 40% task difficulty, women recognized angry faces better than men in the placebo condition. Furthermore, in the placebo condition, men recognized sadness better than anger. At 80% task difficulty, men and women performed equally well in recognizing sad faces but men performed worse compared to women with regard to angry faces. Apparently, our results did not support the hypothesis that increases in cortisol concentration alone influence empathy and emotion recognition in healthy young individuals. However, sex and task difficulty appear to be important variables in emotion recognition from facial expressions. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Influence of Affective States Varying in Motivational Intensity on Cognitive Scope

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Eddie eHarmon-Jones

2012-09-01

Full Text Available We review a program of research that has suggested that affective states high in motivationally intensity (e.g., enthusiasm, disgust narrow cognitive scope, whereas affective states low in motivationally intensity (e.g., joy, sadness broaden cognitive scope. Further supporting this interpretation, indices of brain activations, derived from human electroencephalography, suggest that the motivational intensity of the affective state predicts the narrowing of cognitive scope. Finally, research suggests that the relationship between emotive intensity and cognitive scope is bi-directional, such that manipulated changes in cognitive scope influence early brain activations associated with emotive intensity. In the end, the review highlights how emotion can impair and improve certain cognitive processes.

Facial Emotion Recognition and Expression in Parkinson's Disease: An Emotional Mirror Mechanism?

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Ricciardi, Lucia; Visco-Comandini, Federica; Erro, Roberto; Morgante, Francesca; Bologna, Matteo; Fasano, Alfonso; Ricciardi, Diego; Edwards, Mark J; Kilner, James

2017-01-01

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients have impairment of facial expressivity (hypomimia) and difficulties in interpreting the emotional facial expressions produced by others, especially for aversive emotions. We aimed to evaluate the ability to produce facial emotional expressions and to recognize facial emotional expressions produced by others in a group of PD patients and a group of healthy participants in order to explore the relationship between these two abilities and any differences between the two groups of participants. Twenty non-demented, non-depressed PD patients and twenty healthy participants (HC) matched for demographic characteristics were studied. The ability of recognizing emotional facial expressions was assessed with the Ekman 60-faces test (Emotion recognition task). Participants were video-recorded while posing facial expressions of 6 primary emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and anger). The most expressive pictures for each emotion were derived from the videos. Ten healthy raters were asked to look at the pictures displayed on a computer-screen in pseudo-random fashion and to identify the emotional label in a six-forced-choice response format (Emotion expressivity task). Reaction time (RT) and accuracy of responses were recorded. At the end of each trial the participant was asked to rate his/her confidence in his/her perceived accuracy of response. For emotion recognition, PD reported lower score than HC for Ekman total score (pemotions sub-scores happiness, fear, anger, sadness (pfacial emotion expressivity task, PD and HC significantly differed in the total score (p = 0.05) and in the sub-scores for happiness, sadness, anger (all pemotions. There was a significant positive correlation between the emotion facial recognition and expressivity in both groups; the correlation was even stronger when ranking emotions from the best recognized to the worst (R = 0.75, p = 0.004). PD patients showed difficulties in recognizing emotional

Emotion regulation in interpersonal problems: the role of cognitive-emotional complexity, emotion regulation goals, and expressivity.

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Coats, Abby Heckman; Blanchard-Fields, Fredda

2008-03-01

Young, middle-aged, and older adults' emotion regulation strategies in interpersonal problems were examined. Participants imagined themselves in anger- or sadness-eliciting situations with a close friend. Factor analyses of a new questionnaire supported a 4-factor model of emotion regulation strategies, including passivity, expressing emotions, seeking emotional information or support, and solving the problem. Results suggest that age differences in emotion regulation (such as older adults' increased endorsement of passive emotion regulation relative to young adults) are partially due to older adults' decreased ability to integrate emotion and cognition, increased prioritization of emotion regulation goals, and decreased tendency to express anger. (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved.

Emotion Regulation in Binge Eating Disorder: A Review

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Dingemans, Alexandra; Danner, Unna; Parks, Melissa

2017-01-01

The purpose of the present review is to provide a summary of the research findings on emotion regulation in Binge Eating Disorder (BED). Negative emotions and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies play a role in the onset and maintenance of binge eating in BED. Anger and sadness, along with negative emotions related to interpersonal experiences (i.e., disappointment, being hurt or loneliness), seem to be particularly relevant. Individuals with BED have a tendency to suppress and ruminate on their unwanted emotions, which leads to increased psychopathological thoughts and symptoms. Compared to healthy controls, they use adaptive strategies, such as reappraisal, less frequently. Evidence concerning the causal relation between negative affect and binge eating is inconclusive and still very limited. While experimental studies in a laboratory setting lack ecological validity, ecological momentary assessment studies offer more promise at unraveling the causal relationship between emotions and binge eating. Increases in negative affect are found to be antecedents of binge eating in BED. However, there seems to be less support for the possibility that binge eating serves as a means to alleviate negative affect. Finally, BED seems to be related to other forms of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as substance abuse and self-harm. PMID:29165348

Emotion Regulation in Binge Eating Disorder: A Review

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Alexandra Dingemans

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The purpose of the present review is to provide a summary of the research findings on emotion regulation in Binge Eating Disorder (BED. Negative emotions and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies play a role in the onset and maintenance of binge eating in BED. Anger and sadness, along with negative emotions related to interpersonal experiences (i.e., disappointment, being hurt or loneliness, seem to be particularly relevant. Individuals with BED have a tendency to suppress and ruminate on their unwanted emotions, which leads to increased psychopathological thoughts and symptoms. Compared to healthy controls, they use adaptive strategies, such as reappraisal, less frequently. Evidence concerning the causal relation between negative affect and binge eating is inconclusive and still very limited. While experimental studies in a laboratory setting lack ecological validity, ecological momentary assessment studies offer more promise at unraveling the causal relationship between emotions and binge eating. Increases in negative affect are found to be antecedents of binge eating in BED. However, there seems to be less support for the possibility that binge eating serves as a means to alleviate negative affect. Finally, BED seems to be related to other forms of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as substance abuse and self-harm.

The link between negative emotions and eating disorder behaviour in patients with anorexia nervosa.

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Espeset, Ester M S; Gulliksen, Kjersti S; Nordbø, Ragnfrid H S; Skårderud, Finn; Holte, Arne

2012-11-01

Several theoretical models suggest that deficits in emotional regulation are central in the maintenance of anorexia nervosa (AN). Few studies have examined how patients view the relationship between negative affect and anorectic behaviour. We explored how patients with AN manage the aversive emotions sadness, anger, fear and disgust, and how they link these experiences to their eating disorder behaviours. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 14 women aged 19-39 years diagnosed with AN (DSM-IV). Interviews were analyzed using Grounded Theory methods. The participants tended to inhibit expression of sadness and anger in interpersonal situations and reported high levels of anger towards themselves, self-disgust and fear of becoming fat. Different emotions were managed by means of specific eating disorder behaviours. Sadness was particularly linked to body dissatisfaction and was managed through restrictive eating and purging. Anger was avoided by means of restrictive eating and purging and released through anorectic self-control, self-harm and exercising. Fear was linked to fear of fatness and was managed through restrictive eating, purging and body checking. Participants avoided the feeling of disgust by avoiding food and body focused situations. Treatment models of eating disorders highlight the significance of working with emotional acceptance and coping in this patient group. Knowledge about how patients understand the relationships between their negative emotions and their anorectic behaviour may be an important addition to treatment programmes for AN. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

How Psychological Stress Affects Emotional Prosody

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Paulmann, Silke; Furnes, Desire; Bøkenes, Anne Ming; Cozzolino, Philip J.

2016-01-01

We explored how experimentally induced psychological stress affects the production and recognition of vocal emotions. In Study 1a, we demonstrate that sentences spoken by stressed speakers are judged by naïve listeners as sounding more stressed than sentences uttered by non-stressed speakers. In Study 1b, negative emotions produced by stressed speakers are generally less well recognized than the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers. Multiple mediation analyses suggest this poorer recognition of negative stimuli was due to a mismatch between the variation of volume voiced by speakers and the range of volume expected by listeners. Together, this suggests that the stress level of the speaker affects judgments made by the receiver. In Study 2, we demonstrate that participants who were induced with a feeling of stress before carrying out an emotional prosody recognition task performed worse than non-stressed participants. Overall, findings suggest detrimental effects of induced stress on interpersonal sensitivity. PMID:27802287

How Psychological Stress Affects Emotional Prosody.

Science.gov (United States)

Paulmann, Silke; Furnes, Desire; Bøkenes, Anne Ming; Cozzolino, Philip J

2016-01-01

We explored how experimentally induced psychological stress affects the production and recognition of vocal emotions. In Study 1a, we demonstrate that sentences spoken by stressed speakers are judged by naïve listeners as sounding more stressed than sentences uttered by non-stressed speakers. In Study 1b, negative emotions produced by stressed speakers are generally less well recognized than the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers. Multiple mediation analyses suggest this poorer recognition of negative stimuli was due to a mismatch between the variation of volume voiced by speakers and the range of volume expected by listeners. Together, this suggests that the stress level of the speaker affects judgments made by the receiver. In Study 2, we demonstrate that participants who were induced with a feeling of stress before carrying out an emotional prosody recognition task performed worse than non-stressed participants. Overall, findings suggest detrimental effects of induced stress on interpersonal sensitivity.

Sensory contribution to vocal emotion deficit in Parkinson's disease after subthalamic stimulation.

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Péron, Julie; Cekic, Sezen; Haegelen, Claire; Sauleau, Paul; Patel, Sona; Drapier, Dominique; Vérin, Marc; Grandjean, Didier

2015-02-01

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease induces modifications in the recognition of emotion from voices (or emotional prosody). Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms are still only poorly understood, and the role of acoustic features in these deficits has yet to be elucidated. Our aim was to identify the influence of acoustic features on changes in emotional prosody recognition following STN stimulation in Parkinson's disease. To this end, we analysed the performances of patients on vocal emotion recognition in pre-versus post-operative groups, as well as of matched controls, entering the acoustic features of the stimuli into our statistical models. Analyses revealed that the post-operative biased ratings on the Fear scale when patients listened to happy stimuli were correlated with loudness, while the biased ratings on the Sadness scale when they listened to happiness were correlated with fundamental frequency (F0). Furthermore, disturbed ratings on the Happiness scale when the post-operative patients listened to sadness were found to be correlated with F0. These results suggest that inadequate use of acoustic features following subthalamic stimulation has a significant impact on emotional prosody recognition in patients with Parkinson's disease, affecting the extraction and integration of acoustic cues during emotion perception. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural correlates of cross-modal affective priming by music in Williams syndrome.

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Lense, Miriam D; Gordon, Reyna L; Key, Alexandra P F; Dykens, Elisabeth M

2014-04-01

Emotional connection is the main reason people engage with music, and the emotional features of music can influence processing in other domains. Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder where musicality and sociability are prominent aspects of the phenotype. This study examined oscillatory brain activity during a musical affective priming paradigm. Participants with WS and age-matched typically developing controls heard brief emotional musical excerpts or emotionally neutral sounds and then reported the emotional valence (happy/sad) of subsequently presented faces. Participants with WS demonstrated greater evoked fronto-central alpha activity to the happy vs sad musical excerpts. The size of these alpha effects correlated with parent-reported emotional reactivity to music. Although participant groups did not differ in accuracy of identifying facial emotions, reaction time data revealed a music priming effect only in persons with WS, who responded faster when the face matched the emotional valence of the preceding musical excerpt vs when the valence differed. Matching emotional valence was also associated with greater evoked gamma activity thought to reflect cross-modal integration. This effect was not present in controls. The results suggest a specific connection between music and socioemotional processing and have implications for clinical and educational approaches for WS.

Improving Negative Emotion Recognition in Young Offenders Reduces Subsequent Crime.

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Hubble, Kelly; Bowen, Katharine L; Moore, Simon C; van Goozen, Stephanie H M

2015-01-01

Children with antisocial behaviour show deficits in the perception of emotional expressions in others that may contribute to the development and persistence of antisocial and aggressive behaviour. Current treatments for antisocial youngsters are limited in effectiveness. It has been argued that more attention should be devoted to interventions that target neuropsychological correlates of antisocial behaviour. This study examined the effect of emotion recognition training on criminal behaviour. Emotion recognition and crime levels were studied in 50 juvenile offenders. Whilst all young offenders received their statutory interventions as the study was conducted, a subgroup of twenty-four offenders also took part in a facial affect training aimed at improving emotion recognition. Offenders in the training and control groups were matched for age, SES, IQ and lifetime crime level. All offenders were tested twice for emotion recognition performance, and recent crime data were collected after the testing had been completed. Before the training there were no differences between the groups in emotion recognition, with both groups displaying poor fear, sadness and anger recognition. After the training fear, sadness and anger recognition improved significantly in juvenile offenders in the training group. Although crime rates dropped in all offenders in the 6 months following emotion testing, only the group of offenders who had received the emotion training showed a significant reduction in the severity of the crimes they committed. The study indicates that emotion recognition can be relatively easily improved in youths who engage in serious antisocial and criminal behavior. The results suggest that improved emotion recognition has the potential to reduce the severity of reoffending.

The effect of music background on the emotional appraisal of film sequences

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Pavlović Ivanka

2011-01-01

Full Text Available In this study the effects of musical background on the emotional appraisal of film sequences was investigated. Four pairs of polar emotions defined in Plutchik’s model were used as basic emotional qualities: joy-sadness, anticipation-surprise, fear-anger, and trust disgust. In the preliminary study eight film sequences and eight music themes were selected as the best representatives of all eight Plutchik’s emotions. In the main experiment the participant judged the emotional qualities of film-music combinations on eight seven-point scales. Half of the combinations were congruent (e.g. joyful film - joyful music, and half were incongruent (e.g. joyful film - sad music. Results have shown that visual information (film had greater effects on the emotion appraisal than auditory information (music. The modulation effects of music background depend on emotional qualities. In some incongruent combinations (joysadness the modulations in the expected directions were obtained (e.g. joyful music reduces the sadness of a sad film, in some cases (anger-fear no modulation effects were obtained, and in some cases (trust-disgust, anticipation-surprise the modulation effects were in an unexpected direction (e.g. trustful music increased the appraisal of disgust of a disgusting film. These results suggest that the appraisals of conjoint effects of emotions depend on the medium (film masks the music and emotional quality (three types of modulation effects.

A comprehensive examination of delayed emotional recovery in borderline personality disorder.

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Fitzpatrick, Skye; Kuo, Janice R

2015-06-01

Despite growing attention to emotion processes in borderline personality disorder (BPD), little research has examined delayed emotional recovery (i.e., long-lasting emotions after the termination of an emotionally evocative stimulus) in this population. The extant data on delayed emotional recovery in BPD are limited by a lack of assessment across a range of indices and emotions. The present study addresses these gaps by comparing emotional recovery between individuals with BPD, social anxiety disorder (SAD), and healthy controls (HCs) using a multi-modal assessment approach. Participants underwent fear, anger, and sadness inductions followed by a 5-min "washout" phase wherein emotional recovery was assessed via self-report, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and skin conductance responses (SCR). After controlling for state dissociation, the BPD and SAD group exhibited decreases in RSA, while the HC group showed no changes in RSA after the anger induction only. Groups did not differ in rate of emotional recovery across self-report, RSA, or SCR after fear and sadness inductions. The present study is limited by a solely female and small sample, and the short time frame in which emotional recovery was assessed. Findings indicate that individuals with BPD generally do not exhibit delayed emotional recovery, but may show decreases in parasympathetic activity during the recovery period after experiencing anger. However, this pattern may not be specific to this disorder. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Are specific emotions narrated differently?

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Habermas, Tilmann; Meier, Michaela; Mukhtar, Barbara

2009-12-01

Two studies test the assertion that anger, sadness, fear, pride, and happiness are typically narrated in different ways. Everyday events eliciting these 5 emotions were narrated by young women (Study 1) and 5- and 8-year-old girls (Study 2). Negative narratives were expected to engender more effort to process the event, be longer, more grammatically complex, more often have a complication section, and use more specific emotion labels than global evaluations. Narratives of Hogan's (2003) juncture emotions anger and fear were expected to focus more on action and to contain more core narrative sections of orientation, complication, and resolution than narratives of the outcome emotions sadness and happiness. Hypotheses were confirmed for adults except for syntactic complexity, whereas children showed only some of these differences. Hogan's theory that juncture emotions are restricted to the complication section was not confirmed. Finally, in adults, indirect speech was more frequent in anger narratives and internal monologue in fear narratives. It is concluded that different emotions should be studied in how they are narrated, and that narratives should be analyzed according to qualitatively different emotions.

Recognition of facial expressions and prosodic cues with graded emotional intensities in adults with Asperger syndrome.

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Doi, Hirokazu; Fujisawa, Takashi X; Kanai, Chieko; Ohta, Haruhisa; Yokoi, Hideki; Iwanami, Akira; Kato, Nobumasa; Shinohara, Kazuyuki

2013-09-01

This study investigated the ability of adults with Asperger syndrome to recognize emotional categories of facial expressions and emotional prosodies with graded emotional intensities. The individuals with Asperger syndrome showed poorer recognition performance for angry and sad expressions from both facial and vocal information. The group difference in facial expression recognition was prominent for stimuli with low or intermediate emotional intensities. In contrast to this, the individuals with Asperger syndrome exhibited lower recognition accuracy than typically-developed controls mainly for emotional prosody with high emotional intensity. In facial expression recognition, Asperger and control groups showed an inversion effect for all categories. The magnitude of this effect was less in the Asperger group for angry and sad expressions, presumably attributable to reduced recruitment of the configural mode of face processing. The individuals with Asperger syndrome outperformed the control participants in recognizing inverted sad expressions, indicating enhanced processing of local facial information representing sad emotion. These results suggest that the adults with Asperger syndrome rely on modality-specific strategies in emotion recognition from facial expression and prosodic information.

Facial Emotion Recognition and Expression in Parkinson’s Disease: An Emotional Mirror Mechanism?

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Ricciardi, Lucia; Visco-Comandini, Federica; Erro, Roberto; Morgante, Francesca; Bologna, Matteo; Fasano, Alfonso; Ricciardi, Diego; Edwards, Mark J.; Kilner, James

2017-01-01

Background and aim Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients have impairment of facial expressivity (hypomimia) and difficulties in interpreting the emotional facial expressions produced by others, especially for aversive emotions. We aimed to evaluate the ability to produce facial emotional expressions and to recognize facial emotional expressions produced by others in a group of PD patients and a group of healthy participants in order to explore the relationship between these two abilities and any differences between the two groups of participants. Methods Twenty non-demented, non-depressed PD patients and twenty healthy participants (HC) matched for demographic characteristics were studied. The ability of recognizing emotional facial expressions was assessed with the Ekman 60-faces test (Emotion recognition task). Participants were video-recorded while posing facial expressions of 6 primary emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and anger). The most expressive pictures for each emotion were derived from the videos. Ten healthy raters were asked to look at the pictures displayed on a computer-screen in pseudo-random fashion and to identify the emotional label in a six-forced-choice response format (Emotion expressivity task). Reaction time (RT) and accuracy of responses were recorded. At the end of each trial the participant was asked to rate his/her confidence in his/her perceived accuracy of response. Results For emotion recognition, PD reported lower score than HC for Ekman total score (pemotions sub-scores happiness, fear, anger, sadness (pfacial emotion expressivity task, PD and HC significantly differed in the total score (p = 0.05) and in the sub-scores for happiness, sadness, anger (all pemotions. There was a significant positive correlation between the emotion facial recognition and expressivity in both groups; the correlation was even stronger when ranking emotions from the best recognized to the worst (R = 0.75, p = 0.004). Conclusions PD

Emotional Intelligence: A Theoretical Framework for Individual Differences in Affective Forecasting

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Hoerger, Michael; Chapman, Benjamin P.; Epstein, Ronald M.; Duberstein, Paul R.

2011-01-01

Only recently have researchers begun to examine individual differences in affective forecasting. The present investigation was designed to make a theoretical contribution to this emerging literature by examining the role of emotional intelligence in affective forecasting. Emotional intelligence was hypothesized to be associated with affective forecasting accuracy, memory for emotional reactions, and subsequent improvement on an affective forecasting task involving emotionally-evocative pictures. Results from two studies (N = 511) supported our hypotheses. Emotional intelligence was associated with accuracy in predicting, encoding, and consolidating emotional reactions. Furthermore, emotional intelligence was associated with greater improvement on a second affective forecasting task, with the relationship explained by basic memory processes. Implications for future research on basic and applied decision making are discussed. PMID:22251053

He Throws like a Girl (but Only when He's Sad): Emotion Affects Sex-Decoding of Biological Motion Displays

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Johnson, Kerri L.; McKay, Lawrie S.; Pollick, Frank E.

2011-01-01

Gender stereotypes have been implicated in sex-typed perceptions of facial emotion. Such interpretations were recently called into question because facial cues of emotion are confounded with sexually dimorphic facial cues. Here we examine the role of visual cues and gender stereotypes in perceptions of biological motion displays, thus overcoming…

Affective Priming in Major Depressive Disorder

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Joelle eLeMoult

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Research on cognitive biases in depression has provided considerable evidence for the impact of emotion on cognition. Individuals with depression tend to preferentially process mood-congruent material and to show deficits in the processing of positive material leading to biases in attention, memory, and judgments. More research is needed, however, to fully understand which cognitive processes are affected. The current study further examines the impact of emotion on cognition using a priming design with facial expressions of emotion. Specifically, this study tested whether the presentation of facial expressions of emotion affects subsequent processing of affective material in participants with major depressive disorder (MDD and healthy controls (CTL. Facial expressions displaying happy, sad, angry, disgusted, or neutral expressions were presented as primes for 500ms, and participants’ speed to identify a subsequent target’s emotional expression was assessed. All participants displayed greater interference from emotional versus neutral primes, marked by slower response times to judge the emotion of the target face when it was preceded by an emotional prime. Importantly, the CTL group showed the strongest interference when happy emotional expressions served as primes whereas the MDD group failed to show this bias. These results add to a growing literature that shows that depression is associated with difficulties in the processing of positive material.

Reading Emotion From Mouse Cursor Motions: Affective Computing Approach.

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Yamauchi, Takashi; Xiao, Kunchen

2018-04-01

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16-26 trajectory features during a choice-reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, film clips, or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10-fold cross-validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from "known" participants (training data) could predict nearly 10%-20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of "unknown" participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users. Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Perceived duration of emotional events: evidence for a positivity effect in older adults.

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Nicol, Jeffrey R; Tanner, Jessica; Clarke, Kelly

2013-01-01

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Arousal and negative affect modulate the effect of emotion on the subjective experience of the passage of time. Given that older adults are less aroused by negative emotional stimuli, and report lower levels of negative affect, compared with younger adults, the present study examined whether the effect of emotion on time perception differed in older and younger adults. Participants performed a temporal bisection task for emotional (i.e., angry, sad, happy) and neutral facial expressions presented at varying temporal intervals. Older adults perceived the duration of both positive and threatening events longer than neutral events, whereas younger adults only perceived threatening events longer than neutral events. The results, which are partially consistent with the positivity effect of aging postulated by the socioemotional selectivity theory, are the first to show how the effect of emotion on perceived duration affects older adults, and support previous research indicating that only threatening events prolong perceived duration in younger adults.

Facial responsiveness of psychopaths to the emotional expressions of others.

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Janina Künecke

Full Text Available Psychopathic individuals show selfish, manipulative, and antisocial behavior in addition to emotional detachment and reduced empathy. Their empathic deficits are thought to be associated with a reduced responsiveness to emotional stimuli. Immediate facial muscle responses to the emotional expressions of others reflect the expressive part of emotional responsiveness and are positively related to trait empathy. Empirical evidence for reduced facial muscle responses in adult psychopathic individuals to the emotional expressions of others is rare. In the present study, 261 male criminal offenders and non-offenders categorized dynamically presented facial emotion expressions (angry, happy, sad, and neutral during facial electromyography recording of their corrugator muscle activity. We replicated a measurement model of facial muscle activity, which controls for general facial responsiveness to face stimuli, and modeled three correlated emotion-specific factors (i.e., anger, happiness, and sadness representing emotion specific activity. In a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we compared the means of the anger, happiness, and sadness latent factors between three groups: 1 non-offenders, 2 low, and 3 high psychopathic offenders. There were no significant mean differences between groups. Our results challenge current theories that focus on deficits in emotional responsiveness as leading to the development of psychopathy and encourage further theoretical development on deviant emotional processes in psychopathic individuals.

Cross-cultural decoding of positive and negative nonlinguistic emotion vocalizations

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Petri eLaukka

2013-07-01

Full Text Available Which emotions are associated with universally recognized nonverbal signals? We address this issue by examining how reliably nonlinguistic vocalizations (affect bursts can convey emotions across cultures. Actors from India, Kenya, Singapore and USA were instructed to produce vocalizations that would convey 9 positive and 9 negative emotions to listeners. The vocalizations were judged by Swedish listeners using a within-valence forced-choice procedure, where positive and negative emotions were judged in separate experiments. Results showed that listeners could recognize a wide range of positive and negative emotions with accuracy above chance. For positive emotions, we observed the highest recognition rates for relief, followed by lust, interest, serenity and positive surprise, with affection and pride receiving the lowest recognition rates. Anger, disgust, fear, sadness and negative surprise received the highest recognition rates for negative emotions, with the lowest rates observed for guilt and shame. By way of summary, results showed that the voice can reveal both basic emotions and several positive emotions other than happiness across cultures, but self-conscious emotions such as guilt, pride, and shame seem not to be well recognized from nonlinguistic vocalizations.

Unaltered emotional experience in Parkinson's disease: Pupillometry and behavioral evidence.

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Schwartz, Rachel; Rothermich, Kathrin; Kotz, Sonja A; Pell, Marc D

2018-04-01

Recognizing emotions in others is a pivotal part of socioemotional functioning and plays a central role in social interactions. It has been shown that individuals suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) are less accurate at identifying basic emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness; however, previous studies have predominantly assessed emotion processing using unimodal stimuli (e.g., pictures) that do not reflect the complexity of real-world processing demands. Dynamic, naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) have been shown to elicit stronger subjective emotional experiences than unimodal stimuli and can facilitate emotion recognition. In this experiment, pupil measurements of PD patients and matched healthy controls (HC) were recorded while they watched short film clips. Participants' task was to identify the emotion elicited by each clip and rate the intensity of their emotional response. We explored (a) how PD affects subjective emotional experience in response to dynamic, ecologically valid film stimuli, and (b) whether there are PD-related changes in pupillary response, which may contribute to the differences in emotion processing reported in the literature. Behavioral results showed that identification of the felt emotion as well as perceived intensity varies by emotion, but no significant group effect was found. Pupil measurements revealed differences in dilation depending on the emotion evoked by the film clips (happy, tender, sadness, fear, and neutral) for both groups. Our results suggest that differences in emotional response may be negligible when PD patients and healthy controls are presented with dynamic, ecologically valid emotional stimuli. Given the limited data available on pupil response in PD, this study provides new evidence to suggest that the PD-related deficits in emotion processing reported in the literature may not translate to real-world differences in physiological or subjective emotion processing in early-stage PD patients.

Contributions of emotional state and attention to the processing of syntactic agreement errors: evidence from P600

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Martine Wilhelmina Francina Teresia Verhees

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The classic account of language is that language processing occurs in isolation from other cognitive systems, like perception, motor action and emotion. The theme of this paper is the relationship between a participant’s emotional state and language comprehension. Does emotional context affect how we process neutral words? Recent studies showed that processing of word meaning –traditionally conceived as an automatic process– is affected by emotional state. The influence of emotional state on syntactic processing is less clear. One study reported a mood-related P600 modulation, while another study did not observe an effect of mood on syntactic processing. The goals of this study were: First, to clarify whether and if so how mood affects syntactic processing. Second, to shed light on the underlying mechanisms by separating possible effects of mood from those of attention on syntactic processing.ERPs were recorded while participants read syntactically correct or incorrect sentences. Mood (happy vs. sad was manipulated by presenting film clips. Attention was manipulated by directing attention to syntactic features vs. physical features. The mood induction was effective. Interactions between mood, attention and syntactic correctness were obtained, showing that mood and attention modulated P600. The mood manipulation led to a reduction in P600 for sad as compared to happy mood when attention was directed at syntactic features. The attention manipulation led to a reduction in P600 when attention was directed at physical features compared to syntactic features for happy mood. From this we draw two conclusions: First, emotional state does affect syntactic processing. We propose mood-related differences in the reliance on heuristics as the underlying mechanism. Second, attention can contribute to emotion-related ERP effects in syntactic language processing. Therefore, future studies on the relation between language and emotion will have to control

Contributions of emotional state and attention to the processing of syntactic agreement errors: evidence from P600.

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Verhees, Martine W F T; Chwilla, Dorothee J; Tromp, Johanne; Vissers, Constance T W M

2015-01-01

The classic account of language is that language processing occurs in isolation from other cognitive systems, like perception, motor action, and emotion. The central theme of this paper is the relationship between a participant's emotional state and language comprehension. Does emotional context affect how we process neutral words? Recent studies showed that processing of word meaning - traditionally conceived as an automatic process - is affected by emotional state. The influence of emotional state on syntactic processing is less clear. One study reported a mood-related P600 modulation, while another study did not observe an effect of mood on syntactic processing. The goals of this study were: First, to clarify whether and if so how mood affects syntactic processing. Second, to shed light on the underlying mechanisms by separating possible effects of mood from those of attention on syntactic processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read syntactically correct or incorrect sentences. Mood (happy vs. sad) was manipulated by presenting film clips. Attention was manipulated by directing attention to syntactic features vs. physical features. The mood induction was effective. Interactions between mood, attention and syntactic correctness were obtained, showing that mood and attention modulated P600. The mood manipulation led to a reduction in P600 for sad as compared to happy mood when attention was directed at syntactic features. The attention manipulation led to a reduction in P600 when attention was directed at physical features compared to syntactic features for happy mood. From this we draw two conclusions: First, emotional state does affect syntactic processing. We propose mood-related differences in the reliance on heuristics as the underlying mechanism. Second, attention can contribute to emotion-related ERP effects in syntactic language processing. Therefore, future studies on the relation between language and emotion will

Environmental Strategies of Affect Regulation and Their Associations With Subjective Well-Being

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Kalevi M. Korpela

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Environmental strategies of affect regulation refer to the use of natural and urban socio-physical settings in the service of regulation. We investigated the perceived use and efficacy of environmental strategies for regulation of general affect and sadness, considering them in relation to other affect regulation strategies and to subjective well-being. Participants from Australia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden (N = 507 evaluated the frequency of use and perceived efficacy of affect regulation strategies using a modified version of the Measure of Affect Regulation Styles (MARS. The internet survey also included the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS, emotional well-being items from the RAND 36-Item Health Survey, and a single-item measure of perceived general health. Environmental regulation formed a separate factor of affect regulation in the exploratory structural equation models (ESEM. Although no relations of environmental strategies with emotional well-being were found, both the perceived frequency of use and efficacy of environmental strategies were positively related to perceived health. Moreover, the perceived efficacy of environmental strategies was positively related to life satisfaction in regulating sadness. The results encourage more explicit treatment of environmental strategies in research on affect regulation.

Environmental Strategies of Affect Regulation and Their Associations With Subjective Well-Being

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Korpela, Kalevi M.; Pasanen, Tytti; Repo, Veera; Hartig, Terry; Staats, Henk; Mason, Michael; Alves, Susana; Fornara, Ferdinando; Marks, Tony; Saini, Sunil; Scopelliti, Massimiliano; Soares, Ana L.; Stigsdotter, Ulrika K.; Ward Thompson, Catharine

2018-01-01

Environmental strategies of affect regulation refer to the use of natural and urban socio-physical settings in the service of regulation. We investigated the perceived use and efficacy of environmental strategies for regulation of general affect and sadness, considering them in relation to other affect regulation strategies and to subjective well-being. Participants from Australia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden (N = 507) evaluated the frequency of use and perceived efficacy of affect regulation strategies using a modified version of the Measure of Affect Regulation Styles (MARS). The internet survey also included the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), emotional well-being items from the RAND 36-Item Health Survey, and a single-item measure of perceived general health. Environmental regulation formed a separate factor of affect regulation in the exploratory structural equation models (ESEM). Although no relations of environmental strategies with emotional well-being were found, both the perceived frequency of use and efficacy of environmental strategies were positively related to perceived health. Moreover, the perceived efficacy of environmental strategies was positively related to life satisfaction in regulating sadness. The results encourage more explicit treatment of environmental strategies in research on affect regulation. PMID:29720955

The Bodily Expressive Action Stimulus Test (BEAST). Construction and Validation of a Stimulus Basis for Measuring Perception of Whole Body Expression of Emotions.

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de Gelder, Beatrice; Van den Stock, Jan

2011-01-01

Whole body expressions are among the main visual stimulus categories that are naturally associated with faces and the neuroscientific investigation of how body expressions are processed has entered the research agenda this last decade. Here we describe the stimulus set of whole body expressions termed bodily expressive action stimulus test (BEAST), and we provide validation data for use of these materials by the community of emotion researchers. The database was composed of 254 whole body expressions from 46 actors expressing 4 emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness). In all pictures the face of the actor was blurred and participants were asked to categorize the emotions expressed in the stimuli in a four alternative-forced-choice task. The results show that all emotions are well recognized, with sadness being the easiest, followed by fear, whereas happiness was the most difficult. The BEAST appears a valuable addition to currently available tools for assessing recognition of affective signals. It can be used in explicit recognition tasks as well as in matching tasks and in implicit tasks, combined either with facial expressions, with affective prosody, or presented with affective pictures as context in healthy subjects as well as in clinical populations.

SAD effects on grantsmanship.

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Lozano, George A

2015-01-01

SAD is a state of depression induced by a lack of sufficient sunlight that occurs at high latitudes during the fall and winter. SAD causes people to be risk-adverse. Granting agencies of high latitude countries should time high-risk research competitions so they do not coincide with the SAD months. © 2015 WILEY Periodicals, Inc.

Dissociation of sad facial expressions and autonomic nervous system responding in boys with disruptive behavior disorders

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Marsh, Penny; Beauchaine, Theodore P.; Williams, Bailey

2009-01-01

Although deficiencies in emotional responding have been linked to externalizing behaviors in children, little is known about how discrete response systems (e.g., expressive, physiological) are coordinated during emotional challenge among these youth. We examined time-linked correspondence of sad facial expressions and autonomic reactivity during an empathy-eliciting task among boys with disruptive behavior disorders (n = 31) and controls (n = 23). For controls, sad facial expressions were associated with reduced sympathetic (lower skin conductance level, lengthened cardiac preejection period [PEP]) and increased parasympathetic (higher respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) activity. In contrast, no correspondence between facial expressions and autonomic reactivity was observed among boys with conduct problems. Furthermore, low correspondence between facial expressions and PEP predicted externalizing symptom severity, whereas low correspondence between facial expressions and RSA predicted internalizing symptom severity. PMID:17868261

Alexithymia, affect intensity and emotional range in suicidal patients.

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Iancu, I; Horesh, N; Offer, D; Dannon, P N; Lepkifker, E; Kotler, M

1999-01-01

Although negative affect in general has been widely associated with suicide, the role of specific emotions and affect features in depression and suicidality is unclear. This study examined the potential of three major components of the affect structure as predictors of suicidal behavior. Twenty suicidal depressed (SD) inpatients were compared with 20 nonsuicidal depressed (NSD) inpatients and 20 healthy controls for alexithymia, emotional range (ER; i.e. variety of emotions experienced by the subjects) and affect intensity (AI; i.e. the intensity of their emotional responsiveness). Both the SD and the NSD patients had a narrower range of emotions, a stronger AI and a higher degree of alexithymia than did the healthy controls. No differences were found between the scores of the two inpatients groups. The three affect components examined (alexithymia, AI and ER) did not prove to represent sensitive predictors of suicidal behavior. Hopelessness and depression severity were found to be more reliable in the prediction of suicidal risk. We discuss the implications of this study, particularly the possibility of early detection and intervention in patients at risk.

Cultural relativity in perceiving emotion from vocalizations.

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Gendron, Maria; Roberson, Debi; van der Vyver, Jacoba Marieta; Barrett, Lisa Feldman

2014-04-01

A central question in the study of human behavior is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms. Responses indicate that Himba participants perceived more basic affective properties of valence (positivity or negativity) and to some extent arousal (high or low activation). In a second, concept-embedded task, we manipulated whether the target and foil on a given trial matched in both valence and arousal, neither valence nor arousal, valence only, or arousal only. Himba participants achieved above-chance accuracy only when foils differed from targets in valence only. Our results indicate that the voice can reliably convey affective meaning across cultures, but that perceptions of emotion from the voice are culturally variable.

On the Time Course of Vocal Emotion Recognition

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Pell, Marc D.; Kotz, Sonja A.

2011-01-01

How quickly do listeners recognize emotions from a speaker's voice, and does the time course for recognition vary by emotion type? To address these questions, we adapted the auditory gating paradigm to estimate how much vocal information is needed for listeners to categorize five basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness) and neutral utterances produced by male and female speakers of English. Semantically-anomalous pseudo-utterances (e.g., The rivix jolled the silling) conveying each emotion were divided into seven gate intervals according to the number of syllables that listeners heard from sentence onset. Participants (n = 48) judged the emotional meaning of stimuli presented at each gate duration interval, in a successive, blocked presentation format. Analyses looked at how recognition of each emotion evolves as an utterance unfolds and estimated the “identification point” for each emotion. Results showed that anger, sadness, fear, and neutral expressions are recognized more accurately at short gate intervals than happiness, and particularly disgust; however, as speech unfolds, recognition of happiness improves significantly towards the end of the utterance (and fear is recognized more accurately than other emotions). When the gate associated with the emotion identification point of each stimulus was calculated, data indicated that fear (M = 517 ms), sadness (M = 576 ms), and neutral (M = 510 ms) expressions were identified from shorter acoustic events than the other emotions. These data reveal differences in the underlying time course for conscious recognition of basic emotions from vocal expressions, which should be accounted for in studies of emotional speech processing. PMID:22087275

Recognizing vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese: a validated database of Chinese vocal emotional stimuli.

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Liu, Pan; Pell, Marc D

2012-12-01

To establish a valid database of vocal emotional stimuli in Mandarin Chinese, a set of Chinese pseudosentences (i.e., semantically meaningless sentences that resembled real Chinese) were produced by four native Mandarin speakers to express seven emotional meanings: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, pleasant surprise, and neutrality. These expressions were identified by a group of native Mandarin listeners in a seven-alternative forced choice task, and items reaching a recognition rate of at least three times chance performance in the seven-choice task were selected as a valid database and then subjected to acoustic analysis. The results demonstrated expected variations in both perceptual and acoustic patterns of the seven vocal emotions in Mandarin. For instance, fear, anger, sadness, and neutrality were associated with relatively high recognition, whereas happiness, disgust, and pleasant surprise were recognized less accurately. Acoustically, anger and pleasant surprise exhibited relatively high mean f0 values and large variation in f0 and amplitude; in contrast, sadness, disgust, fear, and neutrality exhibited relatively low mean f0 values and small amplitude variations, and happiness exhibited a moderate mean f0 value and f0 variation. Emotional expressions varied systematically in speech rate and harmonics-to-noise ratio values as well. This validated database is available to the research community and will contribute to future studies of emotional prosody for a number of purposes. To access the database, please contact pan.liu@mail.mcgill.ca.

Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music.

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Xiao, Naiqi G; Quinn, Paul C; Liu, Shaoying; Ge, Liezhong; Pascalis, Olivier; Lee, Kang

2018-03-01

We used a novel intermodal association task to examine whether infants associate own- and other-race faces with music of different emotional valences. Three- to 9-month-olds saw a series of neutral own- or other-race faces paired with happy or sad musical excerpts. Three- to 6-month-olds did not show any specific association between face race and music. At 9 months, however, infants looked longer at own-race faces paired with happy music than at own-race faces paired with sad music. Nine-month-olds also looked longer at other-race faces paired with sad music than at other-race faces paired with happy music. These results indicate that infants with nearly exclusive own-race face experience develop associations between face race and music emotional valence in the first year of life. The potential implications of such associations for developing racial biases in early childhood are discussed. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Emotion (Dys)regulation and Links to Depressive Disorders

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Kovacs, Maria; Joormann, Jutta; Gotlib, Ian H.

2010-01-01

Clinical depression is a significant mental health problem that is associated with personal suffering and impaired functioning. These effects underscore the continuing need for new approaches that can inform researchers and clinicians when designing interventions. We propose that individual differences in the self-regulation of sadness and distress provide an important link between stress, depressed mood, and the onset of depressive disorder, and that if we have a better understanding of the ways children successfully manage negative emotions, we can better prevent and treat pediatric depression. In this article, we therefore examine the normative development of responses that children use to attenuate sadness, and aspects of the neurobiological infrastructure that both enable and constrain such self-regulatory efforts. We also address the emerging literature on affect regulation among children at familial risk for depressive disorders. We conclude that problems with adaptively self-regulating sadness and distress represent one pathway that can lead to juvenile-onset depression. And we need integrated, developmental studies of the psychosocial and neurobiological aspects of self-regulatory responses to sadness and distress in order to better understand this process, and to design age-sensitive intervention strategies for pediatric depression. PMID:20721304

Emotional Awareness and Couples' Relationship Satisfaction

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Croyle, Kristin L.; Waltz, Jennifer

2002-01-01

This study examined the role of emotional awareness in couples' relationships and the effects of a tendency to respond to difficult couples' situations with "soft" emotions (including sadness and fear) versus "hard" emotions (including anger and resentment). Participants were 56 heterosexual couples who completed a measure of relationship…

The effects of experimentally-induced sad and happy mood on sexual arousal in sexually healthy women.

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ter Kuile, Moniek M; Both, Stephanie; van Uden, Janneke

2010-03-01

In depressed women, common sexual difficulties include decreased sexual desire, sexual arousal and orgasmic difficulties, reduced sexual satisfaction, and reduced sexual pleasure. Experimental research on the influence of depressed mood on genital and subjective sexual arousal in women is scarce. To investigate the effects of sad mood on genital and subjective sexual arousal in sexually healthy women, using a mood induction procedure. Thirty-two subjects received a sad mood and a happy mood induction, on two different days, using a within subjects design. The mood induction procedure was a combination of the Velten procedure and music. In the Velten procedure, the subject is asked to read sad or happy self-referent sentences and to experience the mood suggested by these sentences. Immediately following mood induction, the subjects were exposed to an erotic film clip. Genital arousal was assessed using vaginal photoplethysmography. Self-report ratings of sad and happy mood, subjective sexual arousal and affective reactions were collected before and after the erotic clip. The sad and happy mood ratings indicated that the mood inductions affected mood as intended. No difference in genital sexual arousal was found between the sad and happy mood conditions. Subjects reported significantly less subjective sexual arousal and positive affect and marginally significant fewer genital sensations and more negative affect in the sad mood condition than in the happy mood condition. The results provide empirical support for the idea that mood can impact on subjective sexual arousal in women.

A cross-cultural study on emotion expression and the learning of social norms

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Hareli, Shlomo; Kafetsios, Konstantinos; Hess, Ursula

2015-01-01

When we do not know how to correctly behave in a new context, the emotions that people familiar with the context show in response to the behaviors of others, can help us understand what to do or not to do. The present study examined cross-cultural differences in how group emotional expressions (anger, sadness, neutral) can be used to deduce a norm violation in four cultures (Germany, Israel, Greece, and the US), which differ in terms of decoding rules for negative emotions. As expected, in all four countries, anger was a stronger norm violation signal than sadness or neutral expressions. However, angry and sad expressions were perceived as more intense and the relevant norm was learned better in Germany and Israel than in Greece and the US. Participants in Greece were relatively better at using sadness as a sign of a likely norm violation. The results demonstrate both cultural universality and cultural differences in the use of group emotion expressions in norm learning. In terms of cultural differences they underscore that the social signal value of emotional expressions may vary with culture as a function of cultural differences, both in emotion perception, and as a function of a differential use of emotions. PMID:26483744

A cross-cultural study on emotion expression and the learning of social norms.

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Hareli, Shlomo; Kafetsios, Konstantinos; Hess, Ursula

2015-01-01

When we do not know how to correctly behave in a new context, the emotions that people familiar with the context show in response to the behaviors of others, can help us understand what to do or not to do. The present study examined cross-cultural differences in how group emotional expressions (anger, sadness, neutral) can be used to deduce a norm violation in four cultures (Germany, Israel, Greece, and the US), which differ in terms of decoding rules for negative emotions. As expected, in all four countries, anger was a stronger norm violation signal than sadness or neutral expressions. However, angry and sad expressions were perceived as more intense and the relevant norm was learned better in Germany and Israel than in Greece and the US. Participants in Greece were relatively better at using sadness as a sign of a likely norm violation. The results demonstrate both cultural universality and cultural differences in the use of group emotion expressions in norm learning. In terms of cultural differences they underscore that the social signal value of emotional expressions may vary with culture as a function of cultural differences, both in emotion perception, and as a function of a differential use of emotions.

A cross-cultural study on emotion expression and the learning of social norms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shlomo eHareli

2015-10-01

Full Text Available When we do not know how to correctly behave in a new context, the emotions that people familiar with the context show in response to the behaviors of others, can help us understand what to do or not to do. The present study examined cross-cultural differences in how group emotional expressions (anger, sadness, neutral can be used to deduce a norm violation in four cultures (Germany, Israel, Greece and the US, which differ in terms of decoding rules for negative emotions. As expected, in all four countries, anger was a stronger norm violation signal than sadness or neutral expressions. However, angry and sad expressions were perceived as more intense and the relevant norm was learned better in Germany and Israel than in Greece and the US. Participants in Greece were relatively better at using sadness as a sign of a likely norm violation. The results demonstrate both cultural universality and cultural differences in the use of group emotion expressions in norm learning. In terms of cultural differences they underscore that the social signal value of emotional expressions may vary with culture as a function of cultural differences, both in emotion perception, and as a function of a differential use of emotions.

Endogenous oxytocin levels are associated with the perception of emotion in dynamic body expressions in schizophrenia.

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Strauss, Gregory P; Keller, William R; Koenig, James I; Sullivan, Sara K; Gold, James M; Buchanan, Robert W

2015-03-01

Lower endogenous oxytocin levels have been associated with impaired social cognition in schizophrenia, particularly facial affect identification. Little is known about the relationship between oxytocin and other forms of emotion perception. In the current study, 41 individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and 22 demographically matched healthy controls (CN) completed a forced-choice affective body expression classification task. Stimuli included dynamic videos of male and female actors portraying 4 discrete emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and neutral. Plasma oxytocin levels were determined via radioimmunoassay. Results indicated that SZ had significantly higher plasma oxytocin concentrations than CN. SZ were also less accurate at identifying expressions of happiness and sadness; however, there were no group differences for anger or neutral stimuli. A group×sex interaction was also present, such that female CN were more accurate than male CN, whereas male SZ were more accurate than female SZ. Higher endogenous oxytocin levels were associated with better total recognition in both SZ and CN; this association was specific to females in SZ. Findings indicate that sex plays an important role in identifying emotional expressions in body gestures in SZ, and that individual differences in endogenous oxytocin predict emotion perception accuracy. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Expression of emotion in the kinematics of locomotion.

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Barliya, Avi; Omlor, Lars; Giese, Martin A; Berthoz, Alain; Flash, Tamar

2013-03-01

Here, we examine how different emotions-happiness, fear, sadness and anger-affect the kinematics of locomotion. We focus on a compact representation of locomotion properties using the intersegmental law of coordination (Borghese et al. in J Physiol 494(3):863-879, 1996), which states that, during the gait cycle of human locomotion, the elevation angles of the thigh, shank and foot do not evolve independently of each other but form a planar pattern of co-variation. This phenomenon is highly robust and has been extensively studied. The orientation of the plane has been correlated with changes in the speed of locomotion and with reduction in energy expenditure as speed increases. An analytical model explaining the conditions underlying the emergence of this plane and predicting its orientation reveals that it suffices to examine the amplitudes of the elevation angles of the different segments along with the phase shifts between them (Barliya et al. in Exp Brain Res 193:371-385, 2009). We thus investigated the influence of different emotions on the parameters directly determining the orientation of the intersegmental plane and on the angular rotation profiles of the leg segments, examining both the effect of changes in walking speed and effects independent of speed. Subjects were professional actors and naïve subjects with no training in acting. As expected, emotions were found to strongly affect the kinematics of locomotion, particularly walking speed. The intersegmental coordination patterns revealed that emotional expression caused additional modifications to the locomotion patterns that could not be explained solely by a change in speed. For all emotions except sadness, the amplitude of thigh elevation angles changed from those in neutral locomotion. The intersegmental plane was also differently oriented, especially during anger. We suggest that, while speed is the dominant variable allowing discrimination between different emotional gaits, emotion can be

Misremembering emotion: Inductive category effects for complex emotional stimuli.

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Corbin, Jonathan C; Crawford, L Elizabeth; Vavra, Dylan T

2017-07-01

Memories of objects are biased toward what is typical of the category to which they belong. Prior research on memory for emotional facial expressions has demonstrated a bias towards an emotional expression prototype (e.g., slightly happy faces are remembered as happier). We investigate an alternate source of bias in memory for emotional expressions - the central tendency bias. The central tendency bias skews reconstruction of a memory trace towards the center of the distribution for a particular attribute. This bias has been attributed to a Bayesian combination of an imprecise memory for a particular object with prior information about its category. Until now, studies examining the central tendency bias have focused on simple stimuli. We extend this work to socially relevant, complex, emotional facial expressions. We morphed facial expressions on a continuum from sad to happy. Different ranges of emotion were used in four experiments in which participants viewed individual expressions and, after a variable delay, reproduced each face by adjusting a morph to match it. Estimates were biased toward the center of the presented stimulus range, and the bias increased at longer memory delays, consistent with the Bayesian prediction that as trace memory loses precision, category knowledge is given more weight. The central tendency effect persisted within and across emotion categories (sad, neutral, and happy). This article expands the scope of work on inductive category effects to memory for complex, emotional stimuli.

Mentalized affectivity: A new model and assessment of emotion regulation.

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David M Greenberg

Full Text Available Here we introduce a new assessment of emotion regulation called the Mentalized Affectivity Scale (MAS. A large online adult sample (N = 2,840 completed the 60-item MAS along with a battery of psychological measures. Results revealed a robust three-component structure underlying mentalized affectivity, which we labeled: Identifying emotions (the ability to identify emotions and to reflect on the factors that influence them; Processing emotions (the ability to modulate and distinguish complex emotions; and Expressing emotions (the tendency to express emotions outwardly or inwardly. Hierarchical modeling suggested that Processing emotions delineates from Identifying them, and Expressing emotions delineates from Processing them. We then showed how these components are associated with personality traits, well-being, trauma, and 18 different psychological disorders (including mood, neurological, and personality disorders. Notably, those with anxiety, mood, and personality disorders showed a profile of high Identifying and low Processing compared to controls. Further, results showed how mentalized affectivity scores varied across psychological treatment modalities and years spent in therapy. Taken together, the model of mentalized affectivity advances prior theory and research on emotion regulation and the MAS is a useful and reliable instrument that can be used in both clinical and non-clinical settings in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.

Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect

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Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i...

Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes (SADS) Foundation

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... SADS Foundation UK SADS Foundation Netherlands SADS Foundation China SADS Foundation Hong Kong Search for: Log in ... research crucial for health of patients and the economy 7/18/2017 More funding for heart disease ...

Eliciting mixed emotions: A meta-analysis comparing models, types and measures.

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Raul eBerrios

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The idea that people can experience two oppositely valenced emotions has been controversial ever since early attempts to investigate the construct of mixed emotions. This meta-analysis examined the robustness with which mixed emotions have been elicited experimentally. A systematic literature search identified 63 experimental studies that instigated the experience of mixed emotions. Studies were distinguished according to the structure of the underlying affect model – dimensional or discrete – as well as according to the type of mixed emotions studied (e.g., happy-sad, fearful-happy, positive-negative. The meta-analysis using a random-effects model revealed a moderate to high effect size for the elicitation of mixed emotions (dIG+ = .77, which remained consistent regardless of the structure of the affect model, and across different types of mixed emotions. Several methodological and design moderators were tested. Studies using the minimum index (i.e., the minimum value between a pair of opposite valenced affects resulted in smaller effect sizes, whereas subjective measures of mixed emotions increased the effect sizes. The presence of more women in the samples was also associated with larger effect sizes. The current study indicates that mixed emotions are a robust, measurable and non-artifactual experience. The results are discussed in terms of the implications for an affect system that has greater versatility and flexibility than previously thought.