Housing induced mood modulates reactions to emotional stimuli in sheep

The assessment of positive and negative short-term affective states (emotions) in animals and their modulation by long-term affective states (mood) is an on-going challenge. This study investigated the use of behavioural and physiological measures to assess emotions and their modulation by mood in sheep. To induce a more Positive and more Negative mood, two groups of sheep (n = 10 and 9) were kept under different housing conditions for 3 weeks. The Positive mood group was placed in a predictable environment rich in stimuli and with a calm human–animal interaction whereas sheep in the Negative mood group experienced a relatively barren and unpredictable environment with a harsher human–animal interaction. In the subsequent test week, 15 (8 and 7) experimental animals were exposed to four situations intended to elicit emotional reactions: separation from group members (negative valence), sham-grooming (low intensity negative), non-grooming (neutral), and grooming (positive valence). Data were tested for interactions between mood group and valence of the test situation using linear mixed models. More frequent ear-posture changes, a higher proportion of asymmetric ears, shorter inter-heartbeat intervals and higher respiration rates were observed during separation than during the other situations. Interactions between mood group and test situation showed that sheep in the Negative mood group reacted more negatively to the negative and more positively to the positive situation (proportion of asymmetric ears, inter-heartbeat interval, respiration rate). In conclusion, our findings suggest that sheep in a Positive mood reacted more weakly to an emotional situation independent of its valence, thus buffering negative events but also degrading positive events. In addition, this investigation showed the potential of using observations of ear postures and cardio-respiratory measures in sheep to assess the valence of short-term emotional states and their modulation by mood states.     

Emotions in Everyday Life

Despite decades of research establishing the causes and consequences of emotions in the laboratory, we know surprisingly little about emotions in everyday life. We developed a smartphone application that monitored real-time emotions of an exceptionally large (N = 11,000+) and heterogeneous participants sample. People’s everyday life seems profoundly emotional: participants experienced at least one emotion 90% of the time. The most frequent emotion was joy, followed by love and anxiety. People experienced positive emotions 2.5 times more often than negative emotions, but also experienced positive and negative emotions simultaneously relatively frequently. We also characterized the interconnections between people’s emotions using network analysis. This novel approach to emotion research suggests that specific emotions can fall into the following categories 1) connector emotions (e.g., joy), which stimulate same valence emotions while inhibiting opposite valence emotions, 2) provincial emotions (e.g., gratitude), which stimulate same valence emotions only, or 3) distal emotions (e.g., embarrassment), which have little interaction with other emotions and are typically experienced in isolation. Providing both basic foundations and novel tools to the study of emotions in everyday life, these findings demonstrate that emotions are ubiquitous to life and can exist together and distinctly, which has important implications for both emotional interventions and theory.     

Evolutionary explanations of emotions

Emotions can be explained as specialized states, shaped by natural selection, that increase fitness in specific situations. The physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics of a specific emotion can be analyzed as possible design features that increase the ability to cope with the threats and opportunities present in the corresponding situation. This approach to understanding the evolutionary functions of emotions is illustrated by the correspondence between (a) the subtypes of fear and the different kinds of threat; (b) the attributes of happiness and sadness and the changes that would be advantageous in propitious and unpropitious situations; and (c) the social emotions and the adaptive challenges of reciprocity relationships. In addition to addressing a core theoretical problem shared by evolutionary and cognitive psychology, explicit formulations of the evolutionary functions of specific emotions are of practical importance for understanding and treating emotional disorders.     

On the time course of vocal emotion recognition

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.     

Implicit Processing of Visual Emotions Is Affected by Sound-Induced Affective States and Individual Affective Traits

The ability to recognize emotions contained in facial expressions are affected by both affective traits and states and varies widely between individuals. While affective traits are stable in time, affective states can be regulated more rapidly by environmental stimuli, such as music, that indirectly modulate the brain state. Here, we tested whether a relaxing or irritating sound environment affects implicit processing of facial expressions. Moreover, we investigated whether and how individual traits of anxiety and emotional control interact with this process. 32 healthy subjects performed an implicit emotion processing task (presented to subjects as a gender discrimination task) while the sound environment was defined either by a) a therapeutic music sequence (MusiCure), b) a noise sequence or c) silence. Individual changes in mood were sampled before and after the task by a computerized questionnaire. Additionally, emotional control and trait anxiety were assessed in a separate session by paper and pencil questionnaires. Results showed a better mood after the MusiCure condition compared with the other experimental conditions and faster responses to happy faces during MusiCure compared with angry faces during Noise. Moreover, individuals with higher trait anxiety were faster in performing the implicit emotion processing task during MusiCure compared with Silence. These findings suggest that sound-induced affective states are associated with differential responses to angry and happy emotional faces at an implicit stage of processing, and that a relaxing sound environment facilitates the implicit emotional processing in anxious individuals.     

Congenital facial palsy and emotion processing: The case of Moebius syndrome

According to the Darwinian perspective, facial expressions of emotions evolved to quickly communicate emotional states and would serve adaptive functions that promote social interactions. Embodied cognition theories suggest that we understand others' emotions by reproducing the perceived expression in our own facial musculature (facial mimicry) and the mere observation of a facial expression can evoke the corresponding emotion in the perceivers. Consequently, the inability to form facial expressions would affect the experience of emotional understanding. In this review, we aimed at providing account on the link between the lack of emotion production and the mechanisms of emotion processing. We address this issue by taking into account Moebius syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that primarily affects the muscles controlling facial expressions. Individuals with Moebius syndrome are born with facial paralysis and inability to form facial expressions. This makes them the ideal population to study whether facial mimicry is necessary for emotion understanding. Here, we discuss behavioral ambiguous/mixed results on emotion recognition deficits in Moebius syndrome suggesting the need to investigate further aspects of emotional processing such as the physiological responses associated with the emotional experience during developmental age.     

Joyful by nature: approaches to investigate the evolution and function of joy in non-human animals

The nature and evolution of positive emotion is a major question remaining unanswered in science and philosophy. The study of feelings and emotions in humans and animals is dominated by discussion of affective states that have negative valence. Given the clinical and social significance of negative affect, such as depression, it is unsurprising that these emotions have received more attention from scientists. Compared to negative emotions, such as fear that leads to fleeing or avoidance, positive emotions are less likely to result in specific, identifiable, behaviours being expressed by an animal. This makes it particularly challenging to quantify and study positive affect. However, bursts of intense positive emotion (joy) are more likely to be accompanied by externally visible markers, like vocalisations or movement patterns, which make it more amenable to scientific study and more resilient to concerns about anthropomorphism. We define joy as intense, brief, and event-driven (i.e. a response to something), which permits investigation into how animals react to a variety of situations that would provoke joy in humans. This means that behavioural correlates of joy are measurable, either through newly discovered ‘laughter’ vocalisations, increases in play behaviour, or reactions to cognitive bias tests that can be used across species. There are a range of potential situations that cause joy in humans that have not been studied in other animals, such as whether animals feel joy on sunny days, when they accomplish a difficult feat, or when they are reunited with a familiar companion after a prolonged absence. Observations of species-specific calls and play behaviour can be combined with biometric markers and reactions to ambiguous stimuli in order to enable comparisons of affect between phylogenetically distant taxonomic groups. Identifying positive affect is also important for animal welfare because knowledge of positive emotional states would allow us to monitor animal well-being better. Additionally, measuring if phylogenetically and ecologically distant animals play more, laugh more, or act more optimistically after certain kinds of experiences will also provide insight into the mechanisms underlying the evolution of joy and other positive emotions, and potentially even into the evolution of consciousness.     

Can emotion recognition be taught to children with autism spectrum conditions?

Children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have major difficulties in recognizing and responding to emotional and mental states in others'' facial expressions. Such difficulties in empathy underlie their social-communication difficulties that form a core of the diagnosis. In this paper we ask whether aspects of empathy can be taught to young children with ASC. We review a study that evaluated The Transporters, an animated series designed to enhance emotion comprehension in children with ASC. Children with ASC (4–7 years old) watched The Transporters every day for four weeks. Participants were tested before and after intervention on emotional vocabulary and emotion recognition at three levels of generalization. The intervention group improved significantly more than a clinical control group on all task levels, performing comparably to typical controls at time 2. The discussion centres on how vehicles as mechanical systems may be one key reason why The Transporters caused the improved understanding and recognition of emotions in children with ASC. The implications for the design of autism-friendly interventions are also explored.     

Affect induction through musical sounds: an ethological perspective

How does music induce or evoke feeling states in listeners? A number of mechanisms have been proposed for how sounds induce emotions, including innate auditory responses, learned associations and mirror neuron processes. Inspired by ethology, it is suggested that the ethological concepts of signals, cues and indices offer additional analytic tools for better understanding induced affect. It is proposed that ethological concepts help explain why music is able to induce only certain emotions, why some induced emotions are similar to the displayed emotion (whereas other induced emotions differ considerably from the displayed emotion), why listeners often report feeling mixed emotions and why only some musical expressions evoke similar responses across cultures.     

额叶EEG偏侧化预测情绪灵活性

随着社会竞争的日益加剧,人们在生活、学习、工作中都可能遇到各种与情绪有关的事件,如何根据情境的要求和个人的需要对情绪进行灵活性的反应,对每个人而言都至关重要.情绪灵活性的研究已成为情绪心理学、临床心理学、健康心理学等多个领域热衷讨论的课题.研究发现,左侧和右侧前额叶皮层半球不同程度地涉及加工和调节对情绪刺激的情绪反应,因此,额叶脑电图(EEG)偏侧化与情绪灵活性存在密切关系.但是,额叶EEG偏侧化是否是情绪灵活性的一个客观指标,以及额叶EEG偏侧化怎样预测情绪灵活性,至今仍不清楚.本研究测量了通过情绪电影范式诱发被试产生高兴、悲伤、愤怒、恐惧、厌恶等情绪过程中的额叶EEG活动.结果显示,情绪灵活性的激活模式反映的是情绪的动机维度,而不是情绪的效价维度.在静息状态下,对于与接近动机相关的情绪,额叶EEG左侧化的个体的左侧化程度增加;对于与回避动机相关的情绪,其左侧化程度降低.与之相对,静息状态额叶EEG右侧化的个体,无论对于与趋近动机相关的情绪还是与回避动机相关的情绪,额叶EEG偏侧化的程度没有发生改变.研究表明,额叶EEG偏侧化模式能够预测情绪灵活性,额叶EEG左侧化的个体有更灵活的情绪反应,额叶EEG右侧化的个体则有相对不灵活的情绪反应.     

Facial EMG Responses to Emotional Expressions Are Related to Emotion Perception Ability

Although most people can identify facial expressions of emotions well, they still differ in this ability. According to embodied simulation theories understanding emotions of others is fostered by involuntarily mimicking the perceived expressions, causing a “reactivation” of the corresponding mental state. Some studies suggest automatic facial mimicry during expression viewing; however, findings on the relationship between mimicry and emotion perception abilities are equivocal. The present study investigated individual differences in emotion perception and its relationship to facial muscle responses - recorded with electromyogram (EMG) - in response to emotional facial expressions. N° = °269 participants completed multiple tasks measuring face and emotion perception. EMG recordings were taken from a subsample (N° = °110) in an independent emotion classification task of short videos displaying six emotions. Confirmatory factor analyses of the m. corrugator supercilii in response to angry, happy, sad, and neutral expressions showed that individual differences in corrugator activity can be separated into a general response to all faces and an emotion-related response. Structural equation modeling revealed a substantial relationship between the emotion-related response and emotion perception ability, providing evidence for the role of facial muscle activation in emotion perception from an individual differences perspective.     

Translating mouse vocalizations: prosody and frequency modulation1

Mental illness can include impaired abilities to express emotions or respond to the emotions of others. Speech provides a mechanism for expressing emotions, by both what words are spoken and by the melody or intonation of speech (prosody). Through the perception of variations in prosody, an individual can detect changes in another's emotional state. Prosodic features of mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), indicated by changes in frequency and amplitude, also convey information. Dams retrieve pups that emit separation calls, females approach males emitting solicitous calls, and mice can become fearful of a cue associated with the vocalizations of a distressed conspecific. Because acoustic features of mouse USVs respond to drugs and genetic manipulations that influence reward circuits, USV analysis can be employed to examine how genes influence social motivation, affect regulation, and communication. The purpose of this review is to discuss how genetic and developmental factors influence aspects of the mouse vocal repertoire and how mice respond to the vocalizations of their conspecifics. To generate falsifiable hypotheses about the emotional content of particular calls, this review addresses USV analysis within the framework of affective neuroscience (e.g. measures of motivated behavior such as conditioned place preference tests, brain activity and systemic physiology). Suggested future studies include employment of an expanded array of physiological and statistical approaches to identify the salient acoustic features of mouse vocalizations. We are particularly interested in rearing environments that incorporate sufficient spatial and temporal complexity to familiarize developing mice with a broader array of affective states.     

Factors affecting the Human Attribution of Emotions toward Animals

ABSTRACT

Attribution of emotions to animals can affect human–animal interactions and dictate animal welfare laws. However, little is known about the factors that influence these attributions. We investigated the effect of belief in animal mind, pet ownership, emotional intelligence, eating orientation, and gender on the attribution of different emotions to a variety of species, from different taxonomic classes, considered as Pet, Use (e.g., used for food, experimentation), or Pest animals. Three hundred and forty-seven participants, aged between 16 and 65 years, completed a questionnaire that measured their belief in the capacity for animals to experience seven primary and secondary emotions. The results showed that attribution of emotions to animals is inconsistent. The ambiguity appears to hinge, in part, upon an animal's functional category and their perceived place in the commonly supposed, though inaccurate, linear hierarchy of species. Nonetheless, the wide range of emotions that were attributed to all species highlights the complex and potentially disorganized thoughts that humans have concerning animals. Belief in animal mind was found to be the strongest and only predictor of emotion attribution to animals in general, but is probably because both are part of the same underlying construct. Ownership of some species—rabbits, horses, rodents and birds—mediated the emotions attributed to that particular species. We conclude that ambiguous attitudes influence the standards of welfare for animals used by humans and that the dichotomous attitudes permit exploitation and welfare violations against animals. Greater understanding of emotion attribution has the potential to improve humane education methods, and suggestions for future research are made.     

The Relationship between Child Maltreatment and Emotion Recognition

Child abuse and neglect affect the development of social cognition in children and inhibit social adjustment. The purpose of this study was to compare the ability to identify the emotional states of others between abused and non-abused children. The participants, 129 children (44 abused and 85 non-abused children), completed a children’s version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). Results showed that the mean accuracy rate on the RMET for abused children was significantly lower than the rate of the non-abused children. In addition, the accuracy rates for positive emotion items (e.g., hoping, interested, happy) were significantly lower for the abused children, but negative emotion and neutral items were not different across the groups. This study found a negative relationship between child abuse and the ability to understand others’ emotions, especially positive emotions.     

Mood induction in depressive patients: a comparative multidimensional approach

Anhedonia, reduced positive affect and enhanced negative affect are integral characteristics of major depressive disorder (MDD). Emotion dysregulation, e.g. in terms of different emotion processing deficits, has consistently been reported. The aim of the present study was to investigate mood changes in depressive patients using a multidimensional approach for the measurement of emotional reactivity to mood induction procedures. Experimentally, mood states can be altered using various mood induction procedures. The present study aimed at validating two different positive mood induction procedures in patients with MDD and investigating which procedure is more effective and applicable in detecting dysfunctions in MDD. The first procedure relied on the presentation of happy vs. neutral faces, while the second used funny vs. neutral cartoons. Emotional reactivity was assessed in 16 depressed and 16 healthy subjects using self-report measures, measurements of electrodermal activity and standardized analyses of facial responses. Positive mood induction was successful in both procedures according to subjective ratings in patients and controls. In the cartoon condition, however, a discrepancy between reduced facial activity and concurrently enhanced autonomous reactivity was found in patients. Relying on a multidimensional assessment technique, a more comprehensive estimate of dysfunctions in emotional reactivity in MDD was available than by self-report measures alone and this was unsheathed especially by the mood induction procedure relying on cartoons. The divergent facial and autonomic responses in the presence of unaffected subjective reactivity suggest an underlying deficit in the patients' ability to express the felt arousal to funny cartoons. Our results encourage the application of both procedures in functional imaging studies for investigating the neural substrates of emotion dysregulation in MDD patients. Mood induction via cartoons appears to be superior to mood induction via faces and autobiographical material in uncovering specific emotional dysfunctions in MDD.     

Body Actions Change the Appearance of Facial Expressions

Perception, cognition, and emotion do not operate along segregated pathways; rather, their adaptive interaction is supported by various sources of evidence. For instance, the aesthetic appraisal of powerful mood inducers like music can bias the facial expression of emotions towards mood congruency. In four experiments we showed similar mood-congruency effects elicited by the comfort/discomfort of body actions. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure, we let participants perform comfortable/uncomfortable visually-guided reaches and tested them in a facial emotion identification task. Through the alleged mediation of motor action induced mood, action comfort enhanced the quality of the participant’s global experience (a neutral face appeared happy and a slightly angry face neutral), while action discomfort made a neutral face appear angry and a slightly happy face neutral. Furthermore, uncomfortable (but not comfortable) reaching improved the sensitivity for the identification of emotional faces and reduced the identification time of facial expressions, as a possible effect of hyper-arousal from an unpleasant bodily experience.     

Was ‘The expression of the emotions’ a misleading phrase?

The title of Darwin's book implies that emotional behaviour is a direct expression of a relatively simple internal state. However data from both animals and humans indicate that neither emotional ‘states’ nor emotional behaviour can be considered independently of the factors that give rise to them, and may involve complex affective-cognitive interactions. Furthermore such ‘expression of emotion’ often involves processes of negotiation between two or more individuals. It is suggested that an attempt to grasp the nettle of the difficulty of defining ‘emotion’ may aid understanding of the processes involved, and facilitate liaison between studies of signal movements in animals and human emotions.     

Not As Good as You Think? Trait Positive Emotion Is Associated with Increased Self-Reported Empathy but Decreased Empathic Performance

How is positive emotion associated with our ability to empathize with others? Extant research provides support for two competing predictions about this question. An empathy amplification hypothesis suggests positive emotion would be associated with greater empathy, as it often enhances other prosocial processes. A contrasting empathy attenuation hypothesis suggests positive emotion would be associated with lower empathy, because positive emotion promotes self-focused or antisocial behaviors. The present investigation tested these competing perspectives by examining associations between dispositional positive emotion and both subjective (i.e., self-report) and objective (i.e., task performance) measures of empathy. Findings revealed that although trait positive emotion was associated with increased subjective beliefs about empathic tendencies, it was associated with both increases and decreases in task-based empathic performance depending on the target’s emotional state. More specifically, trait positive emotion was linked to lower overall empathic accuracy toward a high-intensity negative target, but also a higher sensitivity to emotion upshifts (i.e., shifts in emotion from negative to positive) toward positive targets. This suggests that trait positive affect may be associated with decreased objective empathy in the context of mood incongruent (i.e., negative) emotional stimuli, but may increase some aspects of empathic performance in the context of mood congruent (i.e., positive) stimuli. Taken together, these findings suggest that trait positive emotion engenders a compelling subjective-objective gap regarding its association with empathy, in being related to a heightened perception of empathic tendencies, despite being linked to mixed abilities in regards to empathic performance. (Word count: 242).     

Sensitivity to reward loss as an indicator of animal emotion and welfare

The scientific study of animal emotion is an important emerging discipline in subjects ranging from neuroscience to animal welfare research. In the absence of direct measures of conscious emotion, indirect behavioural and physiological measures are used. However, these may have significant limitations (e.g. indicating emotional arousal but not valence (positivity versus negativity)). A new approach, taking its impetus from human studies, proposes that biases in information processing, and underlying mechanisms relating to the evaluation of reward gains and losses, may reliably reflect emotional valence in animals. In general, people are more sensitive to reward losses than gains, but people in a negative affective state (e.g. depression) are particularly sensitive to losses. This may underlie broader findings such as an enhanced attention to, and memory of, negative events in depressed individuals. Here we show that rats in unenriched housing, who typically exhibit indicators of poorer welfare and a more negative affective state than those in enriched housing, display a prolonged response to a decrease in anticipated food reward, indicating enhanced sensitivity to reward loss. Sensitivity to reward reduction may thus be a valuable new indicator of animal emotion and welfare.     

Collective emotions online and their influence on community life

Background

E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information – how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions in turn are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. However, it is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members'' personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group activities.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Here, for the first time, we show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large scale as observed in four million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of emotion in messages fell during discussions.

Conclusions/Significance

Overall, our results prove that collective emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.