Psychophysiological Response Patterns to Affective Film Stimuli

Psychophysiological research on emotion utilizes various physiological response measures to index activation of the defense system. Here we tested 1) whether acoustic startle reflex (ASR), skin conductance response (SCR) and heart rate (HR) elicited by highly arousing stimuli specifically reflect a defensive state and 2) the relation between resting heart rate variability (HRV) and affective responding. In a within-subject design, participants viewed film clips with a positive, negative and neutral content. In contrast to SCR and HR, we show that ASR differentiated between negative, neutral and positive states and can therefore be considered as a reliable index of activation of the defense system. Furthermore, resting HRV was associated with affect-modulated characteristics of ASR, but not with SCR or HR. Interestingly, individuals with low-HRV showed less differentiation in ASR between affective states. We discuss the important value of ASR in psychophysiological research on emotion and speculate on HRV as a potential biological marker for demarcating adaptive from maladaptive responding.     

Well-being and affective style: neural substrates and biobehavioural correlates

One of the most salient features of emotion is the pronounced variability among individuals in their reactions to emotional incentives and in their dispositional mood. Collectively, these individual differences have been described as affective style. Recent research has begun to dissect the constituents of affective style. The search for these components is guided by the neural systems that instantiate emotion and emotion regulation. In this article, this body of research and theory is applied specifically to positive affect and well-being. The central substrates and peripheral biological correlates of well-being are described. A resilient affective style is associated with high levels of left prefrontal activation, effective modulation of activation in the amygdala and fast recovery in response to negative and stressful events. In peripheral biology, these central patterns are associated with lower levels of basal cortisol and with higher levels of antibody titres to influenza vaccine. The article concludes with a consideration of whether these patterns of central and peripheral biology can be modified by training and shifted toward a more salubrious direction.     

Sex-Related Neuroanatomical Basis of Emotion Regulation Ability

Behavioral research has demonstrated that males have a higher capability of regulating their own and others'' emotions than females; however, little is known about the sex-specific brain mechanisms involved in emotion regulation ability. In the present study, we used voxel-based morphometry to investigate the neural basis underlying emotion regulation ability in a large sample of young adults. Assessment of emotion regulation ability was performed using the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale. As expected, males significantly scored higher in emotion regulation ability than females did. More importantly, we found the sex differences in the neuroanatomical basis of emotion regulation ability. Males showed a stronger positive relation between emotion regulation ability and regional gray matter volume (rGMV) in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, females demonstrated a stronger positive relation between emotion regulation ability and rGMV in an anatomical cluster that extends from the left brainstem to the left hippocampus, the left amygdala and the insular cortex. The present study provides the first empirical evidence regarding the sex-linked neuroanatomical correlates of emotion regulation ability. These findings may help understand why there is a higher prevalence of affective disorders in females and maladaptive behaviors in males.     

Functional connectivity of pain-mediated affect regulation in Borderline Personality Disorder

Affective instability and self-injurious behavior are important features of Borderline Personality Disorder. Whereas affective instability may be caused by a pattern of limbic hyperreactivity paired with dysfunctional prefrontal regulation mechanisms, painful stimulation was found to reduce affective arousal at the neural level, possibly underlying the soothing effect of pain in BPD.We used psychophysiological interactions to analyze functional connectivity of (para-) limbic brain structures (i.e. amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate cortex) in Borderline Personality Disorder in response to painful stimulation. Therefore, we re-analyzed a dataset from 20 patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and 23 healthy controls who took part in an fMRI-task inducing negative (versus neutral) affect and subsequently applying heat pain (versus warmth perception).Results suggest an enhanced negative coupling between limbic as well as paralimbic regions and prefrontal regions, specifically with the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, when patients experienced pain in addition to emotional arousing pictures. When neutral pictures were combined with painful heat sensation, we found positive connectivity in Borderline Personality Disorder between (para-)limbic brain areas and parts of the basal ganglia (lentiform nucleus, putamen), as well areas involved in self-referential processing (precuneus and posterior cingulate).We found further evidence for alterations in the emotion regulation process in Borderline Personality Disorder, in the way that pain improves the inhibition of limbic activity by prefrontal areas. This study provides new insights in pain processing in BPD, including enhanced coupling of limbic structures and basal ganglia.     

Paying less but harvesting more:the effect of unconscious acceptance in regulating frustrating emotion

Previous studies indicate that emotion regulation may occur unconsciously, without the cost of cognitive effort, while conscious acceptance may enhance negative experiences despite having potential long-term health benefits. Thus, it is important to overcome this weakness to boost the efficacy of the acceptance strategy in negative emotion regulation. As unconscious regulation occurs with little cost of cognitive resources, the current study hypothesizes that unconscious acceptance regulates the emotional consequence of negative events more effectively than does conscious acceptance. Subjects were randomly assigned to conscious acceptance, unconscious acceptance and no-regulation conditions. A frustrating arithmetic task was used to induce negative emotion. Emotional experiences were assessed on the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale while emotion-related physiological activation was assessed by heart-rate reactivity. Results showed that conscious acceptance had a significant negative affective consequence, which was absent during unconscious acceptance. That is, unconscious acceptance was linked with little reduction of positive affect during the experience of frustration, while this reduction was prominent in the control and conscious acceptance groups. Instructed, conscious acceptance resulted in a greater reduction of positive affect than found for the control group. In addition, both conscious and unconscious acceptance strategies significantly decreased emotion-related heart-rate activity(to a similar extent) in comparison with the control condition. Moreover, heart-rate reactivity was positively correlated with negative affect and negatively correlated with positive affect during the frustration phase relative to the baseline phase, in both the control and unconscious acceptance groups. Thus, unconscious acceptance not only reduces emotion-related physiological activity but also better protects mood stability compared with conscious acceptance. This suggests that the clinical practice of acceptance therapy may need to consider using the unconscious priming of an accepting attitude, instead of intentionally instructing people to implement such a strategy, to boost the efficacy of acceptance in emotion regulation.     

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).     

无意识接受策略在挫折情景下的情绪调节效应:行为与生理证据

由于无意识调节过程具有节省认知资源的特征,本研究假设无意识接受策略相比有意识接受策略能更加有效地调控负性事件的情绪影响.实验以挫折任务诱发负面情绪同时记录被试的主观情绪体验与情绪相关的生理变化(心率).被试被随机分为控制组、有意识接受组和无意识接受组.结果显示,无意识接受组和有意识接受组在情绪体验上存在显著差异:在挫折诱发阶段有意识接受组比无意识接受组出现了更多正性情绪指标的下降.此外,相对于控制组,挫折情景下有意识接受和无意识接受都显著降低了被试情绪相关的心率活动水平;但两者的调节水平无显著差异.并且,心率活动水平可预测主观情绪体验强度:控制组的心率变化值与负性情绪变化值存在正相关关系,与正性情绪指标变化值存在负相关趋势.因此,在挫折情景下,无意识接受策略不仅能有效降低情绪相关的生理活动水平,且相比有意识接受策略对主观情绪体验具有更好的调节效果.这提示,无意识接受策略对于现实生活中的情绪调节具有重要启示意义.     

Emotion Regulation Moderates the Association between Empathy and Prosocial Behavior

Theory and evidence suggest that empathy is an important motivating factor for prosocial behaviour and that emotion regulation, i.e. the capacity to exert control over an emotional response, may moderate the degree to which empathy is associated with prosocial behaviour. However, studies to date have not simultaneously explored the associations between different empathic processes and prosocial behaviour, nor whether different types of emotion regulation strategies (e.g. cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) moderate associations between empathy and prosocial behaviour. One hundred–and-ten healthy adults completed questionnaire measures of empathy, emotion regulation and prosocial tendencies. In this sample, both affective and cognitive empathy predicted self-reported prosocial tendencies. In addition, cognitive reappraisal moderated the association between affective empathy and prosocial tendencies. Specifically, there was a significant positive association between empathy and prosocial tendencies for individuals with a low or average tendency to reappraise but not for those with a high tendency to reappraise. Our findings suggest that, in general, empathy is positively associated with prosocial behaviour. However, this association is not significant for individuals with a high tendency for cognitive reappraisal.     

Towards meeting Tinbergen's challenge

In mammals, sex specialization is reflected by differences in brain anatomy and function. Measurable differences are documented in reproductive behavior, cognition, and emotion. We hypothesized that gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) plays a crucial role in controlling the extent of the brain's sex specificity and that changes in GnRH action during critical periods of brain development, such as puberty, will result in altered sex-specific behavioral and physiological patterns. We blocked puberty in half of the 48 same-sex Scottish mule Texel cross sheep twins with GnRH analog (GnRHa) goserelin acetate every 3 weeks, beginning just before puberty. To determine the effects of GnRHa treatment on sex-specific behavior and emotion regulation in different social contexts, we employed the food acquisition task (FAT) and measurement of heart rate variability (HRV). ANOVA revealed significant sex and sex × treatment interaction effects, suggesting that treated males were more likely to leave their companions to acquire food than untreated, while the opposite effect was observed in females. Concordant results were seen in HRV; treated males displayed higher HRV than untreated, while the reverse pattern was found in females, as shown by significant sex and sex × treatment interaction effects. We conclude that long-term prepubertal GnRHa treatment significantly affected sex-specific brain development, which impacted emotion and behavior regulation in sheep. These results suggest that GnRH is a modulator of cognitive function in the developing brain and that the sexes are differentially affected by GnRH modulation.     

Path Models of Vocal Emotion Communication

We propose to use a comprehensive path model of vocal emotion communication, encompassing encoding, transmission, and decoding processes, to empirically model data sets on emotion expression and recognition. The utility of the approach is demonstrated for two data sets from two different cultures and languages, based on corpora of vocal emotion enactment by professional actors and emotion inference by naïve listeners. Lens model equations, hierarchical regression, and multivariate path analysis are used to compare the relative contributions of objectively measured acoustic cues in the enacted expressions and subjective voice cues as perceived by listeners to the variance in emotion inference from vocal expressions for four emotion families (fear, anger, happiness, and sadness). While the results confirm the central role of arousal in vocal emotion communication, the utility of applying an extended path modeling framework is demonstrated by the identification of unique combinations of distal cues and proximal percepts carrying information about specific emotion families, independent of arousal. The statistical models generated show that more sophisticated acoustic parameters need to be developed to explain the distal underpinnings of subjective voice quality percepts that account for much of the variance in emotion inference, in particular voice instability and roughness. The general approach advocated here, as well as the specific results, open up new research strategies for work in psychology (specifically emotion and social perception research) and engineering and computer science (specifically research and development in the domain of affective computing, particularly on automatic emotion detection and synthetic emotion expression in avatars).     

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.     

Effects of Head-Down Bed Rest on the Executive Functions and Emotional Response

Prolonged bed rest may cause changes in the autonomic nervous system that are related to cognition and emotion. This study adopted an emotional flanker task to evaluate the effect of 45 days -6° head-down bed rest (HDBR) on executive functioning in 16 healthy young men at each of six time points: the second-to-last day before the bed rest period, the eleventh, twentieth, thirty-second and fortieth day during the bed rest period, and the eighth day after the bed rest period. In addition, self-report inventories (Beck Anxiety Inventory, BAI; Beck Depression Inventory, BDI; Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale, PANAS) were conducted to record emotional changes, and the participants’ galvanic skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) were assessed as measures of physiological activity. The results showed that the participants’ reaction time on the flanker task increased significantly relative to their responses on the second-to-last day before the period of bed rest, their galvanic skin response weakened and their degrees of positive affect declined during the bed rest period. Our results provide some evidence for a detrimental effect of prolonged bed rest on executive functioning and positive affect. Whether this stems from a lack of aerobic physical activity and/or the effect of HDBR itself remains to be determined.     

Women's Greater Ability to Perceive Happy Facial Emotion Automatically: Gender Differences in Affective Priming

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.     

Emotion Regulation and Excess Weight: Impaired Affective Processing Characterized by Dysfunctional Insula Activation and Connectivity

Emotion-regulation strategies are understood to influence food intake. This study examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of negative emotion processing and emotion regulation in individuals with excess weight compared to normal-weight controls. Fifteen participants with excess-weight (body mass index >25) and sixteen normal-weight controls (body mass index 18–25) performed an emotion-regulation task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were exposed to 24 negative affective or neutral pictures that they were instructed to Observe (neutral pictures), Maintain (sustain the emotion elicited by negative pictures) or Regulate (down-regulate the emotion provoked by negative pictures through previously trained reappraisal techniques). When instructed to regulate negative emotions by means of cognitive reappraisal, participants with excess weight displayed persistently heightened activation in the right anterior insula. Decreased responsivity was also found in right anterior insula, the orbitofrontal cortex and cerebellum during negative emotion experience in participants with excess weight. Psycho-physiological interaction analyses showed that excess-weight participants had decreased negative functional coupling between the right anterior insula and the right dlPFC, and the bilateral dmPFC during cognitive reappraisal. Our findings support contentions that excess weight is linked to an abnormal pattern of neural activation and connectivity during the experience and regulation of negative emotions, with the insula playing a key role in these alterations. We posit that ineffective regulation of emotional states contributes to the acquisition and preservation of excess weight.     

Darwin’s Duchenne: Eye Constriction during Infant Joy and Distress

Darwin proposed that smiles with eye constriction (Duchenne smiles) index strong positive emotion in infants, while cry-faces with eye constriction index strong negative emotion. Research has supported Darwin’s proposal with respect to smiling, but there has been little parallel research on cry-faces (open-mouth expressions with lateral lip stretching). To investigate the possibility that eye constriction indexes the affective intensity of positive and negative emotions, we first conducted the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF) procedure at 6 months. In the FFSF, three minutes of naturalistic infant-parent play interaction (which elicits more smiles than cry-faces) are followed by two minutes in which the parent holds an unresponsive still-face (which elicits more cry-faces than smiles). Consistent with Darwin’s proposal, eye constriction was associated with stronger smiling and with stronger cry-faces. In addition, the proportion of smiles with eye constriction was higher during the positive-emotion eliciting play episode than during the still-face. In parallel, the proportion of cry-faces with eye constriction was higher during the negative-emotion eliciting still-face than during play. These results are consonant with the hypothesis that eye constriction indexes the affective intensity of both positive and negative facial configurations. A preponderance of eye constriction during cry-faces was observed in a second elicitor of intense negative emotion, vaccination injections, at both 6 and 12 months of age. The results support the existence of a Duchenne distress expression that parallels the more well-known Duchenne smile. This suggests that eye constriction–the Duchenne marker–has a systematic association with early facial expressions of intense negative and positive emotion.     

Extraversion is linked to volume of the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala

Neuroticism and extraversion are personality factors associated with the vulnerability for developing depression and anxiety disorders, and are possibly differentially related to brain structures implicated in the processing of emotional information and the generation of mood states. To date, studies on brain morphology mainly focused on neuroticism, a dimension primarily related to negative affect, yielding conflicting findings concerning the association with personality, partially due to methodological issues and variable population samples under study. Recently, extraversion, a dimension primarily related to positive affect, has been repeatedly inversely related to with symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders. In the present study, high resolution structural T1-weighted MR images of 65 healthy adults were processed using an optimized Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM) approach. Multiple regression analyses were performed to test for associations of neuroticism and extraversion with prefrontal and subcortical volumes. Orbitofrontal and right amygdala volume were both positively related to extraversion. Extraversion was differentially related to volume of the anterior cingulate cortex in males (positive) and females (negative). Neuroticism scores did not significantly correlate with these brain regions. As extraversion is regarded a protective factor for developing anxiety disorders and depression and has been related to the generation of positive affect, the present results indicate that the reduced likelihood of developing affective disorders in individuals high on extraversion is related to modulation of emotion processing through the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala.     

Neural Networks for Mindfulness and Emotion Suppression

Mindfulness, an attentive non-judgmental focus on “here and now” experiences, has been incorporated into various cognitive behavioral therapy approaches and beneficial effects have been demonstrated. Recently, mindfulness has also been identified as a potentially effective emotion regulation strategy. On the other hand, emotion suppression, which refers to trying to avoid or escape from experiencing and being aware of one’s own emotions, has been identified as a potentially maladaptive strategy. Previous studies suggest that both strategies can decrease affective responses to emotional stimuli. They would, however, be expected to provide regulation through different top-down modulation systems. The present study was aimed at elucidating the different neural systems underlying emotion regulation via mindfulness and emotion suppression approaches. Twenty-one healthy participants used the two types of strategy in response to emotional visual stimuli while functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted. Both strategies attenuated amygdala responses to emotional triggers, but the pathways to regulation differed across the two. A mindful approach appears to regulate amygdala functioning via functional connectivity from the medial prefrontal cortex, while suppression uses connectivity with other regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Thus, the two types of emotion regulation recruit different top-down modulation processes localized at prefrontal areas. These different pathways are discussed.     

Mental illness and well‐being: an affect regulation perspective

Mental health crucially depends upon affective states such as emotions, stress responses, impulses and moods. These states shape how we think, feel and behave. Often, they support adaptive functioning. At other times, however, they can become detrimental to mental health via maladaptive affect generation processes and/or maladaptive affect regulation processes. Here, we present an integrative framework for considering the role of affect generation and regulation in mental illness and well‐being. Our model views affect generation as an iterative cycle of attending to, appraising and responding to situations. It views affect regulation as an iterative series of decisions aimed at altering affect generation. Affect regulation decisions include identifying what, if anything, should be changed about affect, selecting where to intervene in the affect generation cycle, choosing how to implement this intervention, and monitoring the regulation attempt to decide whether to maintain, switch or stop it. Difficulties with these decisions, often arising from biased inputs to them, can contribute to manifestations of mental illness such as clinical symptoms, syndromes and disorders. The model has a number of implications for clinical assessment and treatment. Specifically, it offers a common set of concepts for characterizing different affective states; it highlights interactions between affect generation and affect regulation; it identifies assessment and treatment targets among the component processes of affect regulation; and it is applicable to prevention and treatment of mental illness as well as to promotion and restoration of psychological well‐being.     

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.     

From shared to distinct self–other representations in empathy: evidence from neurotypical function and socio-cognitive disorders

Neuroscientific research has identified two fundamental components of empathy: shared emotional representations between self and other, and self–other distinction. The concept of shared representations suggests that during empathy, we co-represent another person''s affect by engaging brain and bodily functions underpinning the first-hand experience of the emotion we are empathizing with. This possible grounding of empathy in our own emotional experiences explains the necessity for self–other distinction, which is the capacity to correctly distinguish between our own affective representations and those related to the other. In spite of the importance of these two components in empathy, several aspects still remain controversial. This paper addresses some of them and focuses on (i) the distinction between shared activations versus representations, raising the question what shared representations entail in terms of the underlying neural mechanisms, (ii) the possible mechanisms behind self–other distinction in the cognitive and the affective domains, and whether they have distinct neural underpinnings and (iii) the consequences associated with a selective impairment of one of the two components, thereby addressing their importance in mental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders, psychopathy and alexithymia.