Origin of Emotion Effects on ERP Correlates of Emotional Word Processing: The Emotion Duality Approach

We distinguish two evaluative systems which evoke automatic and reflective emotions. Automatic emotions are direct reactions to stimuli whereas reflective emotions are always based on verbalized (and often abstract) criteria of evaluation. We conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) study in which 25 women were required to read and respond to emotional words which engaged either the automatic or reflective system. Stimulus words were emotional (positive or negative) and neutral. We found an effect of valence on an early response with dipolar fronto-occipital topography; positive words evoked a higher amplitude response than negative words. We also found that topographically specific differences in the amplitude of the late positive complex were related to the system involved in processing. Emotional stimuli engaging the automatic system were associated with significantly higher amplitudes in the left-parietal region; the response to neutral words was similar regardless of the system engaged. A different pattern of effects was observed in the central region, neutral stimuli engaging the reflective system evoked a higher amplitudes response whereas there was no system effect for emotional stimuli. These differences could not be reduced to effects of differences between the arousing properties and concreteness of the words used as stimuli.     

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.     

The Collective Benefits of Feeling Good and Letting Go: Positive Emotion and (dis)Inhibition Interact to Predict Cooperative Behavior

Cooperation is central to human existence, forming the bedrock of everyday social relationships and larger societal structures. Thus, understanding the psychological underpinnings of cooperation is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work using a dual-process framework suggests that intuitive processing can promote cooperation while deliberative processing can undermine it. Here we add to this line of research by more specifically identifying deliberative and intuitive processes that affect cooperation. To do so, we applied automated text analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to investigate the association between behavior in one-shot anonymous economic cooperation games and the presence inhibition (a deliberative process) and positive emotion (an intuitive process) in free-response narratives written after (Study 1, N = 4,218) or during (Study 2, N = 236) the decision-making process. Consistent with previous results, across both studies inhibition predicted reduced cooperation while positive emotion predicted increased cooperation (even when controlling for negative emotion). Importantly, there was a significant interaction between positive emotion and inhibition, such that the most cooperative individuals had high positive emotion and low inhibition. This suggests that inhibition (i.e., reflective or deliberative processing) may undermine cooperative behavior by suppressing the prosocial effects of positive emotion.     

Laughing Rats Are Optimistic

Emotions can bias human decisions- for example depressed or anxious people tend to make pessimistic judgements while those in positive affective states are often more optimistic. Several studies have reported that affect contingent judgement biases can also be produced in animals. The animals, however, cannot self-report; therefore, the valence of their emotions, to date, could only be assumed. Here we present the results of an experiment where the affect-contingent judgement bias has been produced by objectively measured positive emotions. We trained rats in operant Skinner boxes to press one lever in response to one tone to receive a food reward and to press another lever in response to a different tone to avoid punishment by electric foot shock. After attaining a stable level of discrimination performance, the animals were subjected to either handling or playful, experimenter-administered manual stimulation – tickling. This procedure has been confirmed to induce a positive affective state in rats, and the 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalisations (rat laughter) emitted by animals in response to tickling have been postulated to index positive emotions akin to human joy. During the tickling and handling sessions, the numbers of emitted high-frequency 50-kHz calls were scored. Immediately after tickling or handling, the animals were tested for their responses to a tone of intermediate frequency, and the pattern of their responses to this ambiguous cue was taken as an indicator of the animals'' optimism. Our findings indicate that tickling induced positive emotions which are directly indexed in rats by laughter, can make animals more optimistic. We demonstrate for the first time a link between the directly measured positive affective state and decision making under uncertainty in an animal model. We also introduce innovative tandem-approach for studying emotional-cognitive interplay in animals, which may be of great value for understanding the emotional-cognitive changes associated with mood disorders.     

Expression of emotion in Eastern and Western music mirrors vocalization

In Western music, the major mode is typically used to convey excited, happy, bright or martial emotions, whereas the minor mode typically conveys subdued, sad or dark emotions. Recent studies indicate that the differences between these modes parallel differences between the prosodic and spectral characteristics of voiced speech sounds uttered in corresponding emotional states. Here we ask whether tonality and emotion are similarly linked in an Eastern musical tradition. The results show that the tonal relationships used to express positive/excited and negative/subdued emotions in classical South Indian music are much the same as those used in Western music. Moreover, tonal variations in the prosody of English and Tamil speech uttered in different emotional states are parallel to the tonal trends in music. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the association between musical tonality and emotion is based on universal vocal characteristics of different affective states.     

Electromyogram of pericranial muscles in frequency bands β and γ comparing various cognitive and emotional states

Results of comparison of power of electromyogram (EMG) of six pericranial muscles in electroencephalographic frequency bands β₁, β₂ and γ are presented corresponding to performances of the tasks bound to inductions of affective experiences. The external induction was implemented by means of presentation of images and the internal induction by means of autobiographical memoirs revived. The tasks were focused on an induction of affective experiences with different emotional valences—positive, negative and neutral. The EMG was derived, registered and processed by means of computer electroencephalography techniques. Self-assessments of signs and intensities of experienced emotions were recorded as well. The study involved two groups of healthy subjects—students-actors (N = 39), and students of other specialties (N = 32). Statistically reliable, reproducible and diverse differences of mean EMG power of the pericranial muscles took place in comparisons of psychophysiological states with different valences of emotions, and certain differences in comparisons of states without expressed emotional differences, but differing in the direction of attention took place also. Therefore it is obviously necessary for an assessment of a degree of muscular contamination in records of high-frequency scalp electroencephalograms (EEG) to supplement psychophysiological EEG methods with EMG registration and statistical analysis and to do such registration for several facial muscles.     

Relating Specific Emotions to Intrinsic Motivation: On the Moderating Role of Positive and Negative Emotion Differentiation

Despite the fact that studies on self-determination theory have traditionally disregarded the explicit role of emotions in the motivation eliciting process, research attention for the affective antecedents of motivation is growing. We add to this emerging research field by testing the moderating role of emotion differentiation –individual differences in the extent to which people can differentiate between specific emotions– on the relationship between twelve specific emotions and intrinsic motivation. To this end, we conducted a daily diary study (N = 72) and an experience sampling study (N = 34). Results showed that the relationship between enthusiasm, cheerfulness, optimism, contentedness, gloominess, miserableness, uneasiness (in both studies 1 and 2), calmness, relaxation, tenseness, depression, worry (only in Study 1) on one hand and intrinsic motivation on the other hand was moderated by positive emotion differentiation for the positive emotions and by negative emotion differentiation for the negative emotions. Altogether, these findings suggest that for people who are unable to distinguish between different specific positive emotions the relationship between those specific positive emotions and intrinsic motivation is stronger, whereas the relationship between specific negative emotions and intrinsic motivation is weaker for people who are able to distinguish between the different specific negative emotions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

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.     

Neural Correlates of Processing Negative and Sexually Arousing Pictures

Recent work has questioned whether the negativity bias is a distinct component of affective picture processing. The current study was designed to determine whether there are different neural correlates of processing positive and negative pictures using event-related brain potentials. The early posterior negativity and late positive potential were greatest in amplitude for erotic pictures. Partial Least Squares analysis revealed one latent variable that distinguished erotic pictures from neutral and positive pictures and another that differentiated negative pictures from neutral and positive pictures. The effects of orienting task on the neural correlates of processing negative and erotic pictures indicate that affective picture processing is sensitive to both stimulus-driven, and attentional or decision processes. The current data, together with other recent findings from our laboratory, lead to the suggestion that there are distinct neural correlates of processing negative and positive stimuli during affective picture processing.     

Relationship of skin temperature changes to the emotions accompanying music

One hundred introductory psychology students were given tasks that caused their skin temperatures to either fall or rise. Then they listened to two musical selections, one of which they rated as evoking arousing, negative emotions while the other was rated as evoking calm, positive emotions. During the first musical selection that was presented, the arousing, negative emotion music terminated skin temperature increases and perpetuated skin temperature decreases, whereas the calm, positive emotion selection terminated skin temperature decreases and perpetuated skin temperature increases. During the second musical selection, skin temperature tended to increase whichever music was played; however, the increases were significant only during the calm, positive emotion music. It was concluded that music initially affects skin temperature in ways that can be predicted from affective rating scales, although the effect of some selections may depend upon what, if any, music had been previously heard.     

Emotion (or Life,the Universe,Everything)

Emotions are fundamental to human life; they define its quality and motivate action. In the past, social scientists who have studied emotions have treated them as biological, cultural or social phenomena. These approaches have tended to fall on either side of the culturally recognised division between nature and culture, and so have failed to recognise that emotions bridge this division, that they are thought of as both biological and cultural, as consisting of both physical feeling and cultural meaning. In this article, an alternative approach is presented in which emotions are treated as ecological mechanisms that operate in the relationship between an individual human being and their environment. In this approach, which draws on models of emotion proposed by William James and Antonio Damasio, emotions connect individual human beings to their surroundings and play an important role in learning. A focus on the individual as the centre of analytical attention—often referred to as ‘methodological individualism’—is a logical consequence of the ecological approach to emotion, which also has significant implications for the relationships between ecological anthropology and other branches of the discipline, and between anthropology and other disciplines. In the face of an ecological understanding of emotion, all relations, including social relations, become ecological and social anthropology melts into and is subsumed by ecological anthropology. At the same time, anthropology tends to lose its distinctiveness from biology, psychology and other disciplines by focusing on a phenomenon that is of common interest to all the human sciences.     

Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media

Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of others. A recent experiment performed on Facebook hypothesized that emotions spread online, even in absence of non-verbal cues typical of in-person interactions, and that individuals are more likely to adopt positive or negative emotions if these are over-expressed in their social network. Experiments of this type, however, raise ethical concerns, as they require massive-scale content manipulation with unknown consequences for the individuals therein involved. Here, we study the dynamics of emotional contagion using a random sample of Twitter users, whose activity (and the stimuli they were exposed to) was observed during a week of September 2014. Rather than manipulating content, we devise a null model that discounts some confounding factors (including the effect of emotional contagion). We measure the emotional valence of content the users are exposed to before posting their own tweets. We determine that on average a negative post follows an over-exposure to 4.34% more negative content than baseline, while positive posts occur after an average over-exposure to 4.50% more positive contents. We highlight the presence of a linear relationship between the average emotional valence of the stimuli users are exposed to, and that of the responses they produce. We also identify two different classes of individuals: highly and scarcely susceptible to emotional contagion. Highly susceptible users are significantly less inclined to adopt negative emotions than the scarcely susceptible ones, but equally likely to adopt positive emotions. In general, the likelihood of adopting positive emotions is much greater than that of negative emotions.     

Similar neural activity during fear and disgust in the rat basolateral amygdala

Much research has focused on how the amygdala processes individual affects, yet little is known about how multiple types of positive and negative affects are encoded relative to one another at the single-cell level. In particular, it is unclear whether different negative affects, such as fear and disgust, are encoded more similarly than negative and positive affects, such as fear and pleasure. Here we test the hypothesis that the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (BLA), a region known to be important for learned fear and other affects, encodes affective valence by comparing neuronal activity in the BLA during a conditioned fear stimulus (fear CS) with activity during intraoral delivery of an aversive fluid that induces a disgust response and a rewarding fluid that induces a hedonic response. Consistent with the hypothesis, neuronal activity during the fear CS and aversive fluid infusion, but not during the fear CS and rewarding fluid infusion, was more similar than expected by chance. We also found that the greater similarity in activity during the fear- and disgust-eliciting stimuli was specific to a subpopulation of cells and a limited window of time. Our results suggest that a subpopulation of BLA neurons encodes affective valence during learned fear, and furthermore, within this subpopulation, different negative affects are encoded more similarly than negative and positive affects in a time-specific manner.     

Affective empathy and prosocial behavior in rodents

Empathy is an essential function for humans as social animals. Emotional contagion, the basic form of afffective empathy, comprises the cognitive process of perceiving and sharing the affective state of others. The observational fear assay, an animal model of emotional contagion, has enabled researchers to undertake molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanism of this behavior. Such studies have revealed that observational fear is mediated through neural circuits involved in processing the affective dimension of direct pain experiences. A mouse can also respond to milder social stimuli induced by either positive or negative emotional changes in another mouse, which seems not dependent on the affective pain circuits. Further studies should explore how different neural circuits contribute to integrating different dimensions of affective empathy.     

Recognition of Intensive Valence and Arousal Affective States via Facial Electromyographic Activity in Young and Senior Adults

Background

Research suggests that interaction between humans and digital environments characterizes a form of companionship in addition to technical convenience. To this effect, humans have attempted to design computer systems able to demonstrably empathize with the human affective experience. Facial electromyography (EMG) is one such technique enabling machines to access to human affective states. Numerous studies have investigated the effects of valence emotions on facial EMG activity captured over the corrugator supercilii (frowning muscle) and zygomaticus major (smiling muscle). The arousal emotion, specifically, has not received much research attention, however. In the present study, we sought to identify intensive valence and arousal affective states via facial EMG activity.

Methods

Ten blocks of affective pictures were separated into five categories: neutral valence/low arousal (0VLA), positive valence/high arousal (PVHA), negative valence/high arousal (NVHA), positive valence/low arousal (PVLA), and negative valence/low arousal (NVLA), and the ability of each to elicit corresponding valence and arousal affective states was investigated at length. One hundred and thirteen participants were subjected to these stimuli and provided facial EMG. A set of 16 features based on the amplitude, frequency, predictability, and variability of signals was defined and classified using a support vector machine (SVM).

Results

We observed highly accurate classification rates based on the combined corrugator and zygomaticus EMG, ranging from 75.69% to 100.00% for the baseline and five affective states (0VLA, PVHA, PVLA, NVHA, and NVLA) in all individuals. There were significant differences in classification rate accuracy between senior and young adults, but there was no significant difference between female and male participants.

Conclusion

Our research provides robust evidences for recognition of intensive valence and arousal affective states in young and senior adults. These findings contribute to the successful future application of facial EMG for identifying user affective states in human machine interaction (HMI) or companion robotic systems (CRS).     

Emotional face recognition, empathic trait (BEES), and cortical contribution in response to positive and negative cues. The effect of rTMS on dorsal medial prefrontal cortex

The present study investigated the relationship between three different measures related to the affective empathy: facial expression detection in response to different emotional patterns (positive vs. negative), personal response to empathic scale [Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES)], and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC) contribution to mediate the facial detection task. Nineteen subjects took part in the study and they were required to recognize facial expression of emotions, after having empathized with these emotional cues. Repeated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) method was used in the present research in order to produce a temporary virtual disruption of dMPFC activity. dMPFC disruption induced a worse performance, especially in response to negative expressions (i.e. anger and fear). High-BEES subjects paid a higher cost after frontal brain perturbation: they showed to be unable to correctly detect facial expressions more than low-BEES. Moreover, a “negative valence effect” was observed only for high-BEES, and it was probably related with their higher impairment to recognize negative more than positive expressions. dMPFC was found to support emotional facial expression recognition in an empathic condition, with a specific increased responsiveness for negative-valenced faces. The contribution of this research was discussed to explain the mechanisms underlying affective empathy based on rTMS application.     

Implicit essentialism: genetic concepts are implicitly associated with fate concepts

Genetic essentialism is the tendency for people to think in more essentialist ways upon encountering genetic concepts. The current studies assessed whether genetic essentialist biases would also be evident at the automatic level. In two studies, using different versions of the Implicit Association Test, we found that participants were faster to categorize when genes and fate were linked, compared to when these two concepts were kept separate and opposing. In addition to the wealth of past findings of genetic essentialism with explicit and deliberative measures, these biases appear to be also evident with implicit measures.     

The emotions of oncologists

Emotions are parts of organizational reality to an ever increasing extent. Importantly, they are not just tools in the hand of healthcare workers to achieve better physician / healthcare professional-to-patient interactions but intrinsic processes and characteristics with psychic, cognitive and somatic actions. For a thorough investigation of the issue, a PANAS-X questionnaire was used to examine the emotions of 187 physicians and other healthcare professionals, all engaged in oncology, in 2009. The research succeeded in exploring the overall emotional state oncology professionals had assumed in relation with their job as well as enabled the authors of this study to draw the respondents' emotional map and assess their fundamental emotional attitudes. Furthermore, the authors managed to identify groups of respondents that had felt more intense positive, and/or less intense negative emotions that are socially accepted than others. They included those of senior experienced oncologists, males, individuals with families, childless individuals, ward workers, and skilled professionals. According to the findings, the range of emotions an oncologist experiences / feels intently during his everyday work is dependent upon a great number of factors.     

Science,method and critical thinking

Science is founded on a method based on critical thinking. A prerequisite for this is not only a sufficient command of language but also the comprehension of the basic concepts underlying our understanding of reality. This constraint implies an awareness of the fact that the truth of the World is not directly accessible to us, but can only be glimpsed through the construction of models designed to anticipate its behaviour. Because the relationship between models and reality rests on the interpretation of founding postulates and instantiations of their predictions (and is therefore deeply rooted in language and culture), there can be no demarcation between science and non-science. However, critical thinking is essential to ensure that the link between models and reality is gradually made more adequate to reality, based on what has already been established, thus guaranteeing that science progresses on this basis and excluding any form of relativism.