“Give,but Give until It Hurts”: The Modulatory Role of Trait Emotional Intelligence on the Motivation to Help

Two studies investigated the effect of trait Emotional Intelligence (trait EI) on people’s motivation to help. In Study 1, we developed a new computer-based paradigm that tested participants’ motivation to help by measuring their performance on a task in which they could gain a hypothetical amount of money to help children in need. Crucially, we manipulated participants’ perceived efficacy by informing them that they had been either able to save the children (positive feedback) or unable to save the children (negative feedback). We measured trait EI using the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire–Short Form (TEIQue-SF) and assessed participants’ affective reactions during the experiment using the PANAS-X. Results showed that high and low trait EI participants performed differently after the presentation of feedback on their ineffectiveness in helping others in need. Both groups showed increasing negative affective states during the experiment when the feedback was negative; however, high trait EI participants better managed their affective reactions, modulating the impact of their emotions on performance and maintaining a high level of motivation to help. In Study 2, we used a similar computerized task and tested a control situation to explore the effect of trait EI on participants’ behavior when facing failure or success in a scenario unrelated to helping others in need. No effect of feedback emerged on participants’ emotional states in the second study. Taken together our results show that trait EI influences the impact of success and failure on behavior only in affect-rich situation like those in which people are asked to help others in need.     

Effects of Achievement Goals on Challenge Seeking and Feedback Processing: Behavioral and fMRI Evidence

We conducted behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research to investigate the effects of two types of achievement goals—mastery goals and performance-approach goals— on challenge seeking and feedback processing. The results of the behavioral experiment indicated that mastery goals were associated with a tendency to seek challenge, both before and after experiencing difficulty during task performance, whereas performance-approach goals were related to a tendency to avoid challenge after encountering difficulty during task performance. The fMRI experiment uncovered a significant decrease in ventral striatal activity when participants received negative feedback for any task type and both forms of achievement goals. During the processing of negative feedback for the rule-finding task, performance-approach-oriented participants showed a substantial reduction in activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the frontopolar cortex, whereas mastery-oriented participants showed little change. These results suggest that performance-approach-oriented participants are less likely to either recruit control processes in response to negative feedback or focus on task-relevant information provided alongside the negative feedback. In contrast, mastery-oriented participants are more likely to modulate aversive valuations to negative feedback and focus on the constructive elements of feedback in order to attain their task goals. We conclude that performance-approach goals lead to a reluctant stance towards difficulty, while mastery goals encourage a proactive stance.     

Are Age Effects in Positivity Influenced by the Valence of Distractors?

An age-related ‘positivity’ effect has been identified, in which older adults show an information-processing bias towards positive emotional items in attention and memory. In the present study, we examined this positivity bias by using a novel paradigm in which emotional and neutral distractors were presented along with emotionally valenced targets. Thirty-five older and 37 younger adults were asked during encoding to attend to emotional targets paired with distractors that were either neutral or opposite in valence to the target. Pupillary responses were recorded during initial encoding as well as a later incidental recognition task. Memory and pupillary responses for negative items were not affected by the valence of distractors, suggesting that positive distractors did not automatically attract older adults’ attention while they were encoding negative targets. Additionally, the pupil dilation to negative items mediated the relation between age and positivity in memory. Overall, memory and pupillary responses provide converging support for a cognitive control account of positivity effects in late adulthood and suggest a link between attentional processes and the memory positivity effect.     

Feedback on Trait or Action Impacts on Caudate and Paracingulum Activity

There is a general conception that positive associations to one’s trait, e.g. ‘I’m clever’, are beneficial for cognitive performance. Scientific evidence shows that this is a simplification. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we used written trial-based trait feedback ‘you are clever’, or task feedback ‘your choice was correct’, on each correct response of a rule-switching task, to investigate how the character of positive self-associations influences performance outcome. Twenty participants took part in this crossover design study. We found that trait feedback was less beneficial for motivation and performance improvement, and resulting in enhanced neural activation on more difficult bivalent rule trials. This indicates that the task was treated as more complex in this condition. For example, ‘you are clever’ feedback led to enhanced activation in anterior caudate nucleus, an area known to process uncertainty. We further observed that activation in anterior paracingulate cortex was sensitive to whether self-reflection was imposed by external feedback or generated from internal processes, where the latter activation correlated positively with performance when following after task feedback. Our results illustrate how feedback can evoke self-reflections that either help or hinder motivation and performance, most likely by impacting on processes of uncertainty. The results support social psychological models stipulating that trait focus take resources away from task focus.     

Dissociation between Active and Observational Learning from Positive and Negative Feedback in Parkinsonism

Feedback to both actively performed and observed behaviour allows adaptation of future actions. Positive feedback leads to increased activity of dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra, whereas dopamine neuron activity is decreased following negative feedback. Dopamine level reduction in unmedicated Parkinson’s Disease patients has been shown to lead to a negative learning bias, i.e. enhanced learning from negative feedback. Recent findings suggest that the neural mechanisms of active and observational learning from feedback might differ, with the striatum playing a less prominent role in observational learning. Therefore, it was hypothesized that unmedicated Parkinson’s Disease patients would show a negative learning bias only in active but not in observational learning. In a between-group design, 19 Parkinson’s Disease patients and 40 healthy controls engaged in either an active or an observational probabilistic feedback-learning task. For both tasks, transfer phases aimed to assess the bias to learn better from positive or negative feedback. As expected, actively learning patients showed a negative learning bias, whereas controls learned better from positive feedback. In contrast, no difference between patients and controls emerged for observational learning, with both groups showing better learning from positive feedback. These findings add to neural models of reinforcement-learning by suggesting that dopamine-modulated input to the striatum plays a minor role in observational learning from feedback. Future research will have to elucidate the specific neural underpinnings of observational learning.     

Feedback Valence Affects Auditory Perceptual Learning Independently of Feedback Probability

Previous studies have suggested that negative feedback is more effective in driving learning than positive feedback. We investigated the effect on learning of providing varying amounts of negative and positive feedback while listeners attempted to discriminate between three identical tones; an impossible task that nevertheless produces robust learning. Four feedback conditions were compared during training: 90% positive feedback or 10% negative feedback informed the participants that they were doing equally well, while 10% positive or 90% negative feedback informed them they were doing equally badly. In all conditions the feedback was random in relation to the listeners’ responses (because the task was to discriminate three identical tones), yet both the valence (negative vs. positive) and the probability of feedback (10% vs. 90%) affected learning. Feedback that informed listeners they were doing badly resulted in better post-training performance than feedback that informed them they were doing well, independent of valence. In addition, positive feedback during training resulted in better post-training performance than negative feedback, but only positive feedback indicating listeners were doing badly on the task resulted in learning. As we have previously speculated, feedback that better reflected the difficulty of the task was more effective in driving learning than feedback that suggested performance was better than it should have been given perceived task difficulty. But contrary to expectations, positive feedback was more effective than negative feedback in driving learning. Feedback thus had two separable effects on learning: feedback valence affected motivation on a subjectively difficult task, and learning occurred only when feedback probability reflected the subjective difficulty. To optimize learning, training programs need to take into consideration both feedback valence and probability.     

Rational inattention and tonic dopamine

Slow-timescale (tonic) changes in dopamine (DA) contribute to a wide variety of processes in reinforcement learning, interval timing, and other domains. Furthermore, changes in tonic DA exert distinct effects depending on when they occur (e.g., during learning vs. performance) and what task the subject is performing (e.g., operant vs. classical conditioning). Two influential theories of tonic DA—the average reward theory and the Bayesian theory in which DA controls precision—have each been successful at explaining a subset of empirical findings. But how the same DA signal performs two seemingly distinct functions without creating crosstalk is not well understood. Here we reconcile the two theories under the unifying framework of ‘rational inattention,’ which (1) conceptually links average reward and precision, (2) outlines how DA manipulations affect this relationship, and in so doing, (3) captures new empirical phenomena. In brief, rational inattention asserts that agents can increase their precision in a task (and thus improve their performance) by paying a cognitive cost. Crucially, whether this cost is worth paying depends on average reward availability, reported by DA. The monotonic relationship between average reward and precision means that the DA signal contains the information necessary to retrieve the precision. When this information is needed after the task is performed, as presumed by Bayesian inference, acute manipulations of DA will bias behavior in predictable ways. We show how this framework reconciles a remarkably large collection of experimental findings. In reinforcement learning, the rational inattention framework predicts that learning from positive and negative feedback should be enhanced in high and low DA states, respectively, and that DA should tip the exploration-exploitation balance toward exploitation. In interval timing, this framework predicts that DA should increase the speed of the internal clock and decrease the extent of interference by other temporal stimuli during temporal reproduction (the central tendency effect). Finally, rational inattention makes the new predictions that these effects should be critically dependent on the controllability of rewards, that post-reward delays in intertemporal choice tasks should be underestimated, and that average reward manipulations should affect the speed of the clock—thus capturing empirical findings that are unexplained by either theory alone. Our results suggest that a common computational repertoire may underlie the seemingly heterogeneous roles of DA.     

Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotions

The development of the explicit recognition of facial expressions of emotions can be affected by childhood maltreatment experiences. A previous study demonstrated the existence of an explicit recognition bias for angry facial expressions among a population of adolescent Sierra Leonean street-boys exposed to high levels of maltreatment. In the present study, the recognition bias for angry facial expressions was investigated in a younger population of street-children and age-matched controls. Participants performed a forced-choice facial expressions recognition task. Recognition bias was measured as participants’ tendency to over-attribute anger label to other negative facial expressions. Participants’ heart rate was assessed and related to their behavioral performance, as index of their stress-related physiological responses. Results demonstrated the presence of a recognition bias for angry facial expressions among street-children, also pinpointing a similar, although significantly less pronounced, tendency among controls. Participants’ performance was controlled for age, cognitive and educational levels and for naming skills. None of these variables influenced the recognition bias for angry facial expressions. Differently, a significant effect of heart rate on participants’ tendency to use anger label was evidenced. Taken together, these results suggest that childhood exposure to maltreatment experiences amplifies children’s “pre-existing bias” for anger labeling in forced-choice emotion recognition task. Moreover, they strengthen the thesis according to which the recognition bias for angry facial expressions is a manifestation of a functional adaptive mechanism that tunes victim’s perceptive and attentive focus on salient environmental social stimuli.     

The ‘Goldilocks Zone’: Getting the Measure of Manual Asymmetries

Some studies have shown that manual asymmetries decrease in older age. These results have often been explained with reference to models of reduced hemispheric specialisation. An alternative explanation, however, is that hand differences are subtle, and capturing them requires tasks that yield optimal performance with both hands. Whereas the hemispheric specialisation account implies that reduced manual asymmetries should be reliably observed in older adults, the ‘measurement difficulty’ account suggests that manual asymmetries will be hard to detect unless a task has just the right level of difficulty—i.e. within the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, where it is not too easy or too hard, but just right. Experiment One tested this hypothesis and found that manual asymmetries were only detected when participants performed in this zone; specifically, performance on a tracing task was only superior in the preferred hand when task constraints were high (i.e. fast speed tracing). Experiment Two used three different tasks to examine age differences in manual asymmetries; one task produced no asymmetries, whilst two tasks revealed asymmetries in both younger and older groups (with poorer overall performance in the old group across all tasks). Experiment Three revealed task-dependent asymmetries in both age groups, but highlighted further detection difficulties linked with the metric of performance and compensatory strategies used by participants. Results are discussed with reference to structural learning theory, whereby we suggest that the processes of inter-manual transfer lead to relatively small performance differences between the hands (despite a strong phenomenological sense of performance disparities).     

Dissecting the links between reward and loss,decision-making,and self-reported affect using a computational approach

Links between affective states and risk-taking are often characterised using summary statistics from serial decision-making tasks. However, our understanding of these links, and the utility of decision-making as a marker of affect, needs to accommodate the fact that ongoing (e.g., within-task) experience of rewarding and punishing decision outcomes may alter future decisions and affective states. To date, the interplay between affect, ongoing reward and punisher experience, and decision-making has received little detailed investigation. Here, we examined the relationships between reward and loss experience, affect, and decision-making in humans using a novel judgement bias task analysed with a novel computational model. We demonstrated the influence of within-task favourability on decision-making, with more risk-averse/‘pessimistic’ decisions following more positive previous outcomes and a greater current average earning rate. Additionally, individuals reporting more negative affect tended to exhibit greater risk-seeking decision-making, and, based on our model, estimated time more poorly. We also found that individuals reported more positive affective valence during periods of the task when prediction errors and offered decision outcomes were more positive. Our results thus provide new evidence that (short-term) within-task rewarding and punishing experiences determine both future decision-making and subjectively experienced affective states.     

Self-Esteem Modulates the Time Course of Self-Positivity Bias in Explicit Self-Evaluation

Researchers have suggested that certain individuals may show a self-positivity bias, rating themselves as possessing more positive personality traits than others. Previous evidence has shown that people evaluate self-related information in such a way as to maintain or enhance self-esteem. However, whether self-esteem would modulate the time course of self-positivity bias in explicit self-evaluation has never been explored. In the present study, 21 participants completed the Rosenberg self-esteem scale and then completed a task where they were instructed to indicate to what extent positive/negative traits described themselves. Behavioral data showed that participants endorsed positive traits as higher in self-relevance compared to the negative traits. Further, participants’ self-esteem levels were positively correlated with their self-positivity bias. Electrophysiological data revealed smaller N1 amplitude and larger late positive component (LPC) amplitude to stimuli consistent with the self-positivity bias (positive-high self-relevant stimuli) when compared to stimuli that were inconsistent with the self-positivity bias (positive-low self-relevant stimuli). Moreover, only in individuals with low self-esteem, the latency of P2 was more pronounced in processing stimuli that were consistent with the self-positivity bias (negative-low self-relevant stimuli) than to stimuli that were inconsistent with the self-positivity bias (positive-low self-relevant stimuli). Overall, the present study provides additional support for the view that low self-esteem as a personality variable would affect the early attentional processing.     

The Influence of Texting Language on Grammar and Executive Functions in Primary School Children

When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children’s literacy abilities. In addition, it is possible that children’s grammar system is affected by textese as well, as grammar rules are often transgressed in this register. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate whether the use of textese influences children’s grammar performance, and whether this effect is specific to grammar or language in general. Additionally, studies have not yet investigated the influence of textese on children’s cognitive abilities. Consequently, the secondary aim of this study was to find out whether textese affects children’s executive functions. To investigate this, 55 children between 10 and 13 years old were tested on a receptive vocabulary and grammar performance (sentence repetition) task and various tasks measuring executive functioning. In addition, text messages were elicited and the number of omissions and textisms in children’s messages were calculated. Regression analyses showed that omissions were a significant predictor of children’s grammar performance after various other variables were controlled for: the more words children omitted in their text messages, the better their performance on the grammar task. Although textisms correlated (marginally) significantly with vocabulary, grammar and selective attention scores and omissions marginally significantly with vocabulary scores, no other significant effects were obtained for measures of textese in the regression analyses: neither for the language outcomes, nor for the executive function tasks. Hence, our results show that textese is positively related to children’s grammar performance. On the other hand, use of textese does not affect—positively nor negatively—children’s executive functions.     

Cognitive Bias in Ambiguity Judgements: Using Computational Models to Dissect the Effects of Mild Mood Manipulation in Humans

Positive and negative moods can be treated as prior expectations over future delivery of rewards and punishments. This provides an inferential foundation for the cognitive (judgement) bias task, now widely-used for assessing affective states in non-human animals. In the task, information about affect is extracted from the optimistic or pessimistic manner in which participants resolve ambiguities in sensory input. Here, we report a novel variant of the task aimed at dissecting the effects of affect manipulations on perceptual and value computations for decision-making under ambiguity in humans. Participants were instructed to judge which way a Gabor patch (250ms presentation) was leaning. If the stimulus leant one way (e.g. left), pressing the REWard key yielded a monetary WIN whilst pressing the SAFE key failed to acquire the WIN. If it leant the other way (e.g. right), pressing the SAFE key avoided a LOSS whilst pressing the REWard key incurred the LOSS. The size (0–100 UK pence) of the offered WIN and threatened LOSS, and the ambiguity of the stimulus (vertical being completely ambiguous) were varied on a trial-by-trial basis, allowing us to investigate how decisions were affected by differing combinations of these factors. Half the subjects performed the task in a ‘Pleasantly’ decorated room and were given a gift (bag of sweets) prior to starting, whilst the other half were in a bare ‘Unpleasant’ room and were not given anything. Although these treatments had little effect on self-reported mood, they did lead to differences in decision-making. All subjects were risk averse under ambiguity, consistent with the notion of loss aversion. Analysis using a Bayesian decision model indicated that Unpleasant Room subjects were (‘pessimistically’) biased towards choosing the SAFE key under ambiguity, but also weighed WINS more heavily than LOSSes compared to Pleasant Room subjects. These apparently contradictory findings may be explained by the influence of affect on different processes underlying decision-making, and the task presented here offers opportunities for further dissecting such processes.     

The ‘Positive Effect’ Is Present in Older Chinese Adults: Evidence from an Eye Tracking Study

The ''Positive Effect'' is defined as the phenomenon of preferential cognitive processing of positive affective information, and avoidance or dismissal of negative affective information in the social environment. The ‘Positive Effect’ is found for older people compared with younger people in western societies and is believed to reflect a preference for positive emotional regulation in older adults. It is not known whether such an effect is Universal, and in East Asian cultures, there is a highly controversial debate concerning this question. In the current experiment we explored whether Chinese older participants showed a ''Positive Effect'' when they inspected picture pairs that were either a positive or a negative picture presented with a neutral picture, or a positive and negative picture paired together. The results indicated that both groups of participants showed an attentional bias to both pleasant (more processing of) and unpleasant pictures (initial orienting to) when these were paired with neutral pictures. When pleasant and unpleasant pictures were paired together both groups showed an initial orientation bias for the pleasant picture, but the older participants showed this bias for initial orienting and increased processing measures, providing evidence of a ‘Positive Effect’ in older Chinese adults.     

Post Learning Sleep Improves Cognitive-Emotional Decision-Making: Evidence for a ‘Deck B Sleep Effect’ in the Iowa Gambling Task

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to assess real life decision-making impairment in a wide variety of clinical populations. Our study evaluated how IGT learning occurs across two sessions, and whether a period of intervening sleep between sessions can enhance learning. Furthermore, we investigate whether pre-sleep learning is necessary for this improvement. A 200-trial version of the IGT was administered at two sessions separated by wake, sleep or sleep and wake (time-of-day control). Participants were categorized as learners and non-learners based on initial performance in session one. In session one, participants initially preferred the high-frequency reward decks B and D, however, a subset of learners decreased choice from negative expected value ‘bad’ deck B and increased choices towards with a positive expected value ‘good’ decks (decks C and D). The learners who had a period of sleep (sleep and sleep/wake control conditions) between sessions showed significantly larger reduction in choices from deck B and increase in choices from good decks compared to learners that had intervening wake. Our results are the first to show that post-learning sleep can improve performance on a complex decision-making task such as the IGT. These results provide new insights into IGT learning and have important implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of “sleeping on” a decision.     

The Influence of a Working Memory Task on Affective Perception of Facial Expressions

In a dual-task paradigm, participants performed a spatial location working memory task and a forced two-choice perceptual decision task (neutral vs. fearful) with gradually morphed emotional faces (neutral ∼ fearful). Task-irrelevant word distractors (negative, neutral, and control) were experimentally manipulated during spatial working memory encoding. We hypothesized that, if affective perception is influenced by concurrent cognitive load using a working memory task, task-irrelevant emotional distractors would bias subsequent perceptual decision-making on ambiguous facial expression. We found that when either neutral or negative emotional words were presented as task-irrelevant working-memory distractors, participants more frequently reported fearful face perception - but only at the higher emotional intensity levels of morphed faces. Also, the affective perception bias due to negative emotional distractors correlated with a decrease in working memory performance. Taken together, our findings suggest that concurrent working memory load by task-irrelevant distractors has an impact on affective perception of facial expressions.     

Timescale Halo: Average-Speed Targets Elicit More Positive and Less Negative Attributions than Slow or Fast Targets

Research on the timescale bias has found that observers perceive more capacity for mind in targets moving at an average speed, relative to slow or fast moving targets. The present research revisited the timescale bias as a type of halo effect, where normal-speed people elicit positive evaluations and abnormal-speed (slow and fast) people elicit negative evaluations. In two studies, participants viewed videos of people walking at a slow, average, or fast speed. We find evidence for a timescale halo effect: people walking at an average-speed were attributed more positive mental traits, but fewer negative mental traits, relative to slow or fast moving people. These effects held across both cognitive and emotional dimensions of mind and were mediated by overall positive/negative ratings of the person. These results suggest that, rather than eliciting greater perceptions of general mind, the timescale bias may reflect a generalized positivity toward average speed people relative to slow or fast moving people.     

Editorial Bias in Crowd-Sourced Political Information

The Internet has dramatically expanded citizens’ access to and ability to engage with political information. On many websites, any user can contribute and edit “crowd-sourced” information about important political figures. One of the most prominent examples of crowd-sourced information on the Internet is Wikipedia, a free and open encyclopedia created and edited entirely by users, and one of the world’s most accessed websites. While previous studies of crowd-sourced information platforms have found them to be accurate, few have considered biases in what kinds of information are included. We report the results of four randomized field experiments that sought to explore what biases exist in the political articles of this collaborative website. By randomly assigning factually true but either positive or negative and cited or uncited information to the Wikipedia pages of U.S. senators, we uncover substantial evidence of an editorial bias toward positivity on Wikipedia: Negative facts are 36% more likely to be removed by Wikipedia editors than positive facts within 12 hours and 29% more likely within 3 days. Although citations substantially increase an edit’s survival time, the editorial bias toward positivity is not eliminated by inclusion of a citation. We replicate this study on the Wikipedia pages of deceased as well as recently retired but living senators and find no evidence of an editorial bias in either. Our results demonstrate that crowd-sourced information is subject to an editorial bias that favors the politically active.     

Effects of Labeling and Group Category of Evaluators on Evaluations of Aggression

This study investigated whether the effect of labeling on people’s evaluation of aggression varies according to the group category of the evaluators (i.e., whether they are ingroup members or third parties). Two labeling strategies—the negative labeling of victims (NL strategy) and the positive labeling of aggressors (PL strategy)–were adopted. We conducted an experiment using the hot sauce paradigm, as a way to assess aggressive intent that includes behavioral measures of evaluations. The results suggested that the NL strategy causes ingroup members to evaluate aggression in a more positive light, while the PL strategy has the same effect but on third parties instead. Thus, labeling strategies may increase the severity of aggressors’ reaction and could also be a factor that can escalate a war or conflict.     

Striving for Excellence Sometimes Hinders High Achievers: Performance-Approach Goals Deplete Arithmetical Performance in Students with High Working Memory Capacity

We tested whether the goal to attain normative superiority over other students, referred to as performance-approach goals, is particularly distractive for high-Working Memory Capacity (WMC) students—that is, those who are used to being high achievers. Indeed, WMC is positively related to high-order cognitive performance and academic success, a record of success that confers benefits on high-WMC as compared to low-WMC students. We tested whether such benefits may turn out to be a burden under performance-approach goal pursuit. Indeed, for high achievers, aiming to rise above others may represent an opportunity to reaffirm their positive status—a stake susceptible to trigger disruptive outcome concerns that interfere with task processing. Results revealed that with performance-approach goals—as compared to goals with no emphasis on social comparison—the higher the students’ WMC, the lower their performance at a complex arithmetic task (Experiment 1). Crucially, this pattern appeared to be driven by uncertainty regarding the chances to outclass others (Experiment 2). Moreover, an accessibility measure suggested the mediational role played by status-related concerns in the observed disruption of performance. We discuss why high-stake situations can paradoxically lead high-achievers to sub-optimally perform when high-order cognitive performance is at play.