Emotions

Saturday, October 01st,   2011 [17:20 - 19:20]

PS_2.025 - High/low avoidance-motivated negative affect and efficiency of cognitive inhibition

Czajak, D. & Cipora, K.

Institute of Psychology. Jagiellonian University. Cracow, Poland.

The aim of presented study was to examine whether high/low avoidance-motivated negative affect influences cognitive inhibition. Despite the fact that inhibition is one of the key aspects of cognitive control only few studies investigated its connections with emotions. Amongst all, some studies revealed that positive mood can lead to increase in the inhibitory costs in Stroop task, while negative affect may reduce Stroop interference. What is more, it has been shown that affective influences on the attentional breadth can be changed depending on the type of approach/avoidance motivation of given affect. Here we focus on negative affect, to which not much attention was paid in previous studies. We hypothesize that approach/avoidance motivation modulates influence of negative emotions not only on attention but on inhibition processes as well. To manipulate affect and type of motivation IAPS (International affective picture system) pictures were presented. The low/high avoidance-evoking pictures were chosen on the basis of pilot study. Subjects were assigned to one of the three groups in which: (1) high avoidance-motivated negative affect; (2) low avoidance-motivated negative affect; (3) neutral affect were evoked. Stop signal and go/no-go tasks were used to measure efficiency of inhibition processes. Data is being processed.

PS_2.026 - When words become negative: using a learning paradigm to explore the effect of emotions on lexical access

Faurous, W. ¹ , Dumay, N. ² & Mathey, S. ¹

1 Université Bordeaux Segalen Laboratoie de psychologie "Santé et Qualité de vie" EA 4139
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

This research explores how words' emotional attributes affect linguistic processing and whether their acquisition requires consolidation. French-speakers were repeatedly exposed to associations between written made up words (e.g., 'évrade') and pictures with either an emotionally negative or a neutral content (e.g., 'a growling pitbull' vs. 'a spoon'). The ability of the novel orthographic forms to activate their emotional attributes was then tested immediately and retested after a week. A stroop-like colour identification task showed facilitation for negative compared to neutral words at test (13 ms), but interference at retest (16 ms). In line with the idea that what had consolidated has to do with more than just arousing power of the stimuli, an old/new recognition task administered only at retest revealed an interaction between participants' general level of anxiety and emotional content: whereas more anxious participants took longer to recognize negative than neutral words, less anxious participants showed the reverse pattern. Altogether, these results indicate that words' emotional attributes need consolidation before they can be activated by the written input; given the fully rotated nature of our design, they also show that negative stimuli freeze participants under attentional tasks that do not focus on word identity.

PS_2.027 - Searching for affective bases of intuition. The influence of affective stimuli on “feeling of warmth” ratings

Marta, S. & Nęcka, E. .

Jagiellonian University

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between emotions and intuition. Intuition can be described as a feeling, knowledge or belief about own’s cognitive states, that is, a kind of metacognition that produces hunches, guesses and feelings. Several studies suggest that intuitive judgements are accurate and that they might be based on simple affective processes. A positive or negative affect can be the effect of progress monitoring and serve as a subtle cue about “being right”. In this experiment we examined the role of externally and subliminally implemented affect on intuitive feelings about approaching the solution of difficult problems (“feeling of warmth”). 130 students of Jagiellonian University were asked to solve two problems and give their feeling of warmth ratings every 15 s. They were also presented subliminally pictures of faces expressing emotions (negative, positive and neutral). The results suggest that it is possible to bias people’s intuitive feelings by external affective stimuli. That means that subtle affective changes might be the core of intuitive feelings.

PS_2.028 - Comparing different paradigms for exploring affective priming

Rebernjak, B.

Department of Psychology, University of Zagreb

In affective priming a presentation of positively or negatively valenced stimuli facilitates the reaction to subsequent stimuli if they are congruent in valence with the first one as compared to the situation when they are not. Numerous paradigms have been developed to measure this effect, and the question remains - do they all measure the same thing? In this study we wanted to explore how different setups of the affective priming paradigm relate to one another and to the several external criteria. Three versions of the design were used: Classical evaluative decision task (EDT), response window technique (RWT) and continuous presentation (CP). In EDT participants react to target words preceded by valenced primes and evaluate them as positive or negative. In RWT, participants are forced to react very fast (usually within 700ms), and the dependent variable is not reaction time like in the EDT, but the items correct. CP is similar like EDT, but the primes and targets are not explicitly distinct, and every stimulus acts as a target for a preceding one and a prime for subsequent one. These methods are compared to one another and evaluated regarding criteria like susceptibility to current mood and implicit affect.

PS_2.029 - Pupillary responses to emotional words

Bayer, M. ^{1, 2} , Sommer, W. ² & Schacht, A. ³

1 Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Berlin, Germany
2 Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
3 CRC Text Structures, University of Göttingen, Germany

The pupillary response of the human eye has been shown to be sensitive to both task load and emotional content. The present study investigated the interplay of both factors in the processing of single words that varied in emotional valence and arousal. To this aim, two tasks of varying cognitive load, uninstructed reading and a lexical decision task, were employed; followed by an unannounced recognition memory task. In contrast to previous findings for pictures and sounds, high-arousing words elicited smaller pupillary responses than low-arousing words. This effect occurred independently of task load, which increased pupil diameter. Furthermore, high-arousing words elicited faster response latencies in the lexical decision task and better incidental memory performance. These results indicate that the influence of arousal in word processing does not mandatorily activate the autonomic nervous system, but rather works on a cognitive level, facilitating word processing.

PS_2.030 - Preferential access to emotional cues is mediated by threshold: An evidence from attentional blink paradigm

Traczyk, J. ¹ , Szczepanowski, R. ² & Fan, Z. ³

1 Center for Research in Economic Behavior. Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Wroclaw Faculty, Poland.
2 The Chair of Cognitive Psychology and Individual Differences. Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Wroclaw Faculty, Poland.
3 Psychology School. Central China Normal University. Wuhan，China.

There is commonsense view that awareness of perceptual information requires not only strong representation of the contents of awareness, but also access to that information. Recent studies suggest that a function relating the perceptual activation strength to conscious access may contain thresholds contrary to the continuous quality of perceptual representation. The main goal of this study was to show that the threshold model was able to account for participants’ performance under attentional blink (AB) paradigm with emotional targets. An analysis of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) was used to distinguish between two models of perception by inspecting two different ROC’s shapes. The results showed that observer’s performance was better described by the linear ROC predicted by the threshold theory than by the ROC’s curvilinear ROC shape provided by the signal-detection theory. This pattern of conscious threshold access to emotional content was consistent among all lag conditions. Moreover, there was no differences in the ROCs between the all-T1-trials condition and the correct-T1-trials condition, providing evidence that emotional representation of stimuli leads to attenuation of the blink effect. Overall, the findings support the notion that conscious access to emotional content operates in the “all-or-none” manner as predicted by the threshold approach.

PS_2.031 - Perception of gesture dynamics from bodily expressions of emotion

Dael, N. ^{1, 2} , Goudbeek, M. ³ & Scherer, K. ¹

1 Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. University of Geneva. Geneva, Switzerland
2 Institute of Psychology. University of Lausanne. Lausanne, Switzerland
3 Department of Communication and Information Sciences. Tilburg University. Tilburg, Netherlands

Gestures serve many cognitive-linguistic functions, but the affective facets of gestural communication have, in contrast to those of vocal and facial expression, not yet been explored. We investigated the perception of spatiotemporal qualities of emotional arm gestures. We examined how the emotion dimensions arousal, valence, and potency, affected the judgment of 6 spatiotemporal characteristics of gestural arm movement that were found to be related to emotion in previous research (amount of movement, movement speed, force, fluency, size, and height/vertical position). The emotional expressions were taken from the Geneva Multimodal Emotional Portrayals. First, we tested the recognition of these emotion dimensions from bodily expressions and found that the rating of the perceived dimension was most strongly influenced by the corresponding encoded dimension in the predicted direction. Valence, potency and arousal are thus relevant dimensions in the perception of bodily expression of emotion. Second, the gesture ratings revealed that arousal and potency are strong determinants of the perception of gestural dynamics, whereas the differences between positive or negative emotions were less pronounced. In sum, this study identifies perceptual cues in gestural arm movement that are relevant in communicating major emotion dimensions. Gesture thus forms an important part of multimodal emotion communication.