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Cognitive penetrability refers to the possibility that perceptual experiences are influenced by our beliefs, expectations, emotions, or other personal-level mental states. In this paper, I focus on the epistemological implication of cognitive penetration, and examine how, exactly, aetiologies matter to the justificatory power of perceptual experiences. I examine a prominent theory, according to which some cognitively penetrated perceptual experiences are like conclusions of bad inferences. Whereas one version of this theory is psychologically implausible, the other version has sceptical consequences. In the second half of the paper, I suggest an alternative theory, drawing on recent empirical research on imagining-perception interaction and the epistemology of imagining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy is the heightened ability to cognitively perceive and/or affectively share the emotions of others, which has been consistently associated with desirable social interactions. This paper aimed to test the bi-factorial structure of a Portuguese version of the Basic Empathy Scale and examine its variation by gender and age using a large community sample (n = 1029) of adolescents. The two-factor model, originally developed and supported by other cross-cultural validations, presented good fit indicators which was similar across genders and adolescent age groups. Girls were more empathic than boys and younger adolescents were more empathic than the older ones. Further support for the validity of the new scale comes from its relations to measures of social skills and aggression which were similar to theoretical predictions. In conclusion, the Portuguese version of the BES is a consistent and valid instrument for the assessment of empathy in samples of adolescents aged 12–18 years old in Portugal, which can now be used in cross-cultural studies of this important psychological construct. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Individuals differ in their willingness to engage with disgusting stimuli (e.g., dirty diapers). We propose that such differences are associated with attitudes towards disgust. Specifically, we predicted that people with less negative attitudes towards disgust (i.e., those who evaluate disgust less negatively) would be more willing to engage with disgusting stimuli. We asked participants to engage with disgusting stimuli in the laboratory and used two measures that assess behavioural and affective or cognitive components of attitudes towards disgust. As predicted, less negative attitudes towards disgust were associated with greater engagement with disgusting stimuli, above and beyond the current experience of disgust and the tendency to experience disgust. These findings stress the importance of attitudes towards emotions in understanding emotion-relevant behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper about the treatment process with a young woman, Anna, illustrates how issues of thinking, reflecting, finding words to express emotions, were closely intertwined with processes in her body. Her difficulties in her adult life corresponded closely to the effects of the development of a “second skin”, as this phenomenon was described by the famous article by Esther Bick in 1968. During her analytic process, Anna needed to find words to enable a loosening of bodily tension, while in a reciprocal action a more relaxed body facilitated emotional and cognitive functioning. She had developed a compensatory adhesive identification with her mother, characterizing also her way of relating within the transference and to other close relationships. Her creative unconscious suggestive of Chr. Bollas’ concept of psychic genera (Bollas, 1993) has helped her in her struggle to bridge gaps in her development. The therapist has consciously tried not to interfere with the patient’s way of finding her trajectory to facilitate development, in order to avoid a possible impasse by becoming caught in a protracted adhesive transference constellation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: The NIH Toolbox for Neurological and Behavioral Function assessment battery contains measures in the domains of cognitive function, motor function, sensory function, and emotional health. It was designed for use in epidemiological and clinical trials health-related research. Design: This paper describes the first phase of instrument development for the stress and self-efficacy subdomain of emotional health. Based on an extensive literature review and expert consultation, 127 measures were initially considered for inclusion in this subdomain, including measures of stress, self-efficacy, emotion regulation, and coping. Results: Several measures, including emotion regulation and measures of coping strategies, did not meet criteria that were a priori established for inclusion. Psychometric properties of the remaining candidate measures were evaluated using data from five independent samples (combined N = 3175). Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses indicated the Perceived Stress Scale and the General Self-Efficacy Scale each assessed single dimensions. Conclusions: Based on their psychometric performance, these two instruments were selected for inclusion and subsequent national norming for the NIH Toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When children reminisce with adults about their own past experiences, they are offered a rich forum in which to develop cognitive and socioemotional skills, build their sense of self, and form emotional bonds. Little attention has been directed to reminiscing in educational contexts, however. Our aim was to explore when, how often, and why early childhood educators engage young children in reminiscing conversations. Participants included 251 Australian educators with 1–45 years of experience. Educators completed an online survey asking them (i) the number of times per day they engaged children in reminiscing, relative to other types of talk, and (ii) the times and places these reminiscing conversations were most likely to occur. While individual differences were apparent, more than 85% of educators reporting engaging children in reminiscing multiple times per day. Popular times included arrival (67.7%), meals (65.7%) and group/circle time (58.2%). Educators' qualitative explanations suggested several important reasons to engage children in reminiscing, including to bond, establish home-centre connections, build children's socioemotional competence, reflect on 'centre life' and support intentional learning activities. Implications for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, gamification with game-based activities was implemented in an undergraduate information technologies course in a university. While the qualitative results of this mixed methods revealed what aspects of gamification supported students' learning in this course, the quantitative analysis of responses to pre- and post-testing showed that the implementation of gamification positively affected students' motivation and engagement in the course. After the implementation, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students to solicit their views of the treatment and its contribution to their learning. The interview results showed positive psychological effects; students who were unmotivated at the beginning of the semester had become more participatory and engaged in the course after experiencing learning through gamification. Overall, the findings of this study show that gamification warrants further examination as an effective pedagogical approach that can increase students' motivation to learn and engagement in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational stakeholders generally assume that inspection feedback directly contributes to school improvement through the mechanism of feedback acceptance. Feedback research in general distinguishes between cognitive and affective responses as significant factors for feedback acceptance, but it also focuses on cognitive responses as antecedents of emotions and emphasises the interplay between cognition, emotions, and feedback acceptance. Quantitative evidence in external school evaluation research to support this view, however, is rather scarce. This study draws on quantitative data collected from 687 teachers in 80 Flemish primary schools that had recently been inspected. Using path analysis, we investigated the existence and strength of relationships between teachers' cognitive and affective responses and teachers' feedback acceptance. The analysis revealed that anger and feedback acceptance are predominantly explained by the perceived fairness of the evaluation process and outcome but that they are also explained by the perceived relevance of the provided feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined whether and to what degree empathy increased in adolescents who participated in a high-intensity writing program over the course of a year. Data for this study came from writing samples of a randomly selected group of middle-grade students (n = 61) collected at three different time points to answer whether: 1) it was possible to reliably and systematically measure empathy as a complex construct that included both affective and cognitive elements, and 2) empathy increased over one year in an intensive writing practice program. The findings showed statistically significant increases in various aspects of empathy such as reasoning, including multiple perspectives, expressing emotion, and proposals for action, and statistically significant increases in empathy as a latent construct. The high-intensity writing program, an essential component of the school's curriculum, served as an educational tool and provided a showcase for the role of deliberate practice in skill building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between parent–child relationship and emotional regulation in adolescents across four countries regarding: (a) mother–child relationship; (b) father–child relationship; (c) adolescents' emotion regulation; and (d) the relationship between mother–child/father–child close relationships and adolescents' emotion regulation. Sex differences were also considered in the analysis. The sample of 270 Zambian, 216 Argentinian, 200 Ghanaian, and 180 Indian adolescents answered The Experience in Close Relationship Questionnaire and the Emotional Regulation Questionnaire. Results revealed cultural differences in the way adolescents perceived their relations with parents. Zambian adolescents were more likely to perceive their relationship as avoidant compared to Ghanaian, Argentina and Indian. Consistent with literature, Zambian and Argentinian adolescents who perceived their parents as avoidant were likely to use less cognitive appraisal as an emotion regulation strategy. Finally, Argentinian adolescents who used expressive suppression were also likely to perceive their parents as avoidant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the relationship between aspects of maternal scaffolding and Chinese preschoolers' self-regulation. Thirty-three children aged 3–5 (12 boys and 21 girls) and their mothers from one kindergarten in Nanning, China, participated in 2 dyadic problem-solving tasks. The children's self-regulation was assessed using the tapping task either before or after a dyadic problem-solving session on the same day. All mother–child joint problem-solving sessions were videotaped and transcribed. Maternal scaffolding was coded in terms of cognitive assistance (elaborative/directive), emotional feedback (positive/negative), and transfer of responsibility (adult's/child's responsibility) in interaction turns. The results of a hierarchical regression analysis indicated that maternal elaborative cognitive assistance and positive feedback positively predicted children's self-regulation, while neither the adult's nor the child's bearing of responsibility in interaction turns significantly predicted children's self-regulation. Reasons for these results and implications for further studies and practitioners are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental coviewing – the act of being present when a child is watching television – can influence the child's cognitive processing and emotional reactions. This study investigated the role coviewing has on the child's cognitive processing – which is evidenced by the phasic psychophysiological orienting response to three types of information: plot explicit, educational explicit, and implicit inference. An experiment was conducted that measured the heart rate of children (N = 88; mean age = 9.12 years) while watching messages either with or without a parent present in the room. It was predicted, and found, that coviewing leads to greater resource allocation to encoding the message – as indicated by phasic cardiac deceleration, and that information that required internal processing, such as plot explicit or implicit inferential content, leads to greater resources allocated to internal processing – as indicated by phasic cardiac acceleration. Implications for parental mediation strategies and educational television programming are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older adults have greater difficulty than younger adults perceiving vocal emotions. To better characterise this effect, we explored its relation to age differences in sensory, cognitive and emotional functioning. Additionally, we examined the role of speaker age and listener sex. Participants (N = 163) aged 19-34 years and 60-85 years categorised neutral sentences spoken by ten younger and ten older speakers with a happy, neutral, sad, or angry voice. Acoustic analyses indicated that expressions from younger and older speakers denoted the intended emotion with similar accuracy. As expected, younger participants outperformed older participants and this effect was statistically mediated by an age-related decline in both optimism and working-memory. Additionally, age differences in emotion perception were larger for younger as compared to older speakers and a better perception of younger as compared to older speakers was greater in younger as compared to older participants. Last, a female perception benefit was less pervasive in the older than the younger group. Together, these findings suggest that the role of age for emotion perception is multi-faceted. It is linked to emotional and cognitive change, to processing biases that benefit young and own-age expressions, and to the different aptitudes of women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to delineate the role of epistemic emotions in personal epistemology and self-regulated learning (SRL). We first review important tenets of personal epistemology and SRL and then present a model of SRL that situates personal epistemology within that model. We then define epistemic emotions, describe under what conditions epistemic emotions arise, and delineate how these emotions may facilitate or constrain learning processes and learning outcomes. Specifically, we present five antecedents to epistemic emotions and five consequences of those emotions during learning. The five antecedents are control, value, novelty, complexity, and achievement or impasses of epistemic aims. The five consequences are effects on planning and goal setting, motivation, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, learning outcomes, and revisions to antecedents. We end with a discussion of educational implications and future directions for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Production Effect (PE) represents superior memory for produced (read aloud) relative to non-produced (silently read) items. Another method of improving memory is taking a test on the study material - the Testing Effect. We evaluated the combined influence of both effects on free recall memory, using delayed vocal production, in which study words were vocally produced only after their disappearance. Such procedure involves an initial instant test since participants had to vocally retrieve the words (rather than read them aloud). In five experiments, participants were presented with study words that they were instructed to learn by no-production (reading silently), immediate production (reading aloud), delayed reading aloud, or delayed vocal production (instant retrieval). The results showed superior recall for delayed production over all other conditions. We suggest that the source of this superiority is the desirable difficulty induced by the addition of the initial test (retrieval effort) to the vocal production. The novel delayed production condition forms a superior mnemonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both scholars and practitioners acknowledge that the major factors explaining behavior are cognition, emotion, and context. However, existing theories tend to only focus on a combination of two. Furthermore, not all models are rooted in a specific theory of mind. Finally, there is no consistent definition of ‘mind.’ To address these issues, we review the major models explaining behavior. We then describe the Theory of Analysis of Demand (TAD), an interactionist (individual-context) model of functioning of mind that thoroughly addresses the conjoint interplay of cognition, emotion, and context. A key concept of the TAD is emotional symbolization, the process of relating one’s experiences of the external context with an inevitable emotional reaction. By considering an intersection among cognition, emotion, and context, TAD fills the gap in the existing literature and expands our understanding of behavior. Moreover, we describe the TAD intervention methodology, Individual-Setting of intervention-Organization technique, which explores an individual’s demand for intervention and the underlying emotion-, cognition-, and context-related categories (i.e., emotional symbolization) that prompt the request. Last, we discuss the potential benefits and boundary conditions of the TAD to integrate existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I join the growing ranks of theorists who reject the terms of traditional debates about the nature of emotion, debates that have long focused on the question of whether emotions should be understood as either cognitive or somatic kinds of states. Here, I propose and defend a way of incorporating both into a single theory, which I label the “Integrated Representational Theory” of emotion (IRT). In Section 2 I begin to construct the theory, defining and explaining emotions in terms of three pieces of content: representations of (1) the emoter’s body, (2) something in the world, and (3) a relevance relation between the objects of these first two pieces of content. I describe four general advantages I think the IRT offers. Finally, in Section 3, I elucidate and defend my account by contrasting it with another, similar proposal: Barlassina and Newen’s Impure Somatic Theory. In so doing, I explain two additional advantages of my view: first, it supports a unified explanation of all types of emotional response; and second, it offers the best framework for explaining how the representational contents of an emotion are integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional deviation has been considered an essential factor in emotion regulation, in that, attempts to compensate for the deviation is reflected on cognitive processes. In the present study, we focused on autobiographical remembering and tested the functional role of memory on emotion regulation. We specifically examined the congruence effect in individuals' subsequent memory reports after recalling emotional events. Individuals were randomly assigned to three groups to report either sadness or anger evoking events or emotionally unspecified events that they experienced in the last five years. Results supported mood-incongruence, but only for the emotional memory groups. Despite highly negative memories reported in the initial recall, individuals in anger-and sad-memory groups revealed an up-regulation trend in subsequent recall. Furthermore, sadness and anger induction affected phenomenological features of the subsequently reported memory. Overall, our findings supported for the emotion regulation function of remembering that serves counterregulation of the negative emotion. We discuss potential mechanisms in the light of explanations by a functional approach to autobiographical memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ageing is associated with declines in several cognitive abilities including working memory (WM). The goal of the present study was to assess whether emotional information could reduce the age gap in the quantity and quality (precision) of representations in visual WM. Young and older adults completed a serial image recognition (SIR) task and a colour-image binding (CIB) task. Results of the SIR task showed worse performance for negative than neutral and positive images within the older group, hence enlarging the age gap in WM. In the CIB task, recall precision was lower in the old than young adults, showing an ageing decline in the quality of WM representations. Positive images tended to improve precision, but this boost was similar for both age groups. In sum, emotional content did not reduce the age gap in visual WM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To succeed in self-regulation, people need to believe that it is possible to change behaviour and they also need to use effective means to enable such a change. We propose that this also applies to emotion regulation. In two studies, we found that people were most successful in emotion regulation, the more they believed emotions can be controlled and the more they used an effective emotion regulation strategy – namely, cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal moderated the link between beliefs about the controllability of emotion and success in emotion regulation, when reappraisal was measured as a trait (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2). Such moderation was found when examining the regulation of disgust elicited by emotion-inducing films (Study 1), and the regulation of anger elicited by real political events (Study 2). We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice in emotion regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mentalization defines the capacity to attribute mental states such as desires and beliefs to others and to understand that these can differ from our own. Such a capacity can be compromised in several psychiatric conditions and is the main target of many types of psychotherapy. Here we propose a theoretic model in which mentalization is achieved through a process we have termed “alphabetization” of the emotions. In this model, the patient–analyst relationship is observed within the analytic field so that all the communications of the patient and/or the analyst can be considered as “dreams” narrating the emotional “climate” of the field itself. Both the analyst and the patient contribute to the generation of the “climate,” and the analyst’s role is to promote the patient’s capacity to convert the unknown sensations into “dreams” or stories so as to make the emotional experience symbolized and meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory proposes that interest is a positive emotion that may either broaden attention to facilitate processing of new information, or narrow attention to preserve engagement with new information. To our knowledge, no research has directly examined the effect of interest on attentional scope. Across four experiments, we show that traits associated with the propensity to experience interest—specifically, trait curiosity and internal boredom proneness—are associated with a narrower scope of attention. We also find that, instead of broadening, interest actually narrows attentional scope in comparison to a neutral state and awe. Challenging the conventional notion that all positive emotions broaden cognition and attention, our findings suggest that specific emotions influence attention in ways that extend beyond a general emotional valence effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The self-positivity bias, which is inherent to healthy people, is known to be blunted in depression. The lack of positive or excessive negative self-reference is considered to be a potential mechanism underlying depressive rumination. However, the motivational factors that drive people to approach and avoid emotional self-related materials are still unclear. Therefore, we measured intrinsic motivation that is associated with emotional self-references by using a reward-based decision-making task (pay-per-view paradigm). Forty-nine undergraduates completed two tasks in which they were asked to choose between negative vs. positive references (Task 1) and self vs. other references (Task 2) for variable monetary rewards. Participants with lower levels of depressive symptoms showed a self-positivity bias, sacrificing rewards for the opportunity to engage in positive self-reference, whereas those with higher levels of depressive symptoms had no specific preference for either negative or positive self-reference (Task 1). However, all participants sacrificed monetary rewards for the opportunity for self-reference versus other reference, regardless of the symptom level or the primed valence (Task 2). Together, these findings suggest that depressive cognition could be characterised by the lack of intrinsic motivation for positive self-reference, which is attributable to the biased valence selection, but not to self–other preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), patients make eye movements (EM) while recalling traumatic memories. Making EM taxes working memory (WM), which leaves less resources available for imagery of the memory. This reduces memory vividness and emotionality during future recalls. WM theory predicts that individuals with small working memory capacities (WMCs) benefit more from low levels of taxing (i.e., slow EM) whereas individuals with large WMC benefit more from high levels of taxing (i.e., fast EM). Objective: We experimentally examined and tested four prespecified hypotheses regarding the role of WMC and EM speed in reducing emotionality and vividness ratings: 1) EM--regardless of WMC and EM speed--are more effective compared to no dual task, 2) increasing EM speed only affects the decrease in memory ratings irrespective of WMC, 3) low-WMC individuals--compared to high-WMC individuals--benefit more from making either type of EM, 4) the EM intervention is most effective when--as predicted by WM theory--EM are adjusted to WMC. Method: Undergraduates with low (n=31) or high (n=35) WMC recalled three emotional memories and rated vividness and emotionality before and after each condition (recall only, recall + slow EM, and recall + fast EM). Results: Contrary to the theory, the data do not support the hypothesis that EM speed should be adjusted to WMC (hypothesis 4). However, the data show that a dual task in general is more effective in reducing memory ratings than no dual task (hypothesis 1), and that a more cognitively demanding dual task increases the intervention's effectiveness (hypothesis 2). Conclusions: Although adjusting EM speed to an individual's WMC seems a straightforward clinical implication, the data do not show any indication that such a titration is helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effects of negative news on Twitter users’ emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses. Four hundred twenty subjects participated in an online experiment and read 10 news stories, modified as Twitter newsfeed. The results show that news negativity had a significant effect on anger and disgust. A significant link was found between exposure to negative news and information seeking. The impact of news negativity on emotions and political learning was moderated by age. Findings also reveal that experiencing negative emotions as a result of exposure to negative news on Twitter is not necessarily at odds with achieving political learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research has claimed that a novelty dimension is needed to represent the cognitive emotion structure over and above valence, power and arousal. Novelty emerged when student samples evaluated the meaning of 24 emotion terms on 142 emotion features. This claim is debatable, however, because to date novelty has never been found in similarity sorting studies. It is possible that novelty emerged because sophisticated student samples evaluated emotion terms on emotion features. The current research identified a large, representative set of emotion terms using a free-listing task in a middle childhood up to early adulthood sample (N= 5071). Children, adolescents, students and adults (N= 1184) then evaluated the similarity between these emotion terms using a similarity rating task without priming any emotion feature. Novelty robustly emerged as the fourth dimension. The existence of novelty is thus confirmed with a different method across a wide variety of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the laboratory, studies have shown an inconsistent pattern of whether, and how, mood may affect cognitive functions indicating both mood-related enhancement as well as decline. Surprisingly, little is known about whether there are similar effects in everyday life. Hence, the present study aimed to investigate possible mood effects on memory and executive control in a real-life situation. Mood effects were examined in the context of winning in a sports competition. Sixty-one male handball players were tested with an extensive cognitive test battery (comprising memory and executive control) both after winning a match and after training as neutral baseline. Mood differed significantly between the two testing situations, while physiological arousal and motivation were comparable. Results showed lowered performance after the win compared with training in selected cognitive measures. Specifically, short-term and episodic memory performance was poorer following a win, whereas executive control performance was unaffected by condition. Differences in memory disappeared when emotional states after the match were entered as covariates into the initial analyses. Thus, findings suggest mood-related impairments in memory, but not in executive control processes after a positive real-life event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reappraisal of negative events is known to be useful in decreasing their emotional impact. However, existent evidence for this conclusion mostly relies on conscious, deliberate reappraisal that comes with the cost of cognitive efforts. The aim of the present study was to compare emotion regulation effects of conscious and unconscious reappraisal, which has been shown to be less costly in previous studies. Subjects randomly assigned to an unconscious reappraisal, conscious reappraisal, and control condition performed a frustrating arithmetic task. Subjective emotional experience and heart-rate reactivity were recorded. Participants primed with unconscious reappraisal showed the same decrease in heart-rate reactivity as those explicitly instructed to reappraise. In addition, the unconscious reappraisal group did not show reductions in subjective negative emotion, whereas this was significantly decreased in the conscious reappraisal group. Heart-rate reactivity was positively correlated with negative emotion ratings and negatively correlated with the positive emotion ratings. These results suggest that unconscious reappraisal is only effective in decreasing physiological consequences of frustrating emotion, but not in reducing subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept oflife-stage orientationis proposed. Youth is a period of time characterised by strong feelings and emotions, but weak reasoning and cognitive skill. Conversely, adulthood is characterised by strong rationality, but weak emotionality. Two studies revealed that merely bringing these concepts to mind changes real-time feelings and behaviour. Participants who were instructed to act like their “adult” selves exhibited greater self-control in a cold pressor test than control participants and those who acted like their “youth” selves (Experiment 1). However, being induced to feel connected to youth enhanced enjoyment for fun videos (Experiment 2). Hence, the extent to which people are oriented towards youth versus adulthood has asymmetric costs and benefits for the present. Connecting to youth boosts experiential capacities (in this case, enjoying oneself) at the cost of agency, whereas connecting to adulthood boosts agentic capacities (in this case, exerting will-power) at the cost of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the present research, we manipulated the perceived superior/inferior status during a competitive cognitive task. In two experiments, we created an explicit and strongly reinforced social hierarchy based on incidental rating on an attentional task. Based on our hypotheses, social rank may influence nonverbal cues (such as facial mimic related to emotional response), cortical lateralized activity in frontal areas (brain oscillations), and cognitive outcomes in response to rank modulation. Thus, the facial mimic (corrugators vs. zygomatic muscle activity), frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta), and real cognitive performance [(error rate (ER); response times (RTs)] were considered. Specifically, a peer-group comparison was enrolled and an improved (experiment 1, N = 29) or decreased (experiment 2, N = 31) performance was artificially manipulated by the experimenter. Results showed a significant improved cognitive performance (decreased ER and RTs), an increased zygomatic activity (positive emotions), and a more prefrontal left-lateralized cortical response in the case of a perceived increased social ranking. On the contrary, a significant decreased cognitive performance (increased ER and RTs), an increased corrugators activity (negative emotions), and a less left-lateralized cortical response were observed as a consequence of a perceived decreased social ranking. Moreover, the correlational values revealed a consistent trend between behavioral (RTs) and EMG and EEG measures for both experiments. The present results suggest that social status not only guides social behavior, but it also influences cognitive processes and subjects’ performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We investigated the moderating impact of the personality construct alexithymia on the ability of younger and older adults to control the recall of negative and neutral material. We conducted two experiments using the directed forgetting paradigm with younger and older adults. Participants studied negative (Experiment 1) or neutral (Experiment 2) words. Participants were instructed to forget the first half and remember the second half of an entire list of words. Overall, we found that alexithymia impairs the ability of both younger and older adults to cognitively control negative material (through both recall and inhibition). The “externally oriented thinking” factor of alexithymia appears to play a particularly pertinent role in terms of inhibiting negative material. Furthermore, older adults recalled fewer sought after negative items, but this was not evident in terms of inhibition. In contrast, only age (older adults) negatively impacted the recall of sought after neutral items. Interestingly, alexithymia had the opposite effect: the “difficulty in identifying emotions” factor of alexithymia was associated with an increased recall of neutral items. We discuss these results in terms of alexithymia and its impact on cognitive control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background:Dispositional emotional approach coping (EAC) marks an adaptive tendency to process and express emotions. EAC's association with cognitions, affect, and intra- and interindividual characteristics that may account for its utility was examined in response to an acute stressor and in daily life.Design:This study included a laboratory stress task and ecological momentary assessment.Methods:Healthy undergraduate students (n= 124; mean age: 20; women: 56%) completed a laboratory component (baseline survey, speech stress task, pre- and posttask measures) and five subsequent days of surveys via palm pilot (six surveys/day).Results:Controlling for sex, neuroticism, and social support, greater EAC was associated with more positive cognitive appraisals, personal resources, and positive affect and less-negative affect during the lab stressor, and with more perceived control and positive affect in daily life. Significant EAC × sex interactions were found for poststressor affect: men with high EAC reported more positive affect and women with high EAC reported less negative affect.Conclusions:Findings provide support that EAC's utility may be independent of intra- and interindividual characteristics, and that men and women may benefit from EAC in different ways in regards to affect. The proclivity to use EAC may come with a resiliency that protects against stress and promotes general well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined whether positive and negative affect motivates verbal and spatial working memory processes, respectively, which have implications for the expenditure of mental effort. We argue that when emotion promotes cognitive tendencies that are goal incompatible with task demands, greater cognitive effort is required to perform well. We sought to investigate whether this increase in cognitive effort impairs behavioural control over a broad domain of self-control tasks. Moreover, we predicted that individuals with higher behavioural inhibition system (BIS) sensitivities would report more negative affect within the goal incompatible conditions because such individuals report higher negative affect during cognitive challenge. Positive or negative affective states were induced followed by completing a verbal or spatial 2-back working memory task. All participants then completed one of three self-control tasks. Overall, we observed that conditions of emotion and working memory incompatibility (positive/spatial and negative/verbal) performed worse on the self-control tasks, and within the incompatible conditions individuals with higher BIS sensitivities reported more negative affect at the end of the study. The combination of findings suggests that emotion and working memory compatibility reduces cognitive effort and impairs behavioural control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies examine individual differences in affective reactivity by linking emotional experience to cognitive self-structure. Consistent with the view that individuals with an evaluative compartmentalised self-structure are emotionally reactive, we find that evaluative compartmentalisation is associated with the experience of, and desire for, high-arousal positive (HAP) affect, whereas evaluative integration is associated with the experience of low-arousal positive (LAP) and low-arousal negative affect and the desire for LAP affect. Although compartmentalised individuals are less granular in their tendency to report experiencing both HAP and LAP, they are strongly differentiated in their perceptions of high-arousal states as positive and low-arousal states as negative. Thus, compartmentalised individuals' reactivity may be explained by their preference for HAP states and the ‘breadth’ of their emotionality (e.g., the tendency to experience sadness and nervousness at the same time). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Individual differences in higher-order cognitive abilities may be an important piece to understanding how and when self-discrepancies lead to negative emotions. In the current study, three measures of reasoning abilities were considered as potential moderators of the relationship between self-discrepancies and depression and anxiety symptoms. Participants (N= 162) completed measures assessing self-discrepancies, depression and anxiety symptoms, and were administered measures examining formal operational thought, and verbal and non-verbal abstract reasoning skills. Both formal operational thought and verbal abstract reasoning were significant moderators of the relationship between actual:ideal discrepancies and depressive symptoms. Discrepancies predicted depressive symptoms for individuals with higher levels of formal operational thought and verbal abstract reasoning skills, but not for those with lower levels. The discussion focuses on the need to consider advanced reasoning skills when examining self-discrepancies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interoceptive awareness (IA)—the ability to detect internal body signals—has been linked to various aspects of emotional processing. However, it has been examined mostly as a trait variable, with few studies also investigating state dependent fluctuations in IA. Based on the known positive correlation between IA and emotional reactivity, negative affectivity, and trait anxiety, the current study examined whether IA, as indexed by heartbeat detection accuracy, would change during an anxiety-provoking situation. Participants in the experimental condition, in which they anticipated giving a speech in front of a small audience, displayed significant IA increases from baseline to anticipation. Enhancement in IA was positively correlated with fear of negative evaluation. Implications of the results are discussed in relation to the role of trait and state IA in emotional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humiliation, the emotion associated with being lowered in status in the eyes of others, seems to be very intense. As such, humiliation has been implied to play an important role in the escalation of inter-individual and inter-group conflict. Here, we provide the first clear empirical evidence that humiliation is indeed a very intense experience. Based on the electro-encephalogram recorded from people reading scenarios that evoked humiliation, anger, or happiness, electrophysiological measures of cognitive intensity were derived for each of the emotion types. The late positive potential (LPP), a measure of the level of perceived (negative), affect was markedly increased in humiliation scenarios compared to happiness and anger scenarios. In addition, event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the alpha-frequency range, a measure of the overall intensity of cortical activation, was significantly more pronounced for humiliation than for happiness and anger scenarios. Our findings support the idea that humiliation is a particularly intense experience that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on theories of development, motivation, and personality we examined children's and adolescents’ emotional and cognitive perception of, and explained their behavioral reactions to, ostracism in two experimental studies. In Study one, 93 fourth- and eighth-graders (49 girls) were either socially included or excluded within a virtual ball-tossing game (cyberball). Results demonstrated that ostracism causes negative emotions and a selective memory for social events, similarly for children and adolescents, which verifies the usefulness of cyberball beyond self-reports. In Study two, 97 fourth- to ninth-graders (43 girls) behaviorally reacted to the previously induced ostracism episode within a modified paradigm (cyberball-R). Multinomial logistic regression demonstrated that psychosocial differences between participants displaying prosocial, avoidant, and antisocial reactions followed the expected pattern, which provides initial evidence concerning moderators that prevent children and adolescents from receiving further aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is widespread belief that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are “emotionally detached” from others. This comprehensive review examines the empirical evidence for this assumption, addressing three critical questions: (1) Are emotion-processing impairmentsuniversalin ASD? (2) Are theyspecific, or can they be explained by deficits in other domains? (3) Is the emotion processing profile seen in ASDuniqueto these conditions? Upon review of the literature (over 200 studies), we conclude that: (1) emotion-processing impairments might not be universal in ASD, as suggested by variability across participants and across emotion-processing tasks; (2) emotion-processing impairments might not be specific to ASD, as domain-general processes appear to account for some of these impairments; and (3) the specific pattern of emotion-processing strengths and weaknesses observed in ASD, involving difficulties with processing social versus non-social, and complex versus simple emotional information (with impairments more consistently reported on implicit than explicit emotion-processing tasks), appears to be unique to ASD. The emotion-processing profile observed in ASD might be best understood as resulting from heterogeneous vulnerabilities in different components of an “emotional communication system” that, in typical development, emerges from the interplay between domain-general cognitive, social and affective processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical decision making is influenced by a variety of cognitive processes and individual differences. However, there is little empirical research on whether and how emotions and emotion regulation strategies influence ethical decisions. Emotions have the potential to influence how people think about ethical problems and make ethical decisions, implying that emotion regulation may also be important to consider. This article examines the influence of anger and fear on ethical decisions and ethical sensemaking strategies. In addition, emotion regulation strategies are examined as potential moderators of these relationships. Findings indicated that anger inhibited ethical decision making and sensemaking. Alternatively, fear facilitated ethical decisions compared to anger and no emotion conditions. Emotion regulation significantly decreased the negative effects of anger on sensemaking and ethical decisions. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an explosion of studies examining behavioural and neural aspects of imagining future events. However, little is known about whether imagined future events reflect future happenings. We examined event occurrence 1 year after participants imagined highly probable future events, specific to place and time. Overall, participants did engage in most of their imagined events. Completion rates were similar to naturalistic prospective memory and implementation intention studies examining personal plan completion. Approximately 20% of events were abandoned. We found participants often imagined events that were repeated many times in the course of a year and this impacted the vividness of recollection, sense of personal importance, personal involvement in event fulfilment, and extent of positive emotionality 1 year later. Together, the results provide an important validation for prospection research and highlight novel dimensions in the temporal structure of future-thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aimed at a detailed understanding of the possible dissociable influences of cognitive aging on the recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness). The participants were 36 older and 36 young adults. They viewed 96 pictures of facial expressions and were asked to choose one emotion that best described each. Four cognitive tasks measuring the speed of processing and fluid intelligence were also administered, the scores of which were used to compute a composite measure of general cognitive ability. A series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that age-related deficits in identifying happiness, surprise, fear, and sadness were statistically explained by general cognitive ability, while the differences in anger and disgust were not. This provides clear evidence that age-related cognitive impairment remarkably and differentially affects the recognition of basic emotions, contrary to the common view that cognitive aging has a uniformly minor effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study (N = 111) sought to assess the roles of emotional involvement and trait absorption in the formation process of spatial presence in a virtual environment. A 2 × 2 between-subjects design was employed with emotional involvement (low vs. high) as an experimental factor and trait absorption (low vs. high) as a quasi-experimental factor. The results indicate that both emotional involvement and trait absorption contribute to the formation of spatial presence. Furthermore, a positive interaction effect between emotional involvement and trait absorption on spatial presence was found. When controlling for other well-known contributing factors (cognitive involvement, the spatial situational model, and suspension of disbelief), the effects of emotional involvement and trait absorption remain stable. Regarding presence as a broad construct, these other factors are often conceptualized as part of the presence experience. Treating them instead as contributing factors and, thus, applying a narrow conceptualization of spatial presence, provides a clear insight of its formation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have claimed that emotional stimuli are able to capture attention automatically when presented outside the main focus of attention. In the current study this claim was tested by using task-relevant and task-irrelevant emotional stimuli. Specifically, in two experiments the effect of emotional stimuli presented in the periphery of attention was tested by using a flanker task. Results showed that emotional stimuli did not capture attention in an unconditional manner. Emotional distracting stimuli created interference only when they were relevant to the task. The findings suggest that “task relevance” is determined by (a) task requirements, and/or (b) target characteristics. The current results have implications for the concept of cognitive load and automaticity of processing emotional stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigated whether the age-related positivity effect strengthens specific event details in autobiographical memory. Participants retrieved past events or imagined future events in response to neutral or emotional cue words. Older adults rated each kind of event more positively than younger adults, demonstrating an age-related positivity effect. We next administered a source memory test. Participants were given the same cue words and tried to retrieve the previously generated event and its source (past or future). Accuracy on this source test should depend on the recollection of specific details about the earlier generated events, providing a more objective measure of those details than subjective ratings. We found that source accuracy was greater for positive than negative future events in both age groups, suggesting that positive future events were more detailed. In contrast, valence did not affect source accuracy for past events in either age group, suggesting that positive and negative past events were equally detailed. Although ageing can bias people to focus on positive aspects of experience, this bias does not appear to strengthen the availability of details for positive relative to negative past events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in emotional and social behavior are considered to be amongst the most common and debilitating consequences of schizophrenia. However, little is known of the effects of schizophrenia on alexithymia, which refers to impairment in aspects of understanding emotions. In the current study, participants with schizophrenia (n = 29) and nonclinical controls (n = 30) completed self-report and performance-based measures of this construct, in addition to measures of cognitive functioning, clinical symptomatology, and negative affect. The results indicated that individuals with schizophrenia showed increased alexithymia as indexed by the performance task, with these difficulties related to cognitive functioning, and the specific clinical symptom of alogia. However, although the correlation between self-reported alexithymia and negative affect in the schizophrenia group was congruent with prior empirical research and theory, there were no group differences in perceived levels of alexithymia. It is suggested that alexithymia may not be affected per se in schizophrenia (as indicated by the lack of group differences on the self-report measure of this construct), but that schizophrenia-related difficulties do emerge in contexts where cognitive demands are incremented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previously we found in preschool that child-directed pretend play in small playing groups importantly improves cognitive competence in mixed-age environment and that the effect is based on close coupling between affective and cognitive domain. To foster affective and cognitive intertwining, it is reasonable to select the most favored pretend plays evoking maximum positive emotions during the playing process. The goal here was to investigate play preferences in mixed-aged and gender classes. We found that girls significantly preferred pretend play (mean number of players ± standard error of the mean, number of analyzed plays: girls versus boys, 2.35 ± 0.03, n = 3006 versus 2.13 ± 0.04, n = 3001, p < 0.0001) as opposed to boys, who favored constructive play (boys versus girls, 2.47 ± 0.04, n = 2884 versus 2.27 ± 0.04, n = 2883, p = 0.0004). The most preferred pretend play, acceptable for both genders, arise from family environment, comprising a potentially effective 'carrier' of the cognitive skills by easy and pleasurable manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Associations among the MSCEIT, a broad-bandwidth measure of ability emotional intelligence (EI), self-report EI, social perception ability, psychometric intelligence and performance on inspection time (IT) tasks, which assessed the speed of processing of emotional and non-emotional information were investigated in two student samples (N=99, 199). The main findings were that MSCEIT scores were unrelated to fluid ability or speed of non-emotional information processing as assessed by IT, but evidence for associations of MSCEIT scores with crystallised ability was found. Positive associations were found between MSCEIT scores, self-report EI and some emotion/social task scores. The results suggest that EI as assessed by the MSCEIT has some properties of an intelligence and is more closely related to crystallised than to fluid ability. The relatively small MSCEIT/gc correlations suggest that the MSCEIT is not a pure ability measure, although restriction of range in the samples used may also be relevant. More work, and the development of new measures, is required to determine whether performance EI has a fluid component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]