The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism

Emotion Differentiation and Youth Mental Health: Current Understanding and Open Questions

A growing body of research identifies emotion differentiation-the ability to specifically identify one's emotions-as a key skill for well-being. High emotion differentiation is associated with healthier and more effective regulation of one's emotions, and low emotion differentiation has been documented in several forms of psychopathology. However, the lion's share of this research has focused on adult samples, even though approximately 50% of mental disorders onset before age 18. This review curates what we know about the development of emotion differentiation and its implications for youth mental health. I first review published studies investigating how emotion differentiation develops across childhood and adolescence, as well as studies testing relations between emotion differentiation and mental health in youth samples. Emerging evidence suggests that emotion differentiation actually falls across childhood and adolescence, a counterintuitive pattern that merits further investigation. Additionally, several studies find relations between emotion differentiation and youth mental health, but some instability in results emerged. I then identify open questions that limit our current understanding of emotion differentiation, including (i) lack of clarity as to the valid measurement of emotion differentiation, (ii) potential third variables that could explain relations between emotion differentiation and mental-health (e.g., mean negative affect, IQ, personality, and circularity with outcomes), and (iii) lack of clear mechanistic models regarding the development of emotion differentiation and how it facilitates well-being. I conclude with a discussion of future directions that can address open questions and work toward interventions that treat (or even prevent) psychopathology.

Physician Use of Stigmatizing Language in Patient Medical Records

IMPORTANCE

Negative attitudes toward patients can adversely impact health care quality and contribute to health disparities. Stigmatizing language written in a patient's medical record can perpetuate negative attitudes and influence decision-making of clinicians subsequently caring for that patient.

OBJECTIVE

To identify and describe physician language in patient health records that may reflect, or engender in others, negative and positive attitudes toward the patient.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS

This qualitative study analyzed randomly selected encounter notes from electronic medical records in the ambulatory internal medicine setting at an urban academic medical center. The 600 encounter notes were written by 138 physicians in 2017. Data were analyzed in 2019.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES

Common linguistic characteristics reflecting an overall positive or negative attitude toward the patient.

RESULTS

A total of 138 clinicians wrote encounter notes about 507 patients. Of these patients, 350 (69%) were identified as female, 406 (80%) were identified as Black/African American, and 76 (15%) were identified as White. Of 600 encounter notes included in this study, there were 5 major themes representing negative language and 6 themes representing positive language. The majority of negative language was not explicit and generally fell into one or more of the following categories: (1) questioning patient credibility, (2) expressing disapproval of patient reasoning or self-care, (3) stereotyping by race or social class, (4) portraying the patient as difficult, and (5) emphasizing physician authority over the patient. Positive language was more often more explicit and included (1) direct compliments, (2) expressions of approval, (3) self-disclosure of the physician's own positive feelings toward the patient, (4) minimization of blame, (5) personalization, and (6) highlighting patient authority for their own decisions.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

This qualitative study found that physicians express negative and positive attitudes toward patients when documenting in the medical record. Although often not explicit, this language could potentially transmit bias and affect the quality of care that patients subsequently receive. These findings suggest that increased physician awareness when writing and reading medical records is needed to prevent the perpetuation of negative bias in medical care.

Language Is a Unique Context for Emotion Perception

Access to words used to label emotion concepts (e.g., "disgust") facilitates perceptions of facial muscle movements as instances of specific emotions (see Lindquist & Gendron, 2013). However, it remains unclear whether the effect of language on emotion perception is unique or whether it is driven by language's tendency to evoke situational context. In two studies, we used a priming and perceptual matching task to test the hypothesis that the effect of language on emotion perception is unique to that of situational context. We found that participants were more accurate to perceptually match facial portrayals of emotion after being primed with emotion labels as compared to situational context or control stimuli. These findings add to growing evidence that language serves as context for emotion perception and demonstrates for the first time that the effect of language on emotion perception is not merely a consequence of evoked situational context.

At the Neural Intersection Between Language and Emotion

What role does language play in emotion? Behavioral research shows that emotion words such as "anger" and "fear" alter emotion experience, but questions still remain about mechanism. Here, we review the neuroscience literature to examine whether neural processes associated with semantics are also involved in emotion. Our review suggests that brain regions involved in the semantic processing of words: (i) are engaged during experiences of emotion, (ii) coordinate with brain regions involved in affect to create emotions, (iii) hold representational content for emotion, and (iv) may be necessary for constructing emotional experience. We relate these findings with respect to four theoretical relationships between language and emotion, which we refer to as "non-interactive," "interactive," "constitutive," and "deterministic." We conclude that findings are most consistent with the interactive and constitutive views with initial evidence suggestive of a constitutive view, in particular. We close with several future directions that may help test hypotheses of the constitutive view.

Testimonial Injustice: Linguistic Bias in the Medical Records of Black Patients and Women

BACKGROUND

Black Americans and women report feeling doubted or dismissed by health professionals.

OBJECTIVE

To identify linguistic mechanisms by which physicians communicate disbelief of patients in medical records and then to explore racial and gender differences in the use of such language.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional.

SETTING/PARTICIPANTS

All notes for patients seen in an academic ambulatory internal medicine practice in 2017.

MAIN MEASURES

A content analysis of 600 clinic notes revealed three linguistic features suggesting disbelief: (1) quotes (e.g., had a "reaction" to the medication); (2) specific "judgment words" that suggest doubt (e.g., "claims" or "insists"); and (3) evidentials, a sentence construction in which patients' symptoms or experience is reported as hearsay. We used natural language processing to evaluate the prevalence of these features in the remaining notes and tested differences by race and gender, using mixed-effects regression to account for clustering of notes within patients and providers.

KEY RESULTS

Our sample included 9251 notes written by 165 physicians about 3374 unique patients. Most patients were identified as Black (74%) and female (58%). Notes written about Black patients had higher odds of containing at least one quote (OR 1.48, 95% CI 1.20-1.83) and at least one judgment word (OR 1.25, 95% CI 1.02-1.53), and used more evidentials (β 0.32, 95% CI 0.17-0.47), compared to notes of White patients. Notes about female vs. male patients did not differ in terms of judgment words or evidentials but had a higher odds of containing at least one quote (OR 1.22, 95% CI 1.05-1.44).

CONCLUSIONS

Black patients may be subject to systematic bias in physicians' perceptions of their credibility, a form of testimonial injustice. This is another potential mechanism for racial disparities in healthcare quality that should be further investigated and addressed.

Let’s Talk About Emotions: the Development of Children’s Emotion Vocabulary from 4 to 11 Years of Age

Learning to use language in an adult-like way is a long-lasting process. This may particularly apply to complex conceptual domains such as emotions. The present study examined children’s and adults’ patterns of emotion word usage regarding their convergence and underlying semantic dimensions, and the factors influencing the ease of emotion word learning. We assessed the production of emotion words by 4- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) and 27 adults (M = 37 years) using a vignette test. We found that the older the children, the more emotion words they produced. Moreover, with increasing age, children’s pattern of emotion word usage converged with adult usage. The analysis for semantic dimensions revealed one clear criterion—the differentiation of positive versus negative emotions—for all children and adults. We further found that broad covering emotion words are produced earlier and in a more adult-like way.

Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition

Fiction reading experience affects emotion recognition abilities, yet the causal link remains underspecified. Current theory suggests fiction reading promotes the simulation of fictional minds, which supports emotion recognition skills. We examine the extent to which contextualized statistical experience with emotion category labels in language is associated with emotion recognition. Using corpus analyses, we demonstrate fiction texts reliably use emotion category labels in an emotive sense (e.g., cry of relief), whereas other genres often use alternative senses (e.g., hurricane relief fund). Furthermore, fiction texts were shown to be a particularly reliable source of information about complex emotions. The extent to which these patterns affect human emotion concepts was analyzed in two behavioral experiments. In experiment 1 (n = 134), experience with fiction text predicted recognition of emotions employed in an emotive sense in fiction texts. In experiment 2 (n = 387), fiction reading experience predicted emotion recognition abilities, overall. These results suggest that long-term language experience, and fiction reading, in particular, supports emotion concepts through exposure to these emotions in context.

Aging bodies, aging emotions: Interoceptive differences in emotion representations and self-reports across adulthood

Bodily sensations are closely linked to emotional experiences. However, most research assessing the body-emotion link focuses on young adult samples. Inspired by prior work showing age-related declines in autonomic reactivity and interoception, we present 2 studies investigating age-related differences in the extent to which adults (18-75 years) associate interoceptive or internal bodily sensations with emotions. Study 1 (N = 150) used a property association task to assess age effects on adults' tendencies to associate interoceptive sensations, relative to behaviors or situations, with negative emotion categories (e.g., anger, sadness). Study 2 (N = 200) used the Day Reconstruction experience sampling method to assess the effect of age on adults' tendencies to report interoceptive sensations and emotional experiences in daily life. Consistent with prior literature suggesting that older adults have more muted physiological responses and interoceptive abilities than younger adults, we found that older adults' mental representations (Study 1) and self-reported experiences (Study 2) of emotion are less associated with interoceptive sensations than are those of younger adults. Across both studies, age effects were most prominent for high arousal emotions (e.g., anger, fear) and sensations (e.g., racing heart) that are often associated with peripheral psychophysiological concomitants in young adults. These findings are consistent with psychological constructionist models and a "maturational dualism" account of emotional aging, suggesting additional pathways by which emotions may differ across adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The conceptualization of emotions across cultures: a model based on interoceptive neuroscience

Mental processes are recognized to be embodied, hence dependent upon functions of the body. Interoception (i.e., the sense of the internal bodily physiology) underpinning motivational states and emotional feelings, however, are mostly ignored within present sensory-motor accounts of embodiment. The inclusion of interoception within models of embodiment is important both for health psychology and for theories of cognition. Here, we deduce that reference to visceral organs, in language describing emotion concepts, should be viewed as metonymy (i.e., the mental mapping wherein a component is used to describe the whole), rather than metaphor (i.e., one familiar and concrete concept used to describe another unfamiliar and/or abstract concept that shares some similarities). This view contrasts with a dominant assumption within cognitive linguistics. We further argue that conceptual differences in the assumption about the body-mind-emotion relationship or emotional somatization, evident when comparing Chinese to standard English, is culturally and cognitively determined (e.g., by divergent Western and Chinese philosophical, medical traditions and meaning systems). We propose a new model in which two contending variables, bodily transparency and cognitive granularity, define cultural differences in emotion conceptualization, capturing the dynamic multidimensional interaction between body, mind, brain, language, and society.

Labeling Emotional Stimuli in Early Childhood Predicts Neural and Behavioral Indicators of Emotion Regulation in Late Adolescence

BACKGROUND

Effective emotion regulation (ER) may be supported by 1) accurate emotion identification, encoding, and maintenance of emotional states and related brain activity of regions involved in emotional response (i.e., amygdala, ventral/posterior insula) and 2) cognitive processes that implement reframing, supported by activation in cognitive control brain regions (e.g., frontal, insular, and parietal cortices). The purpose of this project was to examine how emotion labeling ability in early childhood is related to ER concurrently and prospectively.

METHODS

Data from a prospective longitudinal study of youths at risk for depression, including measures of emotion labeling (i.e., Facial Affect Comprehension Evaluation) and ER ability (i.e., Emotion Regulation Checklist) and strategy use (i.e., Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Children's Response Style Questionnaire), and functional magnetic resonance imaging data during a sadness ER task (N = 139) were examined.

RESULTS

Findings from multilevel modeling and linear regression suggested that greater emotion labeling ability of more difficult emotions in early childhood was associated with enhanced parent-reported ER in adolescence, but not with a tendency to engage in adaptive or maladaptive ER strategies. Recognition of fear and surprise predicted greater activation in cortical regions involved in cognitive control during an ER of sadness task, including in the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that early ability to identify and label difficult facial emotions in early childhood is associated with better ER in adolescence and enhanced activity of cognitive control regions of the brain.

Does Emotional Intelligence Have an Impact on Linguistic Competences? A Primary Education Study

The relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and academic achievement has received a lot of attention in the school environment. The objective of this study is to identify which EI components are more related to linguistic competences in primary education. One hundred eighty students between 8 and 11 years of age participated in the study. We administered the BarOn EI Inventory, the intellectual skills test (EFAI) to determine the intellectual abilities, and a test of basic linguistic competences. The results showed that the EI factors of adaptability and interpersonal had the strongest impact on linguistic competences. Specifically, adaptability was the EI component more related to reading comprehension, explaining 13.2% of the reading score’s variance, while adaptability and stress management were the best predictors of writing skills, accounting for 15.4% of the variance of the writing score. These results point to the need to consider emotional competences to help students reach academic success and personal well-being.

The continuous impact of cognitive flexibility on the development of emotion understanding in children aged 4 and 5 years: A longitudinal study

The current study investigated the impact of cognitive flexibility on the development of emotion understanding using a longitudinal tracking study. A total of 98 children aged 4 and 5 years were tested for cognitive flexibility, emotion understanding, and verbal ability across three time points within a year. The cross-lagged analyses indicated that early cognitive flexibility played a predictive role in the development of emotion understanding. More precisely, cognitive flexibility at Time 1 predicted emotion understanding at Time 2 and Time 3, and cognitive flexibility at Time 2 predicted emotion understanding at Time 3. Furthermore, mediation analysis showed that verbal ability mediated the impact of cognitive flexibility on emotion understanding. Early cognitive flexibility contributed to later emotion understanding by improving children's verbal ability. These findings suggest that there is a verbal ability-mediated pathway from cognitive flexibility to emotion understanding that provides a new perspective for the development mechanism of children's emotion understanding.

Multicentric evidence of emotional impairments in hypertensive heart disease

The mechanisms underlying emotional alterations constitute a key research target in neuroscience. Emerging evidence indicates that these disruptions can be related to abnormal interoception (i.e., the sensing of visceral feelings), as observed in patients with cardiodynamic deficits. To directly assess these links, we performed the first multicenter study on emotion recognition and interoception in patients with hypertensive heart disease (HHD). Participants from two countries completed a facial emotion recognition test, and a subsample additionally underwent an interoception protocol based on a validated heartbeat detection task. HHD patients from both countries presented deficits in the recognition of overall and negative emotions. Moreover, interoceptive performance was impaired in the HHD group. In addition, a significant association between interoceptive performance and emotion recognition was observed in the control group, but this relation was abolished in the HHD group. All results survived after covariance with cognitive status measures, suggesting they were not biased by general cognitive deficits in the patients. Taken together, these findings suggest that emotional recognition alterations could represent a sui generis deficit in HHD, and that it may be partially explained by the disruption of mechanisms subserving the integration of neuro-visceral signals.

Charting the development of emotion comprehension and abstraction from childhood to adulthood using observer-rated and linguistic measures

This study examined two facets of emotion development: emotion word comprehension (knowing the meaning of emotion words such as "anger" or "excitement") and emotion concept abstraction (representing emotions in terms of internal psychological states that generalize across situations). Using a novel emotion vocabulary assessment, we captured how a cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 (N = 196) defined 24 emotions. Smoothing spline regression models suggested that emotion comprehension followed an emergent shape: Knowledge of emotion words increased across childhood and plateaued around age 11. Human coders rated the abstractness of participants' responses, and these ratings also followed an emergent shape but plateaued significantly later than comprehension, around age 18. An automated linguistic analysis of abstractness supported coders' perceptions of increased abstractness across age. Finally, coders assessed the definitional strategies participants used to describe emotions. Young children tended to describe emotions using concrete strategies such as providing example situations that evoked those emotions or by referring to physiological markers of emotional experiences. Whereas use of these concrete strategies decreased with age, the tendency to use more abstract strategies such as providing general definitions that delineated the causes and characteristics of emotions or by providing synonyms of emotion words increased with age. Overall, this work (a) provides a tool for assessing definitions of emotion terms, (b) demonstrates that emotion concept abstraction increases across age, and (c) suggests that adolescence is a period in which emotion words are comprehended but their level of abstraction continues to mature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online

With more than 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important role in the spread of moralized content (a phenomenon we call moral contagion). Next, we propose a psychological model called the motivation, attention, and design (MAD) model to explain moral contagion. The MAD model posits that people have group-identity-based motivations to share moral-emotional content, that such content is especially likely to capture our attention, and that the design of social-media platforms amplifies our natural motivational and cognitive tendencies to spread such content. We review each component of the model (as well as interactions between components) and raise several novel, testable hypotheses that can spark progress on the scientific investigation of civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation, and other moralized behaviors in the digital age.

Personality Traits and Emotional Word Recognition: An ERP Study

Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of positive, neutral, and negative words that were matched for arousal. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from healthy participants while they performed a lexical decision task. We found that personality traits influenced emotional word recognition at N400 (300-450 ms) and LPC (450-800 ms). At the earlier (N400) stage, the more extraverted and neurotic a participant was, the more reduced the N400s for the positive words relative to neutral words were. This suggests that the extroverts and high neurotics (i.e., high impulsivity) identified positive content in words during lexical feature retrieval, which facilitated such retrieval. At the later (LPC) stage, both the introverts and high neurotics (i.e., high anxiety) showed greater LPCs to negative than neutral words, indicating their sustained attention and elaborative processing of negative information. These results suggest that extraversion and neuroticism collectively influence different stages of emotional word recognition in a way that is consistent with Gray's biopsychological theory of personality.

Anticipatory feelings: Neural correlates and linguistic markers

This review introduces anticipatory feelings (AF) as a new construct related to the process of anticipation and prediction of future events. AF, defined as the state of awareness of physiological and neurocognitive changes that occur within an oganism in the form of a process of adapting to future events, are an important component of anticipation and expectancy. They encompass bodily-related interoceptive and affective components and are influenced by intrapersonal and dispositional factors, such as optimism, hope, pessimism, or worry. In the present review, we consider evidence from animal and human research, including neuroimaging studies, to characterize the brain structures and brain networks involved in AF. The majority of studies reviewed revealed three brain regions involved in future oriented feelings: 1) the insula; 2) the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC); and 3) the amygdala. Moreover, these brain regions were confirmed by a meta-analysis, using a platform for large-scale, automated synthesis of fMRI data. Finally, by adopting a neurolinguistic and a big data approach, we illustrate how AF are expressed in language.

Brain-computer interfaces and personhood: interdisciplinary deliberations on neural technology

OBJECTIVE

Scientists, engineers, and healthcare professionals are currently developing a variety of new devices under the category of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Current and future applications are both medical/assistive (e.g. for communication) and non-medical (e.g. for gaming). This array of possibilities has been met with both enthusiasm and ethical concern in various media, with no clear resolution of these conflicting sentiments.

APPROACH

To better understand how BCIs may either harm or help the user, and to investigate whether ethical guidance is required, a meeting entitled 'BCIs and Personhood: A Deliberative Workshop' was held in May 2018.

MAIN RESULTS

We argue that the hopes and fears associated with BCIs can be productively understood in terms of personhood, specifically the impact of BCIs on what it means to be a person and to be recognized as such by others.

SIGNIFICANCE

Our findings suggest that the development of neural technologies raises important questions about the concept of personhood and its role in society. Accordingly, we propose recommendations for BCI development and governance.

The Default Mode Network's Role in Discrete Emotion

Emotions are often assumed to manifest in subcortical limbic and brainstem structures. While these areas are clearly important for representing affect (e.g., valence and arousal), we propose that the default mode network (DMN) is additionally important for constructing discrete emotional experiences (of anger, fear, disgust, etc.). Findings from neuroimaging studies, invasive electrical stimulation studies, and lesion studies support this proposal. Importantly, our framework builds on a constructionist theory of emotion to explain how instances involving diverse physiological and behavioral patterns can be conceptualized as belonging to the same emotion category. We argue that this ability requires abstraction (from concrete features to broad mental categories), which the DMN is well positioned to support, and we make novel predictions from our proposed framework.

Emotion words, emotion concepts, and emotional development in children: A constructionist hypothesis

In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches-the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism-to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular context but are highly variable in their affective, physical, and perceptual features. Next, we discuss the possibility that emotional development is the process of developing emotion concepts, and that emotion words may be a critical part of this process. We hypothesize that infants and children learn emotion categories the way they learn other abstract conceptual categories-by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Finally, we hypothesize that emotional development can be understood as a concept construction problem: a child becomes capable of experiencing and perceiving emotion only when her brain develops the capacity to assemble ad hoc, situated emotion concepts for the purposes of guiding behavior and giving meaning to sensory inputs. Specifically, we offer a predictive processing account of emotional development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The language of chronic pain

OBJECTIVE

Pain is a universal phenomenon, but is also inherently private and subjective - there's no objective test for its existence. Sufferers rely on language to describe their pain experience. The McGill Pain Questionnaire paved the way for incorporating language into pain assessment and recent research has explored aspects of pain language such as metaphors and grammatical patterns. This study investigated how chronic pain sufferers use language to describe their pain experience.

DESIGN

Three focus groups were conducted (N = 16, age 22-74 years, M = 46.6 years) with participants attending an outpatient chronic pain management program in Sydney, Australia. Participants were asked to describe aspects of their pain experience.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE

The language which participants utilized to talk about their pain experience.

RESULTS

Thematic analysis identified five superordinate themes: Isolation, Physical Sensations of Pain, Pain Personified, Pain as Overwhelming, and Coping with Pain. Across themes, participants relied on metaphorical language, which reflects the complex, multidimensional aspects of pain as well as the desire to effectively communicate it to others.

CONCLUSIONS

This study underscores research indicating the complexity of pain experience and hence pain language, and suggests that single word adjectival measures are inadequate to completely capture its complexity. IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION Chronic pain is now considered a disease in and of itself, with patient's pain language being an important study area due to the lack of objective tests for pain. In both assessment and rehabilitation, patients rely on metaphorical pain language in order to facilitate understanding and garner support from others. Pain metaphors may provide a useful target for interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, particularly when addressing catastrophic thinking patterns.

Emotional valence may influence memory performance for visual artworks in Parkinson's disease

BACKGROUND

Non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) include reduced reactivity to emotional stimuli. Visual artworks can evoke emotional responses. Motor, sensorial and cognitive networks implicated in the aesthetic experience and in the emotional-reward domain show a significant overlap with the pathological nigrostriatal, mesocortical and mesolimbic circuitry that characterises PD.

METHODS

Memory enhancement by emotional stimuli such as visual artwork-stimuli was explored in 12 right-sided and 12 left-sided non-demented-PD patients, 12 Alzheimer's disease patients (AD) and 13 healthy controls (HC). Ten emotional and 10 non-emotional stimuli were previously identified based on the ratings of the emotional impact provided by 45 non-PD subjects on 82 pictures of paintings. Only figurative artworks were included. Patients and HC were requested to rate on a 7-point scale the emotional impact of 20 pictures; they were then requested to recognise the 20 pictures amongst 20 distractors (incidental memory task).

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

Recognition of emotional stimuli was more accurate compared to non-emotional stimuli in AD, left-sided PD and HC; right-sided PD did not show sensitivity to the emotional valence of the stimuli suggesting the involvement of the nigrostriatal, mesocortical and mesolimbic circuitry of the left hemisphere in the emotional-reward system related to the aesthetic experience.

The Role of Language in Alexithymia: Moving Towards a Multiroute Model of Alexithymia

Alexithymia is characterized by difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotion. Identifying and describing one’s emotion involves several cognitive processes, so alexithymia may result from a number of impairments. Here we propose the alexithymia language hypothesis—the hypothesis that language impairment can give rise to alexithymia—and critically review relevant evidence from healthy populations, developmental disorders, adult-onset illness, and acquired brain injury. We conclude that the available evidence is supportive of the alexithymia–language hypothesis, and therefore that language impairment may represent one of multiple routes to alexithymia. Where evidence is lacking, we outline which approaches will be useful in testing this hypothesis.

Mothers' and fathers' mind-mindedness influences physiological emotion regulation of infants across the first year of life

The main aim of this study was to test whether mothers' (n = 116) and fathers' (n = 116) mind-mindedness predicts infants' physiological emotion regulation (heart rate variability; HRV) across the first year of life. Three hypotheses were examined: (a) parents' mind-mindedness at 4 and 12 months predicts infants' HRV at 12 months over and above infants' initial HRV levels at 4 months, (b) mothers' and fathers' mind-mindedness independently predict infant HRV, and (c) the effects of mind-mindedness on infant HRV (partially) operate via parenting behaviour. Infants' HRV was assessed during rest and a stranger approach. Mind-mindedness was assessed by calculating the proportions of appropriate and non-attuned mind-related comments during free-play interactions, and parenting quality was observed at 4 and 12 months in the same interactions. Path analyses showed that mothers' appropriate mind-related comments at 4 and 12 months predicted higher baseline HRV at 12 months, whereas mothers' non-attuned comments predicted lower baseline HRV at 12 months. Similar, but concurrent, relations were found for fathers' appropriate and non-attuned mind-related comments and infant baseline HRV at 12 months. In addition, fathers' appropriate mind-related comments showed an indirect association with infant baseline HRV at 12 months via fathers' parenting quality. With regard to infant HRV reactivity during the stranger approach, mothers' appropriate mind-related comments at 4 months and fathers' non-attuned mind-related comments at 12 months predicted a larger HRV decline during the stranger approach at 12 months. Infants' HRV at 4 months did not predict parents' later mind-mindedness. The results indicate that mothers' and fathers' appropriate and non-attuned mind-related speech uniquely impacts the development of infants' physiological emotion regulation.

"To Suffer in Paradise": Feelings Mothers Share on Portuguese Facebook Sites

Background: Motherhood is an emotional rollercoaster. This is overlooked by most literature, which tends to refer mothers’ pathological states of postpartum depression and anxiety, mainly seeking to understand their causes or predicting factors, and consequences on children’s development.

Objective: In this study, we aim to observe the diversity of mothers’ emotional states, and to analyze both positive and negative feelings they disclose on specific public and closed motherhood sites on Facebook. We hypothesize that the intensive motherhood model is prevalent in Portuguese society, thus influencing the type of feelings and circumstances in which mothers disclose them.

Methods: We collected posts and comments from the four most popular Portuguese Facebook motherhood sites during 2015 and, then, conducted a quantitative and content analysis to identify the expressed range of feelings concerning motherhood.

Results: Mothers preferably share their positive feelings on public pages, whereas negative feelings are shared more in closed groups (CGs). Expressed positive and negative feelings were significantly different whether we look at normative or non-normative, public or closed sites.

Discussion: We assume that motherhood sites on Portuguese Facebook reflect an intensive motherhood model that is normative in Portuguese society. Positive feelings toward children are promoted and openly shared in public normative sites, while negative feelings concerning motherhood are dealt with in the privacy of CGs. We propose an extensive motherhood model to overcome this duality and to allow women to pursue several different social roles simultaneously in an equally rewarding way.

Emotional Response Categorization in Adolescents and Young Adults

Categorization is based on cognitive mechanisms allowing the development of internal representations of the environment that guide behavior. This study tests the influence of emotions on categorization in adolescents and young adults. After a mood induction (negative, positive, or neutral), we compared how 68 adolescents aged 13 to 15 and 57 young adults aged 21 to 29 categorized emotional concepts using a lexical emotional categorization task. Participants had to choose which of three associates, of different emotional valence (positive, negative or neutral), was more similar to a target concept. The aim of this study was to determine if adolescents rely on the emotional dimension in categorization more than adults. The results show that the emotional state can influence the cognitive process of categorization in adolescence, particularly in the negative mood.

Emotion Perception as Conceptual Synchrony

Psychological research on emotion perception anchors heavily on an object perception analogy. We present static “cues,” such as facial expressions, as objects for perceivers to categorize. Yet in the real world, emotions play out as dynamic multidimensional events. Current theoretical approaches and research methods are limited in their ability to capture this complexity. We draw on insights from a predictive coding account of neural activity and a grounded cognition account of concept representation to conceive of emotion perception as a stream of synchronized conceptualizations between two individuals, which is supported and shaped by language. We articulate how this framework can illuminate the fundamental need to study culture, as well as other sources of conceptual variation, in unpacking conceptual synchrony in emotion. We close by suggesting that the conceptual system provides the necessary flexibility to overcome gaps in emotional synchrony.

Language and alexithymia: Evidence for the role of the inferior frontal gyrus in acquired alexithymia

The clinical relevance of alexithymia, a condition associated with difficulties identifying and describing one's own emotion, is becoming ever more apparent. Increased rates of alexithymia are observed in multiple psychiatric conditions, and also in neurological conditions resulting from both organic and traumatic brain injury. The presence of alexithymia in these conditions predicts poorer regulation of one's emotions, decreased treatment response, and increased burden on carers. While clinically important, the aetiology of alexithymia is still a matter of debate, with several authors arguing for multiple 'routes' to impaired understanding of one's own emotions, which may or may not result in distinct subtypes of alexithymia. While previous studies support the role of impaired interoception (perceiving bodily states) in the development of alexithymia, the current study assessed whether acquired language impairment following traumatic brain injury, and damage to language regions, may also be associated with an increased risk of alexithymia. Within a sample of 129 participants with penetrating brain injury and 33 healthy controls, neuropsychological testing revealed that deficits in a non-emotional language task, object naming, were associated with alexithymia, specifically with difficulty identifying one's own emotions. Both region-of-interest and whole-brain lesion analyses revealed that damage to language regions in the inferior frontal gyrus was associated with the presence of both this language impairment and alexithymia. These results are consistent with a framework for acquired alexithymia that incorporates both interoceptive and language processes, and support the idea that brain injury may result in alexithymia via impairment in any one of a number of more basic processes.

Emotion recognition from faces with in- and out-group features in patients with depression

BACKGROUND

Previous research has shown that context (e.g. culture) can have an impact on speed and accuracy when identifying facial expressions of emotion. Patients with a major depressive disorder (MDD) are known to have deficits in the identification of facial expressions, tending to give rather stereotypical judgments. While healthy individuals perceive situations which conflict with their own cultural values more negatively, this pattern would be even stronger in MDD patients, as their altered mood results in stronger biases. In this study we investigate the effect of cultural contextual cues on emotion identification in depression.

METHODS

Emotional faces were presented for 100ms to 34 patients with an MDD and matched controls. Stimulus faces were either covered by a cap and scarf (in-group condition) or by an Islamic headdress (niqab; out-group condition). Speed and accuracy were evaluated.

RESULTS

Results showed that across groups, fearful faces were identified faster and with higher accuracy in the out-group than in the in-group condition. Sadness was also identified more accurately in the out-group condition. In comparison, happy faces were more accurately (and tended to be faster) identified in the in-group condition. Furthermore, MDD patients were slower, yet not more accurate in identifying expressions of emotion compared to controls.

LIMITATIONS

All patients were on pharmacological treatment. Participants' political orientation was not included. The experiment differs from real life situations.

CONCLUSION

While our results underline findings that cultural context has a general impact on emotion identification, this effect was not found to be more prominent in patients with MDD.

The role of language in the experience and perception of emotion: a neuroimaging meta-analysis

Recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that labeling one's emotional experiences and perceptions alters those states. Here, we used a comprehensive meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature to systematically explore whether the presence of emotion words in experimental tasks has an impact on the neural representation of emotional experiences and perceptions across studies. Using a database of 386 studies, we assessed brain activity when emotion words (e.g. 'anger', 'disgust') and more general affect words (e.g. 'pleasant', 'unpleasant') were present in experimental tasks vs not present. As predicted, when emotion words were present, we observed more frequent activations in regions related to semantic processing. When emotion words were not present, we observed more frequent activations in the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus, bilaterally. The presence of affect words did not have the same effect on the neural representation of emotional experiences and perceptions, suggesting that our observed effects are specific to emotion words. These findings are consistent with the psychological constructionist prediction that in the absence of accessible emotion concepts, the meaning of affective experiences and perceptions are ambiguous. Findings are also consistent with the regulatory role of 'affect labeling'. Implications of the role of language in emotion construction and regulation are discussed.

Bio-behavioral synchrony promotes the development of conceptualized emotions

As adults, we have structured conceptual representations of our emotions that help us to make sense of and regulate our ongoing affective experience. The ability to use emotion concepts is critical to make predictions about the world and choose appropriate action, such as 'I am afraid, and going to run away' or 'I am hungry and going to eat'. Thus, emotion concepts have an important role in helping us maintain our ongoing physiological balance, or allostasis. We will suggest here that infants can learn emotion concepts for the purpose of allostasis regulation, and that conceptualization is key component in emotional development. Moreover, we will suggest that social dyads facilitate concept learning because of a robust evolutionary feature seen in newborns of social species: they cannot survive alone and depend on conspecifics for allostasis regulation. Such social dependency creates a robust driving force for social learning of emotion concepts, and makes the social dyad, which is designed to regulate the infant's allostasis, an optimal medium for concept learning. In line with that, we will review evidence showing that the neural reference space for emotion overlaps with neural circuits that support allostasis (striatum, amygdala, and hypothalamus) and conceptualization (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex), and that their developmental trajectories are interrelated, and depend on synchronous social care.

Constructing emotion through simulation

Evidence increasingly suggests that simulations implement patterns of prior experience to construct one's current experience, whether that experience is oriented in the past, in the here and now, or in the future. Simulation is the mechanism by which the brain capitalizes on prior learning to efficiently navigate the situation at hand. This review examines the latest developments in theory and empirical research that address simulation during emotional phenomena. Integration of evidence across multiple literatures suggests that simulation accounts provide a unifying framework across many different emotional phenomena and highlights the importance of investigating dynamics, complexity, and variation in emotional experiences moving forward.

Constructing nonhuman animal emotion

Scientists and lay-people alike have long been fascinated with the emotional lives of nonhuman animals. To date, scientific approaches to the study of 'animal' emotion have assumed that emotions are biologically evolutionarily conserved, hardwired and have discrete behavioral and physiological outputs. According to this view, emotions and their outputs are homologous across species, allowing humans to accurately perceive (or 'read') animal emotion using our own concepts of what emotions are. In this paper, I discuss the challenges to that perspective and propose using an alternative theoretical approach to understand animal emotion. Adopting this alternative approach, which represents a collection of similar theories (referred to as 'Theories of Constructed Emotion'), changes the questions that we ask about animal emotion, how we study emotion across phylogeny and advance translational science, and how we understand the evolution of emotion.

Emotional Granularity Effects on Event-Related Brain Potentials during Affective Picture Processing

There is debate about whether emotional granularity, the tendency to label emotions in a nuanced and specific manner, is merely a product of labeling abilities, or a systematic difference in the experience of emotion during emotionally evocative events. According to the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion (CAT) (Barrett, 2006), emotional granularity is due to the latter and is a product of on-going temporal differences in how individuals categorize and thus make meaning of their affective states. To address this question, the present study investigated the effects of individual differences in emotional granularity on electroencephalography-based brain activity during the experience of emotion in response to affective images. Event-related potentials (ERP) and event-related desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/ERS) analysis techniques were used. We found that ERP responses during the very early (60-90 ms), middle (270-300 ms), and later (540-570 ms) moments of stimulus presentation were associated with individuals' level of granularity. We also observed that highly granular individuals, compared to lowly granular individuals, exhibited relatively stable desynchronization of alpha power (8-12 Hz) and synchronization of gamma power (30-50 Hz) during the 3 s of stimulus presentation. Overall, our results suggest that emotional granularity is related to differences in neural processing throughout emotional experiences and that high granularity could be associated with access to executive control resources and a more habitual processing of affective stimuli, or a kind of "emotional complexity." Implications for models of emotion are also discussed.

Constructing contempt

Gervais & Fessler argue that contempt is a natural kind and that its experience cannot be explained by a constructionist account of emotion. We dispute these claims and offer a positive constructionist model of contempt that accounts for the existing evidence and unifies conflicting findings in the literature on contempt.

Bodily Contributions to Emotion: Schachter’s Legacy for a Psychological Constructionist View on Emotion

Although early emotion theorists posited that bodily changes contribute to emotion, the primary view in affective science over the last century has been that emotions produce bodily changes. Recent findings from physiology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology support the early intuition that body representations can help constitute emotion. These findings are consistent with the modern psychological constructionist hypothesis that emotions emerge when representations of bodily changes are conceptualized as an instance of emotion. We begin by introducing the psychological constructionist approach to emotion. With Schachter as inspiration, we next examine how embodied representations contribute to affective states, and ultimately emotion, with inflammation as a key example. We close by looking forward to future research on how body representations contribute to human experience.

Functional dissociation between anterior temporal lobe and inferior frontal gyrus in the processing of dynamic body expressions: Insights from behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia

Several brain regions are involved in the processing of emotional stimuli, however, the contribution of specific regions to emotion perception is still under debate. To investigate this issue, we combined behavioral testing, structural and resting state imaging in patients diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and age matched controls, with task-based functional imaging in young, healthy volunteers. As expected, bvFTD patients were impaired in emotion detection as well as emotion categorization tasks, testing dynamic emotional body expressions as stimuli. Interestingly, their performance in the two tasks correlated with gray matter volume in two distinct brain regions, the left anterior temporal lobe for emotion detection and the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for emotion categorization. Confirming this observation, multivoxel pattern analysis in healthy volunteers demonstrated that both ROIs contained information for emotion detection, but that emotion categorization was only possible from the pattern in the IFG. Furthermore, functional connectivity analysis showed reduced connectivity between the two regions in bvFTD patients. Our results illustrate that the mentalizing network and the action observation network perform distinct tasks during emotion processing. In bvFTD, communication between the networks is reduced, indicating one possible cause underlying the behavioral symptoms. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4472-4486, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Intellectual development in Noonan syndrome: a longitudinal study

INTRODUCTION

Although cognitive impairments in adults with Noonan syndrome seem to be limited to a low-average intelligence and slower processing speed, studies in children with Noonan syndrome have demonstrated more extensive cognitive problems. These include deficits in language skills, memory, attention, and executive functioning. This longitudinal study is the first to investigate intellectual development in a group of individuals with Noonan syndrome.

METHODS

Sixteen patients with Noonan syndrome underwent intelligence assessment both in childhood and in adulthood, using Wechsler's intelligence scales. IQ scores and Wechsler standard scores achieved in childhood and adulthood were compared. Subsequently, verbal and performance IQ in childhood were used as predictors for adult IQ and index scores.

RESULTS

Compared with childhood scores, adult full-scale IQ and performance IQ significantly increased. Adult performance IQ was higher than verbal IQ. Childhood performance IQ and verbal IQ together predicted all adult IQ and index scores, except for the processing speed index.

DISCUSSION

Childhood IQ was a significant predictor of adult intelligence in patients with Noonan syndrome. Performance IQ advanced to a normal level in adulthood, while verbal IQ did not develop proportionately, resulting in a discrepancy between adult performance IQ and verbal IQ. This finding could suggest a delay in the development of executive functioning in patients with Noonan syndrome, which seems to be outgrown in adulthood.