Mixed emotions in the predictive brain

Why do people engage with the suffering of strangers? Exploring epistemic, eudaimonic, social, and affective motives

Reading violent stories or watching a war documentary are examples in which people voluntarily engage with the suffering of others whom they do not know. Using a mixed-methods approach, we investigated why people make these decisions, while also mapping the characteristics of strangers' suffering to gain a rich understanding. In Study 1 (N = 247), participants described situations of suffering and their reasons to engage with it. Using qualitative thematic analysis, we developed a typology of the stranger (who), the situation (what), the source (how), and the reason(s) for engaging with the situation (why). We categorised the motives into four overarching themes - epistemic, eudaimonic, social, and affective - reflecting diversity in the perceived functionality of engaging with a stranger's suffering. Next, we tested the robustness of the identified motives in a quantitative study. In Study 2, participants (N = 250) recalled a situation in which they engaged with the suffering of a stranger and indicated their endorsement with a variety of possible motives. Largely mirroring Study 1, Study 2 participants engaged to acquire knowledge, for personal and social utility, and to feel positive and negative emotions. We discuss implications for understanding the exploration of human suffering as a motivated phenomenon.

The bright side of words: Norms for 9000 Spanish words in seven discrete positive emotions

In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion ("pure" emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion ("mixed" emotion words). This study will provide researchers a rich source of information to do research that contributes to expanding the current knowledge on the role of positive emotions in language. The norms are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21533571.v2.

Exploring Within-Person Variability in Qualitative Negative and Positive Emotional Granularity by Means of Latent Markov Factor Analysis

Emotional granularity (EG) is an individual's ability to describe their emotional experiences in a nuanced and specific way. In this paper, we propose that researchers adopt latent Markov factor analysis (LMFA) to investigate within-person variability in qualitative EG (i.e., variability in distinct granularity patterns between specific emotions across time). LMFA clusters measurement occasions into latent states according to state-specific measurement models. We argue that state-specific measurement models of repeatedly assessed emotion items can provide information about qualitative EG at a given point in time. Applying LMFA to the area of EG for negative and positive emotions separately by using data from an experience sampling study with 11,662 measurement occasions across 139 participants, we found three latent EG states for the negative emotions and three for the positive emotions. Momentary stress significantly predicted transitions between the EG states for both the negative and positive emotions. We further identified two and three latent classes of individuals who differed in state trajectories for negative and positive emotions, respectively. Neuroticism and dispositional mood regulation predicted latent class membership for negative (but not for positive) emotions. We conclude that LMFA may enrich EG research by enabling more fine-grained insights into variability in qualitative EG patterns.

From emotional signals to symbols

The quest for the origins of language is a diverse enterprise, where research from a variety of disciplines brings area-specific ideas and area-specific terminology to bear. This variety often results in misunderstandings and misconceptions about communication in various species. In the present paper, we argue for focus on emotional systems as the primary motivators for social signals in animals in general. This focus can help resolve discrepancies of interpretation among different areas of inquiry and can illuminate distinctions among different social signals as well as their phylogenetic origins in animals and especially in humans. We advocate, following Jaak Panksepp, a view wherein the Seeking System, the endogenous tendency to search and explore, is the most fundamental emotional motivation. The Seeking System forms the basis for flexible, voluntary, and exploratory control of motor systems and makes much of learning possible. The relative lack of vocal learning and expression in nonhuman primates contrasted with extensive vocal learning and expression in humans began, we propose, with the evolution in ancient hominins of a necessary foundation for the many subsequent capabilities required for language. That foundation was, according to the reasoning, naturally selected in the form of neurological connections between the Seeking System and mechanisms of glottal/phonatory control. The new connections allowed ancient hominins to develop flexible, endogenous vocal fitness signals produced at very high rates and including large numbers of discrete syllables, recombinable to form syllable combinations with many prosodic variations. The increasing sociality of hominins supported evolution of massive expansion in the utilization of these flexible vocal forms to allow development of words and sentences.

Control your emotions: evidence for a shared mechanism of cognitive and emotional control

The current investigation examined the bidirectional effects of cognitive control and emotional control and the overlap between these two systems in regulating emotions. Based on recent neural and cognitive findings, we hypothesised that two control systems largely overlap as control recruited for one system (either emotional or cognitive) can be used by the other system. In two experiments, participants completed novel versions of either the Stroop task (Experiment 1) or the Flanker task (Experiment 2) in which the emotional and cognitive control systems were actively manipulated into either a high or low emotional-load condition (achieved by varying the proportions of negative-valence emotional cues) and a high and a low cognitive control condition (achieved through varying the proportion of conflict-laden trials). In both experiments, participants' performance was impaired when both emotional and cognitive control were low, but significantly and similarly improved when one of the two control mechanisms were activated - the emotional or the cognitive. In Experiment 2, performance was further improved when both systems were activated. Our results give further support for a more integrative notion of control in which the two systems (emotional and cognitive control) not only influence each other, but rather extensively overlap.

The Human Affectome

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective constructs and operationalizations. However, an assumption about the purpose of affective phenomena can guide us to a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. In this capstone paper, we home in on a nested teleological principle for human affective phenomena in order to synthesize metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. Under this framework, human affective phenomena can collectively be considered algorithms that either adjust based on the human comfort zone (affective concerns) or monitor those adaptive processes (affective features). This teleologically-grounded framework offers a principled agenda and launchpad for both organizing existing perspectives and generating new ones. Ultimately, we hope the Human Affectome brings us a step closer to not only an integrated understanding of human affective phenomena, but an integrated field for affective research.

Fear-related psychophysiological patterns are situation and individual dependent: A Bayesian model comparison approach

Is there a universal mapping of physiology to emotion, or do these mappings vary substantially by person or situation? Psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have debated this question for decades. Most previous studies have focused on differentiating emotions on the basis of accompanying autonomic responses using analytical approaches that often assume within-category homogeneity. In the present study, we took an alternative approach to this question. We determined the extent to which the relationship between subjective experience and autonomic reactivity generalizes across, or depends upon, the individual and situation for instances of a single emotion category, specifically, fear. Electrodermal activity and cardiac activity-two autonomic measures that are often assumed to show robust relationships with instances of fear-were recorded while participants reported fear experience in response to dozens of fear-evoking videos related to three distinct situations: spiders, heights, and social encounters. We formally translated assumptions from diverse theoretical models into a common framework for model comparison analyses. Results exceedingly favored a model that assumed situation-dependency in the relationship between fear experience and autonomic reactivity, with subject variance also significant but constrained by situation. Models that assumed generalization across situations and/or individuals performed much worse by comparison. These results call into question the assumption of generalizability of autonomic-subjective mappings across instances of fear, as required in translational research from nonhuman animals to humans, and advance a situated approach to understanding the autonomic correlates of fear experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

What We Can Learn About Emotion by Talking With the Hadza

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals' subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans, constraining psychological theory and methods. In this article, we present observations from an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with the Hadza, a community of small-scale hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and juxtapose them with a set of interviews conducted with Americans from North Carolina. Although North Carolina event descriptions largely conformed to the assumptions of eurocentric psychological theory, Hadza descriptions foregrounded action and bodily sensations, the physical environment, immediate needs, and the experiences of social others. These observations suggest that subjective feelings and internal mental states may not be the organizing principle of emotion the world around. Qualitative analysis of emotion narratives from outside of a U.S. (and western) cultural context has the potential to uncover additional diversity in meaning-making, offering a descriptive foundation on which to build a more robust and inclusive science of emotion.

CROWD-5e: A Croatian psycholinguistic database of affective norms for five discrete emotions

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 3022 Croatian words on five discrete emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. The words were rated by 1239 Croatian native speakers. Each participant rated 251 or 252 words for one discrete emotion on a five-point Likert scale. The analyses revealed a significant relationship between discrete emotions, emotional dimensions (valence and arousal), and other psycholinguistic properties of words. In addition, small sex differences in discrete emotion ratings were found. Finally, the analysis of the distribution of words among discrete emotions allowed a distinction between "pure" words (i.e., those mostly related to a single emotion) and "mixed" words (i.e., those related to more than one emotion). The new database extends the existing Croatian affective norms collected from a dimensional conception of emotions, providing the necessary resource for future experimental investigation in Croatian within the theoretical framework of discrete emotions.

Looking on the bright side: the impact of ambivalent images on emotion regulation choice

Previous research has found that people choose to reappraise low intensity images more often than high intensity images. However, this research does not account for image ambivalence, which is presence of both positive and negative cues in a stimulus. The purpose of this research was to determine differences in ambivalence in high intensity and low intensity images used in previous research (experiments 1-2), and if ambivalence played a role in emotion regulation choice in addition to intensity (experiments 3-4). Experiments 1 and 2 found that the low intensity images were more ambivalent than the high intensity images. Experiment 2 further found a positive relationship between ambivalence of an image and reappraisal affordances. Experiments 3 and 4 found that people chose to reappraise ambivalent images more often than non-ambivalent images, and they also chose to reappraise low intensity images more often than high intensity images. These experiments support the idea that ambivalence is a factor in emotion regulation choice. Future research should consider the impact ambivalent stimuli have on emotion regulation, including the potential for leveraging ambivalent stimuli to improve one's emotion regulation ability.

Quantifying social performance: A review with implications for further work

Human social performance has been a focus of theory and investigation for more than a century. Attempts to quantify social performance have focused on self-report and non-social performance measures grounded in intelligence-based theories. An expertise framework, when applied to individual differences in social interaction performance, offers novel insights and methods of quantification that could address limitations of prior approaches. The purposes of this review are 3-fold. First, to define the central concepts related to individual differences in social performance, with a particular focus on the intelligence-based framework that has dominated the field. Second, to make an argument for a revised conceptualization of individual differences in social-emotional performance as a social expertise. In support of this second aim, the putative components of a social-emotional expertise and the potential means for their assessment will be outlined. To end, the implications of an expertise-based conceptual framework for the application of computational modeling approaches in this area will be discussed. Taken together, expertise theory and computational modeling methods have the potential to advance quantitative assessment of social interaction performance.

Sorting out emotions: How labels influence emotion categorization

The ability to categorize emotions has long-term implications for children's social and emotional development. Therefore, identifying factors that influence early emotion categorization is of great importance. Yet, whether and how language impacts emotion category development is still widely debated. The present study aimed to assess how labels influence young children's ability to group faces into emotion categories for both earliest-learned and later-learned emotion categories. Across two studies, 128 two- and 3-year-olds (77 female; Mean age = 3.04 years; 35.9% White, 12.5% Multiple ethnicities or races, 6.3% Asian, 3.1% Black, and 42.2% not reported) were presented with three emotion categories (Study 1 = happy, sad, angry; Study 2 = surprised, disgusted, afraid). Children sorted 30 images of adults posing stereotypical facial expressions into one of the three categories. Children were randomly assigned to either hear the emotion labels before sorting (e.g., "happy faces go here") or were not given labels (e.g., "faces like this go here"). Study 1 results indicated no significant effects of labels for earlier-learned emotion categories, F(1, 60) = .94, p = .337, ηp² = .013. However, the Study 2 results revealed that labels improved emotion categorization for later-learned categories, F(1, 60) = 8.15, p = .006, ηp² = .024. Taken together, these results suggest that labels are important for emotion categorization, but the impact of labels may depend on children's familiarity with the emotion category. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Allostasis, Action, and Affect in Depression: Insights from the Theory of Constructed Emotion

The theory of constructed emotion is a systems neuroscience approach to understanding the nature of emotion. It is also a general theoretical framework to guide hypothesis generation for how actions and experiences are constructed as the brain continually anticipates metabolic needs and attempts to meet those needs before they arise (termed allostasis). In this review, we introduce this framework and hypothesize that allostatic dysregulation is a trans-disorder vulnerability for mental and physical illness. We then review published findings consistent with the hypothesis that several symptoms in major depressive disorder (MDD), such as fatigue, distress, context insensitivity, reward insensitivity, and motor retardation, are associated with persistent problems in energy regulation. Our approach transforms the current understanding of MDD as resulting from enhanced emotional reactivity combined with reduced cognitive control and, in doing so, offers novel hypotheses regarding the development, progression, treatment, and prevention of MDD.

Specificity in the Study of Mixed Emotions: A Theoretical Framework

Research on mixed emotions is yet to consider emotion-specificity, the idea that same-valenced emotions have distinctive characteristics and functions. We review two decades of research on mixed emotions, focusing on evidence for the occurrence of mixed emotions and the effects of mixed emotions on downstream outcomes. We then propose a novel theoretical framework of mixed-emotion-specificity with three foundational tenets: (a) Mixed emotions are distinguishable from single-valenced emotions and other mixed emotions based on their emotion-appraisal relationships; (b) Mixed emotions can further be characterized by four patterns that describe relationships between simultaneous appraisals or appraisals that are unique to mixed emotions; and (c) Carryover effects occur only on outcomes that are associated with the appraisal characteristics of mixed emotion. We outline how mixed-emotion-specific effects can be predicted based on the appraisal tendency framework. Temporal dynamics, the application of mixed-emotion-specificity to individual difference research, methodological issues, and future directions are also discussed.

Synergy of Effectuation and Causation: An Emotional Complexity Perspective

This study enriches the literature on entrepreneurial decisions by investigating the antecedents of the synergetic use of causal and effectual logic. Based on entrepreneurial metacognition and emotional complexity theories, we argued that the emotional complexity of an entrepreneur, referred to as the granular experience of, or variety in, experienced emotions during the entrepreneurial task, would contribute to the synergetic use of decision logic. With survey data gathered from 218 Chinese entrepreneurs, we found that entrepreneurs with higher emotional complexity are more likely to adopt two types of entrepreneurial logic in tandem, and cognitive flexibility mediates this positive relationship. Thereby, this study helps to unravel some of the complexities behind the choice of decision logic of entrepreneurs.

Averting the Next Credibility Crisis in Psychological Science: Within-Person Methods for Personalized Diagnostics and Intervention

Personalizing assessments, predictions, and treatments of individuals is currently a defining trend in psychological research and applied fields, including personalized learning, personalized medicine, and personalized advertisement. For instance, the recent pandemic has reminded parents and educators of how challenging yet crucial it is to get the right learning task to the right student at the right time. Increasingly, psychologists and social scientists are realizing that the between-person methods that we have long relied upon to describe, predict, and treat individuals may fail to live up to these tasks (e.g., Molenaar, 2004). Consequently, there is a risk of a credibility loss, possibly similar to the one seen during the replicability crisis (Ioannides, 2005), because we have only started to understand how many of the conclusions that we tend to draw based on between-person methods are based on a misunderstanding of what these methods can tell us and what they cannot. An imminent methodological revolution will likely lead to a change of even well-established psychological theories (Barbot et al., 2020). Fortunately, methodological solutions for personalized descriptions and predictions, such as many within-person analyses, are available and undergo rapid development, although they are not yet embraced in all areas of psychology, and some come with their own limitations. This article first discusses the extent of the theory-method gap, consisting of theories about within-person patterns being studied with between-person methods in psychology, and the potential loss of trust that might follow from this theory-method gap. Second, this article addresses advantages and limitations of available within-person methods. Third, this article discusses how within-person methods may help improving the individual descriptions and predictions that are needed in many applied fields that aim for tailored individual solutions, including personalized learning and personalized medicine.

Interoception, Trait Anxiety, and the Gut Microbiome: A Cognitive and Physiological Model

Trait anxiety is characterized as a constant and often subliminal state that persists during daily life. Interoception is the perception of internal states and sensations, including from the autonomic nervous system. This review aims to develop a predictive model to explain the emergence, manifestations, and maintenance of trait anxiety. The model begins with the assumption that anxiety states arise from active interoceptive inference. The subsequent activation of autonomic responses results from aversive sensory encounters. A cognitive model is proposed for trait anxiety that includes the aversive sensory components from interoception, exteroception, and proprioception. A further component of the hypothesis is that repeated exposure to subliminal anxiety-evoking sensory elements can lead to an overgeneralization of this response to other inputs that are generally non-aversive. Increased uncertainty may result when predicting the sensory environment, resulting in arbitrary interoceptive anxiety responses that may be due to unjustifiable causes. Arbitrary successful or unsuccessful matching of predictions and responses reduces the individual’s confidence to maintain the anxiety trait. In this review, the application of the proposed model is illustrated using gut microbial dysbiosis or imbalance of the gut microbiome.

Investigating the relationship between emotional granularity and cardiorespiratory physiological activity in daily life

Emotional granularity describes the ability to create emotional experiences that are precise and context-specific. Despite growing evidence of a link between emotional granularity and mental health, the physiological correlates of granularity have been under-investigated. This study explored the relationship between granularity and cardiorespiratory physiological activity in everyday life, with particular reference to the role of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an estimate of vagal influence on the heart often associated with positive mental and physical health outcomes. Participants completed a physiologically triggered experience-sampling protocol including ambulatory recording of electrocardiogram, impedance cardiogram, movement, and posture. At each prompt, participants generated emotion labels to describe their current experience. In an end-of-day survey, participants elaborated on each prompt by rating the intensity of their experience on a standard set of emotion adjectives. Consistent with our hypotheses, individuals with higher granularity exhibited a larger number of distinct patterns of physiological activity during seated rest, and more situationally precise patterns of activity during emotional events: granularity was positively correlated with the number of clusters of cardiorespiratory physiological activity discovered in seated rest data, as well as with the performance of classifiers trained on event-related changes in physiological activity. Granularity was also positively associated with RSA during seated rest periods, although this relationship did not reach significance in this sample. These findings are consistent with constructionist accounts of emotion that propose concepts as a key mechanism underlying individual differences in emotional experience, physiological regulation, and physical health.

Social interoception and social allostasis through touch: Legacy of the Somatovisceral Afference Model of Emotion

John Cacioppo and colleagues' Somatovisceral Afference Model of Emotion (SAME) highlighted the importance of interoception in emotional experience. Here we compare how the SAME and the more recent theory of constructed emotion (TCE) view the role of interoceptive signals in creating emotional experiences. We describe the characteristics of touch sensations that are carried by thin, unmyelinated fibers called C-tactile afferents (CTs) to the posterior insula, and are thus deemed interoceptive despite their typically social (external) origin. We explore how this social interoceptive input might contribute to the emotion-related effects of social touch more generally, and speculate that all social touch, with or without CT afferent stimulation, can directly influence allostasis, or the predictive regulation of short- and long-term energy resources required by the body. Finally, we describe several features of CT-optimal touch that make it a potentially useful tool to help illuminate basic interoceptive mechanisms, emotion-related phenomena, and disorders involving atypical affect or somatosensation. These proposed ideas demonstrate the long intellectual reach of John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson's highly productive scientific collaboration, which was formative for the fields of social neuroscience, social psychophysiology, and affective neuroscience.

SARS-CoV-2, Trait Anxiety, and the Microbiome

During the COVID-19 pandemic, research on the relationships between the virus and its human host has become fundamental to understand this pathology and its effects. Attaining this profound understanding is critical for the effective containment and treatment of infections caused by the virus. In this review, we present some possible mechanisms by which psychopathological symptoms emerge following viral infections of the central nervous system (CNS). These proposed mechanisms are based on microbial communication and the induced priming of microglial antibody activation within the CNS through Toll-like receptor signaling. In this process, chronic microglial activation causes increased glutamate release in virally-altered, high-density neuronal structures, thereby modulating cognitive networks and information integration processes. This modulation, in turn, we suggest, affects the accuracy of sensory integration and connectivity of major control networks, such as the default mode network. The chronic activation of immunological responses and neurochemical shifts toward an elevated glutamate/gamma-aminobutyric acid ratio lead to negative reinforcement learning and suboptimal organismic functioning, for example, maintaining the body in an anxious state, which can later become internalized as trait anxiety. Therefore, we hypothesize that the homeostatic relationship between host, microbiome, and virome, would be decisive in determining the efficiency of subsequent immunological responses, disease susceptibility, and long-term psychopathological effects of diseases that impact the CNS, such as the COVID-19.

Animal models of human mood

Humans' everyday experience of the world is influenced by our moods. Moods are consciously accessible affective states that extend over time that are characterized by their valence and arousal. They also likely have a long evolutionary heritage and serve as an important adaptive affective mechanism. When they become maladaptive or overly biased, pathological affective states such as depression can emerge. Despite the importance of moods for human experience, little is known about their causal neurobiological mechanisms. In humans, limitations related to methods and interpretations of the data prevent causal investigations into the origins of mood, highlighting the importance of animal models. Nonhuman primates that share key neuroanatomical, affective, and social features with humans will be essential to uncovering their foundation. Identifying and validating mood-like states in animals is, however, challenging not least because mood is a human construct requiring verbal communication. Here we outline a theoretical framework for animal models of human mood, drawing upon established psychological literature where it exists before reviewing the extant studies of non-human primate models of mood-like states.

Comparing supervised and unsupervised approaches to emotion categorization in the human brain, body, and subjective experience

Machine learning methods provide powerful tools to map physical measurements to scientific categories. But are such methods suitable for discovering the ground truth about psychological categories? We use the science of emotion as a test case to explore this question. In studies of emotion, researchers use supervised classifiers, guided by emotion labels, to attempt to discover biomarkers in the brain or body for the corresponding emotion categories. This practice relies on the assumption that the labels refer to objective categories that can be discovered. Here, we critically examine this approach across three distinct datasets collected during emotional episodes—measuring the human brain, body, and subjective experience—and compare supervised classification solutions with those from unsupervised clustering in which no labels are assigned to the data. We conclude with a set of recommendations to guide researchers towards meaningful, data-driven discoveries in the science of emotion and beyond.

Salience and default-mode network connectivity during threat and safety processing in older adults

The appropriate assessment of threat and safety is important for decision‐making but might be altered in old age due to neurobiological changes. The literature on threat and safety processing in older adults is sparse and it is unclear how healthy ageing affects the brain's functional networks associated with affective processing. We measured skin conductance responses as an indicator of sympathetic arousal and used functional magnetic resonance imaging and independent component analysis to compare young and older adults' functional connectivity in the default mode (DMN) and salience networks (SN) during a threat conditioning and extinction task. While our results provided evidence for differential threat processing in both groups, they also showed that functional connectivity within the SN – but not the DMN – was weaker during threat processing in older compared to young adults. This reduction of within‐network connectivity was accompanied by an age‐related decrease in low frequency spectral power in the SN and a reduction in inter‐network connectivity between the SN and DMN during threat and safety processing. Similarly, we found that skin conductance responses were generally lower in older compared to young adults. Our results are the first to demonstrate age‐related changes in brain activation during aversive conditioning and suggest that the ability to adaptively filter affective information is reduced in older adults.

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.

Keep calm and carry on: electrophysiological evaluation of emotional anticipation in the second language

Investigations of the so-called ‘foreign language effect’ have shown that emotional experience is language-dependent in bilingual individuals. Response to negative experiences, in particular, appears attenuated in the second language (L2). However, the human brain is not only reactive, but it also builds on past experiences to anticipate future events. Here, we investigated affective anticipation in immersed Polish–English bilinguals using a priming paradigm in which a verbal cue of controlled affective valence allowed making predictions about a subsequent picture target. As expected, native word cues with a negative valence increased the amplitude of the stimulus preceding negativity, an electrophysiological marker of affective anticipation, as compared with neutral ones. This effect was observed in Polish–English bilinguals and English monolinguals alike. The contrast was non-significant when Polish participants were tested in English, suggesting a possible reduction in affective sensitivity in L2. However, this reduction was not validated by a critical language × valence interaction in the bilingual group, possibly because they were highly fluent in English and because the affective stimuli used in the present study were particularly mild. These results, which are neither fully consistent nor inconsistent with the foreign language effect, provide initial insights into the electrophysiology of affective anticipation in bilingualism.

Emotional distress, brain functioning, and biobehavioral processes in cancer patients: a neuroimaging review and future directions

Despite emerging evidence that distress and adversity can contribute to negative health outcomes in cancer, little is known about the brain networks, regions, or circuits that can contribute to individual differences in affect/distress states and health outcomes in treated cancer patients. To understand the state-of-the-science in this regard, we reviewed neuroimaging studies with cancer patients that examined the associations between negative affect (distress) and changes in the metabolism or structure of brain regions. Cancer patients showed changes in function and/or structure of key brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex, thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate cortex (mainly subgenual area), hypothalamus, basal ganglia (striatum and caudate), and insula, which are associated with greater anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and distress. These results provide insights for understanding the effects of these psychological and emotional factors on peripheral stress-related biobehavioral pathways known to contribute to cancer progression and long-term health outcomes. This line of work provides leads for understanding the brain-mediated mechanisms that may explain the health effects of psychosocial interventions in cancer patients and survivors. A multilevel and integrated model for distress management intervention effects on psychological adaptation, biobehavioral processes, cancer pathogenesis, and clinical outcomes is proposed for future research.

Developing an Understanding of Emotion Categories: Lessons from Objects

How and when infants and young children begin to develop emotion categories is not yet well understood. Research has largely treated the learning problem as one of identifying perceptual similarities among exemplars (typically posed, stereotyped facial configurations). However, recent meta-analyses and reviews converge to suggest that emotion categories are abstract, involving high-dimensional and situationally variable instances. In this paper we consult research on the development of abstract object categorization to guide hypotheses about how infants might learn abstract emotion categories because the two domains present infants with similar learning challenges. In particular, we consider how a developmental cascades framework offers opportunities to understand how and when young children develop emotion categories.

Working With the Predictable Life of Patients: The Importance of "Mentalizing Interoception" to Meaningful Change in Psychotherapy

To understand our patients and optimize their treatment, psychotherapists of all theoretical orientations may benefit from considering current scientific evidence alongside psychodynamic constructs. There is recent neuroscientific evidence that subjective awareness, feelings and emotions depend upon "interoception," defined as the neural signaling to the brain from all tissues of the body. Interoception is the obvious basis of homeostasis (in the brainstem) but some interoceptive signals rise above this level and contribute to inferential processes that substantiate intrapersonal and interpersonal experience. The focus of this paper is on the essential role that their "interoception" plays in our patients' emotional experience and subjective awareness, and how the process referred to as "mentalizing interoception" may be harnessed in therapy. This can best be understood in terms of "predictive processing," which describes how subjective states, and particularly emotion, are inferred from sensory inputs - both interoceptive and exteroceptive. Predictive processing assumes that the brain infers (probabilistically) the likely cause of sensation experienced through the sense organs, by testing this sensory data against its innate and learned "priors." This implies that any effort at changing heavily over-learned prior beliefs will require action upon the system that has generated that set of prior beliefs. This involves, quite literally, acting upon the world to alter inferential processes, or in the case of interoceptive priors, acting on the patient's body to alter habitual autonomic nervous system (ANS) reflexes. Focused attention to bodily sensations/reactions, in the safety of the therapeutic relationship, provides a route to "mentalizing interoception," by means of the bodily cues that may be the only conscious element of deeply hidden priors and thus the clearest way to access them. This can: update patients' characteristic, dysfunctional responses to emotion and feelings; increase emotional insight; decrease cognitive distortions; and engender a more acute awareness of the present moment. These important ideas are outlined below from the perspective of psychodynamic psychotherapeutic practice, in order to discuss how relevant information from neuroscientific theory and current research can best be applied in clinical treatment. A clinical case will be presented to illustrate how this argument or treatment relates directly to clinical practice.

Concepts dissolve artificial boundaries in the study of emotion and cognition, uniting body, brain, and mind

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. "fear" is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process-a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development.

The Nonlinear Development of Emotion Differentiation: Granular Emotional Experience Is Low in Adolescence

People differ in how specifically they separate affective experiences into different emotion types-a skill called emotion differentiation or emotional granularity. Although increased emotion differentiation has been associated with positive mental health outcomes, little is known about its development. Participants ( N = 143) between the ages of 5 and 25 years completed a laboratory measure of negative emotion differentiation in which they rated how much a series of aversive images made them feel angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset. Emotion-differentiation scores were computed using intraclass correlations. Emotion differentiation followed a nonlinear developmental trajectory: It fell from childhood to adolescence and rose from adolescence to adulthood. Mediation analyses suggested that an increased tendency to report feeling emotions one at a time explained elevated emotion differentiation in childhood. Importantly, two other mediators (intensity of emotional experiences and scale use) did not explain this developmental trend. Hence, low emotion differentiation in adolescence may arise because adolescents have little experience conceptualizing co-occurring emotions.

Negative emotions in art reception: Refining theoretical assumptions and adding variables to the Distancing-Embracing model

While covering all commentaries, our response specifically focuses on the following issues: How can the hypothesis of emotional distancing (qua art framing) be compatible with stipulating high levels of felt negative emotions in art reception? Which concept of altogether pleasurable mixed emotions does our model involve? Can mechanisms of predictive coding, social sharing, and immersion enhance the power of our model?

Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action

Mental representations of everyday experience are rich, structured, and multimodal. In this article we consider the adaptive pressures that led to human construction of such representations, arguing that structured event representations enable cognitive systems to more effectively predict the trajectory of naturalistic everyday activity. We propose an account of how cortical systems and the hippocampus (HPC) interact to construct, maintain, and update event representations. This analysis throws light on recent research on story comprehension, event segmentation, episodic memory, and action planning. It also suggests how the growing science base can be deployed to diagnose impairments in event perception and memory, and to improve memory for everyday events.