Working memory capacity is associated with optimal adaptation of response bias to perceptual sensitivity in emotion perception

Inducing sad recognition bias: A novel emotional probabilistic reward task and its affective consequences

Recognition of sadness from facial expressions is associated with empathic responses. In this study, we devised an emotional probabilistic reward task (PRT) to facilitate sadness recognition and tested its effects on attentional and empathic responses to others in distress. During the emotional PRT, healthy participants were asked to discriminate between facial expressions subtly expressing sadness or anger. Reward feedback for correct sadness and anger recognition was provided, with different probabilities between the training (70% vs. 30%) and control groups (50% vs. 50%). Subsequently, participants performed a visual dot-probe task involving facial expressions of sadness, anger, fear, and happiness. They also completed an empathy rating task while viewing short video clips depicting people experiencing distressing or neutral events. The results showed that the training group developed greater recognition bias for sadness than the control group. Within the training group, sad recognition bias was positively associated with subsequent attentional orienting to sad faces and empathic concern towards distressed others. These findings suggest that the emotional PRT holds promise for modifying cognitive and emotional processes that are associated with empathy for others.

Effortfulness of visual working memory: Gauged by physical exertion

Active maintenance of information in working memory (WM) is an essential but effortful cognitive process. Yet, the effortful nature of WM remains poorly understood. Here, we constructed a model to evaluate how perceived effort of WM is directly compared to that of physical exertion. In Experiment 1, participants freely chose to either remember a certain number of colors in a visual WM task or hold a hand dynamometer to a required percentage of maximal voluntary contraction (%MVC) to obtain a fixed task credit upon successful task completion. We found that participants discounted WM-related effort in the same way as they discounted handgrip-related effort based on a computation of expected choice outcomes (hence utility) associated with different task loads. This rationality in an observer's prospective choice in Experiment 1 was generalized to retrospective choice in Experiment 2 where participants reported which task was more effortful immediately after they had performed both tasks in a randomized order without any reward or feedback. Experiment 3 further probed this shared mechanism using a dual-task paradigm. As predicted by our model, we found that physical exertion could disrupt the performance in the concurrent WM task, proportional to the iso-effort relationship between WM and physical exertion when task loads were high for both tasks. Collectively, our findings converge on a shared computational principle connecting task load, perceived effort, and choice utility across physical and cognitive domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving adaptive response to negative stimuli through non-emotional working memory training

People with high working memory (WM) capacity tend to respond proactively and experience a decrease in undesired emotions, implying the potential influence of WM training on emotional responses. Although training emotional WM could enhance emotional control, the training also improves emotional response itself. Thus, the far-transfer effects of non-emotional WM training on emotional responses remain an open question. In the present study, two experiments were conducted to detect these effects. The Preliminary experiment matched the expectations of the gains of the training tasks between the experimental and active control groups (n = 33). In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed 7-day and 15-day training procedures, respectively. Results indicated that after a 7-day training, non-emotional WM training (n = 17) marginally reduced individuals' emotional responses compared with the active control group (n = 18); importantly, this improvement became significant after a 15-day training (n _{(WM training)} = 20, n _{(active control)} = 18). A combination analysis for Experiments 1 and 2 showed that training gains on WM performance were significantly related to reduced emotional responses (r = -0.359), indicating a dosage effect. Therefore, non-emotional WM training provides a safe and effective way to enhance adaptive emotional responses.

Evaluating the neuropeptide-social cognition link in ageing: the mediating role of basic cognitive skills

The roles of oxytocin (OT) and arginine-vasopressin (AVP) as crucial modulators of social cognition and related behaviours have been extensively addressed in the literature. The involvement of these neuropeptides in social cognition in ageing, however, and a potential mediating effect of basic cognitive capacities on this link, are not well understood. To fill these research gaps, this study assessed associations of plasma OT and AVP levels with dynamic emotion identification accuracy in generally healthy older men (aged 55-95 years) and probed the underlying roles of crystallized and fluid cognition in these associations. Higher plasma OT levels were associated with lower accuracy in dynamic emotion identification, with this negative relationship fully mediated by cognition. For plasma AVP levels, in contrast, there was no association with dynamic emotion identification accuracy. Integrated within existing theoretical accounts, results from this study advance understanding of the neuropeptide-social cognition link in ageing and support basic cognitive capacities as mediators in this association. This article is part of the theme issue 'Interplays between oxytocin and other neuromodulators in shaping complex social behaviours'.

Oxytocin alters the effect of payoff but not base rate in emotion perception

Emotion perception, inferring the emotional state of another person, can be formalized as decision under uncertainty: another person's scowling face may indicate anger or concentration and the optimal inference is contingent on the decision consequences (payoff) and how likely real anger is encountered (base rate). Although emerging evidence suggests that the neuropeptide oxytocin influences human perception of emotional facial expressions, whether such effect relates to the alternated process of payoff or base rate still remains unclear. In addition, little is known about oxytocin's effect on metacognitive process involved in emotion perception. One hundred and twenty-two healthy male adults (sixty-two in Experiment 1 and sixty in Experiment 2, respectively) received 24 international units (IU) of intranasal oxytocin or placebo (between-subjects) in a randomized and double-blind study. We independently and systematically manipulated the payoff and base rate levels in an emotion categorization task and measured participants' response bias via categorization choice and metacognitive sensitivity via confidence report. Compared to the placebo group, oxytocin specifically induced a categorization bias under the payoff, but not base rate manipulation. In contrast, oxytocin had no effect on subjects' confidence rating, indicating that the metacognitive sensitivity can be dissociated from emotion perception. Our results pinpoint the specific role of oxytocin in payoff evaluation, but not target likelihood estimation and provide a potential theoretical framework to bridge oxytocin research in emotion perception, social cognition and value-based decisions.

Perceiving facial affective ambiguity: A behavioral and neural comparison of adolescents and adults

The current study examined perceptual differences between adults and youth in perceiving ambiguous facial expressions. We estimated individuals' internal representation for facial expressions and compared it between age groups (adolescents: N = 108, Mage = 13.04 years, 43.52% female; adults: N = 81, Mage = 31.54, 65.43% female). We found that adolescents' perceptual representation for facial emotion is broader than that of adults', such that adolescents experience more difficulty in identifying subtle configurational differences of facial expressions. At the neural level, perceptual uncertainty in face-selective regions (e.g., fusiform face area, occipital face area) were significantly higher for adolescents than for adults, suggesting that adolescents' brains more similarly represent lower intensity emotional faces than do adults'. Our results provide evidence for age-related differences concerning psychophysical differences in perceptual representation of emotional faces at the neural and behavioral level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Targeting separate specific learning parameters underlying cognitive behavioral therapy can improve perceptual judgments of anger

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Anxiety disorders are characterized by biased perceptual judgment. An experimental model using simple verbal instruction to target specific decision parameters that influence perceptual judgment was developed to test if it could influence anger perception, and to examine differences between individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) relative to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or non-psychiatric controls.

METHODS

Anger perception was decomposed into three decision parameters (perceptual similarity of angry vs. not-angry facial expressions, base rate of encountering angry vs. not-angry expressions, payoff for correct vs. incorrect categorization of face stimuli) using a signal detection framework. Participants with SAD (n = 97), GAD (n = 90), and controls (n = 98) were assigned an instruction condition emphasizing one of the three decision parameters. Anger perception pre-vs. post-instruction and its interaction with diagnosis were examined.

RESULTS

For all participants, base rate instructions impacted response bias over and above practice effects, supporting the validity of this instructional task-based approach to altering response bias. We failed to find a similarity or payoff instruction effect, nor a diagnosis interaction.

LIMITATIONS

Future instructional tasks may need to more closely target core cognitive and perceptual biases in anxiety disorders to identify specific deficits and how to optimally influence them.

CONCLUSIONS

This study demonstrates that specific decision parameters underlying perceptual judgment can be experimentally manipulated. Although our study failed to show diagnosis specific effects, it suggests that individual parameter "estimation" deficits may be experimentally isolated and potentially targeted, with the ultimate goal of developing an objective approach to personalized intervention targeting biased perceptual judgments in anxiety disorders.

Poor Sleep Quality and Compromised Visual Working Memory Capacity

OBJECTIVES

Reduction in the amount of information (storage capacity) retained in working memory (WM) has been associated with sleep loss. The present study examined whether reduced WM capacity is also related to poor everyday sleep quality and, more importantly, whether the effects of sleep quality could be dissociated from the effects of depressed mood and age on WM.

METHODS

In two studies, WM was assessed using a short-term recall task, producing behavioral measures for both the amount of retained WM information (capacity) and how precise the retained WM representations were (precision). Self-report measures of sleep quality and depressed mood were obtained using questionnaires.

RESULTS

In a sample of college students, Study 1 found that poor sleep quality and depressed mood could independently predict reduced WM capacity, but not WM precision. Study 2 generalized these sleep- and mood-related WM capacity effects to a community sample (aged 21-77 years) and further showed that age was associated with reduced WM precision.

CONCLUSIONS

Together, these findings demonstrate dissociable effects of three health-related factors (sleep, mood, and age) on WM representations and highlighte the importance of assessing different aspects of WM representations (e.g., capacity and precision) in future neuropsychological research.

A suicidal mind tends to maintain less negative information in visual working memory

The motivation to avoid psychological pain may characterize a suicidal mindset. This study examines how this motivational manifestation of suicidal ideation modulates the maintenance of affective information in visual working memory (WM). Forty-five outpatients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and twenty-five healthy participants performed visual WM change localization tasks with emotional (e.g., positive or negative schematic facial expressions) and non-emotional (e.g., colors) stimuli. The number of items that participants retained in WM (i.e., capacity) for each of those stimuli was measured. Based on the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation, MDD patients were categorized into high and low suicidal ideation groups. These two groups had comparable depression levels. In addition to showing a smaller overall WM capacity for emotionally neutral information (colors), MDD patients with high suicidal ideation retained fewer negative schematic facial stimuli in WM. This disproportional reduction in the amount of negative information held in visual WM was correlated with levels of suicidal ideation and psychological pain across participants. Together, these results reveal the impact of pain avoidance motivation on information processing in WM and provide a novel perspective to understand aberrant cognitive patterns that are potentially driven by maladaptive affective processing in individuals with higher suicide risk.

Assessing the Validity of Emotional Intelligence Measures

We describe an approach that enables a more complete evaluation of the validity of emotional intelligence measures. We argue that a source of evidence for validity is often overlooked by researchers and test developers, namely, evidence based on response processes. This evidence can be obtained through (a) a definition of the ability, (b) a description of the mental processes that operate when a person uses the ability, (c) the development of a theory of response behaviour that links variation in the construct with variation on the responses to the items of a measure, and (d) a test of the theory of response behaviour through one or more strategies that we describe.

Affective bias in visual working memory is associated with capacity

How does the affective nature of task stimuli modulate working memory (WM)? This study investigates whether WM maintains emotional information in a biased manner to meet the motivational principle of approaching positivity and avoiding negativity by retaining more approach-related positive content over avoidance-related negative content. This bias may exist regardless of individual differences in WM functionality, as indexed by WM capacity (overall bias hypothesis). Alternatively, this bias may be contingent on WM capacity (capacity-based hypothesis), in which a better WM system may be more likely to reveal an adaptive bias. In two experiments, participants performed change localisation tasks with emotional and non-emotional stimuli to estimate the number of items that they could retain for each of those stimuli. Although participants did not seem to remember one type of emotional content (e.g. happy faces) better than the other type of emotional content (e.g. sad faces), there was a significant correlation between WM capacity and affective bias. Specifically, participants with higher WM capacity for non-emotional stimuli (colours or line-drawing symbols) tended to maintain more happy faces over sad faces. These findings demonstrated the presence of a "built-in" affective bias in WM as a function of its systematic limitations, favouring the capacity-based hypothesis.