Emotion-word processing difficulties in abstinent alcoholics with and without lifetime externalizing disorders

The good, the bad, and the ambivalent: Extrapolating affective values for 38,000+ Chinese words via a computational model

Word affective ratings are important tools in psycholinguistic research, natural language processing, and many other fields. However, even for well-studied languages, such norms are usually limited in scale. To extrapolate affective (i.e., valence and arousal) values for words in the SUBTLEX-CH database (Cai & Brysbaert, 2010, PLoS ONE, 5(6):e10729), we implemented a computational neural network which captured how words' vector-based semantic representations corresponded to the probability densities of their valence and arousal. Based on these probability density functions, we predicted not only a word's affective values, but also their respective degrees of variability that could characterize individual differences in human affective ratings. The resulting estimates of affective values largely converged with human ratings for both valence and arousal, and the estimated degrees of variability also captured important features of the variability in human ratings. We released the extrapolated affective values, together with their corresponding degrees of variability, for over 38,000 Chinese words in the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/s9zmd/ ). We also discussed how the view of embodied cognition could be illuminated by this computational model.

Problematic alcohol use and acute intoxication predict anger-related attentional biases: A test of the alcohol myopia theory

Previous research has demonstrated a significant association between alcohol and aggression. However, the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship have yet to be fully elucidated. In the present study, we examined alcohol's effects on an attentional bias toward aggressogenic cues as the first step in a possible mediation model of alcohol-facilitated intimate partner aggression. More specifically, we tested an interactive effect of problematic alcohol use and acute alcohol intoxication on an attentional bias toward anger words. Participants in this study were 249 male and female heavy drinkers from the community with a history of past-year intimate partner aggression perpetration who participated in an alcohol-administration laboratory study assessing the effect of alcohol intoxication on cognitive biases. Multiple linear regression was used to test the proposed moderation model. Acute alcohol intoxication moderated the effect of problematic alcohol use on an attentional bias toward anger, with this effect being stronger for individuals in the alcohol compared to no-alcohol control condition. These findings suggest that problematic drinkers may be more likely to attend to aggressogenic stimuli while acutely intoxicated, relative to when they are sober. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).