Implicit affectivity and rapid processing of affective body language: An fMRI study

Brain imaging studies of emotional well-being: a scoping review

This scoping review provides an overview of previous empirical studies that used brain imaging techniques to investigate the neural correlates of emotional well-being (EWB). We compiled evidence on this topic into one accessible and usable document as a foundation for future research into the relationship between EWB and the brain. PRISMA 2020 guidelines were followed. We located relevant articles by searching five electronic databases with 95 studies meeting our inclusion criteria. We explored EWB measures, brain imaging modalities, research designs, populations studied, and approaches that are currently in use to characterize and understand EWB across the literature. Of the key concepts related to EWB, the vast majority of studies investigated positive affect and life satisfaction, followed by sense of meaning, goal pursuit, and quality of life. The majority of studies used functional MRI, followed by EEG and event-related potential-based EEG to study the neural basis of EWB (predominantly experienced affect, affective perception, reward, and emotion regulation). It is notable that positive affect and life satisfaction have been studied significantly more often than the other three aspects of EWB (i.e., sense of meaning, goal pursuit, and quality of life). Our findings suggest that future studies should investigate EWB in more diverse samples, especially in children, individuals with clinical disorders, and individuals from various geographic locations. Future directions and theoretical implications are discussed, including the need for more longitudinal studies with ecologically valid measures that incorporate multi-level approaches allowing researchers to better investigate and evaluate the relationships among behavioral, environmental, and neural factors.

Systematic review registration

https://osf.io/t9cf6/.

The concert of personality: Explaining personality functioning and coherence by personality systems interactions

Several psychological approaches concern explaining the dynamic psychological processes and mechanisms that render personality a coherent whole, a “well-sounding concert.” Building upon personality systems interactions (PSI) theory, which explains personality functioning on the basis of interactions among cognitive and affective-motivational personality systems, we demonstrate how diverse perspectives on personality coherence may functionally be integrated. To do so, we describe interactions among four cognitive personality systems considered to underlie and optimize two meta principles of personality functioning—self-growth (in terms of the integration of adverse experiences) and action control (in terms of goal pursuit). These meta principles establish different subtypes of personality coherence differentially focused by psychological perspectives. We highlight the interdisciplinary relevance and practical application of the present approach and conclude with implications for future research.

Criterion Validity of the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test: Prediction of Facial Affect Perception

This study focused on the criterion-related validity of the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). The IPANAT is thought to be a measure of automatic activation of cognitive representations of affects. In this study, it was investigated whether implicit affect scores differentially predict ratings of facial emotions over and above explicit affectivity. Ninety-six young female participants completed the IPANAT, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) as an explicit measure of state and trait affectivity, and a task for the perception of facial emotions. Implicit negative affect predicted the perception of negative but not positive facial emotions, whereas implicit positive affect predicted the perception of positive but not negative facial emotions. The observed double-dissociation in the correlational pattern strongly supports the validity of the IPANAT as a measure of implicit affectivity and is indicative of the orthogonality and thus functional distinctness of the two affect dimensions of the IPANAT. Moreover, such affect-congruent correlations were absent for explicit affect scales, which additionally supports the incremental validity of the IPANAT.

Implicit Affect, Heart Rate Variability, and the Metabolic Syndrome

OBJECTIVE

Greater negative affect has been associated with an increased risk of the metabolic syndrome (METs). However, all studies to date have examined this association using explicit affect measures based on subjective ratings of emotional experiences. Prior studies suggest that implicit affect, representing the automatic, prereflective appraisal process involved in conscious emotional experiences, is associated with physiological stress responses independent of explicit affect. Furthermore, low resting heart rate variability (HRV) may increase the risk of stress-related diseases. The goals of this study were to evaluate the associations between implicit and explicit affect and METs and to assess whether these associations were amplified by lower HRV.

METHODS

This secondary analysis of a larger study included 217 middle-aged women who completed measures of implicit affect, explicit affect, high-frequency HRV, and the different components of METs.

RESULTS

There was a significant interaction between implicit negative affect and HRV predicting METs (odds ratio = 0.57, 95% confidence interval = 0.35-0.92), such that the combination of higher implicit affect and lower HRV was associated with a greater likelihood of METs. Similarly, there was a main effect of implicit negative affect as well as an interaction between implicit negative affect and HRV on the lipid accumulation product (b (standard error) = -0.06 (0.02), 95% confidence interval = -0.11 to -0.02), a combination of waist circumference and triglycerides.

CONCLUSIONS

Higher implicit negative affect in the context of lower HRV may be related to a greater risk of METs. The present findings highlight the relevance of including implicit affect measures in psychosomatic medicine research.

Individual differences in anxiety and automatic amygdala response to fearful faces: A replication and extension of Etkin et al. (2004)

Trait anxiety refers to the stable tendency to attend to threats and experience fears and worries across many situations. According to the widely noticed, pioneering investigation by Etkin et al. (2004) trait anxiety is strongly associated with reactivity in the right basolateral amygdala to non-conscious threat. Although this observation was based on a sample of only 17 individuals, no replication effort has been reported yet. We reexamined automatic amygdala responsiveness as a function of anxiety in a large sample of 107 participants. Besides self-report instruments, we administered an indirect test to assess implicit anxiety. To assess early, automatic stages of emotion processing, we used a color-decision paradigm presenting brief (33 ms) and backward-masked fearful facial expressions. N = 56 participants were unaware of the presence of masked faces. In this subset of unaware participants, the relationship between trait anxiety and basolateral amygdala activation by fearful faces was successfully replicated in region of interest analyses. Additionally, a relation of implicit anxiety with masked fear processing in the amygdala and temporal gyrus was observed. We provide evidence that implicit measures of affect can be valuable predictors of automatic brain responsiveness and may represent useful additions to explicit measures. Our findings support a central role of amygdala reactivity to non-consciously perceived threat in understanding and predicting dispositional anxiety, i.e. the frequency of spontaneously occurring anxiety in everyday life.

A Brief Version of the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT-18)

As self-reports of affect are limited in several regards, an indirect measure of affect, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2009) has previously been developed and adapted to more than 10 languages (Quirin et al., 2018), showing adequate reliability and validity. Based on a sample of 242 Spanish adults (111 males), we evaluate a trimmed 18 items version of the IPANAT (IPANAT-18). Item reductive procedures consisted in a random selection of the stimuli words used in the IPANAT. Psychometric properties of the IPANAT-18 were evaluated via Confirmatory Factor Analysis. In addition, correlational analyses were used to determine the relationship between the brief and the full version of the IPANAT, and with explicit measures of affect. We replicated a two-factors structure of positive affect versus negative affect and found a good fit for the IPANAT-18 model (CFI = 1; TLI = 1; RMSEA = .00; SRMR = .03). Reliability was adequate (implicit PA, α = .86; implicit NA, α = .77) and the pattern of relationships with explicit affect measures were congruent and consistent with previous findings. Differences between the mean scores of implicit affect assessed with 18 items or 36 items were statistically non-significant, and showed strong correlations (PA, r = .92, p < .01; NA, r = .88, p < .01). In sum, the IPANAT-18 showed satisfactory psychometric properties and constitutes a useful tool for economically measuring affective processes such as in experimental and economical multiple assessment (e.g., daily diary) settings.

"The Harder One Tries …": Findings and Insights From the Application of Covert Response Pressure Assessment Technology in Three Studies of Visual Perception

In this article, we present a force measuring method for assessing participant responses in studies of visual perception. We present a device disguised as a mouse pad and designed to measure mouse-click-pressure and click-press-to-release-time responses by unaware, as regards to the physiological assessment, participants. The aim of the current technology, in the current studies, was to provide a physiological assessment of confidence and task difficulty. We tested the device in three experiments. The studies comprised of a gender-recognition study using morphed male and female faces, a visual suppression study using backwards masking, and a target-search study that included deciding whether a letter was repeated in a subsequently presented letter string. Across all studies, higher task difficulty was associated with higher click-release-time responses. Higher task difficulty was, intriguingly, also associated with lower click pressure. Higher confidence ratings were consistently associated with higher click pressure and shorter click-release time across all experiments. These findings suggest that the current technology can be used to assess responses relating to task difficulty and participant confidence in studies of visual perception. We suggest that the assessment of release times can also be implemented using standard equipment, and we provide manual and easy-to-use code for the implementation.

Implicit affectivity in clinically depressed patients during acute illness and recovery

BACKGROUND

Clinical depression is characterized by high levels of negative affect (NA) and attenuated positive affect (PA). Psychological and pharmacological treatments have been shown to reduce NA and to enhance PA in depressed patients. Following dual-process models, two types of affect can be distinguished: explicit (or self-reported) affect, which is formed by conscious reflections, and implicit affect, which relates to automatic affective reactions. The present study was conducted to examine, for the first time, both implicit and explicit affectivity in patients suffering from acute depression. Moreover, changes in patients' implicit and explicit affectivity were investigated over the course of inpatient treatment.

METHODS

Thirty-nine patients suffering from major depression and 39 healthy individuals participated in the study. Implicit affectivity was assessed using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. The explicit state and trait affectivity were measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. The level of depressive symptoms was assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory. Tests were administered to patients after admission and after 7 weeks of therapy, whereas healthy controls were investigated only once. We examined whether either comorbidity or antidepressant medication has an effect on affectivity.

RESULTS

Patients with acute depression had lower implicit and explicit PA scores and higher implicit and explicit NA scores than the healthy controls. After treatment, patients' level of depression decreased significantly. At posttreatment, patients exhibited heightened implicit and explicit PA and diminished explicit trait NA. Independent of antidepressant medication and comorbidity, no significant change in implicit NA was observed over the course of treatment. Implicit NA was correlated with explicit NA in acute depression but not during recovery.

CONCLUSIONS

Acute depression appears to be characterized by decreased implicit and explicit PA and increased implicit and explicit NA. After 7 weeks of treatment, depressed patients' implicit and explicit PA increased, and explicit trait NA decreased. No decrease in implicit NA and explicit state NA occurred over the course of treatment. Finally, it seems that in the state of acute depression, the interplay between the automatic and reflective systems could be increased for negative affectivity.

Implicit Affect and Autonomous Nervous System Reactions: A Review of Research Using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test

In everyday life, affective processes occur spontaneously and typically go along with an automatic activation of action tendencies and physiological responses. Because self-reports of affect are also known to be biased by various factors, including deficits in introspection or impression management strategies, an indirect measure, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT), was developed to assess implicit affect and to circumvent these difficulties. In this review, findings from neurobiological and clinical studies administering the IPANAT are revised, we focus on the link between implicit affect and psychophysiological reactions to affective stimuli and stressors. Specifically, implicit affect as measured by the IPANAT was found to predict cardiovascular, endocrine, and functional neuroimaging correlates of stress or fear beyond explicit affect. The present evidence strongly suggests the usage of implicit affect measures in future research on stress and psychopathology.

Implicit negative affect predicts attention to sad faces beyond self-reported depressive symptoms in healthy individuals: An eye-tracking study

Cognitive theories of depression assume biased attention towards mood-congruent information as a central vulnerability and maintaining factor. Among other symptoms, depression is characterized by excessive negative affect (NA). Yet, little is known about the impact of naturally occurring NA on the allocation of attention to emotional information. The study investigates how implicit and explicit NA as well as self-reported depressive symptoms predict attentional biases in a sample of healthy individuals (N = 104). Attentional biases were assessed using eye-tracking during a free viewing task in which images of sad, angry, happy and neutral faces were shown simultaneously. Participants' implicit affectivity was measured indirectly using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. Questionnaires were administered to assess actual and habitual explicit NA and presence of depressive symptoms. Higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with sustained attention to sad faces and reduced attention to happy faces. Implicit but not explicit NA significantly predicted gaze behavior towards sad faces independently from depressive symptoms. The present study supports the idea that naturally occurring implicit NA is associated with attention allocation to dysphoric facial expression. The findings demonstrate the utility of implicit affectivity measures in studying individual differences in depression-relevant attentional biases and cognitive vulnerability.

Oral contraceptives positively affect mood in healthy PMS-free women: A longitudinal study

OBJECTIVE

Menstrual cycle phase and oral contraceptives (OC) use influence mood and cognition and these effects may be moderated by the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) genotype. The effect of menstrual cycle phase on mood may be increased if participants know that this is the focus of study. We assessed aspects associated with reproductive depression such as mood, interpersonal sensitivity, affect lability and depressive cognitions in MR-genotyped OC-users and naturally cycling (NC) women in a carefully masked design.

METHODS

A homogenous sample of healthy, PMS-free, pre-menopausal MR-genotyped women (n=92) completed online questionnaires eight times during two consecutive cycles.

RESULTS

The masking of the research question was successful. OC-users did not differ significantly from NC women in positive and negative affect at the time of assessment, personality characteristics (e.g. neuroticism) or mental and physical health. Both groups reported more shifts in anger in the first cycle week (p<0.001; η_p²=0.08). Compared to NC women, OC-users reported fewer mood-shifts between depression and elation in the mid-luteal phase of the menstrual cycle (p=0.002; η_p²=0.10) and had fewer ruminating thoughts at all phases (p=0.003; η_p²=0.11). Effects of MR-genotype were not significant after correction for multiple comparisons.

CONCLUSION

OC users scored more favorably on measures associated with reproductive depression. OC users also showed a decreased affect variability possibly indicating an emotional blunting effect, which is in line with previous reports on affect-stabilizing effects of OC. Limitations were loss of cases due to irregularities in the menstrual cycle length and possible confounding by the 'survivor effect', since almost all OC-users took OC for more than a year.

Alexithymia Components Are Differentially Related to Explicit Negative Affect But Not Associated with Explicit Positive Affect or Implicit Affectivity

Alexithymia represents a multifaceted personality construct defined by difficulties in recognizing and verbalizing emotions and externally oriented thinking. According to clinical observations, experience of negative affects is exacerbated and experience of positive affects is decreased in alexithymia. Findings from research based on self-report indicate that all alexithymia facets are negatively associated with the experience of positive affects, whereas difficulties identifying and describing feelings are related to heightened negative affect. Implicit affectivity, which can be measured using indirect assessment methods, relates to processes of the impulsive system. The aim of the present study was to examine, for the first time, the relations between alexithymia components and implicit and explicit positive and negative affectivity in healthy adults. The 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) were administered to two hundred and forty-one healthy individuals along with measures of depression and trait anxiety. Difficulties identifying feelings were correlated with explicit negative trait affect, depressive mood and trait anxiety. Difficulties describing feelings showed smaller but also significant correlations with depressive mood and trait anxiety but were not correlated with explicit state or trait affect as assessed by the PANAS. Externally oriented thinking was not significantly correlated with any of the implicit and explicit affect measures. According to our findings, an externally oriented, concrete way of thinking appears to be generally unrelated to dispositions to develop positive or negative affects. Difficulties identifying feelings seem to be associated with increased conscious negative affects but not with a heightened disposition to develop negative affects at an automatic response level.

Mineralocorticoid receptor haplotype, estradiol, progesterone and emotional information processing

BACKGROUND

Carriers of MR-haplotype 1 and 3 (GA/CG; rs5522 and rs2070951) are more sensitive to the influence of oral contraceptives (OC) and menstrual cycle phase on emotional information processing than MR-haplotype 2 (CA) carriers. We investigated whether this effect is associated with estradiol (E2) and/or progesterone (P4) levels.

METHOD

Healthy MR-genotyped premenopausal women were tested twice in a counterbalanced design. Naturally cycling (NC) women were tested in the early-follicular and mid-luteal phase and OC-users during OC-intake and in the pill-free week. At both sessions E2 and P4 were assessed in saliva. Tests included implicit and explicit positive and negative affect, attentional blink accuracy, emotional memory, emotion recognition, and risky decision-making (gambling).

RESULTS

MR-haplotype 2 homozygotes had higher implicit happiness scores than MR-haplotype 2 heterozygotes (p=0.031) and MR-haplotype 1/3 carriers (p<0.001). MR-haplotype 2 homozygotes also had longer reaction times to happy faces in an emotion recognition test than MR-haplotype 1/3 (p=0.001). Practice effects were observed for most measures. The pattern of correlations between information processing and P4 or E2 differed between sessions, as well as the moderating effects of the MR genotype. In the first session the MR-genotype moderated the influence of P4 on implicit anxiety (sr=-0.30; p=0.005): higher P4 was associated with reduction in implicit anxiety, but only in MR-haplotype 2 homozygotes (sr=-0.61; p=0.012). In the second session the MR-genotype moderated the influence of E2 on the recognition of facial expressions of happiness (sr=-0.21; p=0.035): only in MR-haplotype 1/3 higher E2 was correlated with happiness recognition (sr=0.29; p=0.005). In the second session higher E2 and P4 were negatively correlated with accuracy in lag2 trials of the attentional blink task (p<0.001). Thus NC women, compared to OC-users, performed worse on lag 2 trials (p=0.041).

CONCLUSION

The higher implicit happiness scores of MR-haplotype 2 homozygotes are in line with previous reports. Performance in the attentional blink task may be influenced by OC-use. The MR-genotype moderates the influence of E2 and P4 on emotional information processing. This moderating effect may depend on the novelty of the situation.