Neuroanatomical markers of social cognition in neglected adolescents

Growing up in neglectful households can impact multiple aspects of social cognition. However, research on neglect's effects on social cognition processes and their neuroanatomical correlates during adolescence is scarce. Here, we aimed to comprehensively assess social cognition processes (recognition of basic and contextual emotions, theory of mind, the experience of envy and Schadenfreude and empathy for pain) and their structural brain correlates in adolescents with legal neglect records within family-based care. First, we compared neglected adolescents (n = 27) with control participants (n = 25) on context-sensitive social cognition tasks while controlling for physical and emotional abuse and executive and intellectual functioning. Additionally, we explored the grey matter correlates of these domains through voxel-based morphometry. Compared to controls, neglected adolescents exhibited lower performance in contextual emotional recognition and theory of mind, higher levels of envy and Schadenfreude and diminished empathy. Physical and emotional abuse and executive or intellectual functioning did not explain these effects. Moreover, social cognition scores correlated with brain volumes in regions subserving social cognition and emotional processing. Our results underscore the potential impact of neglect on different aspects of social cognition during adolescence, emphasizing the necessity for preventive and intervention strategies to address these deficits in this population.

"Anger? No, thank you. I don't mimic it": how contextual modulation of facial display meaning impacts emotional mimicry

Research indicates that emotional mimicry predominantly occurs in response to affiliative displays, such as happiness, while the mimicry of antagonistic displays, like anger, is seldom observed in social contexts. However, contextual factors, including the identity of the displayer (e.g. social similarity with the observer) and whose action triggered the emotional reaction (i.e. to whom display is directed), can modulate the meaning of the display. In two experiments, participants observed happiness, sadness, and anger expressed by individuals with similar or different social attitudes in response to actions from either a participant or another person. Results demonstrated that three manipulated factors - displayer social similarity, whose action caused an emotional display, and the type of emotional display - affected participants' perception of the display. In turn, mimicry was predominantly observed in response to happiness (Experiments 1 and 2), to a lesser extent to sadness (Experiment 1), and not to anger. Furthermore, participants mimicked individuals who were more socially similar (Experiment 1), while whose action caused an emotional reaction did not influence mimicry. The findings suggest that when the context mitigates the meaning of negative or antagonistic facial displays, it does not necessarily increase the inclination to mimic them.

Emotion in motion: perceiving fear in the behaviour of individuals from minimal motion capture displays

The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm. Across three studies, participants made judgments about the emotional states of others based on motion-capture body movement recordings of those individuals actively engaged in walking a virtual plank at ground-level or 80 stories above a city street. Results indicated that participants were reliably able to differentiate between height and non-height conditions (Studies 1 & 2), were more likely to spontaneously describe target behaviour in the height condition as fearful (Study 2) and their fear estimates were highly calibrated with the fear ratings from the targets (Studies 1-3). Findings show that VR height scenarios can induce fearful behaviour and that people can perceive fear in minimal representations of body movement.

Clouded judgments? The role of virtual weather in word valence evaluations

Exploring the dynamic interface of environmental psychology and psycholinguistics, this investigation delves into how simulated weather conditions - sunny versus rainy - affect emotional perceptions of linguistic stimuli within a Virtual Reality (VR) framework. Participants assessed words' emotional valence being exposed to these distinct environmental simulations. Contrary to expectations, we found that while rainy conditions modestly prolonged response times, they did not significantly alter the emotional valence attributed to words. Our study shows that weather can affect emotional cognition, but intrinsic emotional word properties are resilient to environmental influences. This highlights the complex interplay between environmental factors and linguistic processing and reaffirms the importance of environmental contexts in cognitive and emotional evaluations, especially in the face of climate change. By integrating VR technology with environmental psychology and linguistics, our research offers novel insights into the subtle yet significant ways in which virtual and real-world environments converge to shape human emotional and cognitive responses.

Ability-Related Emotional Intelligence: An Introduction

Emotionally intelligent people are thought to be more skilled in recognizing, thinking about, using, and regulating emotions. This construct has garnered considerable interest, but initial enthusiasm has faded and it is time to take stock. There is consensus that ability-related measures of emotional intelligence (EI) can be favored to self-report tests, in part because the resulting scores cannot be equated with personality traits. However, there are questions surrounding measurement as well as predictive value. Experts in the field were encouraged to chart new directions, with the idea that these new directions could reinvigorate EI scholarship. Special Issue papers speak to theory, mechanism, measurement, and training. In addition, these papers seek to forge links with research traditions focused on interpersonal perception, emotional awareness, and emotion regulation. As a result of these efforts, new insights into what EI is and how it works can be anticipated in upcoming years.

Conversational Speech Behaviors Are Context Dependent

PURPOSE

According to the interpersonal synergy model of spoken dialogue, interlocutors modify their communicative behaviors to meet the contextual demands of a given conversation. Although a growing body of research supports this postulation for linguistic behaviors (e.g., semantics, syntax), little is understood about how this model applies to speech behaviors (e.g., speech rate, pitch). The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that interlocutors adjust their speech behaviors across different conversational tasks with different conversational goals.

METHOD

In this study, 28 participants each engaged in two different types of conversations (i.e., relational and informational) with two partners (i.e., Partner 1 and Partner 2), yielding a total of 112 conversations. We compared six acoustic measures of participant speech behavior across conversational task and partner.

RESULTS

Linear mixed-effects models demonstrated significant differences between speech feature measures in informational and relational conversations. Furthermore, these findings were generally robust across conversations with different partners.

CONCLUSIONS

Results suggest that contextual demands influence speech behaviors. These findings provide empirical support for the interpersonal synergy model and highlight important considerations for assessing speech behaviors in individuals with communication disorders.

Face and context integration in emotion inference is limited and variable across categories and individuals

The ability to make nuanced inferences about other people's emotional states is central to social functioning. While emotion inferences can be sensitive to both facial movements and the situational context that they occur in, relatively little is understood about when these two sources of information are integrated across emotion categories and individuals. In a series of studies, we use one archival and five empirical datasets to demonstrate that people could be integrating, but that emotion inferences are just as well (and sometimes better) captured by knowledge of the situation alone, while isolated facial cues are insufficient. Further, people integrate facial cues more for categories for which they most frequently encounter facial expressions in everyday life (e.g., happiness). People are also moderately stable over time in their reliance on situational cues and integration of cues and those who reliably utilize situation cues more also have better situated emotion knowledge. These findings underscore the importance of studying variability in reliance on and integration of cues.

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.

Language access differentially alters functional connectivity during emotion perception across cultures

Introduction

It is often assumed that the ability to recognize the emotions of others is reflexive and automatic, driven only by observable facial muscle configurations. However, research suggests that accumulated emotion concept knowledge shapes the way people perceive the emotional meaning of others' facial muscle movements. Cultural upbringing can shape an individual's concept knowledge, such as expectations about which facial muscle configurations convey anger, disgust, or sadness. Additionally, growing evidence suggests that access to emotion category words, such as "anger," facilitates access to such emotion concept knowledge and in turn facilitates emotion perception.

Methods

To investigate the impact of cultural influence and emotion concept accessibility on emotion perception, participants from two cultural groups (Chinese and White Americans) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session to assess functional connectivity between brain regions during emotion perception. Across four blocks, participants were primed with either English emotion category words ("anger," "disgust") or control text (XXXXXX) before viewing images of White American actors posing facial muscle configurations that are stereotypical of anger and disgust in the United States.

Results

We found that when primed with "disgust" versus control text prior to seeing disgusted facial expressions, Chinese participants showed a significant decrease in functional connectivity between a region associated with semantic retrieval (the inferior frontal gyrus) and regions associated with semantic processing, visual perception, and social cognition. Priming the word "anger" did not impact functional connectivity for Chinese participants relative to control text, and priming neither "disgust" nor "anger" impacted functional connectivity for White American participants.

Discussion

These findings provide preliminary evidence that emotion concept accessibility differentially impacts perception based on participants' cultural background.

How previous experience shapes future affective subjective ratings: A follow-up study investigating implicit learning and cue ambiguity

People use their previous experience to predict future affective events. Since we live in ever-changing environments, affective predictions must generalize from past contexts (from which they may be implicitly learned) to new, potentially ambiguous contexts. This study investigated how past (un)certain relationships influence subjective experience following new ambiguous cues, and whether past relationships can be learned implicitly. Two S1-S2 paradigms were employed as learning and test phases in two experiments. S1s were colored circles, S2s negative or neutral affective pictures. Participants (Experiment 1 N = 121, Experiment 2 N = 116) were assigned to the certain (CG) or uncertain group (UG), and they were presented with 100% (CG) or 50% (UG) S1-S2 congruency during an uninstructed (Experiment 1) or implicit (Experiment 2) learning phase. During the test phase both groups were presented with a new 75% S1-S2 paradigm, and ambiguous (Experiment 1) or unambiguous (Experiment 2) S1s. Participants were asked to rate the expected valence of upcoming S2s (expectancy ratings), or their experienced valence and arousal (valence and arousal ratings). In Experiment 1 ambiguous cues elicited less negative expectancy ratings, and less unpleasant valence ratings, independently of prior experience. In Experiment 2, both groups showed similar expectancies, predicting upcoming pictures' valence according to the 75% contingencies of the test phase. Overall, we found that in the presence of ambiguous cues subjective affective experience is dampened, and that implicit previous experience does not emerge at the subjective level by significantly shaping reported affective experience.

Event-related alpha power in early stage of facial expression processing in social anxiety: Influence of language context

Accurate interpretation of the emotional information conveyed by others' facial expressions is crucial for social interactions. Event-related alpha power, measured by time-frequency analysis, is a frequently used EEG index of emotional information processing. However, it is still unclear how event-related alpha power varies in emotional information processing in social anxiety groups. In the present study, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants from the social anxiety and healthy control groups viewed facial expressions (angry, happy, neutral) preceded by contextual sentences conveying either a positive or negative evaluation of the subject. The impact of context on facial expression processing in both groups of participants was explored by assessing behavioral ratings and event-related alpha power (0-200 ms after expression presentation). In comparison to the healthy control group, the social anxiety group exhibited significantly lower occipital alpha power in response to angry facial expressions in negative contexts and neutral facial expressions in positive contexts. The influence of language context on facial expression processing in individuals with social anxiety may occur at an early stage of processing.

Cultural facial expressions dynamically convey emotion category and intensity information

Communicating emotional intensity plays a vital ecological role because it provides valuable information about the nature and likelihood of the sender's behavior.1,2,3 For example, attack often follows signals of intense aggression if receivers fail to retreat.4,5 Humans regularly use facial expressions to communicate such information.6,7,8,9,10,11 Yet how this complex signaling task is achieved remains unknown. We addressed this question using a perception-based, data-driven method to mathematically model the specific facial movements that receivers use to classify the six basic emotions-"happy," "surprise," "fear," "disgust," "anger," and "sad"-and judge their intensity in two distinct cultures (East Asian, Western European; total n = 120). In both cultures, receivers expected facial expressions to dynamically represent emotion category and intensity information over time, using a multi-component compositional signaling structure. Specifically, emotion intensifiers peaked earlier or later than emotion classifiers and represented intensity using amplitude variations. Emotion intensifiers are also more similar across emotions than classifiers are, suggesting a latent broad-plus-specific signaling structure. Cross-cultural analysis further revealed similarities and differences in expectations that could impact cross-cultural communication. Specifically, East Asian and Western European receivers have similar expectations about which facial movements represent high intensity for threat-related emotions, such as "anger," "disgust," and "fear," but differ on those that represent low threat emotions, such as happiness and sadness. Together, our results provide new insights into the intricate processes by which facial expressions can achieve complex dynamic signaling tasks by revealing the rich information embedded in facial expressions.

Development of the RIKEN database for dynamic facial expressions with multiple angles

The development of facial expressions with sensing information is progressing in multidisciplinary fields, such as psychology, affective computing, and cognitive science. Previous facial datasets have not simultaneously dealt with multiple theoretical views of emotion, individualized context, or multi-angle/depth information. We developed a new facial database (RIKEN facial expression database) that includes multiple theoretical views of emotions and expressers' individualized events with multi-angle and depth information. The RIKEN facial expression database contains recordings of 48 Japanese participants captured using ten Kinect cameras at 25 events. This study identified several valence-related facial patterns and found them consistent with previous research investigating the coherence between facial movements and internal states. This database represents an advancement in developing a new sensing system, conducting psychological experiments, and understanding the complexity of emotional events.

A systematic review of the acute effects of alcohol on emotion recognition of facial expressions

Alcohol has been linked to both positive (e.g., sociability) and negative (e.g., aggression) social outcomes, and researchers have proposed that alcohol-induced changes in emotion recognition may partially explain these effects. Here, we systematically review alcohol administration studies to clarify the acute effects of alcohol on emotion recognition. We also investigate various moderator variables (i.e., sex, study quality, study design, alcohol dosage, emotion recognition task and outcome measure). PsycINFO, PubMed and Google Scholar were searched following a pre-registered PROSPERO protocol (CRD42021225392) and PRISMA methodology. Analyses focused on differences in emotion recognition between participants consuming alcoholic and/or non-alcoholic (i.e., placebo or no-alcohol control) beverages. Nineteen unique samples (N = 1271 participants) were derived from 17 articles (two articles included two studies, each conducted on a unique sample). Data were extracted for sample characteristics, alcohol administration methods and emotion recognition tasks and outcomes. All studies compared an alcoholic beverage to a placebo beverage and used tasks that asked participants to identify emotions from images or videos of facial expressions. Otherwise, methodologies varied substantially across studies, including the alcohol dosage(s) tested, the specific emotion recognition task(s) used and the outcome variable(s) assessed. No consistent effects of alcohol on emotion recognition emerged for any emotion. None of the moderator variables affected the findings, except for some indication that alcohol may affect males' emotion recognition abilities more so than females. Alcohol does not appear to consistently affect positive or negative emotion recognition of facial expressions, at least with the tasks currently used in the field.

Cooperative Learning for Personalized Context-Aware Pain Assessment From Wearable Data

Despite the promising performance of automated pain assessment methods, current methods suffer from performance generalization due to the lack of relatively large, diverse, and annotated pain datasets. Further, the majority of current methods do not allow responsible interaction between the model and user, and do not take different internal and external factors into consideration during the model's design and development. This article aims to provide an efficient cooperative learning framework for the lack of annotated data while facilitating responsible user communication and taking individual differences into consideration during the development of pain assessment models. Our results using body and muscle movement data, collected from wearable devices, demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective in leveraging both the human and the machine to efficiently learn and predict pain.

Infrequent facial expressions of emotion do not bias attention

Despite the obvious importance of facial expressions of emotion, most studies have found that they do not bias attention. A critical limitation, however, is that these studies generally present face distractors on all trials of the experiment. For other kinds of emotional stimuli, such as emotional scenes, infrequently presented stimuli elicit greater attentional bias than frequently presented stimuli, perhaps due to suppression or habituation. The goal of the current study then was to test whether such modulation of attentional bias by distractor frequency generalizes to facial expressions of emotion. In Experiment 1, both angry and happy faces were unable to bias attention, despite being infrequently presented. Even when the location of these face cues were more unpredictable-presented in one of two possible locations-still no attentional bias was observed (Experiment 2). Moreover, there was no bottom-up influence for angry and happy faces shown under high or low perceptual load (Experiment 3). We conclude that task-irrelevant posed facial expressions of emotion cannot bias attention even when presented infrequently.

Dynamic Emotion Recognition and Social Inference Ability in Traumatic Brain Injury: An Eye-Tracking Comparison Study

Emotion recognition and social inference impairments are well-documented features of post-traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet the mechanisms underpinning these are not fully understood. We examined dynamic emotion recognition, social inference abilities, and eye fixation patterns between adults with and without TBI. Eighteen individuals with TBI and 18 matched non-TBI participants were recruited and underwent all three components of The Assessment of Social Inference Test (TASIT). The TBI group were less accurate in identifying emotions compared to the non-TBI group. Individuals with TBI also scored lower when distinguishing sincere and sarcastic conversations, but scored similarly to those without TBI during lie vignettes. Finally, those with TBI also had difficulty understanding the actor's intentions, feelings, and beliefs compared to participants without TBI. No group differences were found for eye fixation patterns, and there were no associations between fixations and behavioural accuracy scores. This conflicts with previous studies, and might be related to an important distinction between static and dynamic stimuli. Visual strategies appeared goal- and stimulus-driven, with attention being distributed to the most diagnostic area of the face for each emotion. These findings suggest that low-level visual deficits may not be modulating emotion recognition and social inference disturbances post-TBI.

Impact of negative links on the structural balance of brain functional network during emotion processing

Activation of specific brain areas and synchrony between them has a major role in process of emotions. Nevertheless, impact of anti-synchrony (negative links) in this process still requires to be understood. In this study, we hypothesized that quantity and topology of negative links could influence a network stability by changing of quality of its triadic associations. Therefore, a group of healthy participants were exposed to pleasant and unpleasant images while their brain responses were recorded. Subsequently, functional connectivity networks were estimated and quantity of negative links, balanced and imbalanced triads, tendency to make negative hubs, and balance energy levels of two conditions were compared. The findings indicated that perception of pleasant stimuli was associated with higher amount of negative links with a lower tendency to make a hub in theta band; while the opposite scenario was observed in beta band. It was accompanied with smaller number of imbalanced triads and more stable network in theta band, and smaller number of balanced triads and less stable network in beta band. The findings highlighted that inter regional communications require less changes to receive new information from unpleasant stimuli, although by decrement in beta band stability prepares the network for the upcoming events.

Facial affect recognition in context in adults with and without TBI

Introduction

Several studies have reported impaired emotion recognition in adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), but studies have two major design features that limit application of results to real-world contexts: (1) participants choose from among lists of basic emotions, rather than generating emotion labels, and (2) images are typically presented in isolation rather than in context. To address these limitations, we created an open-labeling task with faces shown alone or in real-life scenes, to more closely approximate how adults with TBI label facial emotions beyond the lab.

Methods

Participants were 55 adults (29 female) with moderate to severe TBI and 55 uninjured comparison peers, individually matched for race, sex, and age. Participants viewed 60 photographs of faces, either alone or in the pictured person's real-life context, and were asked what that person was feeling. We calculated the percent of responses that were standard forced-choice-task options, and also used sentiment intensity analysis to compare verbal responses between the two groups. We tracked eye movements for a subset of participants, to explore whether gaze duration or number of fixations helped explain any group differences in labels.

Results

Over 50% of responses in both groups were words other than basic emotions on standard affect tasks, highlighting the importance of eliciting open-ended responses. Valence of labels by participants with TBI was attenuated relative to valence of Comparison group labels, i.e., TBI group responses were less positive to positive images and the same was true for negative images, although the TBI group responses had higher lexical diversity. There were no significant differences in gaze duration or number of fixations between groups.

Discussion

Results revealed qualitative differences in affect labels between adults with and without TBI that would not have emerged on standard forced-choice tasks. Verbal differences did not appear to be attributable to differences in gaze patterns, leaving open the question of mechanisms of atypical affect processing in adults with TBI.

Role of facial familiarity and emotional expression intensity in ensemble emotion perception

When looking at groups of people, we can extract information from the different faces to derive properties of the group, such as its average facial emotion, although how this average is computed remains a matter of debate. Here, we examined whether our participants' personal familiarity with the faces in the group, as well as the intensity of the facial expressions, biased ensemble perception. Participants judged the average emotional expression of ensembles of four different identities whose expressions depicted either neutral, angry, or happy emotions. For the angry and happy expressions, the intensity of the emotion could be either low (e.g., slightly happy) or high (very happy). When all the identities in the ensemble were unfamiliar, the presence of any high intensity emotional face biased ensemble perception towards its emotion. However, when a familiar face was present in the ensemble, perception was biased towards the familiar face's emotion regardless of its intensity. These findings reveal that how we perceive the average emotion of a group is influenced by both the emotional intensity and familiarity of the faces comprising the group, supporting the idea that different faces may be weighted differently in ensemble perception. These findings have important implications for the judgements we make about a group's overall emotional state may be biased by individuals within the group.

Semantic satiation of emotional words impedes facial expression processing in two stages

To explore the mechanism of emotional words semantic satiation effect on facial expression processing, participants were asked to judge the facial expression (happiness or sadness) after an emotional word ((cry) or (smile)) or a neutral word ((Ah), baseline condition) was presented for 20 s. The results revealed that participants were slower in judging valence-congruent facial expressions and reported a more enlarged (Experiment 1) and prolonged (Experiment 2) N170 component than the baseline condition. No significant difference in behavior and N170 appeared between the valence-incongruent and the baseline condition. However, the amplitude of LPC (Late Positive Complex) under both valence-congruent/incongruent conditions was smaller than the baseline condition. It indicates that, in the early stage, the impeding effect of satiated emotional words is specifically constrained to facial expressions with the same emotional valence; in the late stage, such an impeding effect might spread to facial expressions with the opposite valence of the satiated emotional word.

Kick Cat Effect: Social Context Shapes the Form and Extent of Emotional Contagion

Emotional contagion refers to the transmission and interaction of emotions among people. Researchers have mainly focused on its process and mechanism, often simplifying its social background due to its complexity. Therefore, in this study, we attempt to explore whether the presence and clarity of social context affect emotional contagion and the related neural mechanisms. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to report their subjective experiences after being exposed to the facial expressions of emotional expressers, with or without the corresponding social context being presented. The results revealed that positive or negative expressions from the expressers elicited corresponding emotional experiences in the receivers, regardless of the presence of social context. However, when the social context was absent, the degree of emotional contagion was greater. In Experiment 2, we further investigated the effect of the clarity of social contexts on emotional contagion and its neural mechanisms. The results showed an effect consistent with those in Experiment 1 and highlighted the special role of N1, N2, P3, and LPP components in this process. According to the emotions as social information theory, individuals may rely more on social appraisal when they lack sufficient contextual information. By referencing the expressions of others and maintaining emotional convergence with them, individuals can adapt more appropriately to their current environment.

Reconceptualizing Emotion Recognition Ability

Emotion decoding accuracy (EDA) plays a central role within the emotional intelligence (EI) ability model. The EI-ability perspective typically assumes personality antecedents and social outcomes of EI abilities, yet, traditionally, there has been very limited research to support this contention. The present paper argues that the way in which EDA has been conceptualized and operationalized in EI research has ignored developments in social perception theory and research. These developments point, on one hand, to the importance of embedding emotion expressions in a social context and, on the other, to reformulating the definitions of emotion decoding accuracy. The present paper outlines the importance of context in the framework of a truth and bias model of the social perception of emotions (Assessment of Contextualized Emotions, ACE) for EI abilities.

Face masks influence emotion judgments of facial expressions: a drift-diffusion model

Face masks slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but it has been unknown how masks might reshape social interaction. One important possibility is that masks may influence how individuals communicate emotion through facial expressions. Here, we clarify to what extent-and how-masks influence facial emotion communication, through drift-diffusion modeling (DDM). Over two independent pre-registered studies, conducted three and 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, online participants judged expressions of 6 emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) with the lower or upper face "masked" or unmasked. Participants in Study 1 (N = 228) correctly identified expressions above chance with lower face masks. However, they were less likely-and slower-to correctly identify these expressions relative to without masks, and they accumulated evidence for emotion more slowly-via decreased drift rate in DDM. This pattern replicated and intensified 3 months later in Study 2 (N = 264). These findings highlight how effectively individuals still communicate with masks, but also explain why they can experience difficulties communicating when masked. By revealing evidence accumulation as the underlying mechanism, this work suggests that time-sensitive situations may risk miscommunication with masks. This research could inform critical interventions to promote continued mask wearing as needed.

Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores

Emotion perception is essential for successful social interactions and maintaining long-term relationships with friends and family. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social communication deficits and have reported difficulties in facial expression recognition. However, emotion recognition depends on more than just processing face expression; context is critically important to correctly infer the emotions of others. Whether context-based emotion processing is impacted in those with Autism remains unclear. Here, we used a recently developed context-based emotion perception task, called Inferential Emotion Tracking (IET), and investigated whether individuals who scored high on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) had deficits in context-based emotion perception. Using 34 videos (including Hollywood movies, home videos, and documentaries), we tested 102 participants as they continuously tracked the affect (valence and arousal) of a blurred-out, invisible character. We found that individual differences in Autism Quotient scores were more strongly correlated with IET task accuracy than they are with traditional face emotion perception tasks. This correlation remained significant even when controlling for potential covarying factors, general intelligence, and performance on traditional face perception tasks. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD may have impaired perception of contextual information, it reveals the importance of developing ecologically relevant emotion perception tasks in order to better assess and treat ASD, and it provides a new direction for further research on context-based emotion perception deficits in ASD.

Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions

The relationship between decoding ability (Emotion recognition accuracy, ERA) for negative and positive emotion expressions from only video, only audio and audio-video stimuli and the skill to understand peoples' unspoken thoughts and feelings (Empathic accuracy, EA) was tested. Participants (N = 101) from three groups (helping professionals with and without therapy training as well as non-helping professionals) saw or heard recordings of narrations of a negative event by four different persons. Based on either audio-video or audio-only recordings, the participants indicated for given time points what they thought the narrator was feeling and thinking while speaking about the event. A Bayesian regression model regressing group and ERA scores on EA scores was showing weak support only for the EA scores for ratings of unspoken feelings from audio only recordings. In a subsample, the quality of self-experienced social interactions in everyday life was assessed with a diary. The analysis of ERA and EA scores in relation to diary scores did not indicate much correspondence. The results are discussed in terms of relations between skills in decoding emotions using different test paradigms and contextual factors.

Age similarities in the anchoring effect in emotion intensity judgment

BACKGROUND

The anchoring effect refers to the tendency that an individual's numerical judgment would assimilate to an anchor (a numerical value) that appears before that judgment. This study investigated whether the anchoring effect exists in the emotion judgment of younger and older adults and observed the age-related characteristics. This could not only broaden the explanation of the anchoring effect but also link this classic judgment bias with daily emotion judgment to refresh our understanding of older adults' ability in emotional perspective taking.

METHOD

Participants (older adults: n = 64, age range: 60-74, 27 males; younger adults: n = 68, age range: 18-34, 34 males) read a brief emotional story and compared the protagonist's emotion intensity to a given numerical anchor (lower or higher than the anchor) and then estimated the protagonist's possible emotion intensity in that story. The task was divided into two cases according to anchor relevance (anchors are relevant or irrelevant relative to the judgment target).

RESULTS

The results showed that the estimates were higher under high-anchor than low-anchor conditions, suggesting the robust anchoring effect. Further, the anchoring effect was greater for anchor-relevant than anchor-irrelevant tasks and for negative rather than positive emotions. No age differences were found.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

The results indicated that the anchoring effect is robust and stable for younger and older adults, even though the anchor information seemed irrelevant. Finally, perceiving others' negative emotions is a crucial but rather difficult aspect of empathy, which could be a challenge and requires more caution for accurate interpretation.

Affective theory of mind impairments underlying callous-unemotional traits and the role of cognitive control

Affective theory of mind (aToM) impairments associated with the youth antisocial phenotype callous-unemotional (CU) traits predict antisocial behaviour above CU traits alone. Importantly, CU traits associate with decrements in complex but not basic aToM. aToM is modulated by cognitive control and CU traits associate with cognitive control impairments; thus, cognitive control is a plausible mechanism underlying aToM impairments in CU traits. Because cognitive control is dependent on the availability of cognitive resources, youth with CU traits may have difficulty with allocating cognitive resources under greater demands that impact complex aToM. To test this, 81 participants (ages 12-14, Female = 51.8%, Male = 48.2%) were recruited to complete a behavioural paradigm that involved an initial aToM task with complex and basic emotions followed by placing additional demands on cognitive control and a final repeat of the same aToM task. Results indicate adolescents higher in CU traits had intact basic aToM but less accuracy in complex aToM that worsened after taxing cognitive control; and this load only required a short duration to account for ToM decrements (200 ms [range 150-1600 ms]). These results demonstrate CU traits association with cognitive control limitations that impact complex aToM. This may partially explain antisocial behaviour associated with CU traits.

Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16-30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N = 5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N = 587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.

Neural response and representation: Facial expressions in scenes

Previous studies have shown that the brain generates expectations based on scenes, which affects facial expression recognition. However, although facial expressions are known to interact with perception, the mechanism underlying this interaction remains poorly understood. Here, we used frequency labeling and decoding techniques to reveal the effects of scene-based expectation on the amplitude and representational strength of neural activity. We also reduced the relative reliability between expectation and sensory input by blurring facial expressions to further investigate the effects of this relative reliability on the pattern of neural activation and representation. Participants viewed emotional changes in unblurred or blurred facial expressions, which flickered at a rate of 6 Hz within a scene. We found that facial expressions that were congruent with the emotional significance of the scene elicited a larger steady-state visual evoked potential amplitude than did facial expressions that were incongruent with the emotional significance of a scene, in both unblurred and blurred conditions. We also found that expected facial expression representations were stronger than unexpected representations during the unblurred condition. In the blurred condition, unexpected representations were stronger than expected representations. Taken together, these results suggested that facial expression processing in the visual cortex is modulated by top-down signals. The relative reliability of expectation and sensory input moderated the influence of a scene on facial expression representation. Furthermore, our study showed that neural activation amplitudes did not correspond to representational strength.

Words matter when inferring emotions: a conceptual replication and extension

It is long known that facial configurations play a critical role when inferring mental and emotional states from others. Nevertheless, there is still a scientific debate on how we infer emotions from facial configurations. The theory of constructed emotion (TCE) suggests that we may infer different emotions from the same facial configuration, depending on the context (e.g. provided by visual and lexical cues) in which they are perceived. For instance, a recent study found that participants were more accurate in inferring mental and emotional states across three different datasets (i.e. RMET, static and dynamic emojis) when words were provided (i.e. forced-choice task), compared to when they were not (i.e. free-labelling task), suggesting that words serve as contexts that modulate the inference from facial configurations. The goal of the current within-subject study was to replicate and extend these findings by adding a fourth dataset (KDEF-dyn), consisting of morphed human faces (to increase the ecological validity). Replicating previous findings, we observed that words increased accuracy across the three (previously used) datasets, an effect that was also observed for the facial morphed stimuli. Our findings are in line with the TCE, providing support for the importance of contextual verbal cues in emotion perception.

A stenography of empathy: Toward a consensual model of the empathic process

Empathy has gained popularity in the general population and the scientific world during the past decade. Recently, several researchers found a significant decrease in empathy scores of healthcare students (notably medical students) and recommend promoting empathy skills in several fields of education. The current paper presents a new model of the empathic process: a stenography of empathy compelling scientific data and contemporary conceptions. Indeed, we combined all pioneer researchers' conceptions of empathy (Davis, Decety, Batson, Preston & de Waal) into an integrative model. This model is centered on the empathizer (i.e., a person observing a target experiencing emotions) and displays how all empathy components are articulated, explaining the individuals' general functioning and how the process might become dysfunctional. We illustrated applications of the model with three clinical examples (i.e., burnout, psychopathy, and borderline personality disorders) to display how empathy is related to psychopathological symptoms. We believe this new dynamic and sequential model would be helpful in explaining how empathy works, which is of great interest to healthcare students, clinicians, researchers, and academics.

What Do We Know About Threat-Related Perceptual Decision Making?

The ability to make rapid and precise decisions regarding the presence or absence of threats in our environment is critical for our survival. While threatening stimuli may be detected more accurately and faster due to the "bottom-up" salience of their features, in the real-world, these stimuli are often encountered in familiar environments in which "top-down" cues signal their arrival. There has been significant progress in our understanding of the mechanisms by which we make perceptual decisions regarding relatively routine stimuli; however, the mechanisms of threat-related perceptual decision-making remain unclear. In this paper, we discuss the psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms by which information from threatening stimuli is integrated with our prior knowledge from cues and surrounding contexts to guide perceptual decision-making.

Customizing virtual interpersonal skills training applications may not improve trainee performance

While some theoretical perspectives imply that the context of a virtual training should be customized to match the intended context where those skills would ultimately be applied, others suggest this might not be necessary for learning. It is important to determine whether manipulating context matters for performance in training applications because customized virtual training systems made for specific use cases are more costly than generic "off-the-shelf" ones designed for a broader set of users. Accordingly, we report a study where military cadets use a virtual platform to practice their negotiation skills, and are randomly assigned to one of two virtual context conditions: military versus civilian. Out of 28 measures capturing performance in the negotiation, there was only one significant result: cadets in the civilian condition politely ask the agent to make an offer significantly more than those in the military condition. These results imply that-for this interpersonal skills application, and perhaps ones like it-virtual context may matter very little for performance during social skills training, and that commercial systems may yield real benefits to military scenarios with little-to-no modification.

Exploring effects of response biases in affect induction procedures

This study examined whether self-reports or ratings of experienced affect, often used as manipulation checks on the efficacy of affect induction procedures (AIPs), reflect genuine changes in affective states rather than response biases arising from demand characteristics or social desirability effects. In a between-participants design, participants were exposed to positive, negative and neutral images with valence-congruent music or sound to induce happy, sad and neutral mood. Half of the participants had to actively appraise each image whereas the other half viewed images passively. We hypothesised that if ratings of affective valence are subject to response biases then they should reflect the target mood in the same way for active appraisal and passive exposure as participants encountered the same affective stimuli in both conditions. We also tested whether the AIP resulted in mood-congruent changes in facial expressions analysed by FaceReader to see whether behavioural indicators corroborate the self-reports. The results showed that while participants' ratings reflected the induced target valence, the difference between positive and negative AIP was significantly attenuated in the active appraisal condition, suggesting that self-reports of mood experienced after the AIP are not entirely a reflection of response biases. However, there were no effects of the AIP on FaceReader valence scores, in line with theories questioning the existence of cross-culturally and inter-individually universal behavioural indicators of affective states. Efficacy of AIPs is therefore best checked using self-reports.

Acoustic and structural differences between musically portrayed subtypes of fear

Fear is a frequently studied emotion category in music and emotion research. However, research in music theory suggests that music can convey finer-grained subtypes of fear, such as terror and anxiety. Previous research on musically expressed emotions has neglected to investigate subtypes of fearful emotions. This study seeks to fill this gap in the literature. To that end, 99 participants rated the emotional impression of short excerpts of horror film music predicted to convey terror and anxiety, respectively. Then, the excerpts that most effectively conveyed these target emotions were analyzed descriptively and acoustically to demonstrate the sonic differences between musically conveyed terror and anxiety. The results support the hypothesis that music conveys terror and anxiety with markedly different musical structures and acoustic features. Terrifying music has a brighter, rougher, harsher timbre, is musically denser, and may be faster and louder than anxious music. Anxious music has a greater degree of loudness variability. Both types of fearful music tend towards minor modalities and are rhythmically unpredictable. These findings further support the application of emotional granularity in music and emotion research.

What is missing in the study of emotion expression?

While approaching celebrations for the 150 years of "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals", scientists' conclusions on emotion expression are still debated. Emotion expression has been traditionally anchored to prototypical and mutually exclusive facial expressions (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). However, people express emotions in nuanced patterns and - crucially - not everything is in the face. In recent decades considerable work has critiqued this classical view, calling for a more fluid and flexible approach that considers how humans dynamically perform genuine expressions with their bodies in context. A growing body of evidence suggests that each emotional display is a complex, multi-component, motoric event. The human face is never static, but continuously acts and reacts to internal and environmental stimuli, with the coordinated action of muscles throughout the body. Moreover, two anatomically and functionally different neural pathways sub-serve voluntary and involuntary expressions. An interesting implication is that we have distinct and independent pathways for genuine and posed facial expressions, and different combinations may occur across the vertical facial axis. Investigating the time course of these facial blends, which can be controlled consciously only in part, is recently providing a useful operational test for comparing the different predictions of various models on the lateralization of emotions. This concise review will identify shortcomings and new challenges regarding the study of emotion expressions at face, body, and contextual levels, eventually resulting in a theoretical and methodological shift in the study of emotions. We contend that the most feasible solution to address the complex world of emotion expression is defining a completely new and more complete approach to emotional investigation. This approach can potentially lead us to the roots of emotional display, and to the individual mechanisms underlying their expression (i.e., individual emotional signatures).

Challenges of measuring empathic accuracy: A mentalizing versus experience-sharing paradigm

Empathic accuracy, the ability to accurately infer the mental states of others, is essential to successful interpersonal relationships. Perceivers can interpret targets' emotional experiences by decoding facial and voice cues (mentalizing) or by using their own feelings as referents (experience-sharing). We examined the relative efficacy of these processes via a replication and extension of Zhou et al. (Psychol Sci., 28, 2017, 482) who found experience-sharing to be more successful but undervalued. Participants estimated targets' emotional ratings in response to positive, neutral and negative images in mentalizing or experience-sharing conditions. Our analysis of absolute magnitudes of error showed similar levels of accuracy across process conditions (a non-replication of Zhou et al.); however, our exploratory analysis of directional variation across valence using raw scores revealed a pattern of conservative estimates for affective stimuli, which was accentuated in the mentalizing condition. Thus, our exploratory analysis lends conceptual support to Zhou et al.'s finding that experience-sharing represents the more successful process, and we replicated their finding that it was nevertheless undervalued. Extending Zhou et al., we also found that empathic accuracy was predicted by individual differences in fiction-exposure. Future research may further examine the impact of individual differences and stimulus properties in the employment of empathic inferencing strategies.

The age bias in labeling facial expressions in children: Effects of intensity and expression

Emotion reasoning, including labeling of facial expressions, is an important building block for a child's social development. This study investigated age biases in labeling facial expressions in children and adults, focusing on the influence of intensity and expression on age bias. Children (5 to 14 years old; N = 152) and adults (19 to 25 years old; N = 30) labeled happiness, disgust or sadness at five intensity levels (0%; 25%; 50%; 75%; and 100%) in facial images of children and adults. Sensitivity was computed for each of the expression-intensity combinations, separately for the child and adult faces. Results show that children and adults have an age bias at low levels of intensity (25%). In the case of sadness, children have an age bias for all intensities. Thus, the impact of the age of the face seems largest for expressions which might be most difficult to recognise. Moreover, both adults and children label most expressions best in adult rather than child faces, leading to an other-age bias in children and an own-age bias in adults. Overall, these findings reveal that both children and adults exhibit an age bias in labeling subtle facial expressions of emotions.

Construction of face databases for tasks to recognize facial expressions of basic emotions: a systematic review

ABSTRACT. Recognizing the other's emotions is an important skill for the social context that can be modulated by variables such as gender, age, and race. A number of studies seek to elaborate specific face databases to assess the recognition of basic emotions in different contexts. Objectives: This systematic review sought to gather these studies, describing and comparing the methodologies used in their elaboration. Methods: The databases used to select the articles were the following: PubMed, Web of Science, PsycInfo, and Scopus. The following word crossing was used: “Facial expression database OR Stimulus set AND development OR Validation.” Results: A total of 36 articles showed that most of the studies used actors to express the emotions that were elicited from specific situations to generate the most spontaneous emotion possible. The databases were mainly composed of colorful and static stimuli. In addition, most of the studies sought to establish and describe patterns to record the stimuli, such as color of the garments used and background. The psychometric properties of the databases are also described. Conclusions: The data presented in this review point to the methodological heterogeneity among the studies. Nevertheless, we describe their patterns, contributing to the planning of new research studies that seek to create databases for new contexts.

Surprise as an Emotion: A Response to Ortony

We write in response to an article published in this journal by Andrew Ortony titled “Are All ‘Basic Emotions’ Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct.” The author claimed that “for all its elevated status as a basic emotion, surprise fails to satisfy the minimal requirements that [he] proposed for something to be an emotion, and if it is not an emotion, it cannot possibly be a basic emotion.” Although we acknowledge the concerns brought forth by Ortony, we respectfully disagree with his conclusion about surprise. To make a case against the assertion that surprise is valence-free, we summarize an extensive body of work showing that surprise is indeed valenced—in a specific manner (i.e., ambiguously valenced)—and that it meets all of Ortony’s criteria for an emotion. In other words, rather than being described as neither positive nor negative, this emotion is either positive or negative. We consider the data with respect to surprise as a basic emotion, and we dispute the definitions of basic emotions as “widely divergent.” Future work is needed to continue defining an emotion, and a basic emotion, but we believe this is a worthy effort toward shaping a still evolving field.

Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning, and population thinking in psychological science

This article considers the status and study of "context" in psychological science through the lens of research on emotional expressions. The article begins by updating three well-trod methodological debates on the role of context in emotional expressions to reconsider several fundamental assumptions lurking within the field's dominant methodological tradition: namely, that certain expressive movements have biologically prepared, inherent emotional meanings that issue from singular, universal processes which are independent of but interact with contextual influences. The second part of this article considers the scientific opportunities that await if we set aside this traditional understanding of "context" as a moderator of signals with inherent psychological meaning and instead consider the possibility that psychological events emerge in ecosystems of signal ensembles, such that the psychological meaning of any individual signal is entirely relational. Such a fundamental shift has radical implications not only for the science of emotion but for psychological science more generally. It offers opportunities to improve the validity and trustworthiness of psychological science beyond what can be achieved with improvements to methodological rigor alone. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional expression in human odour

Recent work has demonstrated that human body odour alters with changing emotional state and that emotionally laden odours can affect the physiology and behaviour of people exposed to them. Here we review these discoveries, which we believe add to a growing recognition that the human sense of smell and its potential role in social interactions have been underappreciated. However, we also critically evaluate the current evidence, with a particular focus on methodology and the interpretation of emotional odour studies. We argue that while the evidence convincingly indicates that humans retain a capacity for olfactory communication of emotion, the extent to which this occurs in ordinary social interaction remains an open question. Future studies should place fewer restrictions on participant selection and lifestyle and adopt more realistic experimental designs. We also need to devote more consideration to underlying mechanisms and to recognise the constraints that these may place on effective communication. Finally, we outline some promising approaches to address these issues, and raise some broader theoretical questions that such approaches may help us to answer.

Trustworthiness perception is mandatory: Task instructions do not modulate fast periodic visual stimulation trustworthiness responses

Although it is often assumed that humans spontaneously respond to the trustworthiness of others’ faces, it is still unclear whether responses to facial trust are mandatory or can be modulated by instructions. Considerable scientific interest lies in understanding whether trust processing is mandatory, given the societal consequences of biased trusting behavior. We tested whether neural responses indexing trustworthiness discrimination depended on whether the task involved focusing on facial trustworthiness or not, using a fast periodic visual stimulation electroencephalography oddball paradigm with a neural marker of trustworthiness discrimination at 1 Hz. Participants judged faces on size without any reference to trust, explicitly formed impressions of facial trust, or were given a financial lending context that primed trust, without explicit trust judgement instructions. Significant trustworthiness discrimination responses at 1 Hz were found in all three conditions, demonstrating the robust nature of trustworthiness discrimination at the neural level. Moreover, no effect of task instruction was observed, with Bayesian analyses providing moderate to decisive evidence that task instruction did not affect trustworthiness discrimination. Our finding that visual trustworthiness discrimination is mandatory points to the remarkable spontaneity of trustworthiness processing, providing clues regarding why these often unreliable impressions are ubiquitous.

Audio-Visual Interactions During Emotion Processing in Bicultural Bilinguals

Despite the growing number of bicultural bilinguals in the world, the way in which multisensory emotions are evaluated by bilinguals who identify with two or more cultures remains unknown. In the present study, Chinese-English bicultural bilinguals from Singapore viewed Asian or Caucasian faces and heard Mandarin or English speech, and evaluated the emotion from one of the two simultaneously-presented modalities. Reliance on the visual modality was greater when bicultural bilinguals processed Western audio-visual emotion information. Although no differences between modalities emerged when processing East-Asian audio-visual emotion information, correlations revealed that bicultural bilinguals increased their reliance on the auditory modality with more daily exposure to East-Asian cultures. Greater interference from the irrelevant modality was observed for Asian faces paired with English speech than for Caucasian faces paired with Mandarin speech. We conclude that processing of emotion in bicultural bilinguals is guided by culture-specific norms, and that familiarity influences how the emotions of those who speak a foreign language are perceived and evaluated.

Comunicación no verbal de emociones: variables sociodemográficas y ventaja endogrupal

En el campo de la comunicación no verbal de las emociones aún existe un debate en torno a la universalidad de las expresiones de emoción y el efecto que tiene la cultura en ellas. Actualmente existen dos teorías que tratan de explicar este fenómeno, la teoría neurocultural y la teoría de los dialectos. Ambas se enfocan en explicar la comunicación no verbal de emociones, pero la primera se centra en los aspectos universales, mientras que la segunda lo hace en la cultura. El objetivo del presente estudio fue indagar la ventaja endogrupal al interior de una cultura. Se diseñó un cuasiexperimento en el que se solicitó a 107 participantes que indicaran la emoción expresada en 42 estímulos en tres formatos de presentación distintos.  Los resultados indican la existencia de dicha ventaja en las mujeres y jóvenes. Los presentes resultados ilustran los efectos de la cultura en este fenómeno.

Contextual cues about reciprocity impact ratings of smile sincerity

Research has shown that context influences how sincere a smile appears to observers. That said, most studies on this topic have focused exclusively on situational cues (e.g. smiling while at a party versus smiling during a job interview) and few have examined other elements of context. One important element concerns any knowledge an observer might have about the smiler as an individual (e.g. their habitual behaviours, traits or attitudes). In this manuscript, we present three experiments that explored the influence of such knowledge on ratings of smile sincerity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the sincerity of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles after having been exposed to cues about the smiler's tendency to reciprocate (this person always, never or occasionally returns favours). In Experiment 3 they performed the same task but with cues about the smiler's love of learning (this person always, never or occasionally enjoys learning new tasks). The results show that cues about the smiler's reciprocity tendency influenced participants' ratings of smile sincerity and did so in a stronger manner than cues about the smiler's love of learning. Overall, these results both strengthen and broaden the literature on the role of context on judgements of smile sincerity.

Conceptualising Bhāvana: How do contemplative Hindu traditions inform understanding emotions and well-being?

There are more than 150 (grand and micro) theories of emotion. Even as European phenomenological perspectives do mention self and agency, the mainstream discourse on emotion in psychology is quite limited in presenting a coherent theory of affective process. A key aspect of Euro-American theories of emotion is that, these theories are topographically flat, thus, unable to provide mechanisms of transformation of emotion relevant for well-being. In this paper, a theory-based framework for emotional transformation through understanding Indian concepts in āyurveda, yoga sutras and the nātya is discussed. Second, the paper proposes that it is Śānta (the Indian conceptualisation of peace) alone, that permits a substantive possibility to a radical re-emotion or experiencing and articulating well-being. The concept for a radical re-emotion is called Bhāvanā, indicating the possibility of conscious and radical re-creation and re-imagination of affective relationships with objects, concepts, processes and people in the world, re-orienting from the isolated ‘re-appraisal’, ‘self-regulation and control’ of emotion as discussed in the mainstream paradigm. The paper contends that these culturally relevant models educate and inform global psychology theory and applied practice.

The Psychology of Communication: The Interplay Between Language and Culture Through Time

Human behavior is often guided by the development and use of language as a means of communication and as a way to represent thoughts and knowledge. Notions of linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis indicate that language plays a role in structuring the worldview and perceptions of individuals. The current work will explore how those perceptions are not only guided by language but are also moderated by culture and the beliefs, mores, and ideas that are sanctioned and regulated by a given cultural group. Papers, chapters, and books that have demonstrated the ways in which culture moderates behavior by way of the language that is used to express that culture will be of primary focus. Moreover, a developmental view of language learning will frame this approach in learning how language, culture, and thought have been examined and assessed as a way of describing how, together, they moderate human behavior. Is there truly evidence of linguistic relativity? Does language serve as the primary moderator of thought, or do cultural influences play a more pressing role in cognitive thought processes for a given group? Developments in theory, methods, and data that help explore these concepts through their publication in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology as well as other outlets will be presented and discussed as a framework that can be developed to generate future research questions, testing paradigms, and experimental approaches—both basic and applied.