Bumpy ride ahead: Anticipated effort as emotional evidence?

Conscious reportable (un)pleasantness feelings were shown to be successfully described by a process in which evidence favoring pleasant and unpleasant feelings accumulates until one response wins the race. This approach is challenged by (a) insufficient specification of "evidence," and (b) incomplete verification that participants report their truly experienced (un)pleasant feelings and not what they expect to feel. In each trial in this preregistered experiment, the (un)pleasant feeling reports regarding emotion evoking pictures was embedded in a period when participants expected a low-effort task (feature visual search) or a high-effort task (feature-conjunction search). Fitting the Linear Ballistic Accumulator model to the feeling report data shows that anticipated effort was associated with a higher rate of unpleasant evidence accumulation, but only when the emotion evoking pictures were normatively unpleasant and not when they were normatively pleasant. These results suggest that anticipated effort may be one source of "evidence," but only given a certain interpretation of the findings, and that genuinely felt emotions contribute to the emotion reports, assuming that participants intended to react to the pictures, as instructed, and not to the anticipated effort.

Botulinum Toxin Treatment for Depression: A New Paradigm for Psychiatry

Multiple randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials have shown that botulinum toxin A (BoNT/A), when injected into the frown musculature, is an antidepressant. This review outlines the conceptual narrative behind this treatment modality, starting with theory developed by Charles Darwin. We develop the concept of emotional proprioception and discuss how the muscles of facial expression play an important role in relaying valenced information to the brain's emotional neuroanatomical circuit. We review the role of facial frown musculature as the brain's barometer and transmitter of negatively valanced emotional information. The direct connections between the corrugator muscles and the amygdala are reviewed, and these provide a neuroanatomical circuit that is a logical target for treatment with BoNT/A. The centrality of amygdala dysfunction in the pathogenesis of many psychiatric disorders, and the evidence that BoNT/A modulates amygdala activity, provides the mechanistic link between BoNT/A and its antidepressant activity. Animal models of BoNT/A's antidepressant effects confirm the evolutionary conservation of this emotional circuit. The clinical and theoretical implications of this evidence, as it relates to the potential treatment of a broad range of psychiatric disorders by BoNT/A, is discussed. The ease of administration, long duration, and favorable side effect profile of this therapy is reviewed in the context of existing antidepressant treatments.

A Survey on Databases for Multimodal Emotion Recognition and an Introduction to the VIRI (Visible and InfraRed Image) Database

Multimodal human–computer interaction (HCI) systems pledge a more human–human-like interaction between machines and humans. Their prowess in emanating an unambiguous information exchange between the two makes these systems more reliable, efficient, less error prone, and capable of solving complex tasks. Emotion recognition is a realm of HCI that follows multimodality to achieve accurate and natural results. The prodigious use of affective identification in e-learning, marketing, security, health sciences, etc., has increased demand for high-precision emotion recognition systems. Machine learning (ML) is getting its feet wet to ameliorate the process by tweaking the architectures or wielding high-quality databases (DB). This paper presents a survey of such DBs that are being used to develop multimodal emotion recognition (MER) systems. The survey illustrates the DBs that contain multi-channel data, such as facial expressions, speech, physiological signals, body movements, gestures, and lexical features. Few unimodal DBs are also discussed that work in conjunction with other DBs for affect recognition. Further, VIRI, a new DB of visible and infrared (IR) images of subjects expressing five emotions in an uncontrolled, real-world environment, is presented. A rationale for the superiority of the presented corpus over the existing ones is instituted.

Does Long-Term Training in a Water Immersion Environment Change Interoception?

The aim of this study was to investigate individual interoception by comparing the responses of swimmers and baseball players when exposed to specific water environments, depending on training content and environment. Forty-eight healthy male university students were evaluated for their interoceptive response (accuracy, sensibility, and awareness) and heart rate following 25 min of water immersion (WI) at 35 °C. We assessed three conditions: pre-WI, during WI, and post-WI. The results indicated that interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) did not differ between groups because both swimming and baseball do not require emotional expression, as opposed to an activity such as dance. The heart rate was significantly decreased at post-WI compared to that at pre-WI. The IAcc of post-WI presented as higher than that of pre-WI. In addition, there was a significant negative correlation between the ratio of IAcc and that of HR among subjects. Moreover, the attention regulation subscale of the MAIA changed in the WI environment and the ratio of IAcc was negatively correlated with that of the not-distracting subscale of the MAIA. These results suggested that interoception did not differ among the athletes who had long-term training, which enabled them to acquire multi-modal sensorimotor integration, compared to that of non-athlete control participants. We conclude that interoception did not differ among athletes who had long-term training compared to that of non-athlete control participants.

Embodiment: I sat, I felt, I performed - Posture effects on mood and cognitive performance

Previous embodiment findings indicate a relationship between physical posture and mood states, suggesting upright postures induce positive mood states. Findings also showed a relationship between moods and cognitive performance. While positive mood states were found to be related to increased processing speed, negative mood states were associated with higher processing accuracy in cognitive task performance. This implies that posture may affect the aforementioned sub-aspects of cognitive performance via mood states. Additionally, most studies on posture effects rely on explicit posture manipulation. With that in mind, our research explores the effects of implicitly manipulated postures on processing speed and accuracy and whether these effects are mediated by general mood. The results revealed that subjects in our sample (N = 82, M = 23.09years) who adopted an upright posture showed a more positive general mood (d = 0.50) and higher processing speed (d = 0.42) compared to those in stooped postures. Surprisingly, no differences in processing accuracy were found. There was no evidence of the proposed mediation in our data.

Interpersonal physiological synchrony is associated with first person and third person subjective assessments of excitement during cooperative joint tasks

Interpersonal physiological synchrony has been shown to play important roles in social activities. While most studies have shed light on the effects of physiological synchrony on recognition of the group state, such as cohesion or togetherness, the effect of physiological synchrony on the recognition of emotional experience has not been adequately researched. In this study, we examined how physiological synchrony is associated with first- and third-person emotion recognition during a joint task. Two participants played a cooperative block-stacking game (Jenga), alternating their roles as player and adviser, while their heart rates were recorded. The participants evaluated their own emotional experience for each turn. Bystanders watched the game to evaluate the players' emotions. Results showed that the players' subjective excitement increased not only with their own heart rate, but also with increased heart rate synchrony with their adviser. Heart rate synchrony between player and adviser also related to increased intensity in perceived excitement from the bystanders. Given that both first- and third-person emotion recognition can have cumulative impacts on a group, the relationship between physiological synchrony and emotion recognition observed in the present study will help deepen understanding of the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying larger group phenomena such as crowd excitement.

Assessing Vocal Chanting as an Online Psychosocial Intervention

The ancient practice of chanting typically takes place within a community as a part of a live ceremony or ritual. Research suggests that chanting leads to improved mood, reduced stress, and increased wellbeing. During the global pandemic, many chanting practices were moved online in order to adhere to social distancing recommendations. However, it is unclear whether the benefits of live chanting occur when practiced in an online format. The present study assessed the effects of a 10-min online chanting session on stress, mood, and connectedness, carried out either in a group or individually. The study employed a 2 (chanting vs. control) × 2 (group vs. individual) between-subjects design. Participants (N = 117) were pseudo-randomly allocated across the four conditions. Before and after participation, individuals completed the Spielberg’s State Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, the Social Connectedness Scale and Aron’s Inclusion of Self in Other Scale. Online chanting led to a significant reduction in stress and an increase in positive affect when compared to the online control task. Participants who took part in group chanting also felt more connected to members of their chanting group than participants in the control group. However, feelings of general connectedness to all people remained similar across conditions. The investigation provides evidence that online chanting may be a useful psychosocial intervention, whether practiced individually or in a group.

Move and Be Moved: The Effect of Moving Specific Movement Elements on the Experience of Happiness

Dynamic body feedback is used in dance movement therapy (DMT), with the aim to facilitate emotional expression and a change of emotional state through movement and dance for individuals with psychosocial or psychiatric complaints. It has been demonstrated that moving in a specific way can evoke and regulate related emotions. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of executing a unique set of kinetic movement elements on an individual mover's experience of happiness. A specific sequence consisting of movement elements that recent studies have related to the feeling of happiness was created and used in a series of conditions. To achieve a more realistic reflection of DMT practice, the study incorporated the interpersonal dimension between the dance movement therapist (DMTh) and the client, and the impact of this interbodily feedback on the emotional state of the client. This quantitative study was conducted in a within-subject design. Five male and 20 female participants (mean age = 20.72) participated in three conditions: a solo executed movement sequence, a movement sequence executed with a DMTh who attuned and mirrored the movements, and a solo executed movement sequence not associated with feelings of happiness. Participants were only informed about the movements and not the feelings that may be provoked by these movements. The effects on individuals were measured using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and visual analog scales. Results showed that a specific movement sequence based on movement elements associated with happiness executed with a DMTh can significantly enhance the corresponding affective state. An additional finding of this study indicated that facilitating expressed emotion through movement elements that are not associated with happiness can enhance feelings such as empowerment, pride, and determination, which are experienced as part of positive affect. The results show the impact of specific full-body movement elements on the emotional state and the support outcome of DMT on emotion regulation.

Vocal signals only impact speakers' own emotions when they are self-attributed

Emotions are often accompanied by vocalizations whose acoustic features provide information about the physiological state of the speaker. Here, we ask if perceiving these affective signals in one's own voice has an impact on one's own emotional state, and if it is necessary to identify these signals as self-originated for the emotional effect to occur. Participants had to deliberate out loud about how they would feel in various familiar emotional scenarios, while we covertly manipulated their voices in order to make them sound happy or sad. Perceiving the artificial affective signals in their own voice altered participants' judgements about how they would feel in these situations. Crucially, this effect disappeared when participants detected the vocal manipulation, either explicitly or implicitly. The original valence of the scenarios also modulated the vocal feedback effect. These results highlight the role of the exteroception of self-attributed affective signals in the emergence of emotional feelings.

Augmenting aesthetic chills using a wearable prosthesis improves their downstream effects on reward and social cognition

Previous studies on aesthetic chills (i.e., psychogenic shivers) demonstrate their positive effects on stress, pleasure, and social cognition. We tested whether we could artificially enhance this emotion and its downstream effects by intervening on its somatic markers using wearable technology. We built a device generating cold and vibrotactile sensations down the spine of subjects in temporal conjunction with a chill-eliciting audiovisual stimulus, enhancing the somatosensation of cold underlying aesthetic chills. Results suggest that participants wearing the device experienced significantly more chills, and chills of greater intensity. Further, these subjects reported sharing the feelings expressed in the stimulus to a greater degree, and felt more pleasure during the experience. These preliminary results demonstrate that emotion prosthetics and somatosensory interfaces offer new possibilities of modulating human emotions from the bottom-up (body to mind). Future challenges will include testing the device on a larger sample and diversifying the type of stimuli to account for negatively valenced chills and intercultural differences. Interoceptive technologies offer a new paradigm for affective neuroscience, allowing controlled intervention on conscious feelings and their downstream effects on higher-order cognition.

Physiological correlates of subjective emotional valence and arousal dynamics while viewing films

An exploration of the physiological correlates of subjective emotional states has theoretical and practical significance. Previous studies have reported that subjective valence and arousal correspond to facial electromyography (EMG) and electrodermal activity (EDA), respectively, across stimuli. However, the reported results were inconsistent, no study investigated subjective-physiological concordance across time, and measures of arousal remain controversial. To investigate these issues, while healthy adults (n = 20) viewed emotional films, we assessed overall and continuous ratings of valence and arousal and recorded EMG from the corrugator supercilii and zygomatic major, EDA from the palms and forehead, and nose-tip temperature. The corrugator and zygomatic EMG were negatively and positively associated with valence ratings, respectively, across stimuli and time. EDA (both sites) and nose-tip temperature were positively and negatively associated with arousal ratings, respectively, across stimuli and time. It is concluded that subjective emotional valence and arousal dynamics have specific physiological correlates.

What "Tears" Remind Us of: An Investigation of Embodied Cognition and Schizotypal Personality Trait Using Pencil and Teardrop Glasses

Facial expressions influence our experience and perception of emotions—they not only tell other people what we are feeling but also might tell us what to feel via sensory feedback. We conducted three experiments to investigate the interaction between facial feedback phenomena and different environmental stimuli, by asking participants to remember emotional autobiographical memories. Moreover, we examined how people with schizotypal traits would be affected by their experience of emotional facial simulations. We found that using a directed approach (gripping a pencil with teeth/lips) while remembering a specific autobiographical memory could successfully evoke participants’ positive (e.g., happy and excited)/negative (e.g., angry and sad) emotions (i.e., Experiment 1). When using indirective environmental stimuli (e.g., teardrop glasses), the results of our experiments (i.e., Experiments 2 and 3) investigating facial feedback and the effect of teardrop glasses showed that participants who scored low in schizotypy reported little effect from wearing teardrop glasses, while those with high schizotypy reported a much greater effect in both between- and within-subject conditions. The results are discussed from the perspective of sense of ownership, which people with schizophrenia are believed to have deficits in.

Convergence of physiological responses to pain during face-to-face interaction

Empathy with another’s pain is an important social glue for maintaining interpersonal relationships. In most previous studies investigating the sharing of pain, a signal conveying a painful experience is presented by a target (“sender”) as a stimulus to a participant (“receiver”), and the emotional/physiological responses of the participant are measured. However, this unilateral “sender-receiver” paradigm does not adequately address the possible bidirectional experience of shared pain accruing from interaction. Our aim was therefore to investigate the bidirectional effects of sharing pain in social settings. Thirty-six unfamiliar pairs were simultaneously and repeatedly exposed to the same pain-provoking (thermal) stimuli, either in a face-to-face or a “shielded” condition where a partition prevented the partner’s responses from being fully observed. We recorded the blood volume pulse of each participant to measure the acute sympathetic response while a pair of participants experienced the stimuli simultaneously. The results revealed that participants with weaker reactions elevated their physiological reactivity to the stimulus in accordance with their partner’s reactions in the face-to-face condition. The pair-level physiological similarity was also higher compared to the shielded condition. Such a low-to-high physiological convergence may underlie the collective elevation of pain expressions, which is often observed in interactive settings.

Happy you, happy me: expressive changes on a stranger's voice recruit faster implicit processes than self-produced expressions

In social interactions, people have to pay attention both to the ‘what’ and ‘who’. In particular, expressive changes heard on speech signals have to be integrated with speaker identity, differentiating e.g. self- and other-produced signals. While previous research has shown that self-related visual information processing is facilitated compared to non-self stimuli, evidence in the auditory modality remains mixed. Here, we compared electroencephalography (EEG) responses to expressive changes in sequence of self- or other-produced speech sounds using a mismatch negativity (MMN) passive oddball paradigm. Critically, to control for speaker differences, we used programmable acoustic transformations to create voice deviants that differed from standards in exactly the same manner, making EEG responses to such deviations comparable between sequences. Our results indicate that expressive changes on a stranger’s voice are highly prioritized in auditory processing compared to identical changes on the self-voice. Other-voice deviants generate earlier MMN onset responses and involve stronger cortical activations in a left motor and somatosensory network suggestive of an increased recruitment of resources for less internally predictable, and therefore perhaps more socially relevant, signals.

Neuroscience in service research: an overview and discussion of its possibilities

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to discuss recent developments in neuroscientific methods and demonstrate its potential for the service field. This work is a call to action for more service researchers to adopt promising and increasingly accessible neuro-tools that allow the service field to benefit from neuroscience theories and insights.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper synthesizes key literature from a variety of domains (e.g. neuroscience, consumer neuroscience and organizational neuroscience) to provide an in-depth background to start applying neuro-tools. Specifically, this paper outlines the most important neuro-tools today and discusses their theoretical and empirical value.

Findings

To date, the use of neuro-tools in the service field is limited. This is surprising given the great potential they hold to advance service research. To stimulate the use of neuro-tools in the service area, the authors provide a roadmap to enable neuroscientific service studies and conclude with a discussion on promising areas (e.g. service experience and servicescape) ripe for neuroscientific input.

Originality/value

The paper offers service researchers a starting point to understand the potential benefits of adopting the neuroscientific method and shows their complementarity with traditional service research methods like surveys, experiments and qualitative research. In addition, this paper may also help reviewers and editors to better assess the quality of neuro-studies in service.

A signal-detection approach to individual differences in negative feeling

Feeling is an important aspect of core personality traits and affective-style. Here we implemented a new signal-detection-theory based model for feeling generation, involving two parameters: report-criterion (c), the level above which enough emotional evidence has gathered for intense feeling to appear, and evidence-differentiation (d_a), the ability to emotionally differentiate between (negative) triggers of varying intensity. Results indicate that a low c was related to Neuroticism but not to affective-style, yet a low d_a was related to limited access to emotion regulation strategies, but not to personality traits.

The paradox of moral cleansing: When physical cleansing leads to increased contamination concerns

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Moral threats, including threats to moral self-worth, have been associated with contamination concerns. Paradoxically, although self-cleansing provides temporary relief, it can worsen feelings of contamination. Self-affirmation might be an effective strategy, especially following obsessive type cognitions (e.g., responsibility beliefs) when moral threats are reactivated.

METHODS

In Experiment 1, participants recalled an immoral deed and then self-cleansed (using a hand-wipe), completed a control task, or self-affirmed. Contamination concerns were subsequently measured by a washing task. In Experiment 2, the same procedure was used but obsessive-type cognitions were activated by asking participants a series of questions about obsessive beliefs.

RESULTS

As expected, relative to the control condition, both self-affirmation and self-cleansing resulted in less subsequent repeated washing behaviour in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, when the immoral recall was followed by activation of obsessive-type cognitions, self-cleansing led to more guilt and repeated washing than self-affirmation and control. Rather than alleviating feelings of contamination, physical self-cleansing led to more contamination concerns and guilt when in the context of activated obsessive-type cognitions, possibly because it paradoxically makes (moral) cleanliness goals salient.

LIMITATIONS

Future research needs to test clinical populations, for whom contamination concerns are all the more central.

CONCLUSIONS

This research provides further evidence of the influence of moral threat in contamination concerns, and the limits of moral cleansing. Self-affirmation resulted in less contamination concerns under both a neutral condition and activated obsessive type cognitions.

The Embodied Theory of Stress: A Constructionist Perspective on the Experience of Stress

An emphasis on the physiological activity related to psychological stress is hardly novel. Considering stress from the perspective of embodiment, however, places that physiological activity in a new light. Research and theory from that perspective emphasizes the reciprocal nature between psychological and physiological processes. This article incorporates findings regarding peripheral, body-based embodiment with existing theories to introduce a more integrated understanding of the experience of psychological stress. A discussion of central embodiment and modality-based simulations leads to the conclusion that the psychological construction paradigm may be more applicable than are previous stimulus–organism–response approaches. The embodied theory of stress (ETS) reflects the constructionist paradigm. The theory hypothesizes that situations are categorized as stressful, and consciously labeled as such, based on the unconscious, automatic integration of data from the body, the external environment, and previous experience. The ETS also asserts that experiences categorized as stressful are accompanied by unique patterns of physiological activity.

Embodied Cognition and the Direct Induction of Affect as a Compliment to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

We make the case for the possible integration of affect experience induced via embodiment techniques with CBT for the treatment of emotional disorders in clinical settings. Theoretically we propose a possible integration of cognitive behavioural theory, neuroscience, embodied cognition and important processes of client change outcomes such as the therapeutic alliance to enhance client outcomes. We draw from evidence of bidirectional effects between embodiment modes of bottom-up (sensory-motor simulations giving rise to important basis of knowledge) and top-down (abstract mental representations of knowledge) processes such as CBT in psychotherapy. The paper first describes the dominance and success of CBT for the treatment of a wide range of clinical disorders. Some limitations of CBT, particularly for depression are also outlined. There is a growing body of evidence for the added value of experiential affect-focused interventions combined with CBT. Evidence for the embodied model of cognition and emotion is reviewed. Advantages of embodiment is highlighted as a complimentary process model to deepen the intensity and valence of affective experience. It is suggested that an integrated embodiment approach with CBT enhances outcomes across a wide range of emotional disorders. A description of our embodiment method integrated with CBT for inducing affective experience, emotional regulation, acceptance of unwanted emotions and emotional mastery is given. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of the therapeutic alliance as a critical component of the change process. The paper ends with a case study highlighting some clinical strategies that may aid the therapist to integrate embodiment techniques in CBT that can further explore in future research on affective experience in CBT for a wider range of clinical disorders.

People with higher interoceptive sensitivity are more altruistic, but improving interoception does not increase altruism

People consistently show preferences and behaviors that benefit others at a cost to themselves, a phenomenon termed altruism. We investigated if perception of one’s body signals – interoception - may be underlying such behaviors. We tested if participants’ sensitivity to their own heartbeat predicted their decision on a choice between self-interest and altruism, and if improving this sensitivity through training would make participants more altruistic. Across these two experiments, interoceptive sensitivity predicted altruism measured through monetary generosity. Improving interoceptive sensitivity did, however, not lead to more altruistic behaviour. We conclude that there is a unique link between interoception and altruistic behaviour, likely established over an individual’s history of altruistic acts, and the body responses they elicit. The findings suggest that humans might literally ‘listen to their heart’ to guide their altruistic behavior.

Congruent bodily arousal promotes the constructive recognition of emotional words

Considerable research has shown that bodily states shape affect and cognition. Here, we examined whether transient states of bodily arousal influence the categorization speed of high arousal, low arousal, and neutral words. Participants realized two blocks of a constructive recognition task, once after a cycling session (increased arousal), and once after a relaxation session (reduced arousal). Results revealed overall faster response times for high arousal compared to low arousal words, and for positive compared to negative words. Importantly, low arousal words were categorized significantly faster after the relaxation than after the cycling, suggesting that a decrease in bodily arousal promotes the recognition of stimuli matching one's current arousal state. These findings highlight the importance of the arousal dimension in emotional processing, and suggest the presence of arousal-congruency effects.

The effect of facial feedback on the evaluation of statements describing everyday situations and the role of awareness

According to theories of embodiment enacting a smile or a frown can positively or negatively influence one's evaluations, even without awareness of one's facial activity. While some previous studies found evidence for facial feedback effects, recent replication attempts could not confirm these findings. Are our decisions throughout the day amenable to the state of our facial muscles? We tested the effect of smiling and frowning on the evaluation of emotional sentences describing everyday situations. While most previous studies based their assessment of awareness on verbal debriefing interviews without explicitly defined criteria, we employed a written debriefing questionnaire in order to avoid potential bias when identifying participants' awareness. Our results indicate that smiling/frowning increased/decreased sentence ratings only for participants aware of their expressions. This emphasizes the importance of more rigorous awareness tests in facial feedback studies. Our results support the view that facial feedback cannot necessarily influence us without conscious mediation.

The Body and the Brain: Measuring Skin Conductance Responses to Understand the Emotional Experience

In this article, we introduce the method of measuring skin conductance responses (SCR) reflecting peripheral (bodily) signals associated with emotions, decisions, and eventually behavior. While measuring SCR is a well-established, robust, widely used, and relatively inexpensive method, it has been rarely utilized in organizational research. We introduce the basic aspects of SCR methodology and explain the behavioral significance of the signal, especially in connection with the emotional experience. Importantly, we describe in detail a specific research protocol (fear conditioning) that serves as an illustrative example to support the initial steps for organizational scholars who are new to the method. We also provide the related scripts for stimulus presentation and basic data analysis, as well as an instructional video, with the aim to facilitate the dissemination of SCR methodology to organizational research. We conclude by suggesting potential future research questions that can be addressed using SCR measurements.

Bodily Contributions to Emotion: Schachter’s Legacy for a Psychological Constructionist View on Emotion

Although early emotion theorists posited that bodily changes contribute to emotion, the primary view in affective science over the last century has been that emotions produce bodily changes. Recent findings from physiology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology support the early intuition that body representations can help constitute emotion. These findings are consistent with the modern psychological constructionist hypothesis that emotions emerge when representations of bodily changes are conceptualized as an instance of emotion. We begin by introducing the psychological constructionist approach to emotion. With Schachter as inspiration, we next examine how embodied representations contribute to affective states, and ultimately emotion, with inflammation as a key example. We close by looking forward to future research on how body representations contribute to human experience.

Getting Bodily Feelings Into Emotional Experience in the Right Way

We argue that the main objections against two central tenets of a Jamesian account of the emotions, that is, that (a) different types of emotions are associated with specific types of bodily feelings ( specificity), and that (b) emotions are constituted by patterns of bodily feeling ( constitution), do not succeed. In the first part, we argue that several reasons adduced against specificity, including one inspired by Schachter and Singer’s work, are unconvincing. In the second part, we argue that constitution, too, can withstand most of the objections raised against it, including the objection that bodily feelings cannot account for the outward-looking and evaluative nature of emotions. In both sections, we argue that the kinds of felt bodily changes posited by a Jamesian account of emotions are best understood in terms of felt states of action readiness.

Anticipatory affect during action preparation: evidence from backward compatibility in dual-task performance

Upcoming responses in the second of two subsequently performed tasks can speed up compatible responses in the temporally preceding first task. Two experiments extend previous demonstration of such backward compatibility to affective features: responses to affective stimuli were faster in Task 1 when an affectively compatible response effect was anticipated for Task 2. This emotional backward-compatibility effect demonstrates that representations of the affective consequences of the Task 2 response were activated before the selection of a response in Task 1 was completed. This finding is problematic for the assumption of a serial stimulus-response translation stage. It also shows that the affective consequence of a response is anticipated during, and has an impact on stimulus-response translation, which implies that action planning considers codes representing and predicting the emotional consequences of actions. Implications for the control of emotional actions are discussed.

Impact of elicited mood on movement expressivity during a fitness task

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the impact of four mood conditions (control, positive, negative, aroused) on movement expressivity during a fitness task. Motion capture data from twenty individuals were recorded as they performed a predefined motion sequence. Moods were elicited using task-specific scenarii to keep a valid context. Movement qualities inspired by Effort-Shape framework (Laban & Ullmann, 1971) were computed (i.e., Impulsiveness, Energy, Directness, Jerkiness and Expansiveness). A reduced number of computed features from each movement quality was selected via Principal Component Analyses. Analyses of variance and Generalized Linear Mixed Models were used to identify movement characteristics discriminating the four mood conditions. The aroused mood condition was strongly associated with increased mean Energy compared to the three other conditions. The positive and negative mood conditions showed more subtle differences interpreted as a result of their moderate activation level. Positive mood was associated with more impulsive movements and negative mood was associated with more tense movements (i.e., reduced variability and increased Jerkiness). Findings evidence the key role of movement qualities in capturing motion signatures of moods and highlight the importance of task context in their interpretations.

Covert digital manipulation of vocal emotion alter speakers' emotional states in a congruent direction

Research has shown that people often exert control over their emotions. By modulating expressions, reappraising feelings, and redirecting attention, they can regulate their emotional experience. These findings have contributed to a blurring of the traditional boundaries between cognitive and emotional processes, and it has been suggested that emotional signals are produced in a goal-directed way and monitored for errors like other intentional actions. However, this interesting possibility has never been experimentally tested. To this end, we created a digital audio platform to covertly modify the emotional tone of participants' voices while they talked in the direction of happiness, sadness, or fear. The result showed that the audio transformations were being perceived as natural examples of the intended emotions, but the great majority of the participants, nevertheless, remained unaware that their own voices were being manipulated. This finding indicates that people are not continuously monitoring their own voice to make sure that it meets a predetermined emotional target. Instead, as a consequence of listening to their altered voices, the emotional state of the participants changed in congruence with the emotion portrayed, which was measured by both self-report and skin conductance level. This change is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of peripheral feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain. As such, our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we often use the same inferential strategies to understand ourselves as those that we use to understand others.

Reduced cerebral and cardiovascular hemodynamics during sustained affective stimulation in young women with chronic low blood pressure

Although low blood pressure has been associated with lower affect and higher depressive symptoms in the elderly, the presence of possible impairment in emotional reactivity in chronic hypotensive individuals in early adulthood remains largely unexplored. Using a combination of transcranial Doppler sonography, beat-to-beat blood pressure recording and impedance cardiography we assessed central and peripheral hemodynamic changes in 15 undergraduate women with chronic hypotension (Age: 23.9 ± 2.7 years) and 15 normotensive controls (Age: 23.7 ± 3.1 years) during sustained exposure to pleasant, unpleasant and neutral pictures. Overall, systolic blood pressure (SBP) increased in normotensives and decreased in hypotensives during picture viewing as compared to baseline. Also, compared to normotensives, in hypotensives mean cerebral blood flow velocity increased to a lesser extent during the viewing of pleasant pictures and the magnitude of this increase was negatively associated with subjective emotional arousal. In addition, in hypotensives screening SBP was positively associated with valence rating of pleasant contents. These findings indicate a close association between chronic low blood pressure and reduced processing of pleasant stimuli in young adulthood.

Enhancing emotional experiences to dance through music: the role of valence and arousal in the cross-modal bias

It is well established that emotional responses to stimuli presented to one perceptive modality (e.g., visual) are modulated by the concurrent presentation of affective information to another modality (e.g., auditory)-an effect known as the cross-modal bias. However, the affective mechanisms mediating this effect are still not fully understood. It remains unclear what role different dimensions of stimulus valence and arousal play in mediating the effect, and to what extent cross-modal influences impact not only our perception and conscious affective experiences, but also our psychophysiological emotional response. We addressed these issues by measuring participants' subjective emotion ratings and their Galvanic Skin Responses (GSR) in a cross-modal affect perception paradigm employing videos of ballet dance movements and instrumental classical music as the stimuli. We chose these stimuli to explore the cross-modal bias in a context of stimuli (ballet dance movements) that most participants would have relatively little prior experience with. Results showed (i) that the cross-modal bias was more pronounced for sad than for happy movements, whereas it was equivalent when contrasting high vs. low arousal movements; and (ii) that movement valence did not modulate participants' GSR, while movement arousal did, such that GSR was potentiated in the case of low arousal movements with sad music and when high arousal movements were paired with happy music. Results are discussed in the context of the affective dimension of neuroentrainment and with regards to implications for the art community.

More on James and the Physical Basis of Emotion

We first present a reconstruction of James’s theory of emotion (JATE) and then argue for four theses: (a) Despite constructivist elements, James’s views are overall in line with basic emotions theory. (b) JATE does not exclude an influence of emotion on intentional action even in its original formulation; nevertheless, this influence is quite limited. It seems possible, however, to repair this problem of the theory. (c) Cannon’s theory of emotion is a centralized version of JATE that inherits from the latter theory a potentially fatal flaw, the insufficient physiological differentiation of emotions. (d) The core claim of JATE, that emotions are bodily feelings, is very likely false.