Withdrawal interference scale: a novel measure of withdrawal-related life disruption in opioid use disorder and alcohol use disorder

Background: Hyperkatifeia describes amplified emotional and motivational withdrawal due to addiction-related sensitization of brain-stress-systems. Hyperkatifeia has been proposed as a target for addiction treatment development. However, translation of basic research in this area will require new tools designed to measure hyperkatifeia and related phenomena outside of laboratory settings.Objectives: We define a novel concept, withdrawal interference, and introduce a new tool - the Withdrawal Interference Scale (WIS) - which measures the impact of withdrawal on daily life among individuals with OUD or AUD.Methods: Described are the combined results of three separate cross-sectional studies. The structural validity, convergent validity, construct validity, trans-diagnostic (AUD/OUD) configural, metric, and scalar invariance, internal consistency, and composite reliability of WIS was tested among three independent samples of 1) treatment-seeking adults with OUD (n = 132), 2) treatment-seeking adults with AUD (n = 123), and 3) non-treatment-seeking adults with OUD (n = 140). Males numbered 218 and females were 163.Results: WIS exhibited structural validity (1 factor), convergent validity (average variance extracted .670-.676), construct validity, trans-diagnostic configural (χ2/df = 2.10), metric (Δχ2 = 5.70, p = .681), and scalar invariance (Δχ2 = 12.34, p = .338), internal consistency (α .882-928), and composite reliability (.924-.925).Conclusion: These results suggest WIS is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring withdrawal-related life disruption in AUD and OUD. Further, given our findings of transdiagnostic measurement invariance, WIS scores of individuals with AUD and OUD can be meaningfully compared in future statistical analyses.

Social Communication in Young Children With Sex Chromosome Trisomy (XXY, XXX, XYY): A Study With Eye Tracking and Heart Rate Measures

OBJECTIVE

Children with sex chromosome trisomy (SCT) have an increased risk for suboptimal development. Difficulties with language are frequently reported, start from a very young age, and encompass various domains. This cross-sectional study examined social orientation with eye tracking and physiological arousal responses to gain more knowledge on how children perceive and respond to communicative bids and evaluated the associations between social orientation and language outcomes, concurrently and 1 year later.

METHOD

In total, 107 children with SCT (33 XXX, 50 XXY, and 24 XYY) and 102 controls (58 girls and 44 boys) aged between 1 and 7 years were included. Assessments took place in the USA and Western Europe. A communicative bids eye tracking paradigm, physiological arousal measures, and receptive and expressive language outcomes were used.

RESULTS

Compared to controls, children with SCT showed reduced attention to the face and eyes of the on-screen interaction partner and reduced physiological arousal sensitivity in response to direct versus averted gaze. In addition, social orientation to the mouth was related to concurrent receptive and expressive language abilities in 1-year-old children with SCT.

CONCLUSIONS

Children with SCT may experience difficulties with social communication that extend past the well-recognized risk for early language delays. These difficulties may underlie social-behavioral problems that have been described in the SCT population and are an important target for early monitoring and support.

Emotion Classification Based on Pulsatile Images Extracted from Short Facial Videos via Deep Learning

Most human emotion recognition methods largely depend on classifying stereotypical facial expressions that represent emotions. However, such facial expressions do not necessarily correspond to actual emotional states and may correspond to communicative intentions. In other cases, emotions are hidden, cannot be expressed, or may have lower arousal manifested by less pronounced facial expressions, as may occur during passive video viewing. This study improves an emotion classification approach developed in a previous study, which classifies emotions remotely without relying on stereotypical facial expressions or contact-based methods, using short facial video data. In this approach, we desire to remotely sense transdermal cardiovascular spatiotemporal facial patterns associated with different emotional states and analyze this data via machine learning. In this paper, we propose several improvements, which include a better remote heart rate estimation via a preliminary skin segmentation, improvement of the heartbeat peaks and troughs detection process, and obtaining a better emotion classification accuracy by employing an appropriate deep learning classifier using an RGB camera input only with data. We used the dataset obtained in the previous study, which contains facial videos of 110 participants who passively viewed 150 short videos that elicited the following five emotion types: amusement, disgust, fear, sexual arousal, and no emotion, while three cameras with different wavelength sensitivities (visible spectrum, near-infrared, and longwave infrared) recorded them simultaneously. From the short facial videos, we extracted unique high-resolution spatiotemporal, physiologically affected features and examined them as input features with different deep-learning approaches. An EfficientNet-B0 model type was able to classify participants' emotional states with an overall average accuracy of 47.36% using a single input spatiotemporal feature map obtained from a regular RGB camera.

Variation in coupling across neural and cardiac systems of regulation is linked to markers of anxiety risk in preschool

Both cortical and parasympathetic systems are believed to regulate emotional arousal in the service of healthy development. Systemic coordination, or coupling, between putative regulatory functions begins in early childhood. Yet the degree of coupling between cortical and parasympathetic systems in young children remains unclear, particularly in relation to the development of typical or atypical emotion function. We tested whether cortical (ERN) and parasympathetic (respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) markers of regulation were coupled during cognitive challenge in preschoolers (N = 121). We found no main effect of RSA predicting ERN. We then tested children's typical and atypical emotion behavior (context-appropriate/context-inappropriate fear, anxiety symptoms, neuroendocrine reactivity) as moderators of early coupling in an effort to link patterns of coupling to adaptive emotional development. Negative coupling (i.e., smaller ERN, more RSA suppression or larger ERN, less RSA suppression) at age 3 was associated with greater atypical and less typical emotion behaviors, indicative of greater risk. Negative age 3 coupling was also visible for children who had greater Generalized Anxiety Disorder symptoms and blunted cortisol reactivity at age 5. Results suggest that negative coupling may reflect a maladaptive pattern across regulatory systems that is identifiable during the preschool years.

Electrocardiographic activity depends on the relative position between intimate persons

Interpersonal space (IPS) refers to the area surrounding the body in which we engage in social interactions while maintaining our comfort. Numerous previous studies have reported the psychological and physiological changes associated with the proximity of two people engaged in face-to-face interaction. Currently, there is limited knowledge about how the relative position between two socially intimate individuals affects their psychological and physiological states. This research measured the subjective discomfort and electrocardiographic responses of participants when standing static at various relative positions. The highest discomfort, lowest heart rate, and highest heart rate variability (HRV; parasympathetic activity index) were observed when the friend stood in the face-to-face position. Interestingly, heart rate also decreased when the friend stood on the right side, although HRV did not change. We interpreted the results as suggesting that the presence of a familiar person elicits the electrocardiographic responses associated with an increase in parasympathetic activity.

Two's company: Biobehavioral research with dyads

The development of paradigms for studying dyadic interaction in the laboratory and methods and analytics for dealing with dyadic data is described. These are illustrated with research findings from the author and others with particular focus on dyadic measures of linkage or synchrony in physiology, expressive behavior, and subjective affective experience.

Physiology and emotions: Within individual associations during caregiver-adolescent conflict

Concordance between physiological and emotional responses is central to models of emotion and has been shown to correspond to effective responses and well-being in adults. A deeper understanding of physiological-emotional concordance during ecologically relevant scenarios is essential to then determine if these associations predict mental health problems or can serve as a helpful biomarker of risk or resilience in adults and youth. The present study assessed the minute-to-minute associations between sympathetic (i.e., skin conductance level [SCL]) and parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) nervous system activity and self-reported emotions, assessed via video-mediated recall procedures, during a parent-adolescent conflict discussion task. Associations between emotion ratings and physiological activity were assessed in adolescents (N = 97; ages 10-15) and their adult caregivers (N = 97). Utilizing a multilevel modeling approach, findings demonstrated a significant positive association between SCL and emotion ratings for youth, suggesting that increased engagement and alertness contributed to more positive emotion. RSA was unrelated to emotion ratings. The presence of significant variability in associations indicated the presence of potential moderators. This could include clinically relevant processes (e.g., emotion regulation, relationship quality, and mental health). Future research should continue to build on findings to determine if, when, and for whom, physiological-emotional concordance occurs, and whether the degree of concordance predicts risk for mental and physical health problems.

Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals Collected with a Wrist Device and Emotional Recall

Implementing affective engineering in real-life applications requires the ability to effectively recognize emotions using physiological measurements. Despite being a widely researched topic, there seems to be a lack of systems that translate results from data collected in a laboratory setting to higher technology readiness levels. In this paper, we delve into the feasibility of emotion recognition beyond controlled laboratory environments. For this reason, we create a minimally-invasive experimental setup by combining emotional recall via autobiographical emotion memory tasks with a user-friendly Empatica wristband measuring blood volume pressure, electrodermal activity, skin temperature, and acceleration. We employ standard practices of feature-based supervised learning and specifically use support vector machines to explore subject dependency through various segmentation methods. We collected data from 45 participants. After preprocessing, using a data set of 134 segments from 40 participants, the accuracy of the classifier after 10-fold cross-validation was barely better than random guessing (36% for four emotions). However, when extracting multiple segments from each emotion task per participant using 10-fold cross-validation (i.e., including subject-dependent data in the training set), the classification rate increased to up to 75% for four emotions but was still as low as 32% for leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (i.e., subject-independent training). We conclude that highly subject-dependent issues might pose emotion recognition.

Mood congruency affects physiological synchrony but not empathic accuracy in a naturalistic empathy task

Empathy is a crucial aspect of our daily lives, as it enhances our wellbeing and is a proxy for prosocial behavior. It encompasses two related but partially distinct components: cognitive and affective empathy. Both are susceptible to context, biases and an individual's physiological state. Few studies have explored the effects of a person's mood on these empathy components, and results are mixed. The current study takes advantage of an ecological, naturalistic empathy task - the empathic accuracy (EA) task - in combination with physiological measurements to examine and differentiate between the effects of one's mood on both empathy components. Participants were induced with positive or negative mood and presented videos of targets narrating autobiographical negative stories, selected from a Chinese empathy dataset that we developed (now publicly available). The stories were conveyed in audio-only, visual-only and full-video formats. Participants rated the target's emotional state while watching or listening to their stories, and physiological measures were taken throughout the process. Importantly, similar measures were taken from the targets when they narrated the stories, allowing a comparison between participants' and targets' measures. We found that in audio-only and visual-only conditions, participants whose moods were congruent with the target showed higher physiological synchrony than those with incongruent mood, implying a mood-congruency effect on affective empathy. However, there was no mood effect on empathic accuracy (reflecting cognitive empathy), suggesting a different influence of mood on the two empathy components.

Synchronized affect in shared experiences strengthens social connection

People structure their days to experience events with others. We gather to eat meals, watch TV, and attend concerts together. What constitutes a shared experience and how does it manifest in dyadic behavior? The present study investigates how shared experiences-measured through emotional, motoric, physiological, and cognitive alignment-promote social bonding. We recorded the facial expressions and electrodermal activity (EDA) of participants as they watched four episodes of a TV show for a total of 4 h with another participant. Participants displayed temporally synchronized and spatially aligned emotional facial expressions and the degree of synchronization predicted the self-reported social connection ratings between viewing partners. We observed a similar pattern of results for dyadic physiological synchrony measured via EDA and their cognitive impressions of the characters. All four of these factors, temporal synchrony of positive facial expressions, spatial alignment of expressions, EDA synchrony, and character impression similarity, contributed to a latent factor of a shared experience that predicted social connection. Our findings suggest that the development of interpersonal affiliations in shared experiences emerges from shared affective experiences comprising synchronous processes and demonstrate that these complex interpersonal processes can be studied in a holistic and multi-modal framework leveraging naturalistic experimental designs.

Effects of environmental colours in virtual reality: Physiological arousal affected by lightness and hue

It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment. We exposed 60 participants to red or blue environments varying in lightness and saturation. We assessed participants' physiological responses (i.e. arousal) with heart rate and skin conductance measures, and their self-reported levels of valence and arousal in response to the coloured environments. The results revealed physiological effects of lightness and hue. When compared with the baseline measures, heart rate increased, and heart rate variability decreased more in the dark than the medium lightness rooms. Both measures signalled higher arousal in the darker room, irrespective of hue. Also, when compared with the baseline measures, skin conductance increased more in the red than the blue rooms, again signalling higher arousal in the red condition. The difference between the red and the blue conditions was detectable only on some saturation and lightness combinations. We conclude that being immersed in environments of different colours can change physiological arousal. However, not all changes are driven by hue and not all the effects are measurable on all physiological parameters.

Joyful by nature: approaches to investigate the evolution and function of joy in non-human animals

The nature and evolution of positive emotion is a major question remaining unanswered in science and philosophy. The study of feelings and emotions in humans and animals is dominated by discussion of affective states that have negative valence. Given the clinical and social significance of negative affect, such as depression, it is unsurprising that these emotions have received more attention from scientists. Compared to negative emotions, such as fear that leads to fleeing or avoidance, positive emotions are less likely to result in specific, identifiable, behaviours being expressed by an animal. This makes it particularly challenging to quantify and study positive affect. However, bursts of intense positive emotion (joy) are more likely to be accompanied by externally visible markers, like vocalisations or movement patterns, which make it more amenable to scientific study and more resilient to concerns about anthropomorphism. We define joy as intense, brief, and event-driven (i.e. a response to something), which permits investigation into how animals react to a variety of situations that would provoke joy in humans. This means that behavioural correlates of joy are measurable, either through newly discovered 'laughter' vocalisations, increases in play behaviour, or reactions to cognitive bias tests that can be used across species. There are a range of potential situations that cause joy in humans that have not been studied in other animals, such as whether animals feel joy on sunny days, when they accomplish a difficult feat, or when they are reunited with a familiar companion after a prolonged absence. Observations of species-specific calls and play behaviour can be combined with biometric markers and reactions to ambiguous stimuli in order to enable comparisons of affect between phylogenetically distant taxonomic groups. Identifying positive affect is also important for animal welfare because knowledge of positive emotional states would allow us to monitor animal well-being better. Additionally, measuring if phylogenetically and ecologically distant animals play more, laugh more, or act more optimistically after certain kinds of experiences will also provide insight into the mechanisms underlying the evolution of joy and other positive emotions, and potentially even into the evolution of consciousness.

Associations among maternal lifetime trauma, psychological symptoms in pregnancy, and infant stress reactivity and regulation

Maternal trauma has intergenerational implications, including worse birth outcomes, altered brain morphology, and poorer mental health. Research investigating intergenerational effects of maternal trauma on infant stress reactivity and regulation is limited. Maternal mental health during pregnancy may be a contributor: psychopathology is a sequela of trauma exposure and predictor of altered self-regulatory capacity in offspring of affected mothers. We assessed associations among maternal lifetime trauma and infant stress responsivity, mediated by psychological symptoms in pregnancy. Mothers reported lifetime trauma history and anxiety, depressive, and posttraumatic stress symptoms during pregnancy. At infant age 6 months, stress reactivity and regulation were assessed via maternal behavior ratings (Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised, IBQ-R) and behavioral (negative mood) and physiological (respiratory sinus arrhythmia, RSA) markers during a laboratory stressor (Still-Face Paradigm). Maternal trauma was directly associated with lower infant physiological regulation and indirectly associated with lower levels of both infant behavioral and physiological regulation via higher maternal anxiety during pregnancy. Maternal trauma was also indirectly associated with higher infant reactivity via higher maternal anxiety during pregnancy. Post hoc analyses indicated differential contributions of maternal prenatal versus postnatal anxiety to infant outcomes. Findings highlight potential contributory mechanisms toward maladaptive child stress response, which has been associated with poor behavioral, cognitive, and academic outcomes.

The Future of Affective Science: Introduction to the Special Issue

Modern affective science-the empirical study of emotional responding and affective experience-has been active for a half-century. The Future of Affective Science special issue considers the history of this field and proposes new directions for the decades ahead. Contributors represent diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological expertise, and domains of study, and the special issue includes both literature reviews and new empirical studies as illustrations. This introductory article synthesizes the contributions, articulating the broader context of the current status of our field and highlighting common themes across articles as well as gaps notable even in this special issue. Sections of the article address theoretical and conceptual issues, research methodology, the questions we ask, and translation of basic affective science to applied domains. We conclude that much has been learned from the first 50 years of affective science, and it is now time for new theories, new research questions, and innovative methods for the decades ahead.

Prediction of moment-by-moment heart rate and skin conductance changes in the context of varying emotional arousal

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses such as heart rate (HR) and galvanic skin responses (GSR) have been linked with cerebral activity in the context of emotion. Although much work has focused on the summative effect of emotions on ANS responses, their interaction in a continuously changing context is less clear. Here, we used a multimodal data set of human affective states, which includes electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals of participants' moment-by-moment reactions to emotional provoking video clips and modeled HR and GSR changes using machine learning techniques, specifically, long short-term memory (LSTM), decision tree (DT), and linear regression (LR). We found that LSTM achieved a significantly lower error rate compared with DT and LR due to its inherent ability to handle sequential data. Importantly, the prediction error was significantly reduced for DT and LR when used together with particle swarm optimization to select relevant/important features for these algorithms. Unlike summative analysis, and contrary to expectations, we found a significantly lower error rate when the prediction was made across different participants than within a participant. Moreover, the predictive selected features suggest that the patterns predictive of HR and GSR were substantially different across electrode sites and frequency bands. Overall, these results indicate that specific patterns of cerebral activity track autonomic body responses. Although individual cerebral differences are important, they might not be the only factors influencing the moment-by-moment changes in ANS responses.

Emotion response disconcordance among trauma-exposed adults: the impact of alexithymia

BACKGROUND

Emotion processing deficits have been identified as a critical transdiagnostic factor that facilitates distress after trauma exposure. Limited skills in identifying and labelling emotional states (i.e. alexithymia) may present on the more automated (less conscious) end of the spectrum of emotional awareness and clarity. Individuals with alexithymia tend to exhibit a disconcordance between subjective experience and autonomic activity (e.g. where high levels of subjective emotional intensity are associated with low physiological arousal), which may exacerbate distress. Although there is a robust link between alexithymia and trauma exposure, no work to date has explored whether alexithymia is associated with emotional response disconcordance among trauma-exposed adults.

METHOD

Using a validated trauma script paradigm, the present study explored the impact of alexithymia on emotion response concordance [skin conductance (Galvanic Skin Response, GSR) and Total Mood Disturbance (TMD)] among 74 trauma-exposed adults recruited via a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment clinic and student research programme.

RESULTS

Unlike posttraumatic symptom severity, age, sex, participant type and mood (which showed no effect on emotion response concordance), alexithymia was associated with heightened emotion response disconcordance between GSR and TMD [F(1, 37) = 8.93, p = 0.006], with low GSR being associated with high TMD. Observed effects of the trauma script were entirely accounted for by the interaction with alexithymia, such that those with alexithymia showed a negligible association between subjective and physiological states.

CONCLUSION

This finding is paramount as it shows that a large proportion of trauma-exposed adults have a divergent emotion engagement profile.

Alterations in facial expressions in individuals at risk for psychosis: a facial electromyography approach using emotionally evocative film clips

BACKGROUND

Negative symptoms such as blunted facial expressivity are characteristic of schizophrenia. However, it is not well-understood if and what abnormalities are present in individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis.

METHODS

This experimental study employed facial electromyography (left zygomaticus major and left corrugator supercilia) in a sample of CHR individuals (N = 34) and healthy controls (N = 32) to detect alterations in facial expressions in response to emotionally evocative film clips and to determine links with symptoms.

RESULTS

Findings revealed that the CHR group showed facial blunting manifested in reduced zygomatic activity in response to an excitement (but not amusement, fear, or sadness) film clip compared to controls. Reductions in zygomatic activity in the CHR group emerged in response to the emotionally evocative peak period of the excitement film clip. Lower zygomaticus activity during the excitement clip was related to anxiety while lower rates of change in zygomatic activity during the excitement video clip were related to higher psychosis risk conversion scores.

CONCLUSIONS

Together, these findings inform vulnerability/disease driving mechanisms and biomarker and treatment development.

Towards PPG-based anger detection for emotion regulation

BACKGROUND

Anger dyscontrol is a common issue after traumatic brain injury (TBI). With the growth of wearable physiological sensors, there is new potential to facilitate the rehabilitation of such anger in the context of daily life. This potential, however, depends on how well physiological markers can distinguish changing emotional states and for such markers to generalize to real-world settings. Our study explores how wearable photoplethysmography (PPG), one of the most widely available physiological sensors, could be used detect anger within a heterogeneous population.

METHODS

This study collected the TRIEP (Toronto Rehabilitation Institute Emotion-Physiology) dataset, which comprised of 32 individuals (10 TBI), exposed to a variety of elicitation material (film, pictures, self-statements, personal recall), over two day sessions. This complex dataset allowed for exploration into how the emotion-PPG relationship varied over changes in individuals, endogenous/exogenous drivers of emotion, and day-to-day differences. A multi-stage analysis was conducted looking at: (1) times-series visual clustering, (2) discriminative time-interval features of anger, and (3) out-of-sample anger classification.

RESULTS

Characteristics of PPG are largely dominated by inter-subject (between individuals) differences first, then intra-subject (day-to-day) changes, before differentiation into emotion. Both TBI and non-TBI individuals showed evidence of linear separable features that could differentiate anger from non-anger classes within time-interval analysis. However, what is more challenging is that these separable features for anger have various degrees of stability across individuals and days.

CONCLUSION

This work highlights how there are contextual, non-stationary challenges to the emotion-physiology relationship that must be accounted for before emotion regulation technology can perform in real-world scenarios. It also affirms the need for a larger breadth of emotional sampling when building classification models.

Dynamic regulatory processes among child welfare parents: Temporal associations between physiology and parenting behavior

This study examined how temporal associations between parents' physiological and behavioral responses may reflect underlying regulatory difficulties in at-risk parenting. Time-series data of cardiac indices (second-by-second estimates of inter-beat intervals - IBI, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia - RSA) and parenting behaviors were obtained from 204 child welfare-involved parents (88% mothers, Mage = 32.32 years) during child-led play with their 3- to 7-year-old children (45.1% female; Mage = 4.76 years). Known risk factors for maltreatment, including parents' negative social cognitions, mental health symptoms, and inhibitory control problems, were examined as moderators of intra-individual physiology-behavior associations. Results of ordinary differential equations suggested increases in parents' cardiac arousal at moments when they showed positive parenting behaviors. In turn, higher arousal was associated with momentary decreases in both positive and negative parenting behaviors. Individual differences in these dynamic processes were identified in association with parental risk factors. In contrast, no sample-wide RSA-behavior associations were evident, but a pattern of increased positive parenting at moments of parasympathetic withdrawal emerged among parents showing more total positive parenting behaviors. This study illustrated an innovative and ecologically-valid approach to examining regulatory patterns that may shape parenting in real-time and identified mechanisms that should be addressed in interventions.

Affective state estimation based on Russell's model and physiological measurements

Affective states are psycho-physiological constructs connecting mental and physiological processes. They can be represented in terms of arousal and valence according to the Russel's model and can be extracted from physiological changes in human body. However, a well-established optimal feature set and a classification method effective in terms of accuracy and estimation time are not present in the literature. This paper aims at defining a reliable and efficient approach for real-time affective state estimation. To obtain this, the optimal physiological feature set and the most effective machine learning algorithm, to cope with binary as well as multi-class classification problems, were identified. ReliefF feature selection algorithm was implemented to define a reduced optimal feature set. Supervised learning algorithms, such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), cubic and gaussian Support Vector Machine, and Linear Discriminant Analysis, were implemented to compare their effectiveness in affective state estimation. The developed approach was tested on physiological signals acquired on 20 healthy volunteers during the administration of images, belonging to the International Affective Picture System, conceived for inducing different affective states. ReliefF algorithm reduced the number of physiological features from 23 to 13. The performances of machine learning algorithms were compared and the experimental results showed that both accuracy and estimation time benefited from the optimal feature set use. Furthermore, the KNN algorithm resulted to be the most suitable for affective state estimation. The results of the assessment of arousal and valence states on 20 participants indicate that KNN classifier, adopted with the 13 identified optimal features, is the most effective approach for real-time affective state estimation.

Coherence and divergence in autonomic-subjective affective space

A central tenet of many theories of emotion is that emotional states are accompanied by distinct patterns of autonomic activity. However, experimental studies of coherence between subjective and autonomic responses during emotional states provide little evidence of coherence. Crucially, previous studies investigating coherence have either adopted univariate approaches or made limited use of multivariate analytic approaches by investigating subjective and autonomic responses separately. The current study addressed this question using a multivariate dimensional approach to build a common autonomic-subjective affective space incorporating subjective responses and three different autonomic signals (heart rate, skin conductance response, and pupil diameter), measured during an emotion-inducing task, in 51 participants. Results showed that autonomic and subjective responses could be adequately described in a two-dimensional affective space. The first dimension included contributions from subjective and autonomic responses, indicating coherence, while contributions to the second dimension were almost exclusively of autonomic covariance. Thus, while there was a degree of coherence between autonomic and subjective emotional responses, there was substantial structure in autonomic responses that did not covary with subjective emotional experience. This study, therefore, contributes new insights into the relationship between subjective and autonomic emotional responses, and provides a framework for future multimodal emotion research, enabling both hypothesis- and data-driven testing.

Beliefs in Regulating Negative Emotions and Vagally Mediated Heart Rate Variability: Does Sex Make a Difference?

OBJECTIVE

This ecological study explored the association between regulatory emotional self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions (RESE-NE) and heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of parasympathetic modulation of the heart that has been positively associated with a better ability to flexibly adjust to a changing environment and regulate emotions.

METHOD

To test these associations, we used data from 161 adults working in relational professions (about 40% men; mean [standard deviation] age = 40.45 [14.17] years) whose HRV was assessed continuously for 24 hours.

RESULTS

Individuals high in RESE-NE showed increased HRV levels ( β = -0.05, p = .011). However, this effect was moderated by biological sex ( β = -0.18, p = .0001) such that RESE-NE positively and significantly predicted HRV for men ( β = 0.18, p < .0001) but not for women ( β = -0.001, p = .989).

CONCLUSIONS

All in all, our study provides initial empirical support for the theoretical expectation derived from social cognitive theory that RESE-NE is positively correlated with a physiological indicator of adaptability to the environmental demands. This was true only for men, likely because of sex differences in physiological stress reactivity and regulation.

A new deep convolutional neural network incorporating attentional mechanisms for ECG emotion recognition

Using ECG signals captured by wearable devices for emotion recognition is a feasible solution. We propose a deep convolutional neural network incorporating attentional mechanisms for ECG emotion recognition. In order to address the problem of individuality differences in emotion recognition tasks, we incorporate an improved Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) into the proposed deep convolutional neural network. The deep convolutional neural network is responsible for capturing ECG features. Channel attention in CBAM is responsible for adding weight information to ECG features of different channels and spatial attention is responsible for the weighted representation of ECG features of different regions inside the channel. We used three publicly available datasets, WESAD, DREAMER, and ASCERTAIN, for the ECG emotion recognition task. The new state-of-the-art results are set in three datasets for multi-class classification results, WESAD for tri-class results, and ASCERTAIN for two-category results, respectively. A large number of experiments are performed, providing an interesting analysis of the design of the convolutional structure parameters and the role of the attention mechanism used. We propose to use large convolutional kernels to improve the effective perceptual field of the model and thus fully capture the ECG signal features, which achieves better performance compared to the commonly used small kernels. In addition, channel attention and spatial attention were added to the deep convolutional model separately to explore their contribution levels. We found that in most cases, channel attention contributed to the model at a higher level than spatial attention.

Dynamic autonomic nervous system states arise during emotions and manifest in basal physiology

The outflow of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is continuous and dynamic, but its functional organization is not well understood. Whether ANS patterns accompany emotions, or arise in basal physiology, remain unsettled questions in the field. Here, we searched for brief ANS patterns amidst continuous, multichannel physiological recordings in 45 healthy older adults. Participants completed an emotional reactivity task in which they viewed video clips that elicited a target emotion (awe, sadness, amusement, disgust, or nurturant love); each video clip was preceded by a pre-trial baseline period and followed by a post-trial recovery period. Participants also sat quietly for a separate 2-min resting period to assess basal physiology. Using principal components analysis and unsupervised clustering algorithms to reduce the second-by-second physiological data during the emotional reactivity task, we uncovered five ANS states. Each ANS state was characterized by a unique constellation of patterned physiological changes that differentiated among the trials of the emotional reactivity task. These ANS states emerged and dissipated over time, with each instance lasting several seconds on average. ANS states with similar structures were also detectable in the resting period but were intermittent and of smaller magnitude. Our results offer new insights into the functional organization of the ANS. By assembling short-lived, patterned changes, the ANS is equipped to generate a wide range of physiological states that accompany emotions and that contribute to the architecture of basal physiology.

The psychophysiology of guilt in healthy adults

Guilt is a negative emotion, elicited by realizing one has caused actual or perceived harm to another person. Anecdotally, guilt often is described as a visceral and physical experience. However, while the way that the body responds to and contributes to emotions is well known in basic emotions, little is known about the characteristics of guilt as generated by the autonomic nervous system. This study investigated the physiologic signature associated with guilt in adults with no history of psychological or autonomic disorder. Healthy adults completed a novel task, including an initial questionnaire about their habits and attitudes, followed by videos designed to elicit guilt, as well as the comparison emotions of amusement, disgust, sadness, pride, and neutral. During the video task, participants' swallowing rate, electrodermal activity, heart rate, respiration rate, and gastric activity rate were continuously recorded. Guilt was associated with alterations in gastric rhythms, electrodermal activity, and swallowing rate relative to some or all the comparison emotions. These findings suggest that there is a mixed pattern of sympathetic and parasympathetic activation during the experience of guilt. These results highlight potential therapeutic targets for modulation of guilt in neurologic and psychiatric disorders with deficient or elevated levels of guilt, such as frontotemporal dementia, posttraumatic stress disorder, and Obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Relationships between feeding behaviors and emotions: an electroencephalogram (EEG) frequency analysis study

Feeding behaviors may be easily affected by emotions, both being based on brain activity; however, the relationships between them have not been explicitly defined. In this study, we investigated how emotional environments modulate subjective feelings, brain activity, and feeding behaviors. Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings were obtained from healthy participants in conditions of virtual comfortable space (CS) and uncomfortable space (UCS) while eating chocolate, and the times required for eating it were measured. We found that the more participants tended to feel comfortable under the CS, the more it took time to eat in the UCS. However, the EEG emergence patterns in the two virtual spaces varied across the individuals. Upon focusing on the theta and low-beta bands, the strength of the mental condition and eating times were found to be guided by these frequency bands. The results determined that the theta and low-beta bands are likely important and relevant waves for feeding behaviors under emotional circumstances, following alterations in mental conditions.

Autonomic Arousal, Ethical Guilt, and Externalizing Behavior in Childhood: A Clinical Extension and Replication

Lower autonomic arousal is associated with higher externalizing behavior in childhood but the mechanisms explaining this link are still debated. One possibility is that lower autonomic arousal makes it difficult for children to anticipate or express social emotions, such as ethical guilt rooted in concern for others, thereby increasing their likelihood of externalizing behavior. However, evidence for this social-emotional hypothesis has been limited to community samples. The present study included ethnically diverse samples of 150 typically developing children (M_age = 8.01 years; 50% girls) and 62 children referred for clinically elevated externalizing behavior (M_age = 9.16 years; 16% girls; N = 212). Caregivers reported children's externalizing behavior. Children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was measured as an indicator of parasympathetic activity in response to hypothetical vignettes depicting externalizing behavior. Children's ethical guilt was coded from semi-structured interviews following each vignette. Greater RSA increases (indicating a low-arousal, rest-and-digest response) were associated with lower ethical guilt. Lower ethical guilt was associated with higher externalizing behavior. A significant indirect effect showed that RSA increases were associated with higher externalizing behavior through relative lapses in ethical guilt. Results were consistent across and within the community and clinical samples. Theoretical and practical implications for clinically elevated externalizing behavior are discussed.

Mean affect and affect variability may interact to predict inflammation

INTRODUCTION

Individuals with greater affect variability (i.e., moment-to-moment fluctuations possibly reflecting emotional dysregulation) are at risk for greater systemic inflammation, which is associated with cardiovascular disease. Some evidence suggests that affect variability is linked with poorer health indicators only among those with higher average levels of affect, particularly for positive affect (PA), and that associations may be non-linear. The present study sought to examine whether links between both PA and negative affect (NA) variability and inflammation are moderated by average level of affect.

METHODS

Participants (N = 300, 50 % female, ages 21-70, 60 % non-Hispanic White, 19 % Hispanic, 15 % non-Hispanic Black) completed a lab assessment and provided a blood sample to measure systemic inflammation (i.e., TNF-α, IL-6, CRP). Affect was collected via a two-day ecological momentary assessment protocol where reports were collected about every 45-min during waking hours. Momentary affect ratings were averaged across both days (i.e., iM), separately for PA and NA, for each participant. Affect variability was calculated as the person-specific SD (i.e., iSD) of affect reports, separately for PA and NA. Linear and quadratic interactions were tested. Models included covariates for sex, race, and body mass index.

RESULTS

There were significant interactions between NA iM and NA iSD predicting TNF-α (b = 6.54; p < 0.05) and between PA iM and PA iSD predicting IL-6 (b = 0.45; p < 0.05). Specifically, the association between these affect variability indicators and inflammatory markers were suggestive of a positive association among those with higher average affect but a negative association among those with lower average affect. There was no evidence of non-linear associations between affect and inflammation.

DISCUSSION

Incorporating interactive effects between affect variability and average affect may be an important consideration in understanding affective-inflammatory associations.

Beyond shallow feelings of complex affect: Non-motor correlates of subjective emotional experience in Parkinson's disease

Affective disorders in Parkinson's disease (PD) concern several components of emotion. However, research on subjective feeling in PD is scarce and has produced overall varying results. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to evaluate the subjective emotional experience and its relationship with autonomic symptoms and other non-motor features in PD patients. We used a battery of film excerpts to elicit Amusement, Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, Tenderness, and Neutral State, in 28 PD patients and 17 healthy controls. Self-report scores of emotion category, intensity, and valence were analyzed. In the PD group, we explored the association between emotional self-reported scores and clinical scales assessing autonomic dysregulation, depression, REM sleep behavior disorder, and cognitive impairment. Patient clustering was assessed by considering relevant associations. Tenderness occurrence and intensity of Tenderness and Amusement were reduced in the PD patients. Tenderness occurrence was mainly associated with the overall cognitive status and the prevalence of gastrointestinal symptoms. In contrast, the intensity and valence reported for the experience of Amusement correlated with the prevalence of urinary symptoms. We identified five patient clusters, which differed significantly in their profile of non-motor symptoms and subjective feeling. Our findings further suggest the possible existence of a PD phenotype with more significant changes in subjective emotional experience. We concluded that the subjective experience of complex emotions is impaired in PD. Non-motor feature grouping suggests the existence of disease phenotypes profiled according to specific deficits in subjective emotional experience, with potential clinical implications for the adoption of precision medicine in PD. Further research on larger sample sizes, combining subjective and physiological measures of emotion with additional clinical features, is needed to extend our findings.

Modulation of Heart Rate Variability following PAP Ion Magnetic Induction Intervention in Subjects with Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Study

Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis has emerged as a simple and non-invasive technique to indirectly evaluate the autonomic nervous system (ANS), and it is considered a sensible and advanced index of health status. Pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMFs) are widely used in clinical settings for improving the health status of individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain. The aim of the present single-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled parallel pilot study was to investigate the acute effect of a single session of PEMFs stimulation by a PAP ion magnetic induction (PAPIMI) device on ANS activity, as measured by HRV, in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain, and compare such effect with that induced by a sham (control) PAPIMI inductor. Thirty-two patients were randomized into two groups: PAPIMI intervention (PAP) (n = 17) and sham PAPIMI intervention (SHAM-PAP) (n = 15). HRV was assessed before and following the interventions. The PAP group showed a significant increase in all values of the time-domain parameters (SDNN, RMSSD, NN50, and pNN50) and the HF component of HRV, suggesting a parasympathetic effect. In contrast, the SHAM-PAP group showed no significant differences in all HRV indices following the intervention. Preliminary findings suggested that PAPIMI inductor could influence ANS activity and provided initial evidence of the potential physiological response induced by the PAPIMI device.

The impact of trauma-informed suicide prevention approaches: A systematic review of evidence across the lifespan

Trauma is associated with an increased likelihood of experiencing suicidality, indicating the need for and potential value of trauma-informed suicide prevention strategies. The aim of this study is to systematically review published literature regarding trauma-informed approaches for suicide prevention, and the impact on suicide outcomes. Systematic searches were conducted in eight databases (Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, Emcare, Nursing, and JBI in the Ovid platform; as well as ProQuest Psychology Database and The Cochrane Library) in March 2022, with no publication date limit. Four studies met the inclusion criteria: two randomized controlled trials and two quasi-experimental studies. Two studies reported reductions in ideation, intent, and behaviour among youth and a cultural minority group. Few studies directly reporting suicide outcomes were identified, all were quantitative, and heterogeneity prevents generalizability across population groups. Currently, there is limited evidence focusing specifically on trauma-informed suicide prevention across the lifespan. Additional research, incorporating lived experience voices, is needed to understand the potential of this approach, as well as how mental health nurses can incorporate these approaches into their practice.

Traditional Sporting Games as an emotional induction procedure

Experimental designs to induct emotional states have frequently used still procedures. However, more naturalistic methods of emotional induction by letting participants move and interact freely with other participants should be considered. Traditional Sporting Games (TSG) have the above-mentioned characteristics. The general aim of this study was to determine whether the different roles which allowed executing ambivalent interactions induced different emotional states in college students. We developed three studies with three paradoxical TSG (Sitting Ball Game, Four Corners Game, and Pitcher's Game). Before beginning to play, all the participants answered the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) in a mood version. After playing, participants were asked to report retrospectively the emotional state they were feeling in each role of the game, responding to the Self-Assessment Manikin, PANAS, and Games and Emotion Scale-II. Statistical analyses were performed by ANOVA, calculating corresponding effect sizes. Consistently, but specifically, in each game, roles still induced less positive and more negative emotions. Regarding the active roles, more positive and less negative emotions were kindled when the role allowed catching other players. On the contrary, when developing an active role that implied an increased likelihood of being caught, more negative and less positive emotions were experienced. We found some significant interaction effects between the moods and the role played before playing. To conclude, TSG could be an adequate procedure to induct emotional states and to study emotional conditions in a naturalistic way, showing ecological validity.

Does context matter in misophonia? A multi-method experimental investigation

Introduction

Misophonia is a recently defined disorder in which certain aversive repetitive sounds and associated stimuli elicit distressing and impairing affective, behavioral, and physiological responses. The responses in misophonia may be stronger when the sound is produced by close friends and family, suggesting that the context in which a triggering cue occurs may have an important role in misophonia. As such, the goal of this study was to test experimentally whether the context of the sound source influences affective and psychophysiological responses to triggering stimuli in misophonia.

Methods

Sixty one adults with misophonia and 45 controls listened to audio recordings (8 s) of human eating, animals eating, and human mouth smacking sounds (without eating). After a break, the same audio recordings were presented embedded within videos of human eating (congruent stimuli), animals eating (congruent stimuli), and, in the mouth smacking condition, with visually incongruent stimuli (hands playing in mud or in a bowl with a watery dough). Psychophysiological responses-skin conductance response (SCR) and heart rate (HR), and self-reported affective responses (valence, arousal, dominance) were gathered during the experiment in a laboratory.

Results

Participants with misophonia assessed all the stimuli as more negative and arousing than the controls, and reported feeling less dominant with respect to the sounds. Animal and mouth smacking sounds were assessed by all the participants as less negative and arousing than human eating sounds, but only in the audio-video conditions. SCR data partially confirmed increased psychophysiological arousal in misophonia participants during an exposure to mouth sounds, but did not reflect the self-report changes in response to different contexts. Misophonia participants had deeper deceleration of HR than controls during human eating sound with congruent video stimuli, while there was no group difference during human mouth smacking with incongruent video stimuli.

Conclusion

Results suggest that the context of mouth sounds influences affective experiences in adults with misophonia, but also in participants without misophonia. Presentation of animal eating sounds with congruent visual stimuli, or human mouth smacking sounds with incongruent stimuli, decreased self-report reaction to common misophonic triggers.

Happiness feels light and sadness feels heavy: introducing valence-related bodily sensation maps of emotions

Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) is a recently developed self-report tool for the assessment of emotions in which people draw their sensations of activation in a body silhouette. Following the circumplex model of affect, activity and valence are the underling dimensions of every emotional experience. The aim of this study was to introduce the neglected valence dimension in BSM. We found that participants systematically report valence-related sensations of bodily lightness for positive emotions (happiness, love, pride), and sensations of bodily heaviness in response to negative emotions (e.g., anger, fear, sadness, depression) with specific body topography (Experiment 1). Further experiments showed that both computers (using a machine learning approach) and humans recognize emotions better when classification is based on the combined activity- and valence-related BSMs compared to either type of BSM alone (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that both types of bodily sensations reflect distinct parts of emotion knowledge. Importantly, participants found it clearer to indicate their bodily sensations induced by sadness and depression in terms of bodily weight than bodily activity (Experiment 2 and 4), suggesting that the added value of valence-related BSMs is particularly relevant for the assessment of emotions at the negative end of the valence spectrum.

A novel physiological feature selection method for emotional stress assessment based on emotional state transition

The connection between emotional states and physical health has attracted widespread attention. The emotional stress assessment can help healthcare professionals figure out the patient's engagement toward the diagnostic plan and optimize the rehabilitation program as feedback. It is of great significance to study the changes of physiological features in the process of emotional change and find out subset of one or several physiological features that can best represent the changes of psychological state in a statistical sense. Previous studies had used the differences in physiological features between discrete emotional states to select feature subsets. However, the emotional state of the human body is continuously changing. The conventional feature selection methods ignored the dynamic process of an individual's emotional stress in real life. Therefore, a dedicated experimental was conducted while three peripheral physiological signals, i.e., ElectroCardioGram (ECG), Galvanic Skin Resistance (GSR), and Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), were continuously acquired. This paper reported a novel feature selection method based on emotional state transition, the experimental results show that the number of physiological features selected by the proposed method in this paper is 13, including 5 features of ECG, 4 features of PPG and 4 features of GSR, respectively, which are superior to PCA method and conventional feature selection method based on discrete emotional states in terms of dimension reduction. The classification results show that the accuracy of the proposed method in emotion recognition based on ECG and PPG is higher than the other two methods. These results suggest that the proposed method can serve as a viable alternative to conventional feature selection methods, and emotional state transition deserves more attention to promote the development of stress assessment.

2D MXene-Based Biosensing: A Review

MXene emerged as decent 2D material and has been exploited for numerous applications in the last decade. The remunerations of the ideal metallic conductivity, optical absorbance, mechanical stability, higher heterogeneous electron transfer rate, and good redox capability have made MXene a potential candidate for biosensing applications. The hydrophilic nature, biocompatibility, antifouling, and anti-toxicity properties have opened avenues for MXene to perform in vitro and in vivo analysis. In this review, the concept, operating principle, detailed mechanism, and characteristic properties are comprehensively assessed and compiled along with breakthroughs in MXene fabrication and conjugation strategies for the development of unique electrochemical and optical biosensors. Further, the current challenges are summarized and suggested future aspects. This review article is believed to shed some light on the development of MXene for biosensing and will open new opportunities for the future advanced translational application of MXene bioassays.

Gratitude, affect balance, and stress buffering: A growth curve examination of cardiovascular responses to a laboratory stress task

Previous research has indicated that gratitude and affect-balance play key stress-buffering roles. However, to date there is limited research on the impact of gratitude and affect balance on cardiovascular recovery from acute psychological stress, and whether affect balance moderates the relationship between gratitude and cardiovascular reactions to acute psychological stress. In this study, 68 adults completed measures of state gratitude, positive and negative affect, and completed a laboratory-based cardiovascular stress-testing protocol. This incorporated a 20-minute acclimatization period, a 10-minute baseline, a 6-minute arithmetic stress task, and an 8-minute recovery period. Mixed-effects growth curve models were fit and the results indicated that state gratitude predicted lower systolic blood pressure responses throughout the stress-testing period. Affect balance was found to moderate the association between state gratitude and diastolic blood pressure responses to stress, amplifying the effects of state gratitude. These findings suggest that state gratitude has a unique stress-buffering effect on both reactions to and recovery from acute psychological stress.

Interoceptive sensibility differentiates the predictive pattern of emotional reactivity on depression

The role of emotional reactivity in the psychopathology of depression has been studied widely but not comprehensively. Inconsistencies in existing literature indicate the presence of other factors may affect this dynamic. An individual's method of processing their physiological sensations is a third variable because emotions are psychophysiological. This study identified the predictiveness of ease of activation, intensity, and duration of negative and positive emotions on depressive symptoms differentiated by interoceptive sensibility (IS). A total of 270 community participants filled-in questionnaires assessing their IS, habitual emotional reactivity, depressive severity, and response bias. A two-step clustering analysis identified the IS characteristics. Negative and positive reactivity models among each IS cluster were tested using bootstrapping regression, controlling for gender and response bias. IS can be clustered into "high IS," "low IS," and "worriers." Both positive and negative reactivity's predictiveness patterns on depression were different between IS clusters. Lower positive reactivity predicted depression among individuals with low IS (harder to activate positive emotions) and worriers (shorter duration of positive emotions) but not among individuals with high IS. Those with high IS also exhibited the highest positive reactivity. Ease of activating negative emotions predicted depression among high IS individuals, and a longer duration of negative emotions predicted depression among worriers. IS may affect the psychopathology of depression through subjective emotional reactivity. Thus, IS characteristics can be incorporated into intervention plans.

Vocally-Encoded Emotional Arousal as a Marker of Callous-Unemotional Traits in a Sample of Justice-Involved Adolescents

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with severe and persistent juvenile offending. CU traits are also associated with dampened emotional arousal, which suggests that fundamental frequency (f0), a measure of vocally-encoded emotional arousal, may serve as an accessible psychophysiological marker of CU traits in youth. This study investigated the associations between f0 range measured during an emotionally evocative task, CU traits, and emotion dysregulation in a mixed-gender sample of 168 justice-involved youth. For boys, after controlling for covariates, wider f0 range-indicating greater emotional arousal-was negatively associated with CU traits and positively associated with emotion dysregulation. For girls, no significant associations with f0 range emerged; however, CU traits were positively associated with emotion dysregulation. Findings suggest that f0 range may serve as a valid indicator of CU traits in JJ-involved boys, and that detained boys and girls with high CU traits are characterized by different profiles of emotion dysregulation.

The Role of Attachment and Dyadic Coping in Shaping Relational Intimacy: Actor-Partner Interdependence Model

People's attachment styles play a fundamental role in shaping their intimate relationships. Anxiously attached individuals have a strong need for closeness but a poor ability to obtain the closeness they seek. In contrast, people high in avoidance tend to avoid intimacy in close relationships. Dyadic coping can strengthen the bond between partners, and develop empathy, commitment, sensitivity, and responsiveness to the partner's needs, which may be the basis of shaping intimacy and closeness. The effects of attachment on relational intimacy were examined, using the actor-partner interdependence model and data from 144 heterosexual couples, aged 26 to 60. Both partners completed measures of attachment, intimacy as a relationship satisfaction dimension, and dyadic coping. The results showed that men's attachment-related avoidance is related to their own intimacy; also, the avoidant attachment of both spouses is related to each other's intimacy. The effect of having children on intimacy was significant for men; the effect of financial situation on intimacy was significant for women. Moreover, problem-focused common dyadic coping appeared to have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between attachment-related avoidance and intimacy. Adult attachment and dyadic coping significantly contributed to partners' relational intimacy.

Subjective-Physiological Coherence during Food Consumption in Older Adults

BACKGROUND

Subjective-physiological emotional coherence is thought to be associated with enhanced well-being, and a relationship between subjective-physiological emotional coherence and superior nutritional status has been suggested in older populations. However, no study has examined subjective-physiological emotional coherence among older adults while tasting food. Accordingly, the present study compared subjective-physiological emotional coherence during food consumption among older and younger adults.

METHODS

Participants consumed bite-sized gel-type foods with different flavors and provided their subjective ratings of the foods while their physiological responses (facial electromyography (EMG) of the corrugator supercilia, masseter, and suprahyoid, and other autonomic nervous system signals) were simultaneously measured.

RESULTS

Our primary findings were that (1) the ratings of liking, wanting, and valence were negatively correlated with corrugator EMG activity in older and young adult participants; (2) the positive association between masseter EMG activity and ratings of wanting/valence was weaker in the older than in the young adult group; and (3) arousal ratings were negatively correlated with corrugator EMG activity in the older group only.

CONCLUSIONS

These results demonstrate commonalities and differences in subjective-physiological emotional coherence during food intake between older and young adults.

Emotional responses to taste and smell stimuli: Self-reports, physiological measures, and a potential role for individual and genetic factors

Taste and olfaction elicit conscious feelings by direct connection with the neural circuits of emotions that affects physiological responses in the body (e.g., heart rate and skin conductance). While sensory attributes are strong determinants of food liking, other factors such as emotional reactions to foods may be better predictors of consumer choices even for products that are equally-liked. Thus, important insights can be gained for understanding the full spectrum of emotional reactions to foods that inform the activities of product developers and marketers, eating psychologist and nutritionists, and policy makers. Today, self-reported questionnaires and physiological measures are the most common tools applied to study variations in emotional perception. The present review discusses these methodological approaches, underlining their different strengths and weaknesses. We also discuss a small, emerging literature suggesting that individual differences and genetic variations in taste and smell perception, like the genetic ability to perceive the bitter compound PROP, may also play a role in emotional reactions to aromas and foods.

Emotion Recognition Based on Energy-related Features of Peripheral Physiological Signals

The interest in development of methods and tools for recognizing human emotions has increased continuously. Using physiological information, especially the peripheral physiological signals, to identify emotions is an important direction for this area. This paper proposes an approach for emotion recognition based on energy-related features extracted from peripheral physiological signals. Three emotions: calm, happiness and fear, were elicited in 54 volunteers using video clips while three peripheral physiological signals were recorded: Electrocardiography (ECG), Photoplethysmography (PPG) and Respiration. Given that energy-related features of physiological signals are closely related to autonomic nervous systems activities, nine energy-related features were extracted from the recorded physiological signals. To find the optimal feature subset to represent the target emotions, the correlation between features and emotion state, as well as the discrimination ability of feature for emotion recognition were both analyzed. Four optimal features were then selected for further classification. Moreover, models based on Decision Tree (DT) were built to evaluate the performance of these features for purpose of recognition of emotion states of calm, happiness, and fear. The results show that the DT models based on these four optimal features could distinguish fear from calm (AUC=0.879, Accuracy=87.8%), happiness from calm (AUC=0.915, Accuracy=91.8%), and fear from happiness (AUC=0.822, Accuracy=81.8%), with a global recognition accuracy of 70.8%. These results indicate that energy-related features of peripheral physiological signals can reliably identify emotions, especially intense emotions.

The Undoing Effect of Positive Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review

The undoing hypothesis proposes that positive emotions serve to undo sympathetic arousal related to negative emotions and stress. However, a recent qualitative review challenged the undoing effect by presenting conflicting results. To address this issue quantitatively, we conducted a meta-analytic review of 16 studies ( N = 1,220; 72 effect sizes) measuring sympathetic recovery during elicited positive emotions and neutral conditions. Findings indicated that in most cases, positive emotions did not speed sympathetic recovery compared to neutral conditions. However, when a composite index of cardiovascular reactivity was used, undoing effects were evident. Our findings suggest the need for further work on the functions of positive emotions.

Savoring Interventions Increase Positive Emotions After a Social-Evaluative Hassle

Achieving a high quality of life is dependent upon how individuals face adversity. Positive psychological interventions are well-suited to support coping efforts; however, experimental research is limited. The purpose of the current research was to examine whether different savoring interventions could increase important coping resources (i.e., positive emotions) in response to a social-evaluative hassle. We completed an experimental mixed subject design study with a university student sample. All participants completed a hassle induction task and were then randomly assigned into different intervention groups. Positive emotion ratings were collected at three points in time (baseline, post-induction task, post-intervention). Results revealed a significant time x intervention interaction effect, such that individuals in the savoring the moment intervention reported higher levels of positive emotions (at post-intervention) compared to individuals assigned to the true control group, guided imagery control group, and savoring through reminiscence intervention. Such findings represent a significant extension to savoring theory and offer support for savoring the moment exercises as a primary prevention strategy to bolster effective responses to social-evaluative hassles.

Diminished preparatory physiological responses in frontotemporal lobar degeneration syndromes

Researchers typically study physiological responses either after stimulus onset or when the emotional valence of an upcoming stimulus is revealed. Yet, participants may also respond when they are told that an emotional stimulus is about to be presented even without knowing its valence. Increased physiological responding during this time may reflect a 'preparation for action'. The generation of such physiological responses may be supported by frontotemporal regions of the brain that are vulnerable to damage in frontotemporal lobar degeneration. We examined preparatory physiological responses and their structural and functional neural correlate in five frontotemporal lobar degeneration clinical subtypes (behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, n = 67; semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, n = 35; non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia, n = 30; corticobasal syndrome, n = 32; progressive supranuclear palsy, n = 30). Comparison groups included patients with Alzheimer's disease (n = 56) and healthy controls (n = 35). Preparatory responses were quantified as cardiac interbeat interval decreases (i.e. heart rate increases) from baseline to an 'instruction period', during which participants were told to watch the upcoming emotional film but not provided the film's valence. Patients' behavioural symptoms (apathy and disinhibition) were also evaluated via a caregiver-reported measure. Compared to healthy controls and Alzheimer's disease, the frontotemporal lobar degeneration group showed significantly smaller preparatory responses. When comparing each frontotemporal lobar degeneration clinical subtype with healthy controls and Alzheimer's disease, significant group differences emerged for behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and progressive supranuclear palsy. Behavioural analyses revealed that frontotemporal lobar degeneration patients showed greater disinhibition and apathy compared to Alzheimer's disease patients. Further, these group differences in disinhibition (but not apathy) were mediated by patients' smaller preparatory responses. Voxel-based morphometry and resting-state functional MRI analyses revealed that across patients and healthy controls, smaller preparatory responses were associated with smaller volume and lower functional connectivity in a circuit that included the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and cortical and subcortical regions of the salience network. Diminished preparatory physiological responding in frontotemporal lobar degeneration may reflect a lack of preparation for actions that are appropriate for an upcoming situation, such as approaching or withdrawing from emotional stimuli. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex and salience network are critical for evaluating stimuli, thinking about the future, triggering peripheral physiological responses, and processing and interpreting interoceptive signals. Damage to these circuits in frontotemporal lobar degeneration may impair preparatory responses and help explain often-observed clinical symptoms such as disinhibition in these patients.