Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task

Influence of transient emotional episodes on affective and cognitive theory of mind

Our emotions may influence how we interact with others. Previous studies have shown an important role of emotion induction in generating empathic reactions towards others' affect. However, it remains unclear whether (and to which extent) our own emotions can influence the ability to infer people's mental states, a process associated with Theory of Mind (ToM) and implicated in the representation of both cognitive (e.g. beliefs and intentions) and affective conditions. We engaged 59 participants in two emotion-induction experiments where they saw joyful, neutral and fearful clips. Subsequently, they were asked to infer other individuals' joy, fear (affective ToM) or beliefs (cognitive ToM) from verbal scenarios. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that brain activity in the superior temporal gyrus, precuneus and sensorimotor cortices were modulated by the preceding emotional induction, with lower response when the to-be-inferred emotion was incongruent with the one induced in the observer (affective ToM). Instead, we found no effect of emotion induction on the appraisal of people's beliefs (cognitive ToM). These findings are consistent with embodied accounts of affective ToM, whereby our own emotions alter the engagement of key brain regions for social cognition, depending on the compatibility between one's own and others' affect.

Individual differences in the evaluation of ambiguous visual and auditory threat-related expressions

This study investigated the neural correlates of the judgement of auditory and visual ambiguous threat-related information, and the influence of state anxiety on this process. Healthy subjects were scanned using a fast, high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) multiband sequence while they performed a two-alternative forced-choice emotion judgement task on faces and vocal utterances conveying explicit anger or fear, as well as ambiguous ones. Critically, the latter was specific to each subject, obtained through a morphing procedure and selected prior to scanning following a perceptual decision-making task. Behavioural results confirmed a greater task-difficulty for subject-specific ambiguous stimuli and also revealed a judgement bias for visual fear, and, to a lesser extent, for auditory anger. Imaging results showed increased activity in regions of the salience and frontoparietal control networks (FPCNs) and deactivation in areas of the default mode network for ambiguous, relative to explicit, expressions. In contrast, the right amygdala (AMG) responded more strongly to explicit stimuli. Interestingly, its response to the same ambiguous stimulus depended on the subjective judgement of the expression. Finally, we found that behavioural and neural differences between ambiguous and explicit expressions decreased as a function of state anxiety scores. Taken together, our results show that behavioural and brain responses to emotional expressions are determined not only by emotional clarity but also modality and the subjects' subjective perception of the emotion expressed, and that some of these responses are modulated by state anxiety levels.

Intergenerational and intragenerational preferences in a developing country to avoid climate change

Intergenerational and intragenerational approaches to climate change take into account the actions taken by the current generation to maintain or improve the climate, which is advantageous to both the present and future generations. Climate-friendly initiatives primarily benefit future generations, with current generations receiving lesser benefits. Self-interest can hinder the management of shared resources, as seen in the "tragedy of the commons" concept, where individuals benefit from defecting, but society bears the consequences of it. This study used three different time horizons to determine the inter- and intra-generational preferences of groups of human subjects for preventing hazardous climate change. We looked at how groups of participants responded in scenarios that varied in motivation, income, social pressure, and learning opportunities. For this purpose, we conducted two group experiments framed around climate change where participants could choose to cooperate for a noble cause: tree plantations. Its rewards are delayed by several years and probably a few decades (intergenerational discounting), where future generations will be the big beneficiaries. There were two more options: the first one delayed the reward by 1 week, and the second was delayed by seven weeks (intragenerational discounting). We found that intergenerational discounting was high when the groups had free will and motivation. Further, it is revealed that having more money does not play a significant positive role in long-term climate sustainability in a developing country; however, it does, but not as much as motivation and free will do.

Self-prioritization is supported by interactions between large-scale brain networks

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has provided solid evidence that the default-mode network (DMN) is implicated in self-referential processing. The functional connectivity of the DMN has also been observed in tasks where self-referential processing leads to self-prioritization (SPE) in perception and decision-making. However, we are less certain about whether (i) SPE solely depends on the interplay within parts of the DMN or is driven by multiple brain networks; and (ii) whether SPE is associated with a unique component of interconnected networks or can be explained by related effects such as emotion prioritization. We addressed these questions by identifying and comparing topological clusters of networks involved in self-and emotion prioritization effects generated in an associative-matching task. Using network-based statistics, we found that SPE controlled by emotion is supported by a unique component of interacting networks, including the medial prefrontal part of the DMN (MPFC), Frontoparietal network (FPN) and insular Salience network (SN). This component emerged as a result of a focal effect confined to few connections, indicating that interaction between DMN, FPC and SN is critical to cognitive operations for the SPE. This result was validated on a separate data set. In contrast, prioritization of happy emotion was associated with a component formed by interactions between the rostral prefrontal part of SN, posterior parietal part of FPN and the MPFC, while sad emotion reveals a cluster of the DMN, Dorsal Attention Network (DAN) and Visual Medial Network (VMN). We discussed theoretical and methodological aspects of these findings within the more general domain of social cognition.

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

Background: Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.

Methods: Ninety-nine students (all women) were randomly assigned to read and evaluate a negative text (negative context) or a neutral text (neutral text) in the first experiment. In the subsequent second experiment, the participants performed the following two tasks: (1) an attentional task in which neutral faces were presented as distractors and (2) a task involving the emotional judgment of neutral faces.

Results: The results show that compared to the neutral context, in the negative context, the participants rated more faces as negative. No significant result was found in the attentional task.

Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that incidental emotional information available in a previous experiment can increase participants’ propensity to interpret neutral faces as more negative when emotional information is directly evaluated. Therefore, the present study adds important evidence to the literature suggesting that our behavior and actions are modulated by previous information in an incidental or low perceived way similar to what occurs in everyday life, thereby modulating our judgments and emotions.

Self-Disclosure to a Robot: Only for Those Who Suffer the Most

Social robots may become an innovative means to improve the well-being of individuals. Earlier research has shown that people easily self-disclose to a social robot, even in cases where it was unintended by the designers. We report on an experiment considering self-disclosing in a diary journal or to a social robot after negative mood induction. An off-the-shelf robot was complemented with our in-house developed AI chatbot, which could talk about ‘hot topics’ after training it with thousands of entries on a complaint website. We found that people who felt strongly negative after being exposed to shocking video footage benefited the most from talking to our robot, rather than writing down their feelings. For people less affected by the treatment, a confidential robot chat or writing a journal page did not differ significantly. We discuss emotion theory in relation to robotics and possibilities for an application in design (the emoji-enriched ‘talking stress ball’). We also underline the importance of otherwise disregarded outliers in a data set of therapeutic nature.

Dynamic functional brain networks underlying the temporal inertia of negative emotions

Affective inertia represents the lasting impact of transient emotions at one time point on affective state at a subsequent time point. Here we describe the neural underpinnings of inertia following negative emotions elicited by sad events in movies. Using a co-activation pattern analysis of dynamic functional connectivity, we examined the temporal expression and reciprocal interactions among brain-wide networks during movies and subsequent resting periods in twenty healthy subjects. Our findings revealed distinctive spatiotemporal expression of visual (VIS), default mode (DMN), central executive (CEN), and frontoparietal control (FPCN) networks both in negative movies and in rest periods following these movies. We also identified different reciprocal relationships among these networks, in transitions from movie to rest. While FPCN and DMN expression increased during and after negative movies, respectively, FPCN occurrences during the movie predicted lower DMN and higher CEN expression during subsequent rest after neutral movies, but this relationship was reversed after the elicitation of negative emotions. Changes in FPCN and DMN activity correlated with more negative subjective affect. These findings provide new insights into the transient interactions of intrinsic brain networks underpinning the inertia of negative emotions. More specifically, they describe a major role of FPCN in emotion elicitation processes, with prolonged impact on DMN activity in subsequent rest, presumably involved in emotion regulation and restoration of homeostatic balance after negative events.

How Much of Me Do I See in Other Minds? Modulating Egocentricity in Emotion Judgments by tDCS

When inferring the mental states of others, individuals’ judgments are influenced by their own state of mind, an effect often referred to as egocentricity. Self–other differentiation is key for an accurate interpretation of other’s mental states, especially when these differ from one’s own states. It has been suggested that the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) is causally involved in overcoming egocentricity in the affective domain. In a double-blind randomized study, 47 healthy adults received anodal (1 mA, 20 min) or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the rSMG prior to performing a newly developed paradigm, the self–other facial emotion judgment (SOFE) task. In this task, participants made judgments of facial emotional expressions while having been previously confronted with congruent or incongruent emotion-inducing situations. To differentiate between emotional and cognitive egocentricity, participants additionally completed an established visual perspective-taking task. Our results confirmed the occurrence of emotional egocentric biases during the SOFE task. No conclusive evidence of a general role of the rSMG in emotional egocentricity was found. However, active as compared to sham tDCS induced descriptively lower egocentric biases when judging incongruent fearful faces, and stronger biases when judging incongruent happy faces, suggesting emotion-specific tDCS effects on egocentric biases. Further, we found significant tDCS effects on cognitive egocentricity. Results of the present study expanded our understanding of emotional egocentricity and point towards emotion-specific patterns of the underlying functionality.

Brain functional connectivity dynamics at rest in the aftermath of affective and cognitive challenges

Carry-over effects on brain states have been reported following emotional and cognitive events, persisting even during subsequent rest. Here, we investigated such effects by identifying recurring co-activation patterns (CAPs) in neural networks at rest with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared carry-over effects on brain-wide CAPs at rest and their modulation after both affective and cognitive challenges. Healthy participants underwent fMRI scanning during emotional induction with negative valence and performed cognitive control tasks, each followed by resting periods. Several CAPs, overlapping with the default-mode (DMN), salience, dorsal attention, and social cognition networks were impacted by both the preceding events (movie or task) and the emotional valence of the experimental contexts (neutral or negative), with differential dynamic fluctuations over time. Temporal metrics of DMN-related CAPs were altered after exposure to negative emotional content (compared to neutral) and predicted changes in subjective affect on self-reported scores. In parallel, duration rates of another attention-related CAP increased with greater task difficulty during the preceding cognitive control condition, specifically in the negative context. These findings provide new insights on the anatomical organization and temporal inertia of functional brain networks, whose expression is differentially shaped by emotional states, presumably mediating adaptive homeostatic processes subsequent to behaviorally challenging events.

Sustained effects of pleasant and unpleasant smells on resting state brain activity

Research suggests that transient emotional episodes produces sustained effects on psychological functions and brain activity during subsequent resting state. In this fMRI study we investigated whether transient emotions induced by smells could impact brain connectivity at rest in a valence-specific manner. The results suggest a sustained reconfiguration of parts of the default mode network which become more connected with areas implicated in olfactory processing, emotional learning, and action control. We found lingering effects of odorants on subsequent resting state that predominantly involved connections of the precuneus with a network comprising the insula, amygdala, medial orbital gyrus. Unpleasant smells in particular predicted greater coupling between insula, hippocampal structures, and prefrontal cortex, possible reflecting enhanced aversive learning and avoidance motivation. More broadly, our study illustrates a novel approach to characterize the impact of smells on brain function and differentiate the neural signatures of their valence, during task-free rest conditions.

Effect of 4 weeks daily wild blueberry supplementation on symptoms of depression in adolescents

Adolescence is an important period for cognitive maturation and emotional regulation, and this age group is particularly vulnerable to developing depression. Diets rich in fruits and vegetables have been associated with decreased risk of developing depressive disorders across the lifespan, maybe due to the high flavonoid content of these foods. Previously, we have shown increases in transient positive affect (PA) in both children and young adults 2 h after administration of a wild blueberry (WBB) intervention. Here, using a randomised double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, we investigated the effects of 4 weeks, daily WBB supplementation (containing about 253 mg anthocyanins) on transient and chronic mood in adolescents. Healthy 12-17-year old (n 64, thirty-five females) participants were randomly assigned to receive either a WBB or matched placebo supplementation. Depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed before and after the intervention period using the Mood and Feeling Questionnaire and Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale. Transient affect was assessed before, 2 weeks and at 4 weeks using PA and negative affect. Following the intervention period, there were significantly fewer self-reported depression symptoms in participants who were supplemented with WBB compared with placebo (P = 0·02, 95 % CI -6·71, -5·35). There was no between-group effect on anxiety symptoms or on transient affect. Further investigation is required to identify specific mechanisms that link flavonoids consumption and mood. If replicated, the observed effects of WBB supplementation may be a potential prevention strategy for adolescent depression and may have benefits for public mental health.

Affective states influence emotion perception: evidence for emotional egocentricity

Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source of information to understand what other people are feeling. The current study investigated whether individuals project their own affective states when reading other's emotional expressions. We used brief autobiographical recall and audiovisual stimuli to induce happy, neutral and sad transient states. After each emotion induction, participants made emotion judgments about ambiguous faces displaying a mixture of happiness and sadness. Using an adaptive psychophysics procedure, we estimated the tendency to perceive the faces as happy under each of the induced affective states. Results demonstrate the occurrence of egocentric projections, such that faces were more likely judged as happy when participants reported being happy as compared to when they were sad. Moreover, the degree of emotional egocentricity was associated with individual differences in perspective-taking, with smaller biases being observed in individuals with higher disposition to take the perspective of others. Our findings extend previous literature on emotional egocentricity by showing that self-projection occurs when we make emotion attributions based on the other's emotional expressions, and supports the notion that perspective-taking tendencies play a role in the ability to understand the other's affective states.

Does my pain affect your disgust? Cross-modal influence of first-hand aversive experiences in the appraisal of others' facial expressions

BACKGROUND

Embodied models of social cognition argue that others' affective states are processed by re-enacting a sensory-specific representation of the same state in the observer. However, neuroimaging studies suggest that a reliable part of the representation shared between self and others is supramodal and relates to dimensions such as Unpleasantness or arousal, common to qualitatively different experiences. Here we investigated whether representations of first-hand pain and disgust influenced the subsequent evaluation of facial expressions in Modality-specific fashion, or in terms of Unpleasantness or arousal.

METHODS

Thirty volunteers were subjected to thermal painful and olfactory disgusting events, and subsequently were asked to classify computer-generated faces expressing pain (characterized by high Unpleasantness and arousal), disgust (high Unpleasantness and low arousal), surprise (low Unpleasantness and high arousal) and hybrid combinations thereof.

RESULTS

Thermal and olfactory events were associated with comparable Unpleasantness ratings and heart rate (but stronger galvanic response was found for painful temperatures). Furthermore, we found that the appraisal of facial expressions was biased by the prior stimulus, with more frequent pain classifications following thermal stimuli, and more frequent disgust classifications following olfactory stimuli. Critically, this modulation was cross-modal in nature, as each first-hand stimulation influenced in comparable fashion facial traits diagnostic of both pain and disgust, without instead generalizing to features of surprise.

CONCLUSION

Overall, these data support the presence of shared coding between one's aversive experiences and the appraisal of others' facial responses, which is best describable as supramodal representation of the Unpleasantness of the experience.

SIGNIFICANCE

These results extend previous findings about common representational coding between the experience of first-hand and others' pain. In particular, they highlight that reliable part of the information shared is supramodal in nature and relates to a broad dimension of Unpleasantness common also to painless aversive states such as disgust.

Resting heart rate variability in young women is a predictor of EEG reactions to linguistic ambiguity in sentences

Recent research has found a relationship between heart rate variability (HRV) and cognitive control mechanisms underlying various experimental tasks. This study explored the interaction between gender and resting-state HRV in brain oscillatory activity during visual recognition of linguistic ambiguity while taking state and trait anxiety scores into account. It is well known that stress or anxiety increases arousal levels, particularly under uncertainty situations. We tasked 50 young Mandarin speakers (26 women; average age 26.00 ± 4.449) with the recognition of linguistic ambiguity in English (foreign) sentences with the purpose of imposing a sense of uncertainty in decision-making. Our results revealed a dependency between resting-state HRV and theta/alpha power in individual women. Low HRV women showed stronger theta/alpha desynchronization compared with their high HRV counterparts, independent of topographic localization. However, low and high HRV men exhibited comparable theta/alpha activity. Trait anxiety scores affected alpha power in the parieto-occipital regions, whereas men with higher scores and women with lower scores showed stronger alpha desynchronization. We posit that stress-provoking situations may impose additional effects on theta/alpha desynchronization in the frontal and temporal regions, a condition in which the interdependency between brain oscillatory activity and resting-state HRV could interact with cognitive control differently in men and women.

The good, the bad, and the suffering. Transient emotional episodes modulate the neural circuits of pain and empathy

People's sensitivity to first-hand pain is affected by their ongoing emotions, with positive states (joy, amusement) exerting analgesic-like effects, and negative states (sadness, fear) often enhancing the subjective experience. It is however less clear how empathetic responses to others' pain are affected by one's own emotional state. Following embodied accounts that posit a shared representational code between self and others' states, it is plausible that pain empathy might be influenced by emotions in the same way as first-hand pain. Alternatively, other theories in psychology suggest that social resources (including empathetic reactions) might be enhanced by positive states, but inhibited by negative states, as only in the former case, one's mindset is sufficiently broad to take into consideration others' needs. To disambiguate between these opposing predictions, we conducted two experiments in which volunteers observed positive, neutral, or negative video clips, and subsequently either received painful thermal stimuli on their own body (first-hand pain), or observed images of wounded hands (others' pain). We measured subjective pain ratings as well as physiological responses and brain activity using fMRI. We found that, contrary to the case of first-hand pain, others' pain produced weaker galvanic responses and lower neural activity in anterior insula and middle cingulate cortex following negative (relative to neutral and positive) videos. Such inhibition was partially counteracted by personal empathy traits, as individuals with higher scores retained greater sensitivity to others' pain after negative emotion induction, in both behavioral and neural responses in medial prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, multivoxel pattern analysis confirmed similar neural representation for first-hand and others' pain in anterior insula, with representation similarity increasing the more the video preceding the observation of others' suffering was positive. These findings speak against the idea that emotion induction affects first-hand and others' pain in an isomorphic way, but rather supports the idea that contrary to negative emotions, positive emotions favors a broader access to social resources.

Motivated Cognition: Effects of Reward, Emotion, and Other Motivational Factors Across a Variety of Cognitive Domains

A growing body of literature has demonstrated that motivation influences cognitive processing. The breadth of these effects is extensive and span influences of reward, emotion, and other motivational processes across all cognitive domains. As examples, this scope includes studies of emotional memory, value-based attentional capture, emotion effects on semantic processing, reward-related biases in decision making, and the role of approach/avoidance motivation on cognitive scope. Additionally, other less common forms of motivation–cognition interactions, such as self-referential and motoric processing can also be considered instances of motivated cognition. Here I outline some of the evidence indicating the generality and pervasiveness of these motivation influences on cognition, and introduce the associated ‘research nexus’ at Collabra: Psychology.