A Systematic Review of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) around the World

Enhancing patient well-being in oncology waiting rooms: a pilot field experiment on the emotional impact of virtual forest therapy

Introduction

This study explores the emotional impact of virtual forest therapy delivered through audio-visual recordings shown to patients in the oncology waiting rooms, focusing on whether simulated forest walks can positively influence patients' emotional states compared to traditional waiting room stimuli.

Methods

The study involved 117 participants from a diverse group of oncology patients in the outpatient clinic waiting room at the Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute. Using a partially randomized controlled trial design, the study assessed basic emotional dimensions-valence and arousal-as well as specific psychological states such as thought control, sadness, anxiety, and pain. This assessment used the Self-Assessment Manikin and the modified Emotional Thermometer before and after participants watched three video types (forest, sea, news). Baseline stress levels were measured using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6).

Results

Participants exposed to forest and sea videos reported significant improvements in emotional valence and reduced arousal, suggesting a calming and uplifting effect. No significant changes were observed in the control and news groups. Secondary outcomes related to anxiety, sadness, and pain showed no significant interaction effects, though small but significant main effects of time on these variables were noted.

Discussion

The findings suggest that videos of forest and sea can be a beneficial intervention in the oncology waiting rooms by enhancing patients' emotional well-being. This pilot study underscores the potential for integrating virtual mental health support elements into healthcare settings to improve patient care experience.

The impact of crossmodal predictions on the neural processing of aesthetic stimuli

Neuroaesthetic research has focused on neural predictive processes involved in the encounter with art stimuli or the related evaluative judgements, and it has been mainly conducted unimodally. Here, with electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography and an affective priming protocol, we investigated whether and how the neural responses to non-representational aesthetic stimuli are top-down modulated by affective representational (i.e. semantically meaningful) predictions between audition and vision. Also, the neural chronometry of affect processing of these aesthetic stimuli was investigated. We hypothesized that the early affective components of crossmodal aesthetic responses are dependent on the affective and representational predictions formed in another sensory modality resulting in differentiated brain responses, and that audition and vision indicate different processing latencies for affect. The target stimuli were aesthetic visual patterns and musical chords, and they were preceded by a prime from the opposing sensory modality. We found that early auditory-cortex responses to chords were more affected by valence than the corresponding visual-cortex ones. Furthermore, the assessments of visual targets were more facilitated by affective congruency of crossmodal primes than the acoustic targets. These results indicate, first, that the brain uses early affective information for predictively guiding aesthetic responses; second, that an affective transfer of information takes place crossmodally, mainly from audition to vision, impacting the aesthetic assessment. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

Posturography Approaches: An Insightful Window to Explore the Role of the Brain in Socio-Affective Processes

A significant amount of research has highlighted the importance of a motor component in the brain's processing of emotional, motivational and social information. Posturography has emerged as an interesting way to assess motor correlates associated with this process. In this review, we highlight recent results within the functional context of painful stimulus perception and discuss the interest in broadening the use of posturography to other motivational and societal functional contexts. Although characterized by significant feasibility, the single measurement of the COP's anteroposterior displacement presents limitations for attesting approach-avoidance behavior towards a visual target. Here, we discuss a number of methodological avenues that could go some way towards overcoming these limitations.

The role of emotional cues in event-based prospective memory

OBJECTIVE

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to perform expected actions in the future. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of stimuli with emotional content on the prospective memory, with particular attention to different age groups.

METHODS

Starting from an experimental paradigm used in a previous study (by Cona et al., 2015), we evaluated whether emotional cues (positive, negative, or neutral images) did influence a prospective memory task based on the event during the performance of an ongoing n-back task in three different age groups.

RESULTS

A difference emerged between the three investigated groups indicating that positive emotional cues were remembered better than negative and neutral ones. In addition, older subjects resulted slower than others in responding to stimuli and showed the tendency to make more errors in the prospective memory task.

CONCLUSIONS

As hypothesized, a difference in the performance of the task appears as due to age. In general, the younger participants take the test more accurately (i.e., with fewer errors). This could be explained because the prospective memory deteriorates with increasing age. Behavioral results do not yet allow us to answer the research question on the role of emotional material in prospective memory; more research is needed to clarify these issues.