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.

Effects of affectively-loaded childhood-related photos from the IAPS on the induction of involuntary autobiographical memories in young and older adults

Objective

Aging produces changes in emotional reactivity and the retrieval of autobiographical memories. The main aim of this study was to assess age-related differences, comparing emotion induction and autobiographical memory recall using photos from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) that are thematically related to childhood.

Method

A cross-sectional observational study was conducted, with the participation of 327 individuals (168 young adults and 159 older adults) with no cognitive impairment and aged between 18 and 88 years. We showed the participants a set of five pictures from the IAPS, the affective content of which was related to childhood. Two of these were considered to be positive images, two negative and one neutral, according to the valence of these pictures in the literature. The main study variables were the reactions associated with emotional valence or pleasure, arousal and dominance, after viewing the photos, and the autobiographical memories retrieved by the participants.

Results

The younger adults retrieved a larger number of memories than their older counterparts. As regards the responses to the five affective pictures (IAPS) on valence, arousal and dominance (IAPS), statistically significant differences were only found for pictures 2,345 (BlackEye), with a more positive valence in the group of older adults and higher arousal in the young ones, and 2,312 (Mother), with a more positive valence in the group of older persons. A greater number of memories were retrieved for the photos that generated higher levels of pleasure, greater relaxation and greater emotional control.

Conclusion

Of the variables that may be associated with the elicitation of involuntary autobiographical memories, the most significant are age and a positive stimulus.

Can action tendencies be counteracted by inducing incompatible emotions? Considering instances of anxiety and anger

BACKGROUND

The incompatible response hypothesis suggests that emotions and other affective states can counteract each other when incompatible. With the present study, we focused on two negative emotions (anger and anxiety) associated with different action tendencies (approach vs. avoidance). Specifically, we wanted to investigate if an anxiety manipulation, subsequent to an anger manipulation, would show a counteracting effect of the approach action tendencies associated with the initial anger manipulation and vice versa for anxiety and avoidance tendencies.

METHODS

We conducted a preregistered online experiment (N = 173). We evaluated changes from when the individual (1) was presented with a task in relation to a specific goal (e.g., anxiety induction: recordings of students' view on climate changes), (2) received a subsequent emotion induction framed within an unrelated task and goal (e.g., anger induction: student feedback on changes to the economic student compensation system), (3) after which they were asked to return to the initial task (e.g., from the anger induction back to the anxiety induction). Primary outcomes included visual and verbal measures of action tendencies, and secondary outcomes included appraisals and emotion experience.

RESULTS

The results showed no evidence of a counteractive effect by inducing emotions unrelated to the initial task and with incompatible action tendencies. Rather, results pointed to spill-over effects, which should be seen in light of the anger conditions resulting not only in increase anger and irritability but also anxiety and nervousness.

CONCLUSIONS

The lack of counteractive effects could be due to either the mixed emotions induced by the anger condition or the compatibility of motivational context (i.e., threat) of anxiety and anger. Future research needs to refine the incompatible response hypothesis, honing the ways in which incompatibility is needed for emotion alteration, for instance by investigating the role of the motivational context.

Walk the plank! Using mobile electroencephalography to investigate emotional lateralization of immersive fear in virtual reality

Most studies on emotion processing induce emotions through images or films. However, this method lacks ecological validity, limiting generalization to real-life emotion processing. More realistic paradigms using virtual reality (VR) may be better suited to investigate authentic emotional states and their neuronal correlates. This pre-registered study examines the neuronal underpinnings of naturalistic fear, measured using mobile electroencephalography (EEG). Seventy-five healthy participants walked across a virtual plank which extended from the side of a skyscraper-either 80 storeys up (the negative condition) or at street level (the neutral condition). Subjective ratings showed that the negative condition induced feelings of fear. Following the VR experience, participants passively viewed negative and neutral images from the international affective picture system (IAPS) outside of VR. We compared frontal alpha asymmetry between the plank and IAPS task and across valence of the conditions. Asymmetry indices in the plank task revealed greater right-hemispheric lateralization during the negative VR condition, relative to the neutral VR condition and to IAPS viewing. Within the IAPS task, no significant asymmetries were detected. In summary, our findings indicate that immersive technologies such as VR can advance emotion research by providing more ecologically valid ways to induce emotion.

Autonomic nervous system reactivity to emotion and childhood trajectories of relational and physical aggression

This study investigated the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) coordination in response to emotion in girls' and boys' development of relational (e.g., ignoring, excluding) and physical (e.g., hitting, kicking) aggression. Caregivers reported on children's relational and physical aggression at ages 6, 7, 8, and 10 years (N = 232, 50.4% girls, 46.6% Latinx). Sympathetic nervous system (assessed via pre-ejection period) and parasympathetic nervous system (assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia) reactivity were measured in response to video clips depicting fear, happiness, and sadness at age 7. Growth curve models indicated that ANS reactivity to sadness, but not to fear or happiness, was related to trajectories of relational aggression. In contrast, ANS reactivity to all three emotions was associated with trajectories of physical aggression. Effects differed across genders, indicating that distinct patterns of ANS reactivity to emotion may be involved in girls' and boys' development of aggression. Overall, these findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the role of ANS reactivity to emotion in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study considers ANS reactivity to specific emotions, as related to both relational and physical aggression, and as differentially expressed among girls versus boys.

Similarities and differences in the induction and regulation of the negative emotions fear and disgust: A functional near infrared spectroscopy study

Affective processing, including induction and regulation of emotion, activates neural networks, induces physiological responses, and generates subjective experience. Dysregulation of these processes can lead to maladaptive behavior and even psychiatric morbidity. Multimodal studies of emotion thus not only help elucidate the nature of emotion, but also contribute to important clinical insights. In the present study, we compared the induction (EI) and effortful regulation (ER) with reappraisal of fear and disgust in healthy subjects using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in conjunction with electrodermal activity (EDA). During EI, there was significant activation in medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) for fear and more widespread activation for disgust, with right lateral PFC significantly more active during disgust compared to fear. ER was equally effective for fear and disgust reducing subjective emotion rating by roughly 45%. Compared to baseline, there was no increased PFC activity for fear during ER, while for disgust lateral PFC was significantly more active. Significant differences between the two negative emotions were also observed in sympathetic nerve activity as reflected in EDA during EI, but not during ER. Lastly, compared to men, women had higher emotion rating for both fear and disgust without corresponding differences in EDA. In conclusion, in the present study we show that emotion induction was associated with differential activation in both PFC and sympathetic nerve activity for fear and disgust. These differences were however less prominent during emotion regulation. We discuss the potential interpretation of our results and their implications regarding our understanding of negative emotion processing.

Emotional characteristic analysis of human gait while real-time movie viewing

Emotion recognition is useful in many applications such as preventing crime or improving customer satisfaction. Most of current methods are performed using facial features, which require close-up face information. Such information is difficult to capture with normal security cameras. The advantage of using gait and posture over conventional biometrics such as facial features is that gaits and postures can be obtained unobtrusively from faraway, even in a noisy environment. This study aims to investigate and analyze the relationship between human emotions and their gaits or postures. We collected a dataset made from the input of 49 participants for our experiments. Subjects were instructed to walk naturally in a circular walking path, while watching emotion-inducing videos on Microsoft HoloLens 2 smart glasses. An OptiTrack motion-capturing system was used for recording the gaits and postures of participants. The angles between body parts and walking straightness were calculated as features for comparison of body-part movements while walking under different emotions. Results of statistical analyses show that the subjects' arm swings are significantly different among emotions. And the arm swings on one side of the body could reveal subjects' emotions more obviously than those on the other side. Our results suggest that the arm movements together with information of arm side and walking straightness can reveal the subjects' current emotions while walking. That is, emotions of humans are unconsciously expressed by their arm swings, especially by the left arm, when they are walking in a non-straight walking path. We found that arm swings in happy emotion are larger than arm swings in sad emotion. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to perform emotion induction by showing emotion-inducing videos to the participants using smart glasses during walking instead of showing videos before walking. This induction method is expected to be more consistent and more realistic than conventional methods. Our study will be useful for implementation of emotion recognition applications in real-world scenarios, since our emotion induction method and the walking direction we used are designed to mimic the real-time emotions of humans as they walk in a non-straight walking direction.

Laugh before You Study: Does Watching Funny Videos before Study Facilitate Learning?

Emotions exist widely in the entire process of learning and affect students' motivation as well as academic performance. In multimedia learning, academics usually focus on the impact of teachers' emotions or the emotional design of multimedia learning materials on students' emotions and learning results. Few studies have investigated how to enhance learning by regulating students' pre-learning emotions. This study focused on whether playing funny videos before learning could promote students' positive emotions to enhance their motivation, satisfaction, and learning outcomes. We randomly divided 81 elementary school students into two groups: experimental group and control group. While the experimental group watched funny video clips, the control group watched neutral video clips before starting the video learning. The experimental group had more positive pre-learning emotions than the control group. After the course, the emotion of the experimental group declined while that of the control group enhanced. However, positive pre-learning emotions still promoted students' understanding and transfer of learning materials. Moreover, no significant differences were observed between the two groups in learning motivation, satisfaction, and retention tests. Furthermore, this paper analyzed the causes of the experimental results and discussed the insights for teaching.

Prone to food in bad mood-Emotion-potentiated food-cue reactivity in patients with binge-eating disorder

OBJECTIVE

Theories on emotional eating are central to our understanding of etiology, maintenance, and treatment of binge eating. Yet, findings on eating changes under induced negative emotions in binge-eating disorder (BED) are equivocal. Thus, we studied whether food-cue reactivity is potentiated under negative emotions in BED, which would point toward a causal role of emotional eating in this disorder.

METHODS

Patients with BED (n = 24) and a control group without eating disorders (CG; n = 69) completed a food picture reactivity task after induction of negative versus neutral emotions. Food-cue reactivity (self-reported food pleasantness, desire to eat [DTE], and corrugator supercilii muscle response, electromyogram [EMG]) was measured for low- and high-caloric food pictures.

RESULTS

Patients with BED showed emotion-potentiated food-cue reactivity compared to controls: Pleasantness and DTE ratings and EMG response were increased in BED during negative emotions. This was independent of caloric content of the images.

CONCLUSIONS

Food-cue reactivity in BED was consistent with emotional eating theories and points to a heightened response to all foods regardless of calorie content. The discrepancy of appetitive ratings with the aversive corrugator response points to ambivalent food responses under negative emotions in individuals with BED.

Behavioral, cortical and autonomic effects of single-dose escitalopram on the induction and regulation of fear and disgust: Comparison with single-session psychological emotion regulation with reappraisal

INTRODUCTION

Adaptive and successful emotion regulation, the ability to flexibly exert voluntary control over emotional experience and the ensuing behavior, is vital for optimal daily functioning and good mental health. In clinical settings, pharmacological and psychological interventions are widely employed to modify pathological emotion processing and ameliorate its deleterious consequences.

METHODS

In this study, we investigated the acute effects of single-dose escitalopram on the induction and regulation of fear and disgust in healthy subjects. Furthermore, we compared these pharmacological effects with psychological emotion regulation that utilized a cognitive strategy with reappraisal. Emotion induction and regulation tasks were performed before and 4 h after ingestion of placebo or 10 mg escitalopram in a randomized, double-blind design. The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) was used as a source of images, with threat-related pictures selected for fear and disease and contamination-related pictures for disgust. Behavioral data, electrodermal activity (EDA), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings were collected.

RESULTS

Escitalopram significantly reduced emotion intensity for both fear and disgust during emotion induction, albeit with differing electrodermal and hemodynamic activity patterns for the two negative emotions. At rest, i.e., in the absence of emotive stimuli, escitalopram increased sympathetic activity during the fear but not during the disgust experiments. For both fear and disgust, emotion regulation with reappraisal was more effective in reducing emotion intensity compared to pharmacological intervention with escitalopram or placebo.

DISCUSSION

We concluded that emotion regulation with reappraisal and acute administration of escitalopram, but not placebo, reduce emotion intensity for both fear and disgust, with cognitive regulation being significantly more efficient compared to pharmacological regulation under the conditions of this study. Results from the fNIRS and EDA recordings support the concept of differential mechanisms of emotion regulation that could be emotion-specific.

The Effects of Emotional Design on Multimedia Learning and Appreciation of Chinese Poetry

Painting, music, literature, and other art forms embody the essence of human wisdom and induce esthetic experience, among which poetry is inherently creative, because it contains a wealth of symbols, imageries, insights, and so forth. The appreciation and learning of Chinese poetry is an important part of the curriculum in secondary schools. However, studies have mainly focused on textual characters of poetry, with little literature focusing on esthetic appreciation and in-depth learning of poetry. In this vein, we ask whether emotional designs will promote the appreciation and learning of Chinese poetry. To answer this question, we explored the influence of the combination of external emotion induction (positive and neutral movie clips) and internal colorful design (chromatic and achromatic) on esthetic preference and learning of poetry. One hundred and sixty-six participants (14–15 years old) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions created by two factors (external emotion induction and internal colorful design). The results showed that the combination of external emotion induction and internal colorful design promoted positive emotions, retention, and transfer performances of learners. Furthermore, perceived difficulty of learners decreased significantly when external emotional induction and internal colorful design were both positive. Consequently, these findings indicated that emotional designs in multimedia facilitated the learning performance of middle school students in Chinese poetry, and supported the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media. This research was a preliminary exploration of emotional design in humanities.

Positive Emotion and Honesty

We report an experiment that considers the impact of emotional state on honesty. Using the die-rolling task created by Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi to detect the level of dishonesty in a sample of individuals, we study the effects of induced happiness on the incidence of self-interested lying. The experiment uses 360-degree videos to induce emotional state. We find that people behave more honestly in a state of happiness than they do in a neutral state.

Bad mood food? Increased versus decreased food cue reactivity in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa during negative emotions

OBJECTIVE

Emotion regulation difficulties in anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) might underlie bingeing and purging in BN, extreme fasting in AN, or combinations of these symptoms in binge-purge type AN. In this study, we tested for decreased food cue reactivity in response to negative emotions in AN, and the opposite pattern for BN. Furthermore, we explored subgroup differences (restrictive vs. binge-purging AN; history of AN in BN).

METHOD

Patients with AN (n = 41), BN (n = 39), and matched controls (n = 70) completed an emotional eating questionnaire. In a laboratory experiment, we induced negative emotions and measured food cue reactivity (pleasantness, desire to eat (DTE), and corrugator muscle activity).

RESULTS

AN reported emotional undereating, while BN reported emotional overeating. In the laboratory task, BN showed increased DTE and an appetitive corrugator response during negative emotions, selectively towards high-calorie foods. AN showed generalized reduced cue reactivity to high-calorie food regardless of emotional state. This pattern appears to be characteristic of restrictive AN, while cue reactivity of both BN subgroups pointed towards emotional overeating.

CONCLUSIONS

The emotional over- versus undereating framework might help to explain bingeing and restricting along the anorectic-bulimic disorder spectrum, which calls for novel transdiagnostic theories and subgroup-specific treatments.

Good Deeds Could Come From Frustrated Individuals

Frustration is often seen as negative, but as to whether it may have a positive impact on the individual is still undecided. This research was conducted to explore the influence of frustration on altruistic tendency and altruistic level in college students (17-21 years old). By presenting a highly difficult task combined with negative feedback, we effectively induced frustration in Experiment 1 (n = 70). By assessing the donation behavior of participants (n = 54) in a real-life scenario following the experimental manipulation of frustration, we examined the relationship between frustration and altruism in Experiment 2. Results showed that frustrating situations could, on some level, improve altruistic behavior [t (8.834) = 3.013, p = 0.015]. More specifically, among participants who donated, the amount donated was higher in the frustration group compared to the control (fulfillment) group; the proportion of people who donated did not differ by group.

The effects of experimentally induced emotions on revising common vaccine misconceptions

Knowledge revision is the process of updating incorrect prior knowledge in light of new, correct information. Although theoretical and empirical knowledge has advanced regarding the cognitive processes involved in revision, less is known about the role of emotions, which have shown inconsistent relations with key revision processes. This study examined the effects of experimentally induced emotions on online and offline knowledge revision of vaccination misconceptions. Before reading refutation and non-refutation texts, 96 individuals received a positive, negative, or no emotion induction. Findings showed that negative emotions, more than positive emotions, resulted in enhanced knowledge revision as indicated by greater ease of integrating correct information during reading and higher comprehension test scores after reading. Findings are discussed with respect to contemporary frameworks of knowledge revision and emotion in reading comprehension and implications for educational practice.

Emotions Induced by Recalling Memories About Interpersonal Stress

The emotions that people experience in day-to-day social situations are often mixed emotions. Although autobiographical recall is useful as an emotion induction procedure, it often involves recalling memories associated with a specific discrete emotion (e.g., sadness). However, real-life emotions occur freely and spontaneously, without such constraints. To understand real-life emotions, the present study examined characteristics of emotions that were elicited by recalling “stressful interpersonal events in daily life” without the targeted evocation of a specific discrete emotion. Assuming generation of mixed and complex emotions, emotional groups with relatively strong correlation of multiple emotions according to surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness were expected. Seventy-two university students (35 males, mean age: 19.69 ± 1.91 years; 37 females, 20.03 ± 2.42) participated in the study. In the emotion induction procedure, participants freely recalled memories as per the instructions on a monitor, and then responded silently to a series of questions concerning any one recalled incident. Assessments of emotional states using emotion scales and another item indicated that validated emotional changes had occurred during the task. Inter-correlations between six emotions demonstrated an emotional group consisting of disgust and anger, which frequently occur as negative interpersonal feelings, and that of fear and sadness. This indicated generation of mixed and complex emotions as experienced in social life. Future studies concerning relationships between these emotions and other factors, including neurophysiological responses, may facilitate further understanding about relationships between mental and physiological processes occurring in daily life.

From Abstract Symbols to Emotional (In-)Sights: An Eye Tracking Study on the Effects of Emotional Vignettes and Pictures

Reading is known to be a highly complex, emotion-inducing process, usually involving connected and cohesive sequences of sentences and paragraphs. However, most empirical results, especially from studies using eye tracking, are either restricted to simple linguistic materials (e.g., isolated words, single sentences) or disregard valence-driven effects. The present study addressed the need for ecologically valid stimuli by examining the emotion potential of and reading behavior in emotional vignettes, often used in applied psychological contexts and discourse comprehension. To allow for a cross-domain comparison in the area of emotion induction, negatively and positively valenced vignettes were constructed based on pre-selected emotional pictures from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka et al., 2014). We collected ratings of perceived valence and arousal for both material groups and recorded eye movements of 42 participants during reading and picture viewing. Linear mixed-effects models were performed to analyze effects of valence (i.e., valence category, valence rating) and stimulus domain (i.e., textual, pictorial) on ratings of perceived valence and arousal, eye movements in reading, and eye movements in picture viewing. Results supported the success of our experimental manipulation: emotionally positive stimuli (i.e., vignettes, pictures) were perceived more positively and less arousing than emotionally negative ones. The cross-domain comparison indicated that vignettes are able to induce stronger valence effects than their pictorial counterparts, no differences between vignettes and pictures regarding effects on perceived arousal were found. Analyses of eye movements in reading replicated results from experiments using isolated words and sentences: perceived positive text valence attracted shorter reading times than perceived negative valence at both the supralexical and lexical level. In line with previous findings, no emotion effects on eye movements in picture viewing were found. This is the first eye tracking study reporting superior valence effects for vignettes compared to pictures and valence-specific effects on eye movements in reading at the supralexical level.

Are You Awed Yet? How Virtual Reality Gives Us Awe and Goose Bumps

“Awe” is a category of emotion within the spectrum of self-transcendent experiences. Awe has wellness benefits, with feelings of social interconnectivity and increased life satisfaction. However, awe experiences remain rare in our everyday lives, and rarer in lab environments. We posit that Virtual Reality (VR) may help to make self-transcendent and potentially transformative experiences of awe more accessible to individuals. Here, we investigated how interactive VR as a positive technology may elicit awe, and how features of aesthetic beauty/scale, familiarity, and personalization (self-selection of travel destinations) may induce awe. In this mixed-methods study, participants used an interactive VR system to explore Earth from ground and orbit. We collected: introspective interviews and self-report questionnaires with participants’ experience of awe; information on personality traits and gender; and we recorded physiological goose bumps on the skin (using an arm-mounted goose bump camera instrument), which is a documented marker of an awe experience. Results showed that on a scale of 0–100 for self-reported awe, four different interactive VR environments yielded an average awe rating of 79.7, indicating that interactive VR can indeed induce awe. 43.8% of participants experienced goose bumps: awe ratings positively correlated with the occurrence of goose bumps with those who experienced goose bumps having showed significantly higher ratings of awe than those who did not. Most (64%) of the goose bumps occurred when participants self-selected their VR environment. Participant statements from the interviews were characteristic of an awe-inspiring experience, revealed themes of social connection, and usability problems with the VR interface. Personality traits yielded no clear correlation to awe ratings, and females appear to experience more goose bumps than males. In summary: (1) Interactive VR can elicit awe, especially within familiar, self-selected environments; (2) Physiological goose bumps can be recorded to provide reliable, non-intrusive indications of awe; (3) Care must be taken to design interaction interfaces that do not impede awe; and (4) While personality traits are not correlated to awe ratings, goose bumps were experienced more frequently among females. We aim to conduct future studies using custom VR environments, interfaces, and additional physiological measures to provide further insight into awe.

Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study

Awe is a little-studied emotion with a great transformative potential. Therefore, the interest toward the study of awe's underlying mechanisms has been increased. Specifically, researchers have been interested in how to reproduce intense feelings of awe within laboratory conditions. It has been proposed that the use of virtual reality (VR) could be an effective way to induce awe in controlled experimental settings, thanks to its ability of providing participants with a sense of "presence," that is, the subjective feeling of being displaced in another physical or imaginary place. However, the potential of VR as awe-inducing medium has not been fully tested yet. In the present study, we provided an evidence-based design and a validation of four immersive virtual environments (VEs) involving 36 participants in a within-subject design. Of these, three VEs were designed to induce awe, whereas the fourth VE was targeted as an emotionally neutral stimulus. Participants self-reported the extent to which they felt awe, general affect and sense of presence related to each environment. As expected, results showed that awe-VEs could induce significantly higher levels of awe and presence as compared to the neutral VE. Furthermore, these VEs induced significantly more positive than negative affect. These findings supported the potential of immersive VR for inducing awe and provide useful indications for the design of awe-inspiring virtual environments.

Toward an implicit measure of emotions: ratings of abstract images reveal distinct emotional states

Although implicit tests of positive and negative affect exist, implicit measures of distinct emotional states are scarce. Three experiments examined whether a novel implicit emotion-assessment task, the rating of emotion expressed in abstract images, would reveal distinct emotional states. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to a sadness-inducing story inferred more sadness, and less happiness, in abstract images. In Experiment 2, an anger-provoking interaction increased anger ratings. In Experiment 3, compared to neutral images, spider images increased fear ratings in spider-fearful participants but not in controls. In each experiment, the implicit task indicated elevated levels of the target emotion and did not indicate elevated levels of non-target negative emotions; the task thus differentiated among emotional states of the same valence. Correlations also supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the implicit task. Supporting the possibility that heuristic processes underlie the ratings, group differences were stronger among those who responded relatively quickly.

Forced-choice decision-making in modified trolley dilemma situations: a virtual reality and eye tracking study

Based on the frameworks of dual-process theories, we examined the interplay between intuitive and controlled cognitive processes related to moral and social judgments. In a virtual reality (VR) setting we performed an experiment investigating the progression from fast, automatic decisions towards more controlled decisions over multiple trials in the context of a sacrificing scenario. We repeatedly exposed participants to a modified ten-to-one version and to three one-to-one versions of the trolley dilemma in VR and varied avatar properties, such as their gender and ethnicity, and their orientation in space. We also investigated the influence of arousing music on decisions. Our experiment replicated the behavioral pattern observed in studies using text versions of the trolley dilemma, thereby validating the use of virtual environments in research on moral judgments. Additionally, we found a general tendency towards sacrificing male individuals which correlated with socially desirable responding. As indicated by differences in response times, the ten-to-one version of the trolley dilemma seems to be faster to decide than decisions requiring comparisons based on specific avatar properties as a result of differing moral content. Building upon research on music-based emotion induction, we used music to induce emotional arousal on a physiological level as measured by pupil diameter. We found a specific temporal signature displaying a peak in arousal around the moment of decision. This signature occurs independently of the overall arousal level. Furthermore, we found context-dependent gaze durations during sacrificing decisions, leading participants to look prolonged at their victim if they had to choose between avatars differing in gender. Our study confirmed that moral decisions can be explained within the framework of dual-process theories and shows that pupillometric measurements are a promising tool for investigating affective responses in dilemma situations.

Developing connections for affective regulation: age-related changes in emotional brain connectivity

The regulation of affective arousal is a critical aspect of children's social and cognitive development. However, few studies have examined the brain mechanisms involved in the development of this aspect of "hot" executive functioning. This process has been conceptualized as involving prefrontal control of the amygdala. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the brain mechanisms involved in the development of affective regulation in typically developing 5- to 11-year-olds and an adult comparison sample. Children and adults displayed differing patterns of increased anterior cingulate cortex and decreased amygdala activation during episodes in which emotion regulation was required. Specifically, amygdala activation increased in adults but decreased in children during recovery from a frustrating episode. In addition, we used effective connectivity analyses to investigate differential correlations between key emotional brain areas in response to the regulatory task demands. We found reliable increases in effective connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala during periods of increased demand for emotion regulation. This effective connectivity increased with age.