Sinful pleasures and pious woes? Using fMRI to examine evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge

Traditionally, lust and pride have been considered pleasurable, yet sinful in the West. Conversely, guilt is often considered aversive, yet valuable. These emotions illustrate how evaluations about specific emotions and beliefs about their hedonic properties may often diverge. Evaluations about specific emotions may shape important aspects of emotional life (e.g. in emotion regulation, emotion experience and acquisition of emotion concepts). Yet these evaluations are often understudied in affective neuroscience. Prior work in emotion regulation, affective experience, evaluation/attitudes and decision-making point to anterior prefrontal areas as candidates for supporting evaluative emotion knowledge. Thus, we examined the brain areas associated with evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge, with a focus on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Participants (N = 25) made evaluative and hedonic ratings about emotion knowledge during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus was associated with an evaluative (vs hedonic) focus on emotion knowledge. Our results suggest that the mPFC and vmPFC, in particular, may play a role in evaluating discrete emotions.

Gender Differences in Mother-Child Conversations About Shame and Pride in a Hungarian Sample

Although meta-analytic reviews repeatedly found significant gender differences in the experiences of shame and pride throughout the life span, to date, gender differences in conversations about these emotions have not been studied. Our research was aimed at investigating the effect of child gender on maternal conversational style in and emotional content of mother-child conversations about shame- and pride-related past events in preschool years. Fifty four mother—preschool child dyads (52% girls, children’s age M = 70.36 months [SD = 8.13], mothers’ age M = 37.51 years [SD = 3.70]) from middle class Hungarian families were asked to talk about two past events, one in which children felt ashamed, and one in which they felt proud. The conversations were transcribed and coded for maternal conversational style and for emotional content. Maternal conversational style was indicated by maternal elaboration and evaluation of the child’s contributions. Emotional content was indicated by specific emotion terms, emotional behavior and emotional evaluations. In mother-son shame conversations, we found higher amount of negative emotional behavior. Boys also had longer conversations with their mothers, and mothers used more open-ended memory questions and more repetitions with boys in both shame and pride conversations. Girls had shorter contributions to pride stories than to shame stories, which was not the case for boys. Exploration of verbal socialization of shame and pride helps us to understand the development of individual differences in proneness to self-conscious emotions, and their implications for mental health.

Emotion words link faces to emotional scenarios in early childhood

Recent theories have suggested that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts. The present study investigates whether emotion words affect children's performance on an emotion category learning task. Across two experiments, 72 three-year-old children (49 female) were asked to identify which emotional face best matched particular emotional scenarios during nine pretest and nine posttest trials. The scenarios in the present studies aligned with emotions typically learned among older age groups (annoyed, disgusted, and nervous). Between pretest and posttest, children participated in training in which a facial configuration (annoyed, disgusted, or nervous) was paired with an associated scenario while they heard the emotion labeled explicitly or heard irrelevant information (Experiment 1) or heard a broad emotion label versus irrelevant information (Experiment 2). Aside from the labels presented, all other information was kept the same across conditions, including the specific faces and scenarios heard during learning trials. In Experiment 1, children's emotion understanding increased more from pretest to posttest in the explicit label versus irrelevant condition, t(34) = 2.26, p = .030, d = .75, but in Experiment 2 the broad emotion labels did not provide an advantage over irrelevant information, t(34) = .72, p = .474, d = .24. These results suggest that emotion labels may be particularly helpful for young children learning about unfamiliar emotions, because specific labels may help children to aggregate disparate emotional information into meaningful categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Can Masked Emotion-Laden Words Prime Emotion-Label Words? An ERP Test on the Mediated Account

The present event-related potential (ERP) study explored whether masked emotion-laden words could facilitate the processing of both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in a valence judgment task. The results revealed that emotion-laden words as primes failed to influence target emotion-label word processing, whereas emotion-laden words facilitated target emotion-laden words in the congruent condition. Specifically, decreased late positivity complex (LPC) was elicited by emotion-laden words primed by emotion-laden words of the same valence than those primed by emotion-laden words of different valence. Nevertheless, no difference was observed for emotion-label words as targets. These findings supported the mediated account that claimed emotion-laden words engendered emotion via the mediation of emotion-label words and hypothesized that emotion-laden words could not prime emotion-label words in the masked priming paradigm. Moreover, this study provided additional evidence showing the distinction between emotion-laden words and emotion-label words.

Are All "Basic Emotions" Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct

Despite decades of challenges to the idea that a small number of emotions enjoys the special status of "basic emotions," the idea continues to have considerable influence in psychology and beyond. However, different theorists have proposed substantially different lists of basic emotions, which suggests that there exists no stable criterion of basicness. To some extent, the basic-emotions enterprise is bedeviled by an overreliance on English affective terms, but there also lurks a more serious problem-the lack of agreement as to what emotions are. To address this problem, three necessary conditions are proposed as a minimal requirement for a mental state to be an emotion. A detailed analysis of surprise, a widely accepted basic emotion, reveals that surprise violates even this minimal test, raising the possibility that it and perhaps other would-be basic emotions might not be emotions at all. An approach that combines ideas such as undifferentiated affect and cognitive appraisal is briefly proposed as a way of theorizing about emotions that is less dependent on the vagaries of language and incoherent notions of basic emotions. Finally, it is suggested that the perennial question of what an emotion is should be given more serious attention.

The Meaning of Emoji to Describe Food Experiences in Pre-Adolescents

Ongoing research has shown that emoji can be used by children to discriminate food products, but it is unclear if they express emotions and how they are linked to emotional words. Little is known about how children interpret emoji in terms of their emotional meaning in the context of food. This study aimed at investigating the emotional meaning of emoji used to describe food experiences in 9–13-year-old pre-adolescents and to measure related age and gender differences. The meaning of 46 emoji used to describe food experience was explored by: mapping emoji according to similarities and differences in their emotional meaning using the projective mapping technique, and linking emoji with emotion words using a check-all-that-apply (CATA) format. The two tasks gave consistent results and showed that emoji were discriminated along the valence (positive vs. negative) and power (dominant vs. submissive) dimension, and to a lower extent along the arousal dimension (high vs. low activation). In general, negative emoji had more distinct meanings than positive emoji in both studies, but differences in nuances of meaning were found also among positive emoji. Girls and older pre-adolescents (12–13 years old (y.o.)) discriminated positive emoji slightly better than boys and younger pre-adolescents (9–11 y.o.). This suggests that girls and older pre-adolescents may be higher in emotional granularity (the ability to experience and discriminate emotions), particularly of positive emotions. The results of the present work can be used for the development of an emoji-based tool to measure emotions elicited by foods in pre-adolescents.

The Taste of Emotion: Metaphoric Association Between Taste Words and Emotion/Emotion-Laden Words

According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, abstract concepts can be metaphorically associated with more concrete, physically embodied concepts, such as gustatory experience. Studies on taste-emotion metaphoric association reported that people associate love with sweet, jealousy with sour and bitter, and sadness with bitter. However, few studies have systematically examined the metaphoric association between taste and words referred to emotion (e.g., "sad") or emotion-laden concepts (e.g., "funeral"). In the current four studies (total N = 357), we examined this metaphoric association by having participants come up with a taste word when reading an emotion and emotion-laden word (Study 1-explicit association of taste words-to-emotion/emotion-laden words), come up with an emotion word when reading taste words (Study 2-explicit association of emotion words-to-taste words), rate the association between taste words and basic or non-basic emotion words (Study 3), and rate the association between taste words and a more expanded pool of emotion/emotion-laden words (Study 4). Results showed that sweet was mostly associated with positive emotion and emotion-laden words, whereas bitter, followed by sour and spicy, was mostly associated with negative emotion and emotion-laden words. The bidirectionality of taste-emotion metaphoric association was supported by our dataset. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and embodied cognition are discussed.

Emotion Words' Effect on Visual Awareness and Attention of Emotional Faces

To explore whether the meaning of a word changes visual processing of emotional faces (i.e., visual awareness and visual attention), we performed two complementary studies. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with emotion and control words and then tracked their visual awareness for two competing emotional faces using a binocular rivalry paradigm. Participants experienced the emotional face congruent with the emotion word for longer than a word-incongruent emotional face, as would be expected if the word was biasing awareness toward the (unseen) face. In Experiment 2, we similarly presented participants with emotion and control words prior to presenting emotional faces using a divided visual field paradigm. Emotion words were congruent with either the emotional face in the right or left visual field. After the presentation of faces, participants saw a dot in either the left or right visual field. Participants were slower to identify the location of the dot when it appeared in the same visual field as the emotional face congruent with the emotion word. The effect was limited to the left hemisphere (RVF), as would be expected for linguistic integration of the word with the face. Since the task was not linguistic, but rather a simple dot-probe task, participants were slower in their responses under these conditions because they likely had to disengage from the additional linguistic processing caused by the word-face integration. These findings indicate that emotion words bias visual awareness for congruent emotional faces, as well as shift attention toward congruent emotional faces.

Left Amygdala Regulates the Cerebral Reading Network During Fast Emotion Word Processing

Emotion words constitute a special class of verbal stimuli which can quickly activate the limbic system outside the left-hemisphere language network. Such fast response to emotion words may arise independently of the left occipitotemporal area involved in visual word-form analysis and rely on a distinct amygdala-dependent emotion circuit involved in fearful face processing. Using a hemifield priming paradigm with fMRI, we explored how the left and right amygdala systems interact with the reading network during emotion word processing. On each trial, participants viewed a centrally presented target which was preceded by a masked prime flashed either to the left or right visual field. Primes and targets, each denoting negative or positive nouns, could be either affectively congruent or incongruent with each other. We observed that affective congruency produced parallel changes in neural priming between the left frontal and parietotemporal regions and the bilateral amygdala. However, we also found that the left, but not right, amygdala exhibited significant change in functional connectivity with the neural components of reading as a function of affective congruency. Collectively, these results suggest that emotion words activate the bilateral amygdala during early stages of emotion word processing, whereas only the left amygdala exerts a long-distance regulatory influence over the reading network via its strong within-hemisphere connectivity.

The semantic structure of emotion words across languages is consistent with componential appraisal models of emotion

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and representation of these processes. Given the complexity of the proposed architecture, comprehensive experimental tests of these predictions are difficult to perform and to date are lacking. Encouraged by the "lexical sedimentation" hypothesis, here we propose an indirect examination of the compatibility of the theoretical assumptions with the semantic structure of a set of major emotion words as measured in a cross-language and cross-cultural study. Specifically, we performed a secondary analysis of the large-scale data set with ratings of affective features covering all components of the emotion process for 24 emotion words in 27 countries, constituting profiles of emotion-specific appraisals, action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences. The results of a series of hierarchical regression analyses to examine the prediction of the theoretical model are highly consistent with the claim that appraisal patterns determine the structure of the response components, which in turn predict central dimensions of the feeling component.

Neural Correlates of Emotion Processing in Word Detection Task

In our previous study, we have proposed a three-stage model of emotion processing; in the current study, we investigated whether the ERP component may be different when the emotional content of stimuli is task-irrelevant. In this study, a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task was used to investigate how the emotional content of words modulates the time course of neural dynamics. Participants performed the task in which affectively positive, negative, and neutral adjectives were rapidly presented while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 18 undergraduates. The N170 component was enhanced for negative words relative to positive and neutral words. This indicates that automatic processing of negative information occurred at an early perceptual processing stage. In addition, later brain potentials such as the late positive potential (LPP) were only enhanced for positive words in the 480-580-ms post-stimulus window, while a relatively large amplitude signal was elicited by positive and negative words between 580 and 680 ms. These results indicate that different types of emotional content are processed distinctly at different time windows of the LPP, which is in contrast with the results of studies on task-relevant emotional processing. More generally, these findings suggest that a negativity bias to negative words remains to be found in emotion-irrelevant tasks, and that the LPP component reflects dynamic separation of emotion valence.

Auditory Emotion Word Primes Influence Emotional Face Categorization in Children and Adults, but Not Vice Versa

In order to assess how the perception of audible speech and facial expressions influence one another for the perception of emotions, and how this influence might change over the course of development, we conducted two cross-modal priming experiments with three age groups of children (6-, 9-, and 12-years old), as well as college-aged adults. In Experiment 1, 74 children and 24 adult participants were tasked with categorizing photographs of emotional faces as positive or negative as quickly as possible after being primed with emotion words presented via audio in valence-congruent and valence-incongruent trials. In Experiment 2, 67 children and 24 adult participants carried out a similar categorization task, but with faces acting as visual primes, and emotion words acting as auditory targets. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants made more errors when categorizing positive faces primed by negative words versus positive words, and that 6-year-old children are particularly sensitive to positive word primes, giving faster correct responses regardless of target valence. Meanwhile, the results of Experiment 2 did not show any congruency effects for priming by facial expressions. Thus, audible emotion words seem to exert an influence on the emotional categorization of faces, while faces do not seem to influence the categorization of emotion words in a significant way.

Measuring inconsistencies can lead you forward: Imageability and the x-ception theory

According to the traditional view, both imageability and concreteness ratings reflect the way word meanings rely on information mediated by the senses. As a consequence, the two measures should and do correlate. The link between these two indexes was already hypothesized and demonstrated by Paivio et al. (1968) in a seminal article, where they introduced the idea of imageability ratings for the first time. However, in this first study, they also noted a contrasting pattern in the ratings for imageability and concreteness with some words that refer to affective attitudes or emotional states receiving high imageability but low concreteness ratings. Recent studies confirm this inconsistency (e.g., Altarriba and Bauer, 2004) leading to the claim that emotion words form a particular class of terms different from both concrete and abstract words. Here we use the MRC psycholinguistic database to show that the there are other classes of terms for which imageability and concreteness are uncorrelated. We show that the common feature of these word classes is that they directly or indirectly refer to proprioceptive, interoceptive, or affective states, i.e., to internal, body-related, sensory experiences. Thus, imageability and concreteness can no longer be considered interchangeable constructs; rather, imageability is a different, and perhaps more interesting, measure: it not only reflects the ease with which memories of external events come to mind, as previously hypothesized, but also reflects the ease with which memories of internal events come to mind.