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.

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.

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

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.