Beyond good and evil: The time-course of neural activity elicited by specific picture content.

The present study examined electrocortical evidence for a negativity bias, focusing on the impact of specific picture content on a range of event-related potentials (ERPs). To this end, ERPs were recorded while 67 participants viewed a variety of pictures from the International Affective Picture System. Examination of broad categories (i.e., pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) found no evidence for a negativity bias in two early components, the N1 and the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), but revealed that unpleasant images did elicit a larger late positive potential (LPP) than pleasant pictures. However, images of erotica and mutilation elicited comparable LPP responses, as did affiliative and threatening images. Exciting (i.e., sports) images and disgusting images elicited smaller LPPs than other emotional images, similar to neutral images containing people—which were associated with the largest LPPs among neutral pictures. When these three anomalous categories (exciting, disgusting, and scenes with people) were excluded, unpleasant images no longer elicited a larger LPP than pleasant images. Thus, including exciting images in pleasant ERP averages disproportionately reduces the LPP. The present findings are discussed in light of the motivational significance of specific picture subtypes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memories of yesterday’s emotions: Does the valence of experience affect the memory-experience gap?

Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which elicit a wide gamut of emotions. We asked female participants (N = 810, Study 1, and N = 615, Study 2) to reconstruct episodes of the previous day using the DRM and demonstrated that memory and experience diverge for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. When they rated their day overall in a retrospectively evaluative frame of mind, the participants recalled more unpleasant and pleasant emotions than they reported feeling during the individual episodes, with a larger gap for unpleasant emotions than for pleasant emotions. The findings suggest that separate processes are used for committing positive and negative events to memory and that, especially when unpleasant emotions are involved, prudence is favored over accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mood, pleasant events, and unpleasant events: Two pilot studies.

Assessed the relationship between mood and both pleasant and unpleasant events in 2 studies with a total of 34 undergraduates. Ss made self-ratings of mood and kept daily logs of pleasant and unpleasant events for approximately 2 wks. Intrasubject correlations in both studies suggested that mood was related to pleasant and unpleasant events independently. Intersubject correlations were consistent but nonsignificant. Cross-lagged correlations were significantly less than same-day correlations. Weighted event scores produced marginally higher correlations with mood than unweighted scores. Minor sex differences are noted. Implications of these results for theory and practice are discussed. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive correlates of emotional traits: Perceptions of self and others.

Two studies examined how individuals' perceptions of self and others are associated with different emotional traits. Study 1 (N = 386) used structural equation modeling of questionnaire data to examine the relations between emotional traits (i.e., affect intensity, affect variability, and trait pleasant and unpleasant affect) and self- and other-perceptions (i.e., self-instability, self-esteem, other-instability, and perceived treatment by others). Study 2 (N = 99) used path analyses of data collected using an event sampling method in which online measures of emotional experiences (i.e., intensity, frequency, and variability of pleasant and unpleasant affect) as well as perceptions of self and others (i.e., self-instability, self-esteem, other-instability, perceived treatment by others) were collected. The strongest and most consistent finding was that affect variability was associated with both self- and other-instability. The results linking affect intensity with self- and other-instability were limited to negative intensity. There was also evidence of pleasant affect being associated with both self-esteem and perceived treatment by others, and unpleasant affect being associated with self-esteem and other-instability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress.

W. Wilson's (1967) review of the area of subjective well-being (SWB) advanced several conclusions regarding those who report high levels of "happiness." A number of his conclusions have been overturned: youth and modest aspirations no longer are seen as prerequisites of SWB. E. Diener's (1984) review placed greater emphasis on theories that stressed psychological factors. In the current article, the authors review current evidence for Wilson's conclusions and discuss modern theories of SWB that stress dispositional influences, adaptation, goals, and coping strategies. The next steps in the evolution of the field are to comprehend the interaction of psychological factors with life circumstances in producing SWB, to understand the causal pathways leading to happiness, understand the processes underlying adaptation to events, and develop theories that explain why certain variables differentially influence the different components of SWB (life satisfaction, pleasant affect, and unpleasant affect). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-Monitoring, Activity Levels, and Mood in the Development and Maintenance of Depression.

The reactive effect on mood of self-monitoring pleasant and unpleasant events was assessed. Forty-five females spent 28 days monitoring in one of four conditions: (a) pleasant events, (b) unpleasant events, (c) both, and (d) no monitoring. Motor activity level (pedometer recordings) and mood were also assessed daily. Class of event monitored was not found to influence mood. Correlations between mood and both pleasant and unpleasant events were found even with activity level partialed out. Implications for self-monitoring assessment in depression therapy programs and for models of depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The personality structure of affect.

We examined the organization of individual differences in pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and six discrete emotions. We used several refinements over past studies: a) systematic sampling of emotions; b) control of measurement error through the use of latent traits; c) multiple methods for measuring affect; d) inclusion of only affects that are widely agreed to be emotions; e) a statistical definition of "independence"; and f) a focus on the frequency and duration of long-term affect. There was strong convergence between the two pleasant emotions (love and joy) and between the four unpleasant emotions (fear, anger, sadness, and shame). The results indicated, however, that individual differences in the discrete emotions cannot be reduced to positive and negative affect. The latent traits of pleasant and unpleasant affect were correlated –.44, and a two-factor model accounted for significantly more variance than a one-factor model. This finding indicates that long-term pleasant and unpleasant affect are not strictly orthogonal, but they are separable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characteristics associated with real and made-up events: The effects of event valence, event elaboration, and individual differences.

In three studies, participants rated both real and made-up personal events on several different characteristics. These included meta-cognitive beliefs about the perceived realness and typicality of these events, imagery ratings of visual detail, and emotional ratings of intensity and feelings. Studies 1 and 2 explored the impact of event valence (pleasant versus unpleasant) on these characteristics, whereas Study 3 focused on the effects of event elaboration involving guided imagery and journaling techniques. All three studies also included consideration of individual difference factors that might either enhance or attenuate the ratings that were obtained. Both Studies 1 and 2 found that pleasant events (be they real or made-up), were viewed as more typical, and more likely to have happened and be true, than unpleasant events. This pattern of meta-cognitive judgments provided support for a general positivity hypothesis, which proposes that most individuals orient towards and emphasize pleasant rather than unpleasant life experience and events. In contrast, the imagery-related components of these events, such as visual details, location, and time, were much less sensitive to the manipulation of event valence. Strong imagery-related effects, however, were noted when events were elaborated in the final study. Furthermore, this event elaboration manipulation also resulted in heightened meta-cognitive judgments of typicality, likelihood of the event having happened, and of being true. Finally, across all three studies, a series of correlational analyses indicated that the individual difference factors did not have any systematic effect on any of the event characteristic ratings. However, when event valence was not specifically manipulated (in Study 3), depressed individuals spontaneously provided twice as many unpleasant personal events as nondepressed individuals. These findings were then discussed in terms of source-confusion issues regarding personal memory accuracy, as well as the further extension of a recent model of autobiographical memory to incorporate event properties such as valence and elaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit associations as the seeds of intergroup bias: How easily do they take root?

Three experiments provided evidence that intergroup bias occurs automatically under minimal conditions, using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998). In Experiment 1, participants more readily paired in-group names with pleasant words and out-group names with unpleasant words, even when they were experienced only with the in-group and had no preconceptions about the out-group. Participants in Experiment 2 likewise showed an automatic bias favoring the in-group, even when in-group/out-group exemplars were completely unfamiliar and identifiable only with the use of a heuristic. In Experiment 3, participants displayed a pro-in-group IAT bias following a minimal group manipulation. Taken together, the results demonstrate the ease with which intergroup bias emerges even in unlikely conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect and memory: Effects of pleasant and unpleasant odors on retrieval of happy and unhappy memories.

Interpretation of studies of induced mood and memory is complicated by the fact that mood induction procedures may elicit mood-related cognition in addition to mood per se. We used odors to produce positive and negative experiences with minimal cognitive involvement. College women recalled memories cued by neutral words while exposed to a pleasant odor, unpleasant odor, or no odor. Subjects then rated their memories as to how happy or unhappy the events recalled were at the time they occurred. Subjects in the pleasant odor condition produced a significantly greater percentage of happy memories than did subjects in the unpleasant odor condition. When subjects who did not find the odors at least moderately pleasant or unpleasant were removed from the analysis, more pronounced effects on memory were found. The results suggest that congruence between the general hedonic tone of current experience and that of material in long-term memory is sufficient to bias retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Static, dynamic, and causative bipolarity of affect.

In what sense are pleasant and unpleasant moods "bipolar?" One must differentiate three types of affective bipolarity: static bipolarity (the zero-order correlation between measures of pleasant and unpleasant affect, net of distortions due to measurement error, tends to be strongly negative), dynamic bipolarity (pleasant and unpleasant feelings generally change in opposite directions and to approximately the same extent), and causative bipolarity (the influence of pleasant and unpleasant affect on other variables is approximately equal and opposite). It is argued that static bipolarity is often attenuated by measurement error, dynamic bipolarity can be masked by asymmetrical scaling artifacts, and causative bipolarity is often obscured by both. The experience and influence of pleasant and unpleasant affect may occur along bipolar lines even if the sources of these feelings are understood as physiologically separable systems with distinct neurological loci. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural variations in optimistic and pessimistic bias: Do Easterners really expect the worst and Westerners really expect the best when predicting future life events?

The authors compared levels of optimistic and pessimistic bias in the prediction of positive and negative life events between European Americans and Japanese. Study 1 showed that European Americans compared with Japanese were more likely to predict positive events to occur to self than to others. The opposite pattern emerged in the prediction of negative events. Study 2 replicated these cultural differences. Furthermore, positive associations emerged between predictions and occurrence of life events 2 months later for both European Americans and Japanese. Across both studies, results of within-groups analyses indicated that both groups expected negative events to be more likely to occur to others than to self (optimistic bias). In addition, Japanese expected positive events to be more likely to occur to others than to self (pessimistic bias). However, European Americans failed to show the expected optimistic bias for positive events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect and Face Perception: Odors Modulate the Recognition Advantage of Happy Faces.

Previous choice reaction time studies have provided consistent evidence for faster recognition of positive (e.g., happy) than negative (e.g., disgusted) facial expressions. A predominance of positive emotions in normal contexts may partly explain this effect. The present study used pleasant and unpleasant odors to test whether emotional context affects the happy face advantage. Results from 2 experiments indicated that happiness was recognized faster than disgust in a pleasant context, but this advantage disappeared in an unpleasant context because of the slow recognition of happy faces. Odors may modulate the functioning of those emotion-related brain structures that participate in the formation of the perceptual representations of the facial expressions and in the generation of the conceptual knowledge associated with the signaled emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The feeling of uncertainty intensifies affective reactions.

Uncertainty has been defined as a lack of information about an event and has been characterized as an aversive state that people are motivated to reduce. The authors propose an uncertainty intensification hypothesis, whereby uncertainty during an emotional event makes unpleasant events more unpleasant and pleasant events more pleasant. The authors hypothesized that this would happen even when uncertainty is limited to the feeling of "not knowing," separable from a lack of information. In 4 studies, the authors held information about positive and negative film clips constant while varying the feeling of not knowing by having people repeat phrases connoting certainty or uncertainty while watching the films. As predicted, the subjective feeling of uncertainty intensified people's affective reactions to the film clips. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further evidence for mixed emotions.

Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions. The authors tested several alternative interpretations for prior evidence that happiness and sadness can co-occur in bittersweet situations (i.e., those containing both pleasant and unpleasant aspects). One possibility is that subjects who reported mixed emotions merely vacillated between happiness and sadness. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 1–3 by asking subjects to complete online continuous measures of happiness and sadness. Subjects reported more simultaneously mixed emotions during a bittersweet film clip than during a control clip. Another possibility is that subjects in earlier studies reported mixed emotions only because they were explicitly asked whether they felt happy and sad. The authors tested this hypothesis in Studies 4–6 with open-ended measures of emotion. Subjects were more likely to report mixed emotions after the bittersweet clip than the control clip. Both patterns occurred even when subjects were told that they were not expected to report mixed emotions (Studies 2 and 5) and among subjects who did not previously believe that people could simultaneously feel happy and sad (Studies 3 and 6). These results provide further evidence that positivity and negativity are separable in experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pleasant events, unpleasant events, and depression.

A review of previous research on P. M. Lewinsohn's (1974) model of depression shows that the causal link between a lack of response-contingent positive reinforcement and subsequent depression remains unsubstantiated. The present study tested this causal relationship through the use of cross-lagged panel correlation. 197 undergraduates completed a battery of measures of depression and pleasant events (including the Beck Depression Inventory and the Pleasant Events Schedule, respectively) twice, 1 mo apart. Results reveal that the null hypothesis of spuriousness could not be rejected, suggesting that the relation often found between a lack of pleasant events and depression is probably due to some unmeasured 3rd variable. Results also indicate that there was no causal relation between unpleasant events and depression. Possible 3rd-variable explanations are discussed. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negativity bias in attribution of external agency.

This research investigated whether people are more likely to attribute events to external agents when events are negative rather than neutral or positive. Participants more often believed that ultimatum game partners were humans rather than computers when the partners offered unusually unfavorable divisions than unusually favorable divisions (Experiment 1A), even when their human partners had no financial stake in the game (Experiment 1B). In subsequent experiments, participants were most likely to infer that gambles were influenced by an impartial participant when the outcomes of those gambles were losses rather than wins (Experiments 2 and 3), despite their explicitly equal probability. The results suggest a negative agency bias—negative events are more often attributed to the influence of external agents than similarly positive and neutral events, independent of their subjective probability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention bias in nicotine withdrawal and under stress.

Drug motivation models postulate that attention biasing toward smoking-related cues is a cognitive mechanism supporting continued or renewed drug use, and they predict that drug use history, deprivation, and distress should modulate the extent of this bias. The present study used the modified Stroop paradigm to extend past research regarding attention biasing toward smoking and unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral words among adult nonsmokers and daily smokers. Both nonsmokers and smokers showed differential attention toward unpleasant and pleasant cues, particularly pleasant cues, but did not show a unique bias toward smoking-related stimuli. Results suggested that, among smokers, nicotine deprivation and exogenous stress (threat of electric shock) have a nonadditive effect on attention toward pleasant cues but no effect on attention to smoking cues specifically. Similarly, instructing smokers that they would have an opportunity to smoke did not significantly increase the bias of nicotine-deprived smokers' attention toward smoking-related cues, relative to arousing unpleasant and pleasant cues. Overall, results suggest that smokers' attention may be biased toward both smoking-related and other salient cues when deprived of nicotine and anticipating an opportunity to smoke. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Taste and olfactory intensity perception changes following left insular stroke.

The authors tested suprathreshold intensity perception of gustatory and olfactory stimuli in a 70-year-old right-handed man following a left posterior insular stroke and compared his results with those of age-matched controls. Both modalities revealed significant differences between left (ipsilateral to lesion) and right (contralateral) ratings of intensity. In both gustation and olfaction, these differences were driven primarily by trends toward increased contralateral sensitivity relative to controls. Intensity changes were most pronounced for unpleasant odors and for tastes perceived strongly as either pleasant (sweet) or unpleasant (salty, bitter). These results show that a left posterior insula lesion may affect taste and olfactory perception similarly by increasing sensitivity contralateral to the lesion. One possible mechanism is release from inhibition at the cortical level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion-Modulated Performance and Activity in Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex.

Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to examine the relationship between processing of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli and activity in prefrontal cortex. Twenty volunteers identified the colors in which pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant words were printed. Pleasant words prompted more activity bilaterally in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) than did unpleasant words. In addition, pleasant words prompted more activity in left than in right DLPFC. Response speed to pleasant words was correlated with DLPFC activity. These data directly link positive affect, enhanced performance, and prefrontal activity, providing some of the first fMRI evidence supporting models of emotional valence and frontal brain asymmetry based on electroencephalography (EEG). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)