The influence of nonremembered affective associations on preference.

An important influence on our preference toward a specific object is its associations with affective information. Here, the authors concentrate on the role of memory on shaping such preferences. Specifically, the authors used a multistage behavioral paradigm that fostered associations between neutral shapes and affective images. Participants that explicitly remembered these affective associations preferred neutral shapes associated with positive images. Counterintuitively, participants who could not explicitly remember the associations preferred neutral shapes that were associated with negative images. Generally, the difference in preference between participants who could and could not remember the affective associations demonstrates a critical link between memory and preference formation. The authors propose that the preference for negatively associated items is a manifestation of a mechanism that produces an inherent incentive for rapidly assessing potentially threatening aspects in the environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It's a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts.

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The affective regulation of cognitive priming.

Semantic and affective priming are classic effects observed in cognitive and social psychology, respectively. The authors discovered that affect regulates such priming effects. In Experiment 1, positive and negative moods were induced before one of three priming tasks; evaluation, categorization, or lexical decision. As predicted, positive affect led to both affective priming (evaluation task) and semantic priming (category and lexical decision tasks). However, negative affect inhibited such effects. In Experiment 2, participants in their natural affective state completed the same priming tasks as in Experiment 1. As expected, affective priming (evaluation task) and category priming (categorization and lexical decision tasks) were observed in such resting affective states. Hence, the authors conclude that negative affect inhibits semantic and affective priming. These results support recent theoretical models, which suggest that positive affect promotes associations among strong and weak concepts, and that negative affect impairs such associations (Clore & Storbeck, 2006; Kuhl, 2000). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Smile intensity and warm touch as thin slices of child and family affective style.

The authors investigate the claim that thin slices of expressive behavior serve as reliable indicators of affective style in children and their families. Using photographs, the authors assessed smile intensity and tactile contact in kindergartners and their families. Consistent with claims that smiling and touch communicate positive emotion, measures of children’s smile intensity and warm family touch were correlated across classroom and family contexts. Consistent with studies of parent–child personality associations, parents’ warm smiles and negative facial displays resembled those of their children. Finally, consistent with observed relations between adult personality and positive display, children’s smiling behavior in the classroom correlated with parent ratings of children’s Extraversion/Surgency. These results highlight the utility of thin slices of smiling and touch as indicators of child and family affective style. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal contributions to affective priming: Electrophysiological correlates.

Current models of affective processing postulate that not only valence but also the arousal dimension characterizes the emotional experience. However, up-to-date research on affective priming has mainly focused on the contributions of valence congruency to priming. In this study, the authors explored the possible influence of arousal in priming processes. For this purpose, event-related potentials and reaction times were measured in response to high- and low-arousing positive targets that were either congruent or incongruent in arousal with a prime word. Priming arousal did not influence reaction times. By contrast, the processing of high-arousing targets was facilitated by a previous exposure to a congruent prime, as reflected by the reduction in the amplitude of a late positive component around 500 ms that has been thought to reflect attentional and memory processes. These results diverge from the findings of previous studies that primed valence and suggest a differential contribution of arousal and valence to affective priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The reduction of uncertainty concerning future pain.

Ss received series of electric shocks to the forearm in which the temporal schedule and the sequence of shock intensities were associated with varying levels of randomness or uncertainty. The Ss were permitted an instrumental response which produced, in advance, information concerning 1 or both of these aspects of the shocks. Such information functioned as a strong positive reinforcement for most Ss. Instrumental response rate was a significant increasing function of the degree of uncertainty associated with the shock series, and occurred significantly more often for information concerning the temporal occurrence of shock than for its intensity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hooked on a feeling: Rumination about positive and negative emotion in inter-episode bipolar disorder.

Rumination has been consistently implicated in the onset and maintenance of depression. Less work has examined rumination in the context of bipolar disorder, especially rumination about positive emotion. The present study examined rumination about negative and positive emotion in interepisode bipolar disorder (BD; n = 39) and healthy controls (CTL; n = 34). Trait rumination about positive and negative emotion, as well as experiential and physiological responses to a rumination induction, was measured. Illness course was also assessed for the BD group. Results indicated that the BD group reported greater trait rumination about positive and negative emotion compared with the CTL group, though no group differences emerged during the rumination induction. For the BD group, trait rumination about positive and negative emotion, as well as increased cardiovascular arousal (i.e., heart rate), was associated with greater lifetime depression frequency; trait rumination about positive emotion was associated with greater lifetime mania frequency. These findings suggest that interepisode BD is associated with greater rumination about positive and negative emotion, which in turn is associated with illness course. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate.

The authors hypothesized that uncertainty following a positive event prolongs the pleasure it causes and that people are generally unaware of this effect of uncertainty. In 3 experimental settings, people experienced a positive event (e.g., received an unexpected gift of a dollar coin attached to an index card) under conditions of certainty or uncertainty (e.g., it was easy or difficult to make sense of the text on the card). As predicted, people's positive moods lasted longer in the uncertain conditions. The results were consistent with a pleasure paradox, whereby the cognitive processes used to make sense of positive events reduce the pleasure people obtain from them. Forecasters seemed unaware of this paradox; they overwhelmingly preferred to be in the certain conditions and tended to predict that they would be in better moods in these conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Action compatibility effects are hedonically marked and have incidental consequences on affective judgment.

Recent results from Cannon, Hayes, and Tipper (2010) have established that the Action Compatibility Effect (ACE) is hedonically marked and elicits a genuine positive reaction. In this work, we aim to show that the hedonic marking of the ACE has incidental consequences on affective judgment. For this, we used the affective priming paradigm principle (for a review, see Musch & Klauer, 2003): participants have to respond, as quickly as they can, regarding the pleasantness or unpleasantness character of a target word. In the priming phase, we do not present an affective stimulus; however, we present two different graspable objects, one after the other. The handles of the graspable objects are shown either both on the same side (i.e., perceptual action compatibility) or not (i.e., perceptual action incompatibility). In addition, the orientation of the handles of the objects are either compatible (i.e., action compatibility) or not (i.e., action compatibility) with the response hand used for the word evaluation. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants responded faster to positive words after perceptual action compatibility and action compatibility (thus demonstrating the ACE) than after incompatibility conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alone but feeling no pain: Effects of social exclusion on physical pain tolerance and pain threshold, affective forecasting, and interpersonal empathy.

Prior findings of emotional numbness (rather than distress) among socially excluded persons led the authors to investigate whether exclusion causes a far-reaching insensitivity to both physical and emotional pain. Experiments 1-4 showed that receiving an ostensibly diagnostic forecast of a lonesome future life reduced sensitivity to physical pain, as indicated by both (higher) thresholds and tolerance. Exclusion also caused emotional insensitivity, as indicated by reductions in affective forecasting of joy or woe over a future football outcome (Experiment 3), as well as lesser empathizing with another person's suffering from either romantic breakup (Experiment 4) or a broken leg (Experiment 5). The insensitivities to pain and emotion were highly intercorrelated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of affective prosody by young and older adults.

Emotion is conveyed in speech by semantic content (what is said) and by prosody (how it is said). Prior research suggests that older adults benefit from linguistic prosody when comprehending language but that they have difficulty understanding affective prosody. In a series of 3 experiments, young and older adults listened to sentences in which the emotional cues conveyed by semantic content and affective prosody were either congruent or incongruent and then indicated whether the talker sounded happy or sad. When judging the emotion of the talker, young adults were more attentive to the affective prosodic cues than to the semantic cues, whereas older adults performed less consistently when these cues conflicted. Participants’ reading and repetition of the sentences were recorded so that age- and emotion-related changes in the production of emotional speech cues could be examined. Both young and older adults were able to produce affective prosody. The age-related difference in perceiving emotion was eliminated when listeners repeated the sentences before responding, consistent with previous findings regarding the beneficial role of repetition in conversation. The results of these experiments suggest that there are age-related differences in interpreting affective prosody but that repeating may be a compensatory strategy that could minimize the everyday consequences of these differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect dynamics, affective forecasting, and aging.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 9(5) of Emotion (see record 2009-17981-017). The first author of the article was listed as being affiliated with both the National Institute on Aging and the Department of Psychology, Stanford University. Dr. Nielsen would like to clarify that the research for this article was conducted while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University; her current affiliation is only with the National Institute on Aging. The copyright notice should also have been listed as “In the Public Domain.”] [Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 8(5) of Emotion (see record 2008-13989-013). The first author of the article was listed as being affiliated with both the National Institute on Aging and the Department of Psychology, Stanford University. Dr. Nielsen would like to clarify that the research for this article was conducted while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. The copyright notice should also have been listed as In the Public Domain.] Affective forecasting, experienced affect, and recalled affect were compared in younger and older adults during a task in which participants worked to win and avoid losing small monetary sums. Dynamic changes in affect were measured along valence and arousal dimensions, with probes during both anticipatory and consummatory task phases. Older and younger adults displayed distinct patterns of affect dynamics. Younger adults reported increased negative arousal during loss anticipation and positive arousal during gain anticipation. In contrast, older adults reported increased positive arousal during gain anticipation but showed no increase in negative arousal on trials involving loss anticipation. Additionally, younger adults reported large increases in valence after avoiding an anticipated loss, but older adults did not. Younger, but not older, adults exhibited forecasting errors on the arousal dimension, underestimating increases in arousal during anticipation of gains and losses and overestimating increases in arousal in response to gain outcomes. Overall, the findings are consistent with a growing literature suggesting that older people experience less negative emotion than their younger counterparts and further suggest that they may better predict dynamic changes in affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rapid picture presentation and affective engagement.

Emotional reactions were assessed to pictorial stimuli presented in a continuous stream at rapid speeds that compromise conceptual memory and the processing of specific picture content. Blocks of unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant pictures were presented at the rate of either three pictures per second or seven pictures per second. Even with rapid presentation rates, startle reflexes, corrugator muscle activity, and skin conductance responses were heightened when viewing unpleasant pictures. These effects were stronger later in the aversive block, suggesting that cumulative exposure increasingly activates the defense system. The findings suggest that, despite conceptual masking inherent in rapid serial visual presentation, affective pictures prompt measurable emotional engagement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective incoherence: When affective concepts and embodied reactions clash.

In five studies, the authors examined the effects on cognitive performance of coherence and incoherence between conceptual and experiential sources of affective information. The studies crossed the priming of happy and sad concepts with affective experiences. In different experiments, these included approach or avoidance actions, happy or sad feelings, and happy or sad expressive behaviors. In all studies, coherence between affective concepts and affective experiences led to better recall of a story than did affective incoherence. The authors suggest that the experience of such experiential affective cues serves as evidence of the appropriateness of affective concepts that come to mind. The results suggest that affective coherence has epistemic benefits and that incoherence is costly in terms of cognitive performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic processes in emotional labor: Perceptions of affective delivery and regulation strategies.

This study examined emotional labor processes from a within-person, episodic framework. The authors hypothesized that the influence of negative emotions on affective delivery would be lessened by regulation strategies for supervisor perceptions but not self-perceptions. In addition, difficulty maintaining display rules was hypothesized to mediate the relation between negative emotions and self-perceptions of affective delivery. Finally, the influence of surface acting strategies on these processes as well as correlations with individual differences was investigated. Hypotheses were tested using ecological momentary assessment of a sample of cheerleading instructors. Results suggest that surface actors can regulate emotions effectively on an episode-to-episode basis but find the episode more difficult. In addition, surface actors exhibit more general tendencies to devalue themselves and experience fewer positive emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Feeling bad and feeling badly.

An alternative psychoanalytic theory of affect is presented. It is suggested here that affective response consists of rapidly repeated generation of a series of brief responses each enduring for fractions of seconds, continuing over whatever period conscious or unconscious focus on a specific mental content is maintained. The subjective impression, however, is that of a continuous steady state. The experiencing of affect is, in this way, similar to that of sensory process experience in general. Affect cannot store. Since affect does not store, there is no damming of affect and no requirement for affect expression or discharge. A sequence of theoretical ramifications and elaborations results in a redefinition of the classic neuroses and some other disorders. Extensive paths of implications of affect actualities and affect dynamics are suggested as impinging on various aspects of human psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No effect of inversion on attentional and affective processing of facial expressions.

The decrease in recognition performance after face inversion has been taken to suggest that faces are processed holistically. Three experiments, 1 with schematic and 2 with photographic faces, were conducted to assess whether face inversion also affected visual search for and implicit evaluation of facial expressions of emotion. The 3 visual search experiments yielded the same differences in detection speed between different facial expressions of emotion for upright and inverted faces. Threat superiority effects, faster detection of angry than of happy faces among neutral background faces, were evident in 2 experiments. Face inversion did not affect explicit or implicit evaluation of face stimuli as assessed with verbal ratings and affective priming. Happy faces were evaluated as more positive than angry, sad, or fearful/scheming ones regardless of orientation. Taken together these results seem to suggest that the processing of facial expressions of emotion is not impaired if holistic processing is disrupted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic categorization precedes affective evaluation of visual scenes.

We compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization by using forced-choice saccadic and manual response tasks. Participants viewed paired emotional and neutral scenes involving humans or animals flashed rapidly in extrafoveal vision. Participants were instructed to categorize the targets by saccading toward the location occupied by a predefined target scene. The affective task involved saccading toward an unpleasant or pleasant scene, and the semantic task involved saccading toward a scene containing an animal. Both affective and semantic target scenes could be reliably categorized in less than 220 ms, but semantic categorization was always faster than affective categorization. This finding was replicated with singly, foveally presented scenes and manual responses. In comparison with foveal presentation, extrafoveal presentation slowed down the categorization of affective targets more than that of semantic targets. Exposure threshold for accurate categorization was lower for semantic information than for affective information. Superordinate-, basic-, and subordinate-level semantic categorizations were faster than affective evaluation. We conclude that affective analysis of scenes cannot bypass object recognition. Rather, semantic categorization precedes and is required for affective evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of affective factors on conceptualization in schizophrenia.

2 groups of schizophrenics, distinguished as to their capacity for abstract thinking (see 15: 3039), and normals were presented with stimuli composed of groupings of words constructed so that affect-laden words could be placed in the figure or ground of a gestalt. Schizophrenics characterized as demonstrating "concrete" thinking avoided affect-laden words whether they appeared in the figure or ground of the tachistoscopically presented gestalten. The finding tends to validate the assumption that generalized withdrawal in some schizophrenics is a product of withdrawal from affect-laden stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Uncertainty management: The influence of uncertainty salience on reactions to perceived procedural fairness.

On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, it is argued in this article that people especially need fairness when they are reminded about aspects of their lives that make them uncertain. It is therefore proposed that thinking about uncertainty should make fairness a more important issue to people. The findings of 3 experiments support this line of reasoning: Asking (vs. not asking) participants 2 questions that solicited their thoughts and feelings of being uncertain led to stronger effects of perceived procedural fairness on participants' affective reactions toward the way they were treated. It is argued that these findings suggest that fairness matters to people especially when they are trying to deal with things that make them uncertain. An implication of the current findings therefore may be that fairness is important to people because it gives them an opportunity to manage uncertain aspects of their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)