Showing papers in "Cognition & Emotion in 1995"

Emotion elicitation using films

Abstract: Researchers interested in emotion have long struggled with the problem of how to elicit emotional responses in the laboratory. In this article, we summarise five years of work to develop a set of films that reliably elicit each of eight emotional states (amusement, anger, contentment, disgust, fear, neutral, sadness, and surprise). After evaluating over 250 films, we showed selected film clips to an ethnically diverse sample of 494 English-speaking subjects. We then chose the two best films for each of the eight target emotions based on the intensity and discreteness of subjects' responses to each film. We found that our set of 16 films successfully elicited amusement, anger, contentment. disgust, sadness, surprise, a relatively neutral state, and, to a lesser extent, fear. We compare this set of films with another set recently described by Philippot (1993), and indicate that detailed instructions for creating our set of film stimuli will be provided on request.

Theory of mind development and social understanding.

Abstract: A cross-sectional, correlational study of 30 children, 3 to 5 years old, investigated relations between their theory of mind development and social interaction, controlling for age and general language ability. Children's overall performance on 4 standard false belief tasks was associated with their production of joint proposals and explicit role assignments during a 10 minute session of pretend play, False belief task performance was not associated with the child's total amount of pretend play or with a measure of empathic concern. We discuss the significance of an association between a laboratory measure of theory of mind development and children's behaviour observed in a naturalistic setting. We argue that the description and explanation of children's theory of mind and social understanding is best pursued through the combined efforts of experimenters and ethologists.

Trait anxiety, anxious mood, and threat detection.

Abstract: Subjects were required to detect either an angry or a happy target face in a stimulus array of 12 photographs. It was found with neutral distractor faces that those high in trait anxiety detected angry faces faster than did low trait-anxious subjects, but the two groups did not differ in their speed of detection of happy targets. In addition, high trait-anxious subjects detected happy target faces slower than low trait-anxious subjects when the distractor faces were angry. Comparable findings were obtained whether or not there was anxious mood induction. It was concluded that high trait-anxious individuals have facilitated detection and processing of environmental threat relative to low trait-anxious subjects, which enhance performance when the target is threatening, but which impair performance when the distractors are threatening.

False belief understanding goes to school: On the social-emotional consequences of coming early or late to a first theory of mind.

Abstract: This research report describes a search for possible relations between children's developing theories of mind and aspects of their social-emotional maturity conducted by comparing the performance of 3-year-olds on measures of false belief understanding with teacher ratings of certain of their social-emotional skills and behaviours. The intuitions guiding this exploratory effort were, not only that a working grasp of the possibility of false belief would prove broadly predictive of social-emotional maturity, but also that such associations would be missing in the specific case of those preschool behaviours largely governed by a simple mastery of social conventions. As a step toward evaluating these possibilities a group of 40 preschoolers were given a battery of six measures of false belief understanding. The preschool teachers of these same children then completed a 40-item questionnaire covering a wide variety of markers of social-emotional maturity. Half of these items (termed “Intentional”) fe...

Early understanding of emotion: Evidence from natural language

Abstract: Young children's early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five children's emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 children's emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond children's production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. W...

Cognitive processing of personally relevant information

Abstract: Subjects performed an idiographic, computerised version of the modified Stroop colour-naming task after having undergone a film-induced mood manipulation designed to produce either anxiety, elation, or a neutral mood. The Stroop stimuli were words related either to the subject's positive current concerns (e.g. goals, interests), to the subject's negative current concerns (e.g. personal worries), or to neither. The results indicated that words strongly related to subject's positive as well as to negative current concerns produced significantly more Stroop interference than did words unrelated or weakly related to their current concerns. Although the films strongly influenced the subjects' moods in predicted directions initially, mood changes were largely not maintained throughout the experiment. Thus, it is not surprising that no significant interactions with word type were found. These results indicate that the “emotional Stroop effect” occurs in normal subjects as well as in anxious patients, an...

Children as psychologists: The later correlates of individual differences in understanding of emotions and other minds

Abstract: The sequelae of individual differences in children's understanding of emotions and of other minds were investigated in a longitudinal study of 46 children. At 40 months, differences in the children's understanding of emotions were not significantly related to their ability to explain behaviour in terms of beliefs within a false belief paradigm. Follow-up in kindergarten showed that early emotion understanding was related to children's positive perception of their peer experiences, to their understanding of mixed emotions, and their moral sensibility as kindergarteners. Early understanding of other minds was, in contrast, related to negative initial perceptions of school, and sensitivity to teacher criticism. These differences in sequelae highlight the importance of differentiating the emotional and cognitive components of social understanding in framing developmental questions.

Mother-child talk about past emotions: Relations of maternal language and child gender over time

Abstract: Emotional understanding and expression is largely constructed in sociocul-tural contexts; thus examination of the ways in which parents talk about emotions with their young children is critical for understanding emotional socialisation. In this longitudinal research, 18 white, middle-class mothers and their preschool children discussed salient past events when the children were 40, 58, and 70 months of age. Analyses revealed that mothers talked more about emotions and talked about a greater variety of emotions with daughters than with sons. Mothers also focused more on negative emotions with daughters than with sons. Although there were no gender differences between girls and boys at the beginning of the study, by the last phase, girls talked more about emotion and about a greater variety of emotion than did boys and also initiated more emotion-related discussions than did boys. Results are discussed in relation to a growing body of evidence on gender and emotion across the life span.

The effects of mood state on judgemental accuracy: Processing strategy as a mechanism

Abstract: Under commonly observed conditions, happy subjects appear to process information in a relatively passive or nonsystematic, less detailed manner and rely on peripheral cues and heuristics in judgement, whereas sad subjects appear to process in a more active or systematic, more detailed manner. Happy subjects should therefore display less accuracy on judgements that have a relatively objective accuracy criterion. Three studies were conducted to test this hypothesis. In Study 1, subjects who had training in statistics were exposed to a happy, neutral, or sad mood induction procedure. Subjects then judged the magnitude and direction of correlation coefficients associated with each of nine scatterplots. Happy subjects were least accurate and used fewest digits in their correlation estimates; sad subjects were most accurate and used most digits. In Study 2, subjects exposed to orthogonal affect and arousal mood inductions completed the correlation estimation task. To address process further, subjects p...

Performance on the emotional Stroop task in groups of anxious, expert, and control subjects: A comparison of computer and card presentation formats.

Abstract: A number of information processing paradigms have been adapted from the cognitive psychology literature in order to investigate processing biases associated with emotional disorder. The most widely used of these methodologies has been the emotional Stroop task and this paper reports two experiments designed to examine some of the issues surrounding the application of this paradigm with groups of anxious subjects. Experiment 1 involved the use of a computer-presentation Stroop task with groups of high- and low-trait anxious subjects and a third group of 'expert' subjects to investigate the nature of the Stroop effect with a set of words related to their area of expertise. Experiment 2 reports the use of a card-presentation format with high- and low-trait anxious subjects. The results from the two methodologies show discrepancies which are broadly consistent with the previous literature on these two versions of the task. In addition, there was a highly significant Stroop effect associated with expe...

Parental meta-emotion structure predicts family and child outcomes

Abstract: Fifty-six families with a preschool child whose parents varied widely in parental marital satisfaction were studied at two time points: at time-I when the children were 5 years old and again at time-2 when the children were 8 years old. At time-1 each parent was separately interviewed about their “meta-emotion structure”, that is, their feelings about their own emotions, and their attitudes, and responses to their children's anger and sadness. Their behaviour during this interview was coded with a meta-emotion coding system. Two meta-emotion variables were studied for each parent, awareness of the parent's own sadness, and parental “coaching” of the child's anger. We termed the high end of these variables an “emotion coaching” (EC) meta-emotion structure. Meta-emotion structure was found to relate to time-1 marital and parent-child interaction. EC-type parents had marriages that were less hostile and they were less negative and more positive during parent-child interaction. Their children showed ...

Attentional shifts to emotionally charged cues: Behavioural and ERP data.

Abstract: When information activated in memory involves emotional associations, the ability to shift attention away from an emotional cue is impaired compared to an emotionally neutral cue. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, and how this is reflected in localised brain electrical activity. Eight emotion and eight neutral words served as cues in a covert attention spatial orienting task. The cues were either valid or invalid indicators of which hemifield the target would be presented to. In the remaining trials, no cue was presented prior to the target. Twenty subjects were instructed to manually respond to the target as fast as possible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed an enhanced P3 component to the emotion words. The ERPs to the target showed enhanced P1 and P3 components on invalid trials, with emotional cues. There were faster reaction times (RTs) to validly cued targets, but only when the emotion words served as cues. The re...

The relation of young children's vicarious emotional responding to social competence, regulation, and emotionality

Abstract: The relation of preschool and kindergarten children's vicarious emotional responding to their social competence, regulation (attentional and coping styles), and emotionality (negative emotional intensity and dispositional negative affect) was examined. Vicarious responding was assessed by means of facial reactions to a film about a peer in a social conflict and children's reported negative affect to viewing peers' real-life negative emotion. Mothers and teachers reported on children's regulation and emotionality, social competence was assessed with sociometric nominations, teachers' reports, and observations of children's real-life anger reactions. Facial concerned attention during the film was associated with various measures of social competence, regulation, and low or moderate negative emotionality. Although negative vicarious emotional responding in real contexts was infrequently related to measures of interest, girls who reported intense negative vicarious emotional responses were relatively...

The determinants of subjective emotional intensity

Abstract: What determines the subjective intensity of emotions? Four major groups of determinants are hypothesised: concerns (strength and relevance), appraisal, regulation, and individual differences. During six weeks subjects reported an emotion every week and answered questions on a computer. It appears that all four groups of supposed determinants are correlated with emotional intensity, the concern variables show the highest correlations. The importance of the determinants is not always the same, there are differences between the emotions and between the dimensions of emotional intensity. The relation between regulation and emotional intensity is complex: Causal relations are expected in both directions. On the one hand, a more intense emotion requires more regulation (positive causal effect), and on the other, regulation will decrease the intensity (negative causal effect). Indications of the existence of both relations are found. Regulation and intensity are positively correlated. The canonical corr...

Will the real relationship between facial expression and affective experience please stand up: The case of exhilaration

Abstract: It is hypothesised that the empirical correlation between facial expression and affective experience varies as a function of the correlational design used to compute the coefficients. Predictions about the rank order of five designs were derived based on two assumptions. Female subjects were placed into one of three alcohol conditions (no ethanol, low dose, high dose) and were exposed to 30 slides containing jokes or cartoons. The degree of rated funniness and overt behaviour were intercorrelated using five different designs to analyse the same set of data. The results show that within-subject analyses yielded higher coefficients than between-subjects analyses. Aggregation of data increased the coefficients for within-subject analyses, but not for between-subject analyses. A cheerful mood was associated with hyper-expressiveness, i.e. the occurrence of smiling and laughter at relatively low levels of perceived funniness. It was demonstrated that low correlations between facial expression and affe...

Preattentive analysis of facial expressions of emotion

Abstract: Some experiments have shown that a face having an expression different from the others in a crowd can be detected in a time that is independent of crowd size. Although this pop-out effect suggests that the valence of a face is available preattentively, it is possible that it is only the detection of sign features (e.g. angle of brow) which triggers an internal code for valence. In experiments testing the merits of valence and feature explanations, subjects searched displays of schematic faces having sad, happy, and vacant mouth expressions for a face having a discrepant sad or happy expression. Because inversion destroys holistic face processing and the implicit representation of valence, a critical test was whether pop-out occurred for inverted faces. Flat search functions (pop-out) for upright and inverted faces provided equivocal support for both explanations. But intercept effects found only with normal faces indicated valences had been analysed at an early stage of stimulus encoding.

The Role of Surprise in the Attribution Process

Abstract: We report five studies which compared two theories linking surprise to causal attribution. According to the attributional model, surprise is frequently caused by luck attributions, whereas according to the expectancydisconfirmation model, surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation and stimulates causal thinking. Studies 1 to 3 focused on the question of whether surprise is caused by luck attributions or by unexpectedness. In Studies 1 and 2, subjects had to recall success or failure experiences characterised by a particular attribution (Study 1) or by low versus high surprisingness (Study 2), whereas in Study 3, unexpectedness and luck versus skill attributions were independently manipulated within a realistic setting. The main dependent variables were unexpectedness (Studies 1 and 2), degree of surprise (Studies 1 and 3), and causal attributions (Study 2). The results strongly suggest that surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation, whereas luck attributions are neither sufficient nor necessary for surprise. Studies 4 and 5 addressed the question of whether surprise stimulates attributional thinking, again using a remembered-incidents technique. The findings of the previous studies were replicated, and it was confirmed that surprising outcomes elicit more attributional search than unsurprising ones. Additional results from Study 5 suggest that causal thinking is also stimulated by outcomes that are both negative and important.

Structural modelling of the relationships between attributional dimensions, emotions, and performance of college freshmen

Abstract: In this paper we report a study examining Weiner's (1986) predictions concerning the relationships between attributional dimensions, emotions, and behaviour, using a causal modelling procedure (LISREL) In two studies, freshmen (N = 585 and 621) who had taken their midterm exams, reported the cause of their outcome, its dimensional properties, and their emotional reactions These data were then related to subsequent performance at the final exams In support of Weiner's predictions, results indicated distinct relationships between midterm outcome and the primary emotions of happiness and sadness; between internal attributions and the self-esteem emotions of pride and shame; between stable attributions and expectations and the anticipatory emotions of hope, despair, and anxiety; between attributions of personal control and the moral emotions of guilt; and between external control and the social emotions of gratitude and anger Contrary to predictions, happiness and sadness were further intensified

Emotion socialisation, attachment, and patterns of adult emotional traits

Abstract: The emotional organisation of adults was studied within the framework of differential emotions theory and its assumptions concerning the formative role of early emotion experiences. Specifically, we explored how early attachment experiences and parental rearing styles as recalled by subjects, related to adult emotion traits and emotion decoding biases. A total of 129 subjects (60 males, 69 females, mean age 25 years) completed measures of attachment style, a maternal discipline questionnaire based on social learning theory, an emotion trait measure, and an emotion decoding task. We found that particular kinds of parental disciplinary style and attachment style were associated with different patterns of emotion traits as well as performance on the decoding task. There were gender differences throughout, but in general parental use of reasoning (matter-of-fact induction) was associated with a balanced emotional profile and low decoding biases, whereas physical punishment was associated with pattern...

Repressive coping and the recall of emotional material

Abstract: Individuals who possess a repressive coping style are known to have difficulty in retrieving negative autobiographical memories. We investigated whether these findings were specific to autobiographical memories. After learning a story containing positive and negative information about mothers and fathers, repressors remembered significantly fewer negative phrases than did controls, although there were no differences in the recall of positive material.

Emotion and prior knowledge in memory and judged comprehension of ambiguous stories

Abstract: Two experiments investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on memory and judged comprehension of stories. The experiments examined the issue of whether induction of a depressed mood would affect prose memory and comprehension and impair the ability of individuals to use prior knowledge, activated by way of a title, in remembering the passage. In Experiment 1, depressed subjects who were given a title for the passage recalled fewer idea units when compared with neutral control conditions, but no depressive deficit in recall occurred in the absence of a title. In Experiment 2 the same pattern of results occurred when subjects learned two successive passages. The depressive deficits obtained were interpreted in terms of a resource allocation model which proposes that emotional states increase the production of irrelevant, competing thoughts that interfere with processes important in remembering the criterion passage. Alternative explanations involving cognitive initiative and sch...

On Oatley and Johnson-Laird's theory of emotion and hierarchical structures in the affective lexicon

Abstract: The semantic theory of emotion words recently proposed by Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1989) was empirically investigated in three studies. In all three studies, I assessed, for different samples of German nonbasic emotion words: (a) subjects' judgements of the conditional probability of experiencing basic emotions, given the experience of nonbasic ones; and (b) their beliefs about whether it is possible to experience nonbasic emotions without also experiencing basic emotions. In Study 1, I examined the proposed semantic relations between 48 nonbasic and their defining basic emotion words, as well as 14 of the proposed semantic relations among nonbasic emotion words. In Study 2, these tests were repeated using object-focused test sentences. In Study 3, the semantically based relations among 12 emotions were compared to all of the nonsemantic relations existing among these emotions, and the theory was additionally tested by examining self-ascriptions of emotion words in concrete situations (hypotheti...

Reasoning in depression: Impairment on a concept discrimination learning task

Abstract: This study compared depressed and nondepressed undergraduates identified by the Beck Depression Inventory on concept discrimination learning problems. In two experiments, both groups generally performed at ceiling when solving simpler 1- and 2-dimensional problems, but the depressed subjects showed significant impairment on 4-dimensional problems. The first experiment investigated the role of storage in task performance. The second experiment was designed to focus attention at critical stages, and also manipulated storage demands. The depressed subjects in each experiment solved fewer problems correctly and made significantly more errors when listing hypotheses; there was little evidence that the experimental manipulations differentially facilitated their performance. The findings are considered in relation to current models of cognitive function in depression.

Emotional responsiveness and obsessive-compulsive behaviour

Abstract: Several clinicians have proposed that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are unusually sensitive to unpleasant events. We tested a non-clinical sample of obsessive-compulsive (O-C) subjects who reported in diagnostic interviews that they experienced significant problems with obsessions and/or compulsions. Excerpts from three emotion-eliciting films were shown to 10 O-C males, 12 O-C females, 12 normal males, and 12 normal females. Emotional response was measured by using a self-report instrument and by recording facial expressions, which were coded for both appropriate emotional reactions as well as reactions that may represent efforts to mask or control the display of negative emotion. The groups did not differ with regard to subjective response to the film clips, but facial responses indicated that O-C subjects made more efforts to suppress the expression of fear (inappropriate smiles/laughs) during the frightening film clip. In spite of these responses, male O-C subjects also te...

Mood-dependent memory for generated and repeated words: Replication and extension

Abstract: Mood-dependent memory (MDM) has been difficult to demonstrate, but Eich and Metcalfe (1989) reported a strong effect with music-induced moods and learning of self-generated responses. Bower and Mayer (1989), however, could not obtain the MDM effect with self-generated responses. The present experiment attempted to replicate Eich and Metcalfe, but induced positive and negative moods with self-referent statements rather than music. Sixty-four subjects (32 males, 32 females) were randomly assigned in equal numbers to one of four mood conditions, same or opposite mood at learning and testing. At learning, immediately following mood induction subjects (Ss) generated 16 response words and 16 repeated words. Forty-eight hours later, Ss were given recall and recognition tests. For recall, there was a significant learn mood by test mood interaction (P < 0.0001), with greater recall for generated than repeated words (P < 0.0001). The interaction for repeated words approached significance (P = 0.07). For re...

Potential pitfalls in computational modelling of appraisal processes: A reply to chwelos and oatley

Abstract: This paper extends the discussion on computational approaches towards modelling emotion antecedent appraisal processes, based on Scherer (1993a) and Chwelos and Oatley (1994). In the first part we briefly discuss the different goals that motivate such modelling as well as potential pitfalls. We then take up some of the critiques of GENESE expressed by Chwelos and Oatley, and examine the proposed alternatives. The paper concludes with an outline of perspectives for future work in this domain.

Perceptual and perceptual-motor fluency as a basis for affective judgements : individual differences in motor memory activation

Abstract: The current study investigated the repetition-liking effect as a function of variations in perceptual-motor processing and individual differences in use of perceptual-motor information. Turkish words from earlier repetition-liking research were used in comparing: (1) perceptual (looking) versus perceptual-motor (looking and pronouncing) processing; and (2) perceptual-motor fluency versus disfluency (pronouncing words in a consistent versus an inconsistent manner). Subjects were divided into groups based on an assessment of imagery ability, a variable associated with the tendency to reactivate motor information in memory. Words were liked more after fluent than after disfluent processing, but only in people with good imagery ability. Perceptual-motor fluency had no effect on the repetition-liking effect in poor imagers. It was concluded that perceptual-motor fluency has an important impact on liking judgements, and that this effect is mediated by individual differences in the tendency to automatic...

The right hemisphere recognises the bad guys

Abstract: This study examines emotional reactions and memory in patients with unilateral temporal and/or frontal lobe epilepsy using a sodium amytal testing procedure. Patients were presented with pictures of ordinary faces and accompanying biographical descriptions while either the right or the left cerebral hemisphere was deactivated. The biographies depicted the individual in the picture either as a pleasant, an unpleasant, or an everyday person. After the drug effect had worn off, the patients were tested for their memory for the faces, their memory for the words used in the biographical descriptions, and for their ratings of the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the individuals in the pictures. Results showed a superior recognition of faces that were associated with unpleasant biographies following left hemisphere injection (i.e. testing the right hemisphere). Although the content of the biographical information could not be recognised, the ratings of the faces associated with the unpleasant biographi...