Positive emotions have a unique capacity to capture attention

The effect of emotional cues on attentional bias to food cues in women with body weight dissatisfaction

The eating behavior of individuals is susceptible to various factors. Emotion is an important factor that influences eating behaviors, especially in women who care about their body weight and dissatisfied with their bodies. This study explored the effect of emotional cues on attentional bias toward food in women with body weight dissatisfaction (BWD). Following the Negative Physical Self Scale-Fatness scores, a total of 60 females were recruited: twenty-nine were assigned to the BWD group, and thirty-one were assigned to the no body weight dissatisfaction (NBWD) group. All participants completed the food dot-probe task after exposure to emotional cues, and their eye-tracking data were recorded. The results showed greater duration bias and first fixation direction bias for high-calorie food in the BWD group than in the NBWD group after exposure to negative emotional cues. After exposure to positive emotional cues, the BWD group showed greater first-fixation duration bias and duration bias for high-calorie food than for low-calorie food. The present study found an effect of emotion on the attention bias toward food in women with BWD, and it provided insight into the psychological mechanism of the relationship between emotion and eating behaviors in women with BWD. Our study suggests that both negative and positive emotional cues may lead women with BWD to focus on high-calorie foods.

Impact of public health communication for prevention and personal resilience at the time of crisis. A pilot study with psychophysiological and self-report measures

Health communication promotes public and individual health. Psychophysiological indices can unveil the unconscious emotional variables that influence audience's representations of these communications. This study explored emotional and cognitive responses to health communications using implicit (psychophysiological) and explicit (self-report) measurements. Twelve communications (health prevention, personal health, public health, Covid-19) were shown to N = 19 participants, while psychophysiological (i.e. Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability (HRV), skin conductance level and response (SCL and SCR)) and self-report (Semantic Differential and Self-Assessment Mannikin (SAM)) data were collected. Higher arousal and physiological engagement (SCL) were observed for health prevention, public and personal health communications. Lower HRV values were found for health prevention compared to crisis communication (Covid-19 stimuli), suggesting higher emotional reactions and concern for the first topic. Self-report results confirmed psychophysiological findings. Overall, using public health communication activates objective indicators about emotional reactions that have important implications for the effectiveness of the communication itself.

Baby don't cry: Unconscious sensitivity to sad baby faces

Infant cues are known to play a crucial role in eliciting caregiving responses, making them essential for survival and development of offspring. Yet, it is still unknown whether infant faces may attract adults' attention when presented under the level of consciousness. Using a disengagement task and an eye-tracker procedure, this study investigated whether the subliminal exposure to emotional baby vs adult faces affects mothers' (N = 57) and non-mothers' (N = 57) attention disengagement. Independently from their parental status, women had longer saccadic latencies following subliminal sad baby faces, compared to happy baby faces and sad adult faces. These findings indicate that infants' sad facial expressions below the threshold of conscious perception can induce an attentional bias, thus representing a highly salient social signal for the human species.

Effects of task switching and emotional stimuli on memory selectivity

It is not always easy to attend to task-relevant information and ignore task-irrelevant distractions. We investigated the impact of task switching and emotional stimuli on goal-oriented selective attention and subsequent recognition memory. Results from two experiments with different stimulus materials (words and images) found that the memory advantage of task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information (i.e. memory selectivity) was attenuated on task switch trials and emotional distractor trials. In contrast, task repetitions and emotional targets improved memory selectivity. These results suggest that both task switching and emotional distractors divert limited cognitive resources needed for selective attention and selective encoding. Emotional targets likely supported selective encoding through the process of attentional prioritisation of emotional stimuli. The effects of task switching and emotional stimuli did not interact, suggesting distinct mechanisms, although this conclusion remains tentative.

Reward History Modulates the Processing of Task-Irrelevant Emotional Faces in a Demanding Task

The aim of the current study was to examine how reward-associated emotional facial distractors could capture attentional resources in a demanding visual task using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the learning phase, a high- or low-reward probability was paired with angry, happy, or neutral faces. Then, in the test phase, participants performed a face-irrelevant task with no reward at stake, in which they needed to discriminate the length of two lines presented in the center of the screen while faces that were taken from the learning phase were used as distractors presented in the periphery. The behavioral results revealed no effect of distractor emotional valence since the emotional information was task-irrelevant. The ERP results in the test phase revealed a significant main effect of distractor emotional valence for the parieto-occipital P200 (170-230 ms); the mean amplitudes in both the angry- and happy-face conditions were more positive than the neutral-face condition. Moreover, we found that the high-reward association enhanced both the N170 (140-180 ms) and EPN (260-330 ms) relative to the low-reward association condition. Finally, the N2pc (270-320 ms) also exhibited enhanced neural activity in the high-reward condition compared to the low-reward condition. The absence of emotional effects indicated that task-irrelevant emotional facial stimuli did not impact behavioral or neural responses in this highly demanding task. However, reward-associated information was processed when attention was directed elsewhere, suggesting that the processing of reward-associated information worked more in an automatic way, irrespective of the top-down task demand.

Facial expression recognition using lightweight deep learning modeling

Facial expression is a type of communication and is useful in many areas of computer vision, including intelligent visual surveillance, human-robot interaction and human behavior analysis. A deep learning approach is presented to classify happy, sad, angry, fearful, contemptuous, surprised and disgusted expressions. Accurate detection and classification of human facial expression is a critical task in image processing due to the inconsistencies amid the complexity, including change in illumination, occlusion, noise and the over-fitting problem. A stacked sparse auto-encoder for facial expression recognition (SSAE-FER) is used for unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. SSAE-FER automatically extracts features from input images, and the softmax classifier is used to classify the expressions. Our method achieved an accuracy of 92.50% on the JAFFE dataset and 99.30% on the CK+ dataset. SSAE-FER performs well compared to the other comparative methods in the same domain.

Irrelevant angry faces impair response inhibition, and the go and stop processes share attentional resources

Response inhibition is a crucial component of executive control, which refers to our ability to suppress responses that are no longer needed or inappropriate. The stop-signal task is a standard tool to assess inhibitory control over actions. Here, we use irrelevant facial expressions (happy, angry, or neutral) as both go and stop-signal to examine competition for shared attentional resources between (a) emotion and inhibition process and (b) go and stop processes. Participants were required to respond to go signals (gender discrimination task: male or female). Occasionally, a stop-signal (face with irrelevant angry, happy, or neutral facial expression) was presented, and participants were required to withhold their motor response. We found that emotion processing (especially angry faces) captures attention away from the task, and the emotionality of the stop signal matters only when the go signal is non-emotional. When the go signal was non-emotional, we found that stop-signal with irrelevant angry facial expressions impaired inhibitory control compared to stop-signal with irrelevant happy and neutral facial expressions. These results indicate that the processing of emotion and inhibition process exploit a shared pool of attentional resources. These results favor an interactive capacity-sharing account of the go and stop processes in models of response inhibition.

Irrelevant positive emotional information facilitates response inhibition only under a high perceptual load

Response inhibition involves suppressing those responses that are no longer needed. Previous research has separately studied the role of attentional resources and emotional information in response inhibition. Here, we simultaneously manipulate attentional resources and emotional information to investigate the interactive role of emotional information and attentional resources. Attentional resources were manipulated by changing the levels of perceptual load (low and high) of go signals. Emotional information was manipulated by changing the emotional content (irrelevant positive and negative emotional information) of the stop signals. Participants made a go response based on searching for a target letter in conditions of either low perceptual load or high perceptual load. They withheld their response on the presentation of a stop signal. The stop-signal stimulus was selected from two classes: arousal matched positive and negative IAPS images (Experiment 1) and happy, angry, and neutral faces (Experiment 2). The result showed a consistent interaction pattern of perceptual load and emotional information across the two experiments, such that irrelevant positive emotional information consistently improved inhibitory control, albeit only under high load. These results have theoretical implications for understanding the nature of emotional information and their interaction with attentional resources in cognitive control functions.

Auditory and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Recently, researchers have expanded the investigation into attentional biases toward positive stimuli; however, few studies have examined attentional biases toward positive auditory information. In three experiments, the present study employed an emotional spatial cueing task using emotional sounds as cues and auditory stimuli (Experiment 1) or visual stimuli (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) as targets to explore whether auditory or visual spatial attention could be modulated by positive auditory cues. Experiment 3 also examined the temporal dynamics of cross-modal auditory bias toward positive natural sounds using event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral results of the three experiments consistently demonstrated that response times to targets were faster after positive auditory cues than they were after neutral auditory cues in the valid condition, indicating that healthy participants showed a selective auditory attentional bias (Experiment 1) and cross-modal attentional bias (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) toward positive natural sounds. The results of Experiment 3 showed that N1 amplitudes were more negative after positive sounds than they were after neutral sounds, which further provided electrophysiological evidence that positive auditory information enhances attention at early stages in healthy adults. The results of the experiments performed in the present study suggest that humans exhibit an attentional bias toward positive natural sounds.

Neuropsychological functions in a pediatric case of partial agenesis of the corpus callosum: Clinical implications

The corpus callosum (CC) is involved in several cognitive processes and the interhemispheric transfer of information. The current case study investigated neurocognitive and emotional processes in a 7-year-old female with partial agenesis of the corpus callosum, with an absent splenium and posterior body, with comorbid autism and ADHD. We measured cognitive functions, such as response inhibition, error monitoring, attentional disengagement, and attention capture by irrelevant emotional stimuli. We found that response inhibition was intact in the case. When happy faces were used as stop-signals, it interfered with response inhibition compared to angry-face-stop-signals. Similarly, happy faces (relative to angry faces) interfered with error monitoring; irrelevant angry faces captured attention more than happy faces. Attentional disengagement functions were impaired in the case compared to healthy controls. The findings give an insight into the interaction between cognition and emotion in pediatric partial agenesis of the CC, and have important clinical and theoretical implications.

Positive and Negative Emotion Classification Based on Multi-channel

The EEG features of different emotions were extracted based on multi-channel and forehead channels in this study. The EEG signals of 26 subjects were collected by the emotional video evoked method. The results show that the energy ratio and differential entropy of the frequency band can be used to classify positive and negative emotions effectively, and the best effect can be achieved by using an SVM classifier. When only the forehead and forehead signals are used, the highest classification accuracy can reach 66%. When the data of all channels are used, the highest accuracy of the model can reach 82%. After channel selection, the best model of this study can be obtained. The accuracy is more than 86%.

Reward history modulates perceptual load effects

The reward history of a stimulus can yield strong attentional selection biases. Indeed, attentional capture can be triggered by previously rewarded items which are neither salient nor relevant for the ongoing task, even when selection is clearly counter-productive to actually obtain the reward outcome. Therefore, value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) has been argued to be an automatic attention mechanism. Our study aimed at putting the VDAC automaticity directly to the test. For this purpose, the Load Theory offers a comprehensive framework where distraction is observed under low but not high perceptual load condition. Nevertheless, if VDAC is indeed automatic, distraction by reward-stimuli should be observed on both perceptual load conditions. We used a feature vs. conjunction discrimination of a go/no-go cue to manipulate perceptual load. As expected, our results revealed that perceptual load decreased interference produced by low-reward distractor. However, this effect was not significant for high-reward distractor, giving support to VDAC automaticity. We discussed our results in light of the Load Theory literature and we strongly encourage to consider reward history along with perceptual load in determining attentional capture.

Recognizing Emotions through Facial Expressions: A Largescale Experimental Study

Experimental research examining emotional processes is typically based on the observation of images with affective content, including facial expressions. Future studies will benefit from databases with emotion-inducing stimuli in which characteristics of the stimuli potentially influencing results can be controlled. This study presents Portuguese normative data for the identification of seven facial expressions of emotions (plus a neutral face), on the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD). The effect of participants’ gender and models’ sex on emotion recognition was also examined. Participants (N = 1249) were exposed to 312 pictures of white adults displaying emotional and neutral faces with a frontal gaze. Recognition agreement between the displayed and participants’ chosen expressions ranged from 69% (for anger) to 97% (for happiness). Recognition levels were significantly higher among women than among men only for anger and contempt. The emotion recognition was higher either in female models or in male models depending on the emotion. Overall, the results show high recognition levels of the facial expressions presented, indicating that the RaFD provides adequate stimuli for studies examining the recognition of facial expressions of emotion among college students. Participants’ gender had a limited influence on emotion recognition, but the sex of the model requires additional consideration.

Older adults detect happy facial expressions less rapidly

Previous experimental psychology studies based on visual search paradigms have reported that young adults detect emotional facial expressions more rapidly than emotionally neutral expressions. However, it remains unclear whether this holds in older adults. We investigated this by comparing the abilities of young and older adults to detect emotional and neutral facial expressions while controlling the visual properties of faces presented (termed anti-expressions) in a visual search task. Both age groups detected normal angry faces more rapidly than anti-angry faces. However, whereas young adults detected normal happy faces more rapidly than anti-happy faces, older adults did not. This suggests that older adults may not be easy to detect or focusing attention towards smiling faces appearing peripherally.