"Emoji, I can feel your pain" - Neural responses to facial and emoji expressions of pain

How effort-based self-interest motivation shapes altruistic donation behavior and brain responses

Prosocial behaviors are central to individual and societal well-being. Although the relationship between effort and prosocial behavior is increasingly studied, the impact of effort-based self-interested motivation on prosocial behavior has received less attention. In the current study, we carried out two experiments to examine the effect of motivation to obtain a reward for oneself on donation behavior and brain response. We observed that individuals who accumulated more money in the effort-expenditure rewards task (EEfRT) donated a lower proportion of their earnings. The sigmoid model fitted participants' choices in the EEfRT task, and the effort-reward bias and sigma parameters negatively correlated with the amount of money donated in the donation task. Additionally, the effort-reward bias and sigma parameters negatively predicted N2 amplitude during processing of charitable donation-related information. We propose that individuals who exhibit a lower level of effort-based self-interest motivation may allocate more cognitive control or attentional resources when processing information related to charitable donations. Our work adds weight to understanding the relationship between effort-based self-interest motivation and prosocial behavior and provides electrophysiological evidence.

Emojis Are Comprehended Better than Facial Expressions, by Male Participants

Emojis are colorful ideograms resembling stylized faces commonly used for expressing emotions in instant messaging, on social network sites, and in email communication. Notwithstanding their increasing and pervasive use in electronic communication, they are not much investigated in terms of their psychological properties and communicative efficacy. Here, we presented 112 different human facial expressions and emojis (expressing neutrality, happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) to a group of 96 female and male university students engaged in the recognition of their emotional meaning. Analyses of variance showed that male participants were significantly better than female participants at recognizing emojis (especially negative ones) while the latter were better than male participants at recognizing human facial expressions. Quite interestingly, male participants were better at recognizing emojis than human facial expressions per se. These findings are in line with more recent evidence suggesting that male individuals may be more competent and inclined to use emojis to express their emotions in messaging (especially sarcasm, teasing, and love) than previously thought. Finally, the data indicate that emojis are less ambiguous than facial expressions (except for neutral and surprise emotions), possibly because of the limited number of fine-grained details and the lack of morphological features conveying facial identity.

Unpredictable fearful stimuli disrupt timing activities: Evidence from event-related potentials

The present study investigated the effect of an imminent fearful stimulus on an ongoing temporal task. Participants judged the duration of a blank temporal interval followed by a fearful or a neutral image. Results showed an underestimation of the duration in the fearful condition relative to the neutral condition, but only when the occurrence of the fearful image was difficult to predict. ERPs results for the blank temporal interval found no effect of the fearful stimulus on the contingent negative variation (CNV) amplitude in the clock stage. However, after the image onset, there was a larger P1 for the fearful relative to the neutral condition. Although this effect was indistinguishable regardless of whether the fearful event could be easily predicted, a late positive potential (LPP) component displayed larger amplitude only for unpredictable fearful stimuli. The time-frequency results showed enhanced delta-theta power (0.5-7.5 Hz) for the unpredictable fearful stimuli in the late stage. Importantly, the enhanced delta-theta rhythm correlated negatively with the duration judgments. Together, these results suggest that an unpredictable fearful event might divert more attention away from the counting process in the working memory stage, resulting in missing ticks and temporal underestimation.