How auditory sensations affect human emotional responses to acoustic environments

Natural and built environments profoundly affect human emotions and well-being. This study focuses on human auditory perception of the physical environment, systematically examining how low-level auditory sensations, measured through standardised psychoacoustic parameters, impact human emotions in terms of both subjective feelings and physiological responses. Using a laboratory listening experiment with 33 participants exposed to 36 binaural recordings from diverse acoustic environments, the results reveal that auditory sensations, beyond high-level cognitive perceptions, significantly affect human emotions, primarily in the Arousal dimension (both subjective feelings and electrodermal activity), but not the Pleasantness dimension. Different psychoacoustic parameters mainly affect different emotions: Loudness and Roughness primarily affect Relaxation-Stress and Arousal; Impulsiveness and Sharpness mainly affect Boredom-Excitement; and Fluctuation, Tonality, and Tonality Frequency mainly affect Arousal and Boredom-Excitement. These findings offer insights into the intrinsic relationship between auditory sensations and emotions and provide practical guidelines for environmental design to improve well-being and quality of life.

N200 and late components reveal text-emoji congruency effect in affective theory of mind

Emojis are thought to be important for online communication, affecting not only our emotional state, but also our ability to infer the sender's emotional state, i.e., the affective theory of mind (aToM). However, it is unclear the role of text-emoji valence congruency in aToM judgements. Participants were presented with positive, negative, or neutral instant messages followed by positive or negative emoji and were required to infer the sender's emotional state as making valence and arousal ratings. Participants rated that senders felt more positive when they displayed positive emojis as opposed to negative emojis, and the senders were more aroused when valence between emoji and sentence was congruent. Event-related potentials were time-locked to emojis and analyzed by robust mass-univariate statistics, finding larger N200 for positive emojis relative to negative emojis in the negative sentence but not in the positive and neutral sentences, possibly reflecting conflict detection. Furthermore, the N400 effect was found between emotional and neutral sentences, but not between congruent and incongruent conditions, which may reflect a rapid bypassing of deeper semantic analysis. Critically, larger later positivity and negativity (600-900 ms) were found for incongruent combinations relative to congruent combinations in emotional sentences, which was more pronounced for positive sentence, reflecting the cognitive efforts needed for reevaluating the emotional meaning of emotional state attribution under incongruent combinations. These results suggest that emoji valence exerts different effects on positive and negative aToM judgments, and affective processing of sentence-emoji combinations precedes semantic processing, highlighting the importance of emojis in aToM.

How language shapes emotional facial expression perception: an ERP study on the role of emotion word type

While it is widely acknowledged that emotion-label words (such as fear and sadness) play a crucial role in emotion perception, there is a limited understanding of how words laden with emotional meaning (e.g., virus, recovery), which do not explicitly refer to emotional states, influence emotion perception. This study conducted two experiments to explore how emotion-label words (Experiment 1) and emotion-laden words (Experiment 2) impact the perception of emotional facial expressions within the masked priming paradigm. Participants were tasked with assessing the valence of emotional facial expressions, and both behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded. Behavioral results from Experiment 1 revealed that positive emotion-label words, as opposed to negative ones, elicited a priming effect. Emotional facial expressions led to a reduced Late Positivity Complex (LPC) when preceded by related emotion-label words compared to unrelated ones. However, Experiment 2 did not show any priming effects in behavioral and Event-Related Potential (ERP) measurements when emotion-laden words were used as primes. The combined results from both experiments underscore that only emotion-label words exert a priming effect on facial expression perception. This highlights the significance of specific emotion words, namely emotion-label words, such as fear and sadness, in shaping emotion perception. The influence of language on emotion perception appears to be restricted to words explicitly conveying emotion concepts, at least in the masked priming paradigm.

Language-specific representation of emotion-concept knowledge causally supports emotion inference

Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as large language models (LLMs) to assess whether language-based representations of emotion causally contribute to the AI's ability to generate inferences about the emotional meaning of novel situations. Fourteen attributes of human emotion concept representation were found to be represented by the LLM's distinct artificial neuron populations. By manipulating these attribute-related neurons, we in turn demonstrated the role of emotion concept knowledge in generative emotion inference. The attribute-specific performance deterioration was related to the importance of different attributes in human mental space. Our findings provide a proof-in-concept that even an LLM can learn about emotions in the absence of sensory-motor representations and highlight the contribution of language-derived emotion-concept knowledge for emotion inference.

Interoception, emotion regulation strategies and skin-picking behaviors - Results of an intensive longitudinal study

Compulsive skin-picking is associated with emotion regulation difficulties, whose origins remain unclear. Interoception, plays an important role in effective emotion regulation. This study examined the relationship between interoception, emotion regulation strategies, and skin-picking in 136 individuals (85% women, aged 18-41), including 71 engaging in skin-picking and 65 psychologically healthy controls. We were interested in between-group differences in maladaptive and adaptive emotion regulation and aspects of interoception as well as associations of the latter with skin-picking symptoms and use of emotion regulation strategies. At baseline, we assessed habitual emotion regulation strategies (rumination, suppression, distraction, engagement, arousal control, reappraisal) and Interoceptive Sensibility (e.g., emotional awareness, body listening, self-regulation, noticing) through self-report questionnaires. Moreover, Interoceptive Accuracy (IAc) was measured via a Heartbeat Counting Task. Additionally, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) over seven days was used to register use of emotion regulation strategies and the occurrence and severity of skin-picking episodes during that period. At baseline, the skin-picking group exhibited lower IAc, emotional awareness, and higher habitual use of rumination than control group. Lower IAc was associated with higher odds of reporting skin-picking episodes assessed during EMA. Body listening correlated with a reduced sense of control over skin-picking during EMA. In total sample, self-regulation was related to lower odds of using rumination during EMA and noticing with less use of cognitive reappraisal. The study highlights the complex relationship between interoception, emotion regulation, and skin-picking, offering new insights into the mechanisms underlying skin picking disorder.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the relationship between subjective interoception and alexithymia: Implications for construct definitions and measurement

Although research indicates that self-reported interoception is associated with deficits in identifying and describing emotional experience, and externally oriented thinking styles (alexithymia), this relationship appears moderated by how interoception is measured. A systematic review and meta-analyses examined the association between self-reported interoception and alexithymia, investigating how different interoceptive questionnaires relate to alexithymia at global and facet levels. PsychINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were searched with predefined terms related to self-reported interoception and alexithymia. Three reviewers independently assessed articles, extracted data, and undertook risk of bias assessment. Thirty-two cross-sectional studies published between 1996 and 2023 were included. Random-effects meta-analyses and narrative synthesis indicated that global alexithymia was positively associated with measures of interoceptive confusion, autonomic nervous system reactivity, and heightened interoceptive attention, and inversely associated with interoceptive accuracy and adaptive interoception, indexed by composite Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness scores, but particularly interoceptive trusting, self-regulation, and attention regulation. These patterns were observed for alexithymic facets and stronger in magnitude for difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings, relative to externally oriented thinking. Overall, results suggested that the association between self-reported interoception and alexithymia differs as a function of the interoceptive self-report. The review highlighted issues with construct definition and operationalisation and determined that existing interoceptive self-reports broadly capture maladaptive and adaptive sensing, attention, interpretation, and memory. The findings underscore the importance of specifying interoceptive constructs and using appropriate assessments to improve convergence between constructs and measurements, further suggesting potential clinical utility in using existing self-reports to measure interoception and alexithymia, facilitating interventions targeting mind-body connections.

First-person thought is associated with body awareness in daily life

Sensations from the body are thought to play a critical role in many aspects of conscious experience, including first-person thought. In the present set of studies, we examined within-person relationships between in-the-moment subjective awareness of sensations from the body and self-reported first-person thought in real-world settings using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocols. In Study 1, participants reported experiencing greater first-person thoughts in moments when they also reported heightened awareness of sensations from their body, and this relationship was stable over a 4-week period even with mean-level changes in body awareness and first-person thought. In Study 2, we replicated this association in a 1-week EMA protocol using both self-report measures and measures derived from participants' open-ended descriptions of their ongoing thoughts using a natural language processing approach. Taken together, findings shed light on the role of subjective body awareness in other facets of conscious experience.

Bodies in action: Do contractive and expansive postures facilitate adaptive behavior?

The present study investigated the effects of expansive and contractive body displays on adaptive behavior and affective outcomes. Addressing limitations in past research, the effects were investigated in two different contexts (i.e., fear context and sadness context), compared with two types of control conditions and the moderating effects of motivational traits and symptoms of psychopathology were accounted for. A sample of 186 adults completed a fear experiment involving a mock job interview and a sadness experiment involving sad mood induction. For each experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of four body manipulations: (1) expansive; (2) contractive; (3) active control (i.e., running in place); or 4) passive control (i.e., doing nothing). The primary outcome was adaptive behavior (i.e., appropriate job-interview behavior and positive recall bias). Secondary affective outcomes were emotions, action tendencies, and appraisals. Results revealed small, non-significant effects of body displays on primary outcomes (ds = 0.19-0.28). For secondary outcomes, significant effects were identified for positive emotions (ds = 0.33). Across secondary outcomes, pairwise comparisons revealed that expansive displays led to more favorable outcomes than contractive displays. For participants with the highest levels of depression, body display conditions led to less favorable affective outcomes than control conditions. The results suggest that body displays do not influence adaptive behavior within the investigated contexts. When compared to contractive displays, expansive displays were found to yield more favorable affective changes. Lastly, the findings indicate that further investigations into body manipulations in the context of psychopathology are warranted.

Physiological and communicative emotional disconcordance in children on the autism spectrum

BACKGROUND

Individuals on the autism spectrum commonly have differences from non-autistic people in expressing their emotions using communicative behaviors, such as facial expressions. However, it is not yet clear if this reduced expressivity stems from reduced physiological reactivity in emotional contexts or if individuals react internally, but do not show these reactions externally to others. We hypothesized that autism is characterized by a discordance between in-the-moment internal psychophysiological arousal and external communicative expressions of emotion.

METHODS

Forty-one children on the autism spectrum and 39 non-autistic, typically developing (TD) children of two age groups (2-4 and 8-12 years) participated in a low-level stress task whilst wearing a wireless electrocardiogram. Children's negative emotional expressions (facial, vocal, bodily) were coded following standardized protocols. Alexithymia traits were assessed using the Children's Alexithymia Measure with school-aged children only. Data analyses involved ANOVAs, correlations, and sensitivity analyses.

RESULTS

There were no group differences in physiological arousal (heart rate) or in communicative expressions of stress to the stress task. For TD preschoolers, physiological arousal during the stress task was associated with vocal expressions and for TD school-aged children, they were associated with facial and bodily expressions. By contrast, for children on the autism spectrum, physiological arousal during the stress tasks was not associated with communicative expressions across age groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that children on the autism spectrum might experience emotional disconcordance, in that their physiological arousal does not align with their communicative expressions. Therefore, the internally experienced stress of children on the autism spectrum may be inadvertently missed by teachers and caregivers and, consequently, learning opportunities for teaching emotional communication and regulation may be also missed. Our results support the use of wearable biosensors to facilitate such interventions in children on the autism spectrum.

Interoceptive attention and mood in daily life: an experience-sampling study

Theories of emotion ascribe a fundamental role to the processing of bodily signals (interoception) in emotional experience. Despite evidence consistent with this, current knowledge is limited by a focus on interoceptive accuracy and laboratory-based interoception measures. This experience-sampling study examines how state interoceptive attention and state emotional experience are related in everyday life, providing the first data to our knowledge examining: (1) within-subject fluctuations in interoceptive attention across domains, and (2) the relationship between trait and state interoception. Compared with rates of exteroceptive attention (auditory attention: engaged 83% of the time), interoceptive signals captured attention approximately 20% of the time, with substantial within- and between-person variability across domains. There were relationships between interoceptive attention and emotion in daily life (greater attention being associated with more negative valence and fatigue) that were specific to interoceptive attention (different patterns were observed with exteroceptive attention). State measures of interoceptive (but not exteroceptive) attention were correlated with the trait interoceptive attention, but not accuracy. Results underscore the relationship between interoceptive attention and emotion, providing new insights into interoceptive attention and the structure of interoceptive ability. Future research should examine the source(s) of within- and between-person variability in interoceptive and exteroceptive attention and its relationship with emotional experience. This article is part of the theme issue 'Sensing and feeling: an integrative approach to sensory processing and emotional experience'.

More than labels: neural representations of emotion words are widely distributed across the brain

Although emotion words such as "anger," "disgust," "happiness," or "pride" are often thought of as mere labels, increasing evidence points to language as being important for emotion perception and experience. Emotion words may be particularly important for facilitating access to the emotion concepts. Indeed, deficits in semantic processing or impaired access to emotion words interfere with emotion perception. Yet, it is unclear what these behavioral findings mean for affective neuroscience. Thus, we examined the brain areas that support processing of emotion words using representational similarity analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data (N = 25). In the task, participants saw 10 emotion words (e.g. "anger," "happiness") while in the scanner. Participants rated each word based on its valence on a continuous scale ranging from 0 (Pleasant/Good) to 1 (Unpleasant/Bad) scale to ensure they were processing the words. Our results revealed that a diverse range of brain areas including prefrontal, midline cortical, and sensorimotor regions contained information about emotion words. Notably, our results overlapped with many regions implicated in decoding emotion experience by prior studies. Our results raise questions about what processes are being supported by these regions during emotion experience.

Feeling more neutral? Evaluative conditioning can increase neutral affective reactions

ABSTRACTWhile it is important to learn what is good and bad, can people learn what is neither? The answer to this question is not readily apparent, but it has important implications for how people learn affective responses. Six experiments examined whether evaluative conditioning (EC) can instill neutral affect. They tested four hypotheses: EC, in which novel conditioned stimuli (CSs) are paired with neutral unconditioned stimuli (USs) (1) creates neutral affect, (2) forms stronger experiences of neutrality when the number of contingent CS-US pairings is high rather than low, (3) creates positive affect, due to mere exposure, and (4) forms responses that are distinct from no US pairings. Respondents rated how positive, negative, and neutral they felt about a CS before and after an EC task in which CSs were paired with USs (positive, negative, neutral, or no stimuli). The positive/negative US conditions increased/decreased positivity, decreased/increased negativity, and decreased neutrality ratings, respectively. Supporting hypotheses 1, 2, and 4, the neutral US, but not the no US, condition increased neutral evaluations when respondents experienced a high (vs. low) number of CS-US pairings. Hypothesis 3 was not supported. The results reveal that people learn not only valenced, but also neutral, preferences.

The neurobiology of interoception and affect

Scholars have argued for centuries that affective states involve interoception, or representations of the state of the body. Yet, we lack a mechanistic understanding of how signals from the body are transduced, transmitted, compressed, and integrated by the brains of humans to produce affective states. We suggest that to understand how the body contributes to affect, we first need to understand information flow through the nervous system's interoceptive pathways. We outline such a model and discuss how unique anatomical and physiological aspects of interoceptive pathways may give rise to the qualities of affective experiences in general and valence and arousal in particular. We conclude by considering implications and future directions for research on interoception, affect, emotions, and human mental experiences.

Beyond Nature Versus Nurture: the Emergence of Emotion

Affective science is stuck in a version of the nature-versus-nurture debate, with theorists arguing whether emotions are evolved adaptations or psychological constructions. We do not see these as mutually exclusive options. Many adaptive behaviors that humans have evolved to be good at, such as walking, emerge during development - not according to a genetically dictated program, but through interactions between the affordances of the body, brain, and environment. We suggest emotions are the same. As developing humans acquire increasingly complex goals and learn optimal strategies for pursuing those goals, they are inevitably pulled to particular brain-body-behavior states that maximize outcomes and self-reinforce via positive feedback loops. We call these recurring, self-organized states emotions. Emotions display many of the hallmark features of self-organized attractor states, such as hysteresis (prior events influence the current state), degeneracy (many configurations of the underlying variables can produce the same global state), and stability. Because most bodily, neural, and environmental affordances are shared by all humans - we all have cardiovascular systems, cerebral cortices, and caregivers who raised us - similar emotion states emerge in all of us. This perspective helps reconcile ideas that, at first glance, seem contradictory, such as emotion universality and neural degeneracy.

Embodied language of emotions: Predicting human intuitions with linguistic distributions in blind and sighted individuals

Recent constructionist theories have suggested that language and sensory experience play a crucial role not only in how individuals categorise emotions but also in how they experience and shape them, helping to acquire abstract concepts that are used to make sense of bodily perceptions associated with specific emotions. Here, we aimed to investigate the role of sensory experience in conceptualising bodily felt emotions by asking 126 Italian blind participants to freely recall in which part of the body they commonly feel specific emotions (N = 15). Participants varied concerning visual experience in terms of blindness onset (i.e., congenital vs late) and degree of visual experience (i.e., total vs partial sensory loss). Using an Italian semantic model to estimate to what extent discrete emotions are associated with body parts in language experience, we found that all participants' reports correlated with the model predictions. Interestingly, blind - and especially congenitally blind - participants' responses were more strongly correlated with the model, suggesting that language might be one of the possible compensative mechanisms for the lack of visual feedback in constructing bodily felt emotions. Our findings present theoretical implications for the study of emotions, as well as potential real-world applications for blind individuals, by revealing, on the one hand, that vision plays an essential role in the construction of felt emotions and the way we talk about our related bodily (emotional) experiences. On the other hand, evidence that blind individuals rely more strongly on linguistic cues suggests that vision is a strong cue to acquire emotional information from the surrounding world, influencing how we experience emotions. While our findings do not suggest that blind individuals experience emotions in an atypical and dysfunctional way, they nonetheless support the view that promoting the use of non-visual emotional signs and body language since early on might help the blind child to develop a good emotional awareness as well as good emotion regulation abilities.

Examining the Role of Emotion Differentiation on Emotion and Cardiovascular Physiological Activity During Acute Stress

Emotion differentiation (ED) - the tendency to experience one's emotions with specificity - is a well-established predictor of adaptive responses to daily life stress. Yet, there is little research testing the role of ED in self-reported and physiological responses to an acute stressor. In the current study, we investigate the effects of negative emotion differentiation (NED) and positive emotion differentiation (PED) on participants' self-reported emotions and cardiac-mediated sympathetic nervous system reactivity (i.e., pre-ejection period) in response to a stressful task. Healthy young adults enrolled in a two-session study. At an initial session, participants completed a modified experience sampling procedure (i.e., the Day Reconstruction Method). At session 2, 195 completed the Trier Social Stress Test while cardiac impedance was acquired throughout. Linear regressions demonstrated that higher NED, but not PED, was associated with experiencing less intense self-reported negative, high arousal emotions (e.g., irritated, panicky) during the stressor (β =  - .15, p < .05) although people with higher NED also exhibited greater sympathetic reactivity (β = .16, p < .05). In exploratory analyses, we tested whether the effect of NED on self-reported stress was mediated by the tendency to make internally focus (or self-focused) attributions about performance on the task but did not find a significant indirect effect (p = .085). These results both complement prior work and provide a more complex picture of the role of NED in adaptive responses to stressful life events, suggesting that people with higher NED may experience their emotions as more manageable regardless of their level of physiological arousal.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00189-y.

Constructing Explicit Prejudice: Evidence From Large Sample Datasets

How does implicit bias contribute to explicit prejudice? Prior experiments show that concept knowledge about fear versus sympathy determines whether negative affect (captured as implicit bias) predicts antisocial outcomes (Lee et al.). Concept knowledge (i.e., beliefs) about groups may similarly moderate the link between implicitly measured negative affect (implicit negative affect) and explicit prejudice. We tested this hypothesis using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2008 Time Series Study (Study 1) and Project Implicit (Study 2). In both studies, participants high in implicit negative affect reported more explicit prejudice if they possessed negative beliefs about Black Americans. Yet, participants high in implicit negative affect reported less explicit prejudice if they possessed fewer negative beliefs about Black Americans. The results are consistent with psychological constructionist and dynamic models of evaluation and offer a more ecologically valid extension of our past laboratory work.

Assessment of Different Feature Extraction Methods for Discriminating Expressed Emotions during Music Performance towards BCMI Application

A Brain-Computer Music Interface (BCMI) system may be designed to harness electroencephalography (EEG) signals for control over musical outputs in the context of emotionally expressive performance. To develop a real-time BCMI system, accurate and computationally efficient emotional biomarkers should first be identified. In the current study, we evaluated the ability of various features to discriminate between emotions expressed during music performance with the aim of developing a BCMI system. EEG data was recorded while subjects performed simple piano music with contrasting emotional cues and rated their success in communicating the intended emotion. Power spectra and connectivity features (Magnitude Square Coherence (MSC) and Granger Causality (GC)) were extracted from the signals. Two different approaches of feature selection were used to assess the contribution of neutral baselines in detection accuracies; 1- utilizing the baselines to normalize the features, 2- not taking them into account (non-normalized features). Finally, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been used to evaluate and compare the capability of various features for emotion detection. Best detection accuracies were obtained from the non-normalized MSC-based features equal to 85.57 ± 2.34, 84.93 ± 1.67, and 87.16 ± 0.55 for arousal, valence, and emotional conditions respectively, while the power-based features had the lowest accuracies. Both connectivity features show acceptable accuracy while requiring short processing time and thus are potential candidates for the development of a real-time BCMI system.

Interoception in Old Age

Emotion regulation in old age was found to be more efficient; seniors seem to focus less on the negative aspects of experiences. Here, we ask, do older individuals regulate their emotions more efficiently or are they numb to the physiological changes that modulate these emotions? Interoception, the perception of physical feelings, influences a person’s mood, emotions, and sense of well-being, and was hardly tested among older adults. We examined the awareness of physiological changes (physiological arousal—blood pressure and heart rate) of 47 older adults, compared to 18 young adults, and their subjective reports of emotional experiences while viewing emotional stimuli. Interoception was decreased in old age. Blood pressure medications had a partial role in this reduction. Moreover, interoception mediated emotional experience, such that low interoception led to lower experiences of changes in physiological arousal. These findings may account for the emotional changes in old age, suggesting a decline in sensitivity with age, which leads to a positive interpretation of information.

The Constructionist Approach to Emotional Aging: Theoretical Insights and Predictions

In this article, we introduce a constructionist approach to understanding emotional aging in adulthood. The purpose of the paper is to show how constructionism offers a promising avenue for gaining new insights into age-related changes in emotional experiences. We begin by introducing the constructionist theoretical framework and illustrating how constructionism may shape conceptualizations of emotional aging in adulthood. We compare the constructionist conceptualization of emotional aging with existing conceptualizations of emotional aging derived from prominent theories of emotional aging, focusing on how such conceptualizations highlight different aspects of emotional aging (e.g., different mechanisms) and overlook or downplay other aspects. We conclude by explicating what constructionism may offer research on emotional aging, including considerations of research agendas, study designs, and method of measurement.

Harvesting Context and Mining Emotions Related to Olfactory Cultural Heritage

This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence approach to mining context and emotions related to olfactory cultural heritage narratives, particularly to fairy tales. We provide an overview of the role of smell and emotions in literature, as well as highlight the importance of olfactory experience and emotions from psychology and linguistic perspectives. We introduce a methodology for extracting smells and emotions from text, as well as demonstrate the context-based visualizations related to smells and emotions implemented in a novel smell tracker tool. The evaluation is performed using a collection of fairy tales from Grimm and Andersen. We find out that fairy tales often connect smell with the emotional charge of situations. The experimental results show that we can detect smells and emotions in fairy tales with an F1 score of 91.62 and 79.2, respectively.

Is There a Difference in Facial Emotion Recognition after Stroke with vs. without Central Facial Paresis?

The Facial Feedback Hypothesis (FFH) states that facial emotion recognition is based on the imitation of facial emotional expressions and the processing of physiological feedback. In the light of limited and contradictory evidence, this hypothesis is still being debated. Therefore, in the present study, emotion recognition was tested in patients with central facial paresis after stroke. Performance in facial vs. auditory emotion recognition was assessed in patients with vs. without facial paresis. The accuracy of objective facial emotion recognition was significantly lower in patients with vs. without facial paresis and also in comparison to healthy controls. Moreover, for patients with facial paresis, the accuracy measure for facial emotion recognition was significantly worse than that for auditory emotion recognition. Finally, in patients with facial paresis, the subjective judgements of their own facial emotion recognition abilities differed strongly from their objective performances. This pattern of results demonstrates a specific deficit in facial emotion recognition in central facial paresis and thus provides support for the FFH and points out certain effects of stroke.

Affect and Social Judgment: The Roles of Physiological Reactivity and Interoceptive Sensitivity

Humans imbue the objects of their perception with affective meaning, a phenomenon called affective realism. The affective realism hypothesis proposes that a brain continually predicts the meaning of sensations (e.g., identifying a sound as a siren, or a visual array as a face) in part by representing the current state of the body and the immediate physiological impact that similar sensory events have entailed in the past. However, the precise contribution of physiological activity to experiences of affective realism remains unknown. In the present study, participants' peripheral physiological activity was recorded while they made social evaluative judgments of target faces displaying neutral expressions. Target faces were shown concurrent with affective images that were suppressed from reportable awareness using continuous flash suppression. Results revealed evidence of affective realism-participants judged target faces more positively when paired with suppressed positive stimuli than suppressed negative stimuli-but this effect was significantly less pronounced among individuals higher in cardiac interoceptive sensitivity. Moreover, while some modest differences in peripheral physiological activity were observed across suppressed affective stimulus conditions, physiological reactivity to affective stimuli did not directly predict social evaluative judgments. We explore the implications of these findings with respect to both theories of emotion and theories detailing a role for interoception in experiences of first-person subjectivity.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00114-9.

The structure of lay-concepts within the fear spectrum revealed using emotional verbal fluency

Given the fact that natural language analysis can distinguish constituents of mental constructs, the present research was designed to investigate the structure of concepts related to the broad spectrum of emotions comprising worry, fear, anxiety, and panic, which in this article is referred to as the ‘fear spectrum’. A new technique presented here is based on a word association task and enables a description of the structure of emotion concepts. The technique is a variant of a verbal fluency task, i.e. emotional verbal fluency technique. Two studies have been conducted: the first to examine the cognitive structure of concepts within the fear spectrum (n = 280, 150 women, 130 men) and the second to confirm the stability of word association in the fear tasks and differentiation of the fear concepts in relation to trait anxiety and dogmatism (n = 190, 100 women, 90 men). A hierarchical clustering analysis, based on the linguistic material, i.e. words produced by the participants for the task of anxiety, was performed to present in what way the emotional verbal fluency technique can be applied to explore the structure of emotional concepts. According to our results, there is a relatively constant tendency in producing semantic clusters (emotional word association) among lay people. Moreover, produced clusters allow to describe the structure and to differentiate lay-concepts within the fear spectrum, such as worry, fear, anxiety, panic [respectively in Polish: obawa, lęk, strach, panika].

Sinful pleasures and pious woes? Using fMRI to examine evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge

Traditionally, lust and pride have been considered pleasurable, yet sinful in the West. Conversely, guilt is often considered aversive, yet valuable. These emotions illustrate how evaluations about specific emotions and beliefs about their hedonic properties may often diverge. Evaluations about specific emotions may shape important aspects of emotional life (e.g. in emotion regulation, emotion experience and acquisition of emotion concepts). Yet these evaluations are often understudied in affective neuroscience. Prior work in emotion regulation, affective experience, evaluation/attitudes and decision-making point to anterior prefrontal areas as candidates for supporting evaluative emotion knowledge. Thus, we examined the brain areas associated with evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge, with a focus on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Participants (N = 25) made evaluative and hedonic ratings about emotion knowledge during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus was associated with an evaluative (vs hedonic) focus on emotion knowledge. Our results suggest that the mPFC and vmPFC, in particular, may play a role in evaluating discrete emotions.

What is an Emotion? A Connectionist Perspective

Researchers often disagree as to whether emotions are largely consistent across people and over time, or whether they are variable. They also disagree as to whether emotions are initiated by appraisals, or whether they may be initiated in diverse ways. We draw upon Parallel-Distributed-Processing to offer an algorithmic account in which features of an emotion instance are bi-directionally connected to each other via conjunction units. We propose that such indirect connections may be innate as well as learned. These ideas lead to the development of the Interactive Activation and Competition framework for Emotion (IAC-E) which allows us to specify when emotions are consistent and when they are variable, as well as when they are appraisal-led and when they are input-agnostic.

Emotion depends on context, culture and their interaction: evidence from effective connectivity

Situated models of emotion hypothesize that emotions are optimized for the context at hand, but most neuroimaging approaches ignore context. For the first time, we applied Granger causality (GC) analysis to determine how an emotion is affected by a person's cultural background and situation. Electroencephalographic recordings were obtained from mainland Chinese (CHN) and US participants as they viewed and rated fearful and neutral images displaying either social or non-social contexts. Independent component analysis and GC analysis were applied to determine the epoch of peak effect for each condition and to identify sources and sinks among brain regions of interest. We found that source-sink couplings differed across culture, situation and culture × situation. Mainland CHN participants alone showed preference for an early-onset source-sink pairing with the supramarginal gyrus as a causal source, suggesting that, relative to US participants, CHN participants more strongly prioritized a scene's social aspects in their response to fearful scenes. Our findings suggest that the neural representation of fear indeed varies according to both culture and situation and their interaction in ways that are consistent with norms instilled by cultural background.

The Role of Interoceptive Sensibility and Emotional Conceptualization for the Experience of Emotions

The theory of constructed emotions suggests that different psychological components, including core affect (mental and neural representations of bodily changes), and conceptualization (meaning-making based on prior experiences and semantic knowledge), are involved in the formation of emotions. However, little is known about their role in experiencing emotions. In the current study, we investigated how individual differences in interoceptive sensibility and emotional conceptualization (as potential correlates of these components) interact to moderate three important aspects of emotional experiences: emotional intensity (strength of emotion felt), arousal (degree of activation), and granularity (ability to differentiate emotions with precision). To this end, participants completed a series of questionnaires assessing interoceptive sensibility and emotional conceptualization and underwent two emotion experience tasks, which included standardized material (emotion differentiation task; ED task) and self-experienced episodes (day reconstruction method; DRM). Correlational analysis showed that individual differences in interoceptive sensibility and emotional conceptualization were related to each other. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) revealed two independent factors that were referred to as sensibility and monitoring. The Sensibility factor, interpreted as beliefs about the accuracy of an individual in detecting internal physiological and emotional states, predicted higher granularity for negative words. The Monitoring factor, interpreted as the tendency to focus on the internal states of an individual, was negatively related to emotional granularity and intensity. Additionally, Sensibility scores were more strongly associated with greater well-being and adaptability measures than Monitoring scores. Our results indicate that independent processes underlying individual differences in interoceptive sensibility and emotional conceptualization contribute to emotion experiencing.

The Importance of Being Familiar: The Role of Semantic Knowledge in the Activation of Emotions and Factual Knowledge from Music in the Semantic Variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia

BACKGROUND

The role of semantic knowledge in emotion recognition remains poorly understood. The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is a degenerative disorder characterized by progressive loss of semantic knowledge, while other cognitive abilities remain spared, at least in the early stages of the disease. The syndrome is therefore a reliable clinical model of semantic impairment allowing for testing the propositions made in theoretical models of emotion recognition.

OBJECTIVE

The main goal of this study was to investigate the role of semantic memory in the recognition of basic emotions conveyed by music in individuals with svPPA.

METHODS

The performance of 9 individuals with svPPA was compared to that of 32 control participants in tasks designed to investigate the ability: a) to differentiate between familiar and non-familiar musical excerpts, b) to associate semantic concepts to musical excerpts, and c) to recognize basic emotions conveyed by music.

RESULTS

Results revealed that individuals with svPPA showed preserved abilities to recognize familiar musical excerpts but impaired performance on the two other tasks. Moreover, recognition of basic emotions and association of musical excerpts with semantic concepts was significantly better for familiar than non-familiar musical excerpts in participants with svPPA.

CONCLUSION

Results of this study have important implications for theoretical models of emotion recognition and music processing. They suggest that impairment of semantic memory in svPPA affects both the activation of emotions and factual knowledge from music and that this impairment is modulated by familiarity with musical tunes.

Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive virtual reality experience

Immersive virtual reality (VR) enables naturalistic neuroscientific studies while maintaining experimental control, but dynamic and interactive stimuli pose methodological challenges. We here probed the link between emotional arousal, a fundamental property of affective experience, and parieto-occipital alpha power under naturalistic stimulation: 37 young healthy adults completed an immersive VR experience, which included rollercoaster rides, while their EEG was recorded. They then continuously rated their subjective emotional arousal while viewing a replay of their experience. The association between emotional arousal and parieto-occipital alpha power was tested and confirmed by (1) decomposing the continuous EEG signal while maximizing the comodulation between alpha power and arousal ratings and by (2) decoding periods of high and low arousal with discriminative common spatial patterns and a long short-term memory recurrent neural network. We successfully combine EEG and a naturalistic immersive VR experience to extend previous findings on the neurophysiology of emotional arousal towards real-world neuroscience.

Adversity and Emotional Functioning

Exposure to early adversity has been linked to variations in emotional functioning. To date, however, the precise nature of these variations has been difficult to pinpoint given widespread differences in the ways in which aspects of emotional functioning are defined and measured. Here, more consistent with models of emotional functioning in typically developing populations (e.g., Halberstadt et al., 2001), we propose defining emotional functioning as consisting of distinct domains of emotion expression, perception, knowledge, reactivity, and regulation. We argue that this framework is useful for guiding hypothesis generation about the specific impact of early adversity on children's emotional functioning. We operationalize the construct of emotional functioning, highlight what is currently known about the association between adversity exposure and each domain of emotional functioning, propose potential mechanisms for these associations, and set the stage for future research examining the development of emotional functioning in the context of early adversity.

Using Visual Representations to Demonstrate Complexity in Mixed Emotional Development Across Childhood

Previous studies have shown a developmental trend in mixed emotional understanding. As children develop throughout childhood, they begin to recognise simultaneity of positive and negative emotions. However, previous studies have limited ecological validity as they assessed emotion choice using only a single positive and single negative emotion. Therefore, the present study aims to broaden the understanding of mixed emotional development by allowing a wider emotion choice. Mixed emotions were measured using the analogue emotions scale (AES) which allows both intensity of the emotional responses and time to be captured. In the present study, 211 children aged 4–10 were divided into one of three protagonist conditions (self, peer and adult) and read a vignette about the protagonist moving house. Choosing from seven emotions (happy, calm, surprise, sad, worry, fear and anger), they plotted the intensity and duration of each emotion they thought was represented in the vignette. The present study replicated the developmental trend that younger children are more likely than older children to choose a single emotion, and older children are more likely to perceive more simultaneity of emotion than younger children. This trend was demonstrated in the number of emotions chosen, and also the complexity of the AES pattern plotted. Additionally, the present study extended previous research by demonstrating that by broadening the emotion choice, the emotion interaction is more complex than previous studies were able to show.

The temperature of emotions

Emotions and temperature are closely related through embodied processes, and people seem to associate temperature concepts with emotions. While this relationship is often evidenced by everyday language (e.g., cold and warm feelings), what remains missing to date is a systematic study that holistically analyzes how and why people associate specific temperatures with emotions. The present research aimed to investigate the associations between temperature concepts and emotion adjectives on both explicit and implicit levels. In Experiment 1, we evaluated explicit associations between twelve pairs of emotion adjectives derived from the circumplex model of affect, and five different temperature concepts ranging from 0°C to 40°C, based on responses from 403 native speakers of four different languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese). The results of Experiment 1 revealed that, across languages, the temperatures were associated with different regions of the circumplex model. The 0°C and 10°C were associated with negative-valanced, low-arousal emotions, while 20°C was associated with positive-valanced, low-to-medium-arousal emotions. Moreover, 30°C was associated with positive-valanced, high-arousal emotions; and 40°C was associated with high-arousal and either positive- or negative-valanced emotions. In Experiment 2 (N = 102), we explored whether these temperature-emotion associations were also present at the implicit level, by conducting Implicit Association Tests (IATs) with temperature words (cold and hot) and opposing pairs of emotional adjectives for each dimension of valence (Unhappy/Dissatisfied vs. Happy/Satisfied) and arousal (Passive/Quiet vs. Active/Alert) on native English speakers. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that participants held implicit associations between the word hot and positive-valanced and high-arousal emotions. Additionally, the word cold was associated with negative-valanced and low-arousal emotions. These findings provide evidence for the existence of temperature-emotion associations at both explicit and implicit levels across languages.

Facial expressions can be categorized along the upper-lower facial axis, from a perceptual perspective

A critical question, fundamental for building models of emotion, is how to categorize emotions. Previous studies have typically taken one of two approaches: (a) they focused on the pre-perceptual visual cues, how salient facial features or configurations were displayed; or (b) they focused on the post-perceptual affective experiences, how emotions affected behavior. In this study, we attempted to group emotions at a peri-perceptual processing level: it is well known that humans perceive different facial expressions differently, therefore, can we classify facial expressions into distinct categories in terms of their perceptual similarities? Here, using a novel non-lexical paradigm, we assessed the perceptual dissimilarities between 20 facial expressions using reaction times. Multidimensional-scaling analysis revealed that facial expressions were organized predominantly along the upper-lower face axis. Cluster analysis of behavioral data delineated three superordinate categories, and eye-tracking measurements validated these clustering results. Interestingly, these superordinate categories can be conceptualized according to how facial displays interact with acoustic communications: One group comprises expressions that have salient mouth features. They likely link to species-specific vocalization, for example, crying, laughing. The second group comprises visual displays with diagnosing features in both the mouth and the eye regions. They are not directly articulable but can be expressed prosodically, for example, sad, angry. Expressions in the third group are also whole-face expressions but are completely independent of vocalization, and likely being blends of two or more elementary expressions. We propose a theoretical framework to interpret the tripartite division in which distinct expression subsets are interpreted as successive phases in an evolutionary chain.

The pain of grief: Exploring the concept of psychological pain and its relation to complicated grief, depression, and risk for suicide in bereaved adults

OBJECTIVE

Emotional or psychological pain is a core symptom of complicated grief (CG), yet its correlates are largely unexamined among bereaved individuals.

METHOD

Bereaved adults (N = 135) completed self-reports regarding psychological pain, CG, depression, and suicidality. We assessed correlations among these variables and tested whether psychological pain was elevated among individuals with CG and individuals with current or past suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Using logistic regression, we also assessed psychological pain, depression, and CG symptom severity as predictors of suicide risk.

RESULTS

Psychological pain was strongly associated with both CG and depression severity and was elevated among subjects reporting current or past suicidality. CG and depression were not statistically significant predictors of suicidal ideation after accounting for the effects of psychological pain.

CONCLUSIONS

Psychological pain is strongly associated with bereavement-related psychopathology and warrants further investigation in studies examining the nature and treatment of CG.

Animal models of human mood

Humans' everyday experience of the world is influenced by our moods. Moods are consciously accessible affective states that extend over time that are characterized by their valence and arousal. They also likely have a long evolutionary heritage and serve as an important adaptive affective mechanism. When they become maladaptive or overly biased, pathological affective states such as depression can emerge. Despite the importance of moods for human experience, little is known about their causal neurobiological mechanisms. In humans, limitations related to methods and interpretations of the data prevent causal investigations into the origins of mood, highlighting the importance of animal models. Nonhuman primates that share key neuroanatomical, affective, and social features with humans will be essential to uncovering their foundation. Identifying and validating mood-like states in animals is, however, challenging not least because mood is a human construct requiring verbal communication. Here we outline a theoretical framework for animal models of human mood, drawing upon established psychological literature where it exists before reviewing the extant studies of non-human primate models of mood-like states.

A New Taxonomy of Affect-A Spatiotemporal Framework: Constructing the Elephant

The holy grail of emotion theory is arguably still the discovery of a taxonomy, but one that is predicated on first establishing a corresponding structure of affect. Plans for the construction of a taxonomy are presented, based on the emotions and supported with the tripartite mind. A two-axis circumplex-like framework forms the proposed structure. The fundamental orthogonal axes are a temporal vertical axis and a spatial horizontal axis, which subsume another five essential opposing and complementary properties that underpin affect. These dimensions create four basic states that categorize affect and account for the differences and similarities between emotions within categories. A binomial labeling method posits the view that the valence of emotions is determined by the valence of the category they emanate from. The Euclidian spaces created account for mixed emotions and conditions and show how basic emotions from different categories create complex emotions and conditions. This model will also explore why some emotions like shame-embarrassment and contempt-disgust are often seen as synonyms due to a categorical error. It also provides an exposition of the function of reactive and self-reflective emotions and anxiety.

The Hedonic Character of Nostalgia: An Integrative Data Analysis

We conducted an integrative data analysis to examine the hedonic character of nostalgia. We combined positive and negative affect measures from 41 experiments manipulating nostalgia ( N = 4,659). Overall, nostalgia inductions increased positive and ambivalent affect, but did not significantly alter negative affect. The magnitude of nostalgia’s effects varied markedly across different experimental inductions of the emotion. The hedonic character of nostalgia, then, depends on how the emotion is elicited and the benchmark (i.e., control condition) to which it is compared. We discuss implications for theory and research on nostalgia and emotions in general.

The Resting Brain Sets Support-Giving in Motion: Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Activity During Momentary Rest Primes Supportive Responding

Humans give support, care, and assistance to others on a daily basis. However, the brain mechanisms that set such supportive behavior in motion are unknown. Based on previous findings demonstrating that activity in a portion of the brain’s default network—the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC)—during brief rest primes social thinking and behavior, momentary fluctuations in this brain region at rest may prime supportive responding. To test this hypothesis, 26 participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they alternated between deciding whether to give support to a close other in financial need, receive support for themselves, and make arbitrary decisions unrelated to support. Decisions were interleaved with brief periods of rest. Results showed that, within participants, spontaneous activity in the DMPFC during momentary periods of rest primed supportive-responding: greater activity in this region at the onset of a brief period of rest predicted, on a trial-by-trial basis, faster decisions to give support to the close other. Thus, activating the DMPFC as soon as our minds are free from external demands to attention may help individuals “default” to support-giving. Implications for understanding the prosocial functions of the resting brain are discussed.

An fMRI Study of Affective Congruence across Visual and Auditory Modalities

Evaluating multisensory emotional content is a part of normal day-to-day interactions. We used fMRI to examine brain areas sensitive to congruence of audiovisual valence and their overlap with areas sensitive to valence. Twenty-one participants watched audiovisual clips with either congruent or incongruent valence across visual and auditory modalities. We showed that affective congruence versus incongruence across visual and auditory modalities is identifiable on a trial-by-trial basis across participants. Representations of affective congruence were widely distributed with some overlap with the areas sensitive to valence. Regions of overlap included bilateral superior temporal cortex and right pregenual anterior cingulate. The overlap between the regions identified here and in the emotion congruence literature lends support to the idea that valence may be a key determinant of affective congruence processing across a variety of discrete emotions.

All Happy Emotions Are Alike but Every Unhappy Emotion Is Unhappy in Its Own Way: A Network Perspective to Academic Emotions

Quantitative research into the nature of academic emotions has thus far been dominated by factor analyses of questionnaire data. Recently, psychometric network analysis has arisen as an alternative method of conceptualizing the composition of psychological phenomena such as emotions: while factor models view emotions as underlying causes of affects, cognitions and behavior, in network models psychological phenomena are viewed as arising from the interactions of their component parts. We argue that the network perspective is of interest to studies of academic emotions due to its compatibility with the theoretical assumptions of the control value theory of academic emotions. In this contribution we assess the structure of a Finnish questionnaire of academic emotions using both network analysis and exploratory factor analysis on cross-sectional data obtained during a single course. The global correlational structure of the network, investigated using the spinglass community detection analysis, differed from the results of the factor analysis mainly in that positive emotions were grouped in one community but loaded on different factors. Local associations between pairs of variables in the network model may arise due to different reasons, such as variable A causing variation in variable B or vice versa, or due to a latent variable affecting both. We view the relationship between feelings of self-efficacy and the other emotions as causal hypotheses, and argue that strengthening the students' self-efficacy may have a beneficial effect on the rest of the emotions they experienced on the course. Other local associations in the network model are argued to arise due to unmodeled latent variables. Future psychometric studies may benefit from combining network models and factor models in researching the structure of academic emotions.

A neurocognitive model of perceptual decision-making on emotional signals

Humans make various kinds of decisions about which emotions they perceive from others. Although it might seem like a split-second phenomenon, deliberating over which emotions we perceive unfolds across several stages of decisional processing. Neurocognitive models of general perception postulate that our brain first extracts sensory information about the world then integrates these data into a percept and lastly interprets it. The aim of the present study was to build an evidence-based neurocognitive model of perceptual decision-making on others' emotions. We conducted a series of meta-analyses of neuroimaging data spanning 30 years on the explicit evaluations of others' emotional expressions. We find that emotion perception is rather an umbrella term for various perception paradigms, each with distinct neural structures that underline task-related cognitive demands. Furthermore, the left amygdala was responsive across all classes of decisional paradigms, regardless of task-related demands. Based on these observations, we propose a neurocognitive model that outlines the information flow in the brain needed for a successful evaluation of and decisions on other individuals' emotions. HIGHLIGHTS: Emotion classification involves heterogeneous perception and decision-making tasks Decision-making processes on emotions rarely covered by existing emotions theories We propose an evidence-based neuro-cognitive model of decision-making on emotions Bilateral brain processes for nonverbal decisions, left brain processes for verbal decisions Left amygdala involved in any kind of decision on emotions.

Toward an Integrative Psychometric Model of Emotions

Emotions are part and parcel of the human condition, but their nature is debated. Three broad classes of theories about the nature of emotions can be distinguished: affect-program theories, constructionist theories, and appraisal theories. Integrating these broad classes of theories into a unifying theory is challenging. An integrative psychometric model of emotions can inform such a theory because psychometric models are intertwined with theoretical perspectives about constructs. To identify an integrative psychometric model, we delineate properties of emotions stated by emotion theories and investigate whether psychometric models account for these properties. Specifically, an integrative psychometric model of emotions should allow (a) identifying distinct emotions (central in affect-program theories), (b) between- and within-person variations of emotions (central in constructionist theories), and (c) causal relationships between emotion components (central in appraisal theories). Evidence suggests that the popular reflective and formative latent variable models-in which emotions are conceptualized as unobservable causes or consequences of emotion components-cannot account for all properties. Conversely, a psychometric network model-in which emotions are conceptualized as systems of causally interacting emotion components-accounts for all properties. The psychometric network model thus constitutes an integrative psychometric model of emotions, facilitating progress toward a unifying theory.

Personality Traits and Emotional Word Recognition: An ERP Study

Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of positive, neutral, and negative words that were matched for arousal. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from healthy participants while they performed a lexical decision task. We found that personality traits influenced emotional word recognition at N400 (300-450 ms) and LPC (450-800 ms). At the earlier (N400) stage, the more extraverted and neurotic a participant was, the more reduced the N400s for the positive words relative to neutral words were. This suggests that the extroverts and high neurotics (i.e., high impulsivity) identified positive content in words during lexical feature retrieval, which facilitated such retrieval. At the later (LPC) stage, both the introverts and high neurotics (i.e., high anxiety) showed greater LPCs to negative than neutral words, indicating their sustained attention and elaborative processing of negative information. These results suggest that extraversion and neuroticism collectively influence different stages of emotional word recognition in a way that is consistent with Gray's biopsychological theory of personality.

What "Tears" Remind Us of: An Investigation of Embodied Cognition and Schizotypal Personality Trait Using Pencil and Teardrop Glasses

Facial expressions influence our experience and perception of emotions—they not only tell other people what we are feeling but also might tell us what to feel via sensory feedback. We conducted three experiments to investigate the interaction between facial feedback phenomena and different environmental stimuli, by asking participants to remember emotional autobiographical memories. Moreover, we examined how people with schizotypal traits would be affected by their experience of emotional facial simulations. We found that using a directed approach (gripping a pencil with teeth/lips) while remembering a specific autobiographical memory could successfully evoke participants’ positive (e.g., happy and excited)/negative (e.g., angry and sad) emotions (i.e., Experiment 1). When using indirective environmental stimuli (e.g., teardrop glasses), the results of our experiments (i.e., Experiments 2 and 3) investigating facial feedback and the effect of teardrop glasses showed that participants who scored low in schizotypy reported little effect from wearing teardrop glasses, while those with high schizotypy reported a much greater effect in both between- and within-subject conditions. The results are discussed from the perspective of sense of ownership, which people with schizophrenia are believed to have deficits in.

Dynamic interactive theory as a domain-general account of social perception

The perception of social categories, emotions, and personality traits from others' faces each have been studied extensively but in relative isolation. We synthesize emerging findings suggesting that, in each of these domains of social perception, both a variety of bottom-up facial features and top-down social cognitive processes play a part in driving initial perceptions. Among such top-down processes, social-conceptual knowledge in particular can have a fundamental structuring role in how we perceive others' faces. Extending the Dynamic Interactive framework (Freeman & Ambady, 2011), we outline a perspective whereby the perception of social categories, emotions, and traits from faces can all be conceived as emerging from an integrated system relying on domain-general cognitive properties. Such an account of social perception would envision perceptions to be a rapid, but gradual, process of negotiation between the variety of visual cues inherent to a person and the social cognitive knowledge an individual perceiver brings to the perceptual process. We describe growing evidence in support of this perspective as well as its theoretical implications for social psychology.