Neural signatures of shared subjective affective engagement and disengagement during movie viewing

When watching a negative emotional movie, we differ from person to person in the ease with which we engage and the difficulty with which we disengage throughout a temporally evolving narrative. We investigated neural responses of emotional processing, by considering inter-individual synchronization in subjective emotional engagement and disengagement. The neural underpinnings of these shared responses are ideally studied in naturalistic scenarios like movie viewing, wherein individuals emotionally engage and disengage at their own time and pace throughout the course of a narrative. Despite the rich data that naturalistic designs can bring to the study, there is a challenge in determining time-resolved behavioral markers of subjective engagement and disengagement and their underlying neural responses. We used a within-subject cross-over design instructing 22 subjects to watch clips of either neutral or sad content while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants watched the same movies a second time while continuously annotating the perceived emotional intensity, thus enabling the mapping of brain activity and emotional experience. Our analyses revealed that between-participant similarity in waxing (engagement) and waning (disengagement) of emotional intensity was directly related to the between-participant similarity in spatiotemporal patterns of brain activation during the movie(s). Similar patterns of engagement reflected common activation in the bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regions often involved in self-referenced evaluation and generation of negative emotions. Similar patterns of disengagement reflected common activation in central executive and default mode network regions often involved in top-down emotion regulation. Together this work helps to better understand cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning engagement and disengagement from emotionally evocative narratives.

Social anxiety and emotion regulation flexibility: a daily diary approach

Previous research suggests that social anxiety symptoms are maintained and intensified by inflexible emotion regulation (ER). Therefore, we examined whether trait-level social anxiety moderates ER flexibility operationalised at both between-person (covariation between variability in emotional intensity and variability in strategy use across occasions) and within-person (associations between emotional intensity and strategy use on a given day) levels. In a sample of healthy college-aged adults (N = 185, Mage = 21.89), we examined overall and emotion-specific intensities (shame, guilt, anxiety, anger, sadness) and regulatory strategies (i.e. experiential avoidance, expressive suppression, and rumination) in response to each day's most emotionally intense event over 6 days. During the study period, we found a positive association between variability in emotional intensity and variability of experiential avoidance in individuals with lower, rather than higher, levels of trait social anxiety after controlling for key covariates (i.e. gender, personality traits, and stress exposure). However, we did not find evidence for the moderating role of trait social anxiety in ER flexibility assessed at within-person levels. Our findings highlight the need to delineate dynamic ER flexibility across everyday events.

Do masks cover more than just a face? A study on how facemasks affect the perception of emotional expressions according to their degree of intensity

Emotional facial expressions convey crucial information in nonverbal communication and serve as a mediator in face-to-face relationships. Their recognition would rely on specific facial traits depending on the perceived emotion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a facemask has thus disrupted the human ability to read emotions from faces. Yet, these effects are usually assessed across studies from faces expressing stereotypical and exaggerated emotions, which is far removed from real-life conditions. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the impact of facemasks through an emotion categorization task using morphs ranging from a neutral face and an expressive face (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) (from 0% neutral to 100% expressive in 20% steps). Our results revealed a strong impact of facemasks on the recognition of expressions of disgust, happiness, and sadness, resulting in a decrease in performance and an increase in misinterpretations, both for low and high levels of intensity. In contrast, the recognition of anger and fear, as well as neutral expression, was found to be less impacted by mask-wearing. Future studies should address this issue from a more ecological point of view with the aim of taking concrete adaptive measures in the context of daily interactions.

Designing Emotions for Health Care Chatbots: Text-Based or Icon-Based Approach

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Successful implementation of cognitive reappraisal: effects of habit and situational factors

Reappraisal is an adaptive emotion regulation strategy associated with favourable mental health outcomes. It is unclear whether the adaptive outcomes of habitual reappraisal are associated with better implementation of reappraisal when faced with negative affective situations. The current study aimed to examine whether habitual reappraisal predicts the implementation of instructed reappraisal and to evaluate the potential moderating effects of situational factors, namely - emotional intensity and reappraisal affordance. To address this question, 100 participants reported their habitual reappraisal tendency and were asked to imagine themselves in different hypothetical interpersonal situations. Participants rated emotional intensity levels and reappraisal affordance for each situation, followed by instructions to implement reappraisal. Implementation success was measured by self-reported affect pre-and-post-implementation. Results indicated that habitual reappraisal was associated with greater reappraisal implementation success. While higher intensity scores predicted greater reappraisal implementation success, intensity did not moderate the association between habitual reappraisal and reappraisal implementation success. Reappraisal affordance did not predict reappraisal implementation success, nor did it moderate the association between habitual reappraisal and reappraisal implementation success. Our findings suggest that individual-centred factors play a significant role in reappraisal implementation success, while the effects of situation-centred factors demand further investigation.

Effects of emotional valence and intensity on cognitive and affective empathy after insula lesions

The insula plays a central role in empathy. However, the complex structure of cognitive (CE) and affective empathy (AE) deficits following insular damage is not fully understood. In the present study, patients with insular lesions (n = 20) and demographically matched healthy controls (n = 24) viewed ecologically valid videos that varied in terms of valence and emotional intensity. The videos showed a person (target) narrating a personal life event. In CE conditions, subjects continuously rated the affective state of the target, while in AE conditions, they continuously rated their own affect. Mean squared error (MSE) assessed deviations between subject and target ratings. Patients differed from controls only in negative, low-intensity AE, rating their own affective state less negative than the target. This deficit was not related to trait empathy, neuropsychological or clinical parameters, or laterality of lesion. Empathic functions may be widely spared after insular damage in a naturalistic, dynamic setting, potentially due to the intact interpretation of social context by residual networks outside the lesion. The particular role of the insula in AE for negative states may evolve specifically in situations that bear higher uncertainty pointing to a threshold role of the insula in online ratings of AE.

Investigating Effectiveness and Predicting Outcome and Dropout From Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving for Emotional Intensity Difficulties (STEPPS EI) in UK Primary Care

Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving (STEPPS) for borderline personality disorder (BPD) has been adapted for a primary care setting into a 13-week group treatment for emotional intensity difficulties (STEPPS EI). This is the first study to examine the effectiveness and potential outcome and dropout predictors of STEPPS EI in a primary care setting. Severity of BPD, depression, and anxiety symptoms were measured pre- and postintervention for 148 participants. Treatment completers showed improvements in depression, anxiety, and BPD symptoms with medium to large effect sizes. A predictor of symptom improvement was higher baseline severity for each of the symptom measures. Attending a psychoeducational group prior to STEPPS EI was associated with lower odds of dropout. The findings support the use of STEPPS EI in a primary care setting, with the potential to alleviate the burden from other local services.

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 Interaction of Facial Expression and Donor-Recipient Eye Contact in Donation Intentions: Based on the Intensity of Emotion

Both happy and sad facial expressions of recipients are frequently used in charity advertisements. However, the relative effectiveness of these two types of facial expressions has been found paradoxical in the past. In this study, we examine when happy facial expression can more effectively increase donation intentions of consumers and when vice versa. Specially, we propose that eye contact between a donor and a potential recipient may moderate the relative effectiveness of happy and sad facial expressions, and further explain the interaction effect from the perspective of emotional intensity. Results from two experiments suggest that, when donor-recipient eye contact is present, consumers tend to have stronger emotional intensity, and, in turn, show higher donation intentions when the recipient is with a happy rather than sad facial expression. In contrast, when the eye contact is absent, consumers may show stronger emotional intensity and donation intentions toward the charity advertisement with a recipient showing sad rather than happy expression.

The entertainment value of conspiracy theories

Many citizens around the globe believe conspiracy theories. Why are conspiracy theories so appealing? Here, we propose that conspiracy theories elicit intense emotions independent of emotional valence. People therefore find conspiracy theories entertaining – that is, narratives that people perceive as interesting, exciting, and attention‐grabbing – and such entertainment appraisals are positively associated with belief in them. Five studies supported these ideas. Participants were exposed to either a conspiratorial or a non‐conspiratorial text about the Notre Dame fire (Study 1) or the death of Jeffrey Epstein (preregistered Study 2). The conspiratorial text elicited stronger entertainment appraisals and intense emotions (independent of emotional valence) than the non‐conspiratorial text; moreover, entertainment appraisals mediated the effects of the manipulation on conspiracy beliefs. Study 3 indicated that participants endorsed stronger conspiracy beliefs when an election event was described in an entertaining rather than a boring manner. Subsequent findings revealed that both organisational (Study 4) and societal conspiracy beliefs (Study 5) are positively associated with sensation seeking – a trait characterised by a preference for exciting and intense experiences. We conclude that one reason why people believe conspiracy theories is because they find them entertaining.

Age differences in olfactory affective responses: evidence for a positivity effect and an emotional dedifferentiation

Studies on aging and hedonic judgment of odors have never been addressed within the empirical frameworks of age-related changes in emotion which state that advancing age is associated with a reduced negativity bias and a less pronounced differentiation between hedonic valence and emotional intensity judgments. Our aim was to examine and extend these age-related effects into the field of odors. Thirty-eight younger adults and 40 older adults were asked to evaluate the hedonic valence, emotional intensity, and familiarity of 50 odors controlled for their pleasantness. Compared to younger adults, older adults rated unpleasant odorants as less unpleasant and showed an increased relationship between hedonic valence and emotional intensity ratings. This yields evidence of reduced negativity bias and emotional dedifferentiation in response to odors. Such data suggest that when faced with odors, older people exhibit a reduction of emotional dimensionality leading them to distort emotional processing in a less negative direction.

Cortisol promotes the cognitive regulation of high intensive emotions independent of timing

Failures to cognitively downregulate negative emotions are a crucial risk factor for mental disorders. Previous studies provide evidence for a stress-induced improvement of cognitive emotion regulation possibly mediated via glucocorticoid actions. Cortisol can initialize immediate non-genomic as well as delayed genomic effects on cognitive control functioning, but its distinct effects on emotion regulation processes remain to be shown. Here, we sought to characterize time-dependent effects of oral cortisol administration on cognitive emotion regulation outcomes. We expected cortisol to improve emotion regulation success. Possible interactions with the delay between cortisol treatment and emotion regulation, strategy use and intensity of the emotional stimuli were examined. Eighty-five healthy men received either 10 mg hydrocortisone or a placebo in a double-blind, randomized design 30 or 90 min prior to an emotion regulation paradigm, in which they were asked to downregulate their emotional responses towards low and high intensive negative pictures via reappraisal or distraction. Affective ratings and pupil dilation served as outcome measures. Reduced arousal, enhanced valence ratings as well as increases in pupil dilations indexing the cognitive regulatory effort indicated successful downregulation of negative emotions evoked by high intensive but not low intensive negative pictures. Cortisol significantly reduced arousal ratings when downregulating high intensive negative emotions via distraction and (at a trend level) via reappraisal, independent of timing, demonstrating a beneficial effect of cortisol on subjective regulatory outcomes. Taken together, this study provides initial evidence suggesting that cortisol promotes the cognitive control of high intensive negative emotions both, 30 and 90 min after treatment.

Social Distance Reduces the Biases of Overweighting Small Probabilities and Underweighting Large Probabilities

People often exhibit biases in probability weighting such as overweighting small probabilities and underweighting large probabilities. Our research examines whether increased social distance would reduce such biases. Participants completed valuation and choice tasks of probabilistic lotteries under conditions with different social distances. The results showed that increased social distance reduced these biases in both hypothetical (Studies 1 and 2) and incentivized (Study 3) settings. This reduction was accompanied by a decrease in emotional intensity and an increase in the attention to probability in the decision-making process (Study 4). Moreover, the bias-buffering effect of social distance was stronger in the gain domain than in the loss domain (Studies 1-4). These results suggest that increasing the social distance from the beneficiaries of the decisions can reduce biases in probability weighting and shed light on the relationship between social distance and the emotional-cognitive process in decision-making.

Emotional response to autobiographical memories in depression: less happiness to positive and more sadness to negative memories

Retrieving positive autobiographical memories effectively repairs mood in healthy individuals. This is not the case in individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) possibly due to lower levels of positive emotions elicited by the positive memories. We examined whether the intensity of emotions experienced from recalling the happiest, saddest, and most anxious autobiographical memories differed between individuals with MDD (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 46). Participants retrieved their happiest, saddest, and most anxious autobiographical memories and rated the emotional intensity experienced at the time of the event and at the time of recall. For all memory types, emotional intensity at the time of the event did not differ between MDD and CTL groups. However, the MDD (vs. CTL) group experienced less happiness recalling their happiest memories, more sadness recalling their saddest memories, and marginally more nervousness recalling their most anxious memories. The CTL group experienced more intense emotions when retrieving happiest (vs. saddest or most anxious) memories. Greater sadness when recalling their saddest memories and less happiness when recalling their happiest memories in the MDD (vs. CTL) group may hinder effective mood regulation and perpetuate negative mood.

Lateralization of facial emotion processing and facial mimicry

The two halves of the brain are believed to play different roles in emotional processing. In studies involving chimeric faces, emotional expressions in the left visual field are more strongly perceived as emotional than those in the right visual field. Notably, the role of facial mimicry has not been studied in relation to hemispheric lateralization. In the current study, which used a novel stimulus set of chimeric faces, we proposed and found that emotional intensity judgments replicate the left visual field bias for facial expressions of emotions. While a general facial mimicry effect to the chimeric faces occurred for the corrugator muscle, these mimicry effects were not related to the visual field bias. The results suggest that encoding the emotionality of another person's facial expression might occur independent from the mere mimicry of the facial expression itself.

Is It Possible to Enhance Intensity in Guided Imagery Exercises? An Experimental Study

OBJECTIVE

Guided imagery exercises can have a powerful impact on distressing mental images. Clinically, it is usually recommended to experience these exercises as intensely as possible. However, patients sometimes object to the related instructions. In this study, we tested whether typical clinical instructions aiming at increasing intensity led to a stronger effect of the exercise.

METHODS

Sixty-four healthy participants watched a trauma movie clip. Then they were pseudo-randomized into one of two strategies (intense, less intense) or a waiting control condition. Dependent variables were self-reported emotional intensity and psychophysiology measures.

RESULTS

Participants in the intense ImRS strategy did not experience the exercise as more intense than those in the less intense ImRS strategy on any outcome measure. Both ImRS strategies showed increased sympathetic activation compared to a decrease of activation in the waiting control group.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results suggest that emotional intensity in guided imagery exercises may not depend very much on the therapist's instructions.

Effects of induced sad mood on facial emotion perception in young and older adults

Older adults perceive less intense negative emotion in facial expressions compared to younger counterparts. Prior research has also demonstrated that mood alters facial emotion perception. Nevertheless, there is little evidence which evaluates the interactive effects of age and mood on emotion perception. This study investigated the effects of sad mood on younger and older adults' perception of emotional and neutral faces. Participants rated the intensity of stimuli while listening to sad music and in silence. Measures of mood were administered. Younger and older participants' rated sad faces as displaying stronger sadness when they experienced sad mood. While younger participants showed no influence of sad mood on happiness ratings of happy faces, older adults rated happy faces as conveying less happiness when they experienced sad mood. This study demonstrates how emotion perception can change when a controlled mood induction procedure is applied to alter mood in young and older participants.

Emotional Intensity Modulates the Integration of Bimodal Angry Expressions: ERP Evidence

Integration of information from face and voice plays a central role in social interactions. The present study investigated the modulation of emotional intensity on the integration of facial-vocal emotional cues by recording EEG for participants while they were performing emotion identification task on facial, vocal, and bimodal angry expressions varying in emotional intensity. Behavioral results showed the rates of anger and reaction speed increased as emotional intensity across modalities. Critically, the P2 amplitudes were larger for bimodal expressions than for the sum of facial and vocal expressions for low emotional intensity stimuli, but not for middle and high emotional intensity stimuli. These findings suggested that emotional intensity modulates the integration of facial-vocal angry expressions, following the principle of Inverse Effectiveness (IE) in multimodal sensory integration.

Unaltered emotional experience in Parkinson's disease: Pupillometry and behavioral evidence

INTRODUCTION

Recognizing emotions in others is a pivotal part of socioemotional functioning and plays a central role in social interactions. It has been shown that individuals suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) are less accurate at identifying basic emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness; however, previous studies have predominantly assessed emotion processing using unimodal stimuli (e.g., pictures) that do not reflect the complexity of real-world processing demands. Dynamic, naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) have been shown to elicit stronger subjective emotional experiences than unimodal stimuli and can facilitate emotion recognition.

METHOD

In this experiment, pupil measurements of PD patients and matched healthy controls (HC) were recorded while they watched short film clips. Participants' task was to identify the emotion elicited by each clip and rate the intensity of their emotional response. We explored (a) how PD affects subjective emotional experience in response to dynamic, ecologically valid film stimuli, and (b) whether there are PD-related changes in pupillary response, which may contribute to the differences in emotion processing reported in the literature.

RESULTS

Behavioral results showed that identification of the felt emotion as well as perceived intensity varies by emotion, but no significant group effect was found. Pupil measurements revealed differences in dilation depending on the emotion evoked by the film clips (happy, tender, sadness, fear, and neutral) for both groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results suggest that differences in emotional response may be negligible when PD patients and healthy controls are presented with dynamic, ecologically valid emotional stimuli. Given the limited data available on pupil response in PD, this study provides new evidence to suggest that the PD-related deficits in emotion processing reported in the literature may not translate to real-world differences in physiological or subjective emotion processing in early-stage PD patients.

Why Seemingly Trivial Events Sometimes Evoke Strong Emotional Reactions: The Role of Social Exchange Rule Violations

People sometimes display strong emotional reactions to events that appear disproportionate to the tangible magnitude of the event. Although previous work has addressed the role that perceived disrespect and unfairness have on such reactions, this study examined the role of perceived social exchange rule violations more broadly. Participants (N = 179) rated the effects of another person's behavior on important personal outcomes, the degree to which the other person had violated fundamental rules of social exchange, and their reactions to the event. Results showed that perceptions of social exchange rule violations accounted for more variance in participants' reactions than the tangible consequences of the event. The findings support the hypothesis that responses that appear disproportionate to the seriousness of the eliciting event are often fueled by perceived rule violations that may not be obvious to others.

The role of the amygdala in the perception of positive emotions: an "intensity detector"

The specific role of the amygdala remains controversial even though the development of functional imaging techniques has established its implication in the emotional process. The aim of this study was to highlight the sensitivity of the amygdala to emotional intensity (arousal). We conducted an analysis of the modulation of amygdala activation according to variation in emotional intensity via an fMRI event-related protocol. Monitoring of electrodermal activity, a marker of psychophysiological emotional perception and a reflection of the activation of the autonomic nervous system, was carried out concurrently. Eighteen subjects (10 men; aged from 22 to 29 years) looked at emotionally positive photographs. We demonstrated that the left and right amygdalae were sensitive to changes in emotional intensity, activating more in response to stimuli with higher intensity. Furthermore, electrodermal responses were more frequent for the most intense stimuli, demonstrating the concomitant activation of the autonomic nervous system. These results highlight the sensitivity of the amygdala to the intensity of positively valenced visual stimuli, and in conjunction with results in the literature on negative emotions, reinforce the role of the amygdala in the perception of intensity.

Emotional intensity influences pre-implementation and implementation of distraction and reappraisal

Although emotional intensity powerfully challenges regulatory strategies, its influence remains largely unexplored in affective-neuroscience. Accordingly, the present study addressed the moderating role of emotional intensity in two regulatory stages--implementation (during regulation) and pre-implementation (prior to regulation), of two major cognitive regulatory strategies--distraction and reappraisal. According to our framework, because distraction implementation involves early attentional disengagement from emotional information before it gathers force, in high-intensity it should be more effective in the short-term, relative to reappraisal, which modulates emotional processing only at a late semantic meaning phase. Supporting findings showed that in high (but not low) intensity, distraction implementation resulted in stronger modulation of negative experience, reduced neural emotional processing (centro-parietal late positive potential, LPP), with suggestive evidence for less cognitive effort (frontal-LPP), relative to reappraisal. Related pre-implementation findings confirmed that anticipating regulation of high-intensity stimuli resulted in distraction (over reappraisal) preference. In contrast, anticipating regulation of low-intensity stimuli resulted in reappraisal (over distraction) preference, which is most beneficial for long-term adaptation. Furthermore, anticipating cognitively demanding regulation, either in cases of regulating counter to these preferences or via the more effortful strategy of reappraisal, enhanced neural attentional resource allocation (Stimulus Preceding Negativity). Broad implications are discussed.

Bad and worse: neural systems underlying reappraisal of high- and low-intensity negative emotions

One of the most effective strategies for regulating emotional responses is cognitive reappraisal. While prior work has made great strides in characterizing reappraisal's neural mechanisms and behavioral outcomes, the key issue of how regulation varies as a function of emotional intensity remains unaddressed. We compared the behavioral and neural correlates of reappraisal of high- and low-intensity emotional responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that successful reappraisal of both high- and low-intensity emotions depends upon recruitment of dorsomedial (dmPFC) as well as left dorsolateral (dlPFC) and ventrolateral (vlPFC) prefrontal cortex. However, reappraisal of high-intensity emotions more strongly activated left dlPFC, and in addition, activated right lateral and dorsomedial PFC regions not recruited by low-intensity reappraisal. No brain regions were more strongly recruited during reappraisal of low when compared with high-intensity emotions. Taken together, these results suggest that reappraisal of high-intensity emotion requires greater cognitive resources as evidenced by quantitative and qualitative differences in prefrontal recruitment. These data have implications for understanding how and when specific PFC systems are needed to regulate different types of emotional responses.

Psychophysical measures of sensitivity to facial expression of emotion

We report the development of two simple, objective, psychophysical measures of the ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion that vary in intensity from a neutral facial expression and to discriminate between varying intensities of emotional facial expression. The stimuli were created by morphing photographs of models expressing four basic emotions, anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness with neutral expressions. Psychometric functions were obtained for 15 healthy young adults using the Method of Constant Stimuli with a two-interval forced-choice procedure. Individual data points were fitted by Quick functions for each task and each emotion, allowing estimates of absolute thresholds and slopes. The tasks give objective and sensitive measures of the basic perceptual abilities required for perceiving and interpreting emotional facial expressions.

How the Object of Affect Guides its Impact

In this article, we examine how affect influences judgment and thought, but also how thought transforms affect. The general thesis is that the nature and impact of affective reactions depends largely on their objects. We view affect as a representation of value, and its consequences as dependent on its object or what it is about. Within a review of relevant literature and a discussion of the nature of emotion, we focus on the role of the object of affect in governing both the nature of emotional reactions and the impact of affect and emotion on cognition and action. Although emotion is always about the here and now, the capacity for abstract thought means that the human here and now includes imagination as well as perception. Indeed, the hopes and fears that dominate human lives often involve things only imagined.