The body language: The spontaneous influence of congruent bodily arousal on the awareness of emotional words

Nowadays, the idea of a reciprocal influence of physiological and psychological processes seems to be widely accepted. For instance, current theories of embodied emotion suggest that knowledge about an emotion concept involves simulations of bodily experienced emotional states relevant to the concept. In line with this framework, the present study investigated whether actual levels of physiological arousal interact with the processing of emotional words. Participants performed 2 blocks of an attentional blink task, once after a cycling session (increased arousal) and once after a relaxation session (reduced arousal). Concretely, participants were instructed to detect and report 2 target words (T1 and T2) presented among a series of nonword distractors. T1 and T2 were either neutral, high arousal, or low arousal words. Results revealed that increased physiological arousal led to improved reports of high arousal T2 words, whereas reduced physiological arousal led to improved reports of low arousal T2 words. Neutral T2 remained unaffected by the arousing conditions. These findings emphasize that actual levels of physiological arousal modulate the cognitive access to arousal (in-)congruent emotional concepts and suggest a direct grounding of emotion knowledge in our bodily systems of arousal.

Violence Exposure and Welfare over Time: Evidence from the Burundi Civil War

We investigate the relationship between exposure to conflict and poverty dynamics over time, using original three-waves panel data for Burundi which tracked individuals and reported local-level violence exposure from 1998 to 2012. Firstly, the data reveal that headcount poverty has not changed since 1998 while we observe multiple transitions into and out of poverty. Moreover, households exposed to the war exhibit a lower level of welfare than non-exposed households, with the difference between the two groups predicted to remain significant at least until 2017, i.e. twelve years after the conflict termination. The correlation between violence exposure and deprivation over time is confirmed in a household-level panel setting. Secondly, our empirical investigation shows how violence exposure over different time spans interacts with households' subsequent welfare. Our analysis of the determinants of households' likelihood to switch poverty status (i.e. to fall into poverty or escape poverty) combined with quantile regressions suggest that, (i) exposure during the first phase of the conflict has affected the entire distribution, and (ii) exposure during the second phase of the conflict has mostly affected the upper tail of the distribution: initially non-poor households have a higher propensity to fall into poverty while initially poor households see their propensity to pull through only slightly decrease with recent exposure to violence. Although not directly testable with the data at hand, these results are consistent with the changing nature of violence in the course of the Burundi civil war, from relatively more labour-destructive to relatively more capital-destructive.