Emotion regulation meets emotional attention: the influence of emotion suppression on emotional attention depends on the nature of the distracters

Recent evidence has suggested a crucial role of people’s current goals in attention to emotional information. This asks for research investigating how and what kinds of goals shape emotional attention. The present study investigated how the goal to suppress a negative emotional state influences attention to emotion-congruent events. After inducing disgust, we instructed participants to suppress all feelings of disgust during a subsequent dot probe task. Attention to disgusting images was modulated by the sort of distracter that was presented in parallel with disgusting imagery. When disgusting images were presented together with neutral images, emotion suppression was accompanied by a tendency to attend to disgusting images. However, when disgusting images were shown with positive images that allow coping with disgust (i.e., images representing cleanliness), attention tended away from disgusting images and toward images representing cleanliness. These findings show that emotion suppression influences the allocation of attention but that the successful avoidance of emotion-congruent events depends on the availability of effective distracters.

Density of insect-pollinated grassland plants decreases with increasing surrounding land-use intensity

Pollinator declines have raised concerns about the persistence of plant species that depend on insect pollination, in particular by bees, for their reproduction. The impact of pollinator declines remains unknown for species-rich plant communities found in temperate seminatural grasslands. We investigated effects of land-use intensity in the surrounding landscape on the distribution of plant traits related to insect pollination in 239 European seminatural grasslands. Increasing arable land use in the surrounding landscape consistently reduced the density of plants depending on bee and insect pollination. Similarly, the relative abundance of bee-pollination-dependent plants increased with higher proportions of non-arable agricultural land (e.g. permanent grassland). This was paralleled by an overall increase in bee abundance and diversity. By isolating the impact of the surrounding landscape from effects of local habitat quality, we show for the first time that grassland plants dependent on insect pollination are particularly susceptible to increasing land-use intensity in the landscape.

Emotional and behavioural problems in children with language impairments and children with autism spectrum disorders

Background: Although it is well-established that children with language impairment (LI) and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) both show elevated levels of emotional and behavioural problems, the level and types of difficulties across the two groups have not previously been directly compared. Aims: To compare levels of emotional and behavioural problems in children with LI and children with ASD recruited from the same mainstream schools. Methods & Procedures: We measured teacher-reported emotional and behavioural problems using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) in a sample of 5-to-13-year old children with LI (N=62) and children with ASD (N=42) attending mainstream school but with identified special educational needs. Outcomes & Results: Both groups showed similarly elevated levels of emotional, conduct and hyperactivity problems. The only differences between the LI and ASD groups were on subscales assessing peer problems (which were higher in the ASD group) and prosocial behaviours (which were higher in the LI group). Overall, there were few associations between emotional and behavioural problems and child characteristics, reflecting the pervasive nature of these difficulties in children with LI and children with ASD, although levels of problems were higher in children with ASD with lower language ability. However, in the ASD group only, a measure of family social economic status was associated with language ability and attenuated the association between language ability and emotional and behavioural problems. Conclusions & Implications: Children with LI and children with ASD in mainstream school show similarly elevated levels of emotional and behavioural problems, which require monitoring and may benefit from intervention. Further work is required to identify the child, family and situational factors that place children with LI and children with ASD at risk of emotional and behavioural problems, and whether these differ between the two groups. This work can then guide the application of evidence-based interventions to these children.

The organization of emotionally autobiographical memories: How emotional knowledge for personal events is represented in autobiographical knowledge base?

The present study aimed to investigate the organization of autobiographical memory and to reveal how emotional knowledge for personal events is represented in autobiographical knowledge base. For these purposes, the event-cueing technique was employed (Brown & Schopflocher, 1998). Forty-six participants were provided eight retrieval cues and asked to generate a personal event related to each of them (i.e., cueing events). Following this, they responded to each cueing event by retrieving two personal episodes (i.e., cued events). The results indicated that cued events shared the life themes with cueing events, suggesting the thematic organization of autobiographical memory. We also found that the life themes of each personal episode determined types of emotional states with which they were associated. The implications for the affect and memory literature and the emotion regulation literature were discussed.

Visual search for basic emotional expressions in autism; impaired processing of anger, fear and sadness, but a typical happy face advantage

Facial expression recognition was investigated in 20 males with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), compared to typically developing individuals matched for chronological age (TD CA group) and verbal and non-verbal ability (TD V/NV group). This was the first study to employ a visual search, “face in the crowd” paradigm with a HFA/AS group, which explored responses to numerous facial expressions using real-face stimuli. Results showed slower response times for processing fear, anger and sad expressions in the HFA/AS group, relative to the TD CA group, but not the TD V/NV group. Reponses to happy, disgust and surprise expressions showed no group differences. Results are discussed with reference to the amygdala theory of autism.

IMF control of cusp proton emission intensity and dayside convection: implications for component and anti-parallel reconnection

We study a brightening of the Lyman-alpha emission in the cusp which occurred in response to a short-lived southward turning of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) during a period of strongly enhanced solar wind plasma concentration. The cusp proton emission is detected using the SI-12 channel of the FUV imager on the IMAGE spacecraft. Analysis of the IMF observations recorded by the ACE and Wind spacecraft reveals that the assumption of a constant propagation lag from the upstream spacecraft to the Earth is not adequate for these high time-resolution studies. The variations of the southward IMF component observed by ACE and Wind allow for the calculation of the ACE-to-Earth lag as a function of time. Application of the derived propagation delays reveals that the intensity of the cusp emission varied systematically with the IMF clock angle, the relationship being particularly striking when the intensity is normalised to allow for the variation in the upstream solar wind proton concentration. The latitude of the cusp migrated equatorward while the lagged IMF pointed southward, confirming the lag calculation and indicating ongoing magnetopause reconnection. Dayside convection, as monitored by the SuperDARN network of radars, responded rapidly to the IMF changes but lagged behind the cusp proton emission response: this is shown to be as predicted by the model of flow excitation by Cowley and Lockwood (1992). We use the numerical cusp ion precipitation model of Lockwood and Davis (1996), along with modelled Lyman-_ emission efficiency and the SI-12 instrument response, to investigate the effect of the sheath field clock angle on the acceleration of ions on crossing the dayside magnetopause. This modelling reveals that the emission commences on each reconnected field line 2–2.5min after it is opened and peaks 3–5 min after it is opened. We discuss how comparison of the Lyman-alpha intensities with oxygen emissions observed simultaneously by the SI-13 channel of the FUV instrument offers an opportunity to test whether or not the clock angle dependence is consistent with the “component” or the “anti-parallel” reconnection hypothesis.

The influence of anxiety on the initial selection of emotional faces presented in binocular rivalry

Neurocognitive theories of anxiety predict that threat-related information can be evaluated before attentional selection, and can influence behaviour differentially in high anxious compared to low anxious individuals. We investigate this further by presenting emotional and neutral faces in an adapted binocular rivalry paradigm. We show that the initial selection of emotional faces presented in binocular rivalry is highly influenced by self-reported state and trait anxiety-level. Heightened anxiety was correlated with increased perception of angry and fearful faces, and decreased perception of happy expressions. These results are consistent with recent evidence of involuntary selection of threat in anxiety.

On the 'special' status of emotional faces... Comment on Yang, Hong, and Blake (2010)

A wealth of literature suggests that emotional faces are given special status as visual objects: Cognitive models suggest that emotional stimuli, particularly threat-relevant facial expressions such as fear and anger, are prioritized in visual processing and may be identified by a subcortical “quick and dirty” pathway in the absence of awareness (Tamietto & de Gelder, 2010). Both neuroimaging studies (Williams, Morris, McGlone, Abbott, & Mattingley, 2004) and backward masking studies (Whalen, Rauch, Etcoff, McInerney, & Lee, 1998) have supported the notion of emotion processing without awareness. Recently, our own group (Adams, Gray, Garner, & Graf, 2010) showed adaptation to emotional faces that were rendered invisible using a variant of binocular rivalry: continual flash suppression (CFS, Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005). Here we (i) respond to Yang, Hong, and Blake's (2010) criticisms of our adaptation paper and (ii) provide a unified account of adaptation to facial expression, identity, and gender, under conditions of unawareness

Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance

Threat-relevant stimuli such as fear faces are prioritized by the human visual system. Recent research suggests that this prioritization begins during unconscious processing: A specialized (possibly subcortical) pathway evaluates the threat relevance of visual input, resulting in preferential access to awareness for threat stimuli. Our data challenge this claim. We used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to present emotional face stimuli outside of awareness. It has been shown using CFS that salient (e.g., high contrast) and recognizable stimuli (faces, words) become visible more quickly than less salient or less recognizable stimuli. We found that although fearful faces emerge from suppression faster than other faces, this was wholly explained by their low-level visual properties, rather than their emotional content. We conclude that, in the competition for visual awareness, the visual system prefers and promotes unconscious stimuli that are more “face-like,” but the emotional content of a face has no effect on stimulus salience.

Neural correlates of emotional responses to music: an EEG study

This paper presents an EEG study into the neural correlates of music-induced emotions. We presented participants with a large dataset containing musical pieces in different styles, and asked them to report on their induced emotional responses. We found neural correlates of music-induced emotion in a number of frequencies over the pre-frontal cortex. Additionally, we found a set of patterns of functional connectivity, defined by inter-channel coherence measures,to be significantly different between groups of music-induced emotional responses.

Emotional responses to Hindustani raga music: the role of musical structure

In Indian classical music, ragas constitute specific combinations of tonic intervals potentially capable of evoking distinct emotions. A raga composition is typically presented in two modes, namely, alaap and gat. Alaap is the note by note delineation of a raga bound by a slow tempo, but not bound by a rhythmic cycle. Gat on the other hand is rendered at a faster tempo and follows a rhythmic cycle. Our primary objective was to (1) discriminate the emotions experienced across alaap and gat of ragas, (2) investigate the association of tonic intervals, tempo and rhythmic regularity with emotional response. 122 participants rated their experienced emotion across alaap and gat of 12 ragas. Analysis of the emotional responses revealed that (1) ragas elicit distinct emotions across the two presentation modes, and (2) specific tonic intervals are robust predictors of emotional response. Specifically, our results showed that the ‘minor second’ is a direct predictor of negative valence. (3) Tonality determines the emotion experienced for a raga where as rhythmic regularity and tempo modulate levels of arousal. Our findings provide new insights into the emotional response to Indian ragas and the impact of tempo, rhythmic regularity and tonality on it.

The psychology of containment: mis/representing emotional and behavioural difficulties in Australian schools

The number of students in special schools has increased at a rapid rate in some Australian states, due in part to increased enrolment under the categories of emotional disturbance (ED) and behaviour disorder (BD). Nonetheless, diagnostic distinctions between ED and BD are unclear. Moreover, despite international findings that students with particular backgrounds are over-represented in special schools, little is known about the backgrounds of students entering such settings in Australia. This study examined the government school enrolment data from New South Wales, the most populous of the Australian states. Linear and quadratic trends were used to describe the numbers and ages of students enrolled in special schools in the ED and BD categories. Changes between 1997 and 2007 were observed. Results showed an over-representation of boys that increased across the decade and a different pattern across age for boys and girls. Consistent with international findings, these results indicate that trends in special school placements are unrelated to disability prevalence in the population. Rather, it is suggested that schools act to preserve time and resources for others by removing their more challenging students: most typically, boys.

Stay calm! Regulating emotional responses by implementation intentions: assessing the impact on physiological and subjective arousal

Implementation intention (IMP) has recently been highlighted as an effective emotion regulatory strategy (Schweiger Gallo et al., 2009). Most studies examining the effectiveness of IMPs to regulate emotion have relied on self-report measures of emotional change. In two studies we employed electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR) in addition to arousal ratings (AR) to assess the impact of an IMP on emotional responses. In Study 1, 60 participants viewed neutral and two types of negative pictures (weapon vs. non-weapon) under the IMP “If I see a weapon, then I will stay calm and relaxed!” or no self-regulatory instructions (Control). In Study 2, additionally to the Control and IMP conditions, participants completed the picture task either under goal intention (GI) to stay calm and relaxed or warning instructions highlighting that some pictures contain weapons. In both studies, participants showed lower EDA, reduced HR deceleration and lower AR to the weapon pictures compared to the non-weapon pictures. In Study 2, the IMP was associated with lower EDA compared to the GI condition for the weapon pictures, but not compared to the weapon pictures in the Warning condition. AR were lower for IMP compared to GI and Warning conditions for the weapon pictures.

Dynamic game soundtrack generation in response to a continously varying emotional trajectory

Dynamic soundtracking presents various practical and aesthetic challenges to composers working with games. This paper presents an implementation of a system addressing some of these challenges with an affectively-driven music generation algorithm based on a second order Markov-model. The system can respond in real-time to emotional trajectories derived from 2-dimensions of affect on the circumplex model (arousal and valence), which are mapped to five musical parameters. A transition matrix is employed to vary the generated output in continuous response to the affective state intended by the gameplay.