Psychophysiological responses to affective pictures in younger and older adults

Despite the central role that emotional reactivity plays in adaptation, few studies have examined age differences in this capacity under well-controlled laboratory conditions, on the basis of standardized emotion-evoking stimuli and assessing experiential, expressive, and physiological measures. 212 adults ranging in age from 20 to 81 years were exposed to 14 picture series, each lasting 60 s and of a different valence and arousal. We assessed valence and arousal ratings, cardiovascular, respiratory and electrodermalmeasures, facial muscle activity and gaze activity. Here, we present findings for 22 younger (mean age=24.0) and 22 older (mean age=72.1) adults for valence and arousal ratings, systolic bloodpressure (SBP) andheart rate (HR).Compared to younger adults, older adults rated unpleasant seriesmore negatively and showed a smaller range in arousal for pleasant series. SBP linearly increased with increasing appetitive activation. HR showed the expected deceleration from the pleasant to the unpleasant series.However, this effect was clearer for the younger adults than the older adults. For older adults, if something is pleasant, it is also judged to be generally lower in arousal, whereas, if something is unpleasant, it is also judged to be generally higher in arousal. The results for SBP indicate that the association between arousal and sympathetic outflow to the cardiovascular system might be similar in younger and older adults. The results for HR suggest that the parasympathetic activation might be attenuated in older adults as compared to younger adults.

Verbal emotional memory in a case with left amygdala damage.

The amygdala nuclei appear to be critically implicated in emotional memory. However, in most studies, encoding and consolidation processes cannot be analyzed separately. We thus studied the verbal emotional memory in a young woman with a ganglioglioma of the left amygdala and analyzed its impact (1) on each step of the memory process (encoding, retrieval, and recognition) (2) on short- and long-term consolidation (1-hour and 1-week delay) and (3) on processing of valence (positive and negative items compared to neutral words). Results showed emotional encoding impairments and, after encoding was controlled for, emotional long-term consolidation. Finally, although the negative words were not acknowledged as emotionally arousing by the patient, these words were specifically poorly encoded, recalled, and consolidated. Our data suggest that separate cerebral networks support the processing of emotional versus neutral stimuli.

Behavioral modulation by mutilation pictures in women

Previous studies have shown that women are more emotionally expressive than men. It is unclear, however, if women are also more susceptible to the emotional modulation of behavior imposed by an affective stimulus. To investigate this issue, we devised a task in which female subjects performed six sequential trials of visual target detection following the presentation of emotional (mutilation and erotic) or neutral pictures (domestic utensils and objects) and compared the data obtained in the present study with those described in a previous study with male subjects. The experiment consisted of three blocks of 24 pictures and each block had an approximate duration of 4 min. Our sample consisted of 36 subjects (age range: 18 to 26 years) and each subject performed all blocks. Trials following the presentation of mutilation pictures (283 ms) had significantly slower reaction times than those following neutral (270 ms) pictures. None of the trials in the "pleasant block" (271 ms) was significantly different from those in the "neutral block". The increase in reaction time observed in the unpleasant block may be related in part to the activation of motivational systems leading to an avoidance behavior. The interference effect observed in this study was similar to the pattern previously described for men. Thus, although women may be more emotionally expressive, they were not more reactive to aversive stimuli than men, as measured by emotional interference in a simple reaction time task.

Grabbing attention while reading website pages: the influence of verbal emotional cues in advertising

The increasing use of the World Wide Web has promised a huge advertising platform for marketers. Investment in online advertising is growing and is expected to overcome traditional media. However, recent studies have reported that users avoid looking at advertising displayed on the World Wide Web. This study aimed at examining the impact of verbal emotional cues (negative/neutral/positive) to capture attention on website’s advertising areas through an eye tracker system. The results revealed significant statistical differences between fixations to negative, positive words and neutral words. Significant differences between the number of fixations and recognition of the target words were found only for the negative valence words. We conclude that negative emotional words could play a major role on user attention to advertising.

Theory of mind and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions: A preliminary study

Theory of mind ability has been associated with performance in interpersonal interactions and has been found to influence aspects such as emotion recognition, social competence, and social anxiety. Being able to attribute mental states to others requires attention to subtle communication cues such as facial emotional expressions. Decoding and interpreting emotions expressed by the face, especially those with negative valence, are essential skills to successful social interaction. The current study explored the association between theory of mind skills and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions. According to the study hypothesis, individuals with poor theory of mind skills showed preferential attention to negative faces over both non-negative faces and neutral objects. Tentative explanations for the findings are offered emphasizing the potential adaptive role of vigilance for threat as a way of allocating a limited capacity to interpret others’ mental states to obtain as much information as possible about potential danger in the social environment.

Psychophysics of emotion: the QUEST for emotional attention

To investigate the mechanisms involved in automatic processing of facial expressions, we used the QUEST procedure to measure the display durations needed to make a gender decision on emotional faces portraying fearful, happy, or neutral facial expressions. In line with predictions of appraisal theories of emotion, our results showed greater processing priority of emotional stimuli regardless of their valence. Whereas all experimental conditions led to an averaged threshold of about 50 ms, fearful and happy facial expressions led to significantly less variability in the responses than neutral faces. Results suggest that attention may have been automatically drawn by the emotion portrayed by face targets, yielding more informative perceptions and less variable responses. The temporal resolution of the perceptual system (expressed by the thresholds) and the processing priority of the stimuli (expressed by the variability in the responses) may influence subjective and objective measures of awareness, respectively.

Beyond arousal and valence: the importance of the biological versus social relevance of emotional stimuli

The present study addressed the hypothesis that emotional stimuli relevant to survival or reproduction (biologically emotional stimuli) automatically affect cognitive processing (e.g., attention, memory), while those relevant to social life (socially emotional stimuli) require elaborative processing to modulate attention and memory. Results of our behavioral studies showed that (1) biologically emotional images hold attention more strongly than do socially emotional images, (2) memory for biologically emotional images was enhanced even with limited cognitive resources, but (3) memory for socially emotional images was enhanced only when people had sufficient cognitive resources at encoding. Neither images’ subjective arousal nor their valence modulated these patterns. A subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging study revealed that biologically emotional images induced stronger activity in the visual cortex and greater functional connectivity between the amygdala and visual cortex than did socially emotional images. These results suggest that the interconnection between the amygdala and visual cortex supports enhanced attention allocation to biological stimuli. In contrast, socially emotional images evoked greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and yielded stronger functional connectivity between the amygdala and MPFC than did biological images. Thus, it appears that emotional processing of social stimuli involves elaborative processing requiring frontal lobe activity.

Allocation of spatial attention to emotional stimuli depends upon arousal and not valence

Attentional allocation to emotional stimuli is often proposed to be driven by valence and in particular by negativity. However, many negative stimuli are also arousing leaving the question whether valence or arousal accounts for this effect. The authors examined whether the valence or the arousal level of emotional stimuli influences the allocation of spatial attention using a modified spatial cueing task. Participants responded to targets that were preceded by cues consisting of emotional pictures varying on arousal and valence. Response latencies showed that disengagement of spatial attention was slower for stimuli high in arousal than for stimuli low in arousal. The effect was independent of the valence of the pictures and not gender-specific. The findings support the idea that arousal affects the allocation of attention.

Valutazione affettiva del setting odontoiatrico in età evolutiva

Lo studio si pone l'obiettivo di approfondire il tema della valutazione affettiva del setting odontoiatrico in età evolutiva indagando se possa essere modulata da fattori quali: differenze di genere, specifici quadri patologici (Displasia Ectodermica e Patologie Sistemiche Croniche) responsabili di pregresse esperienze odontoiatriche e/o ospedalizzazioni; stato affettivo del bambino, stato affettivo del genitore. Materiali e metodi Studio 1. 85 soggetti [39 (19 maschi e 20 femmine) affetti da PSC e 46 (26 maschi e 20 femmine) soggetti sani] (range di età: 5-14 anni). Sono stati somministrati: un compito di valutazione immagini con 36 immagini (12 a contenuto piacevole, 12 neutro e 12 spiacevole) dallo IAPS e 12 immagini a contenuto odontoiatrico e dei questionari (MCDASf, CFSS-DS, TAD). Studio 2. 45 soggetti (19 maschi affetti da EDs e 26 maschi sani) (range di età: 5-14 anni). Sono stati somministrati: il compito di valutazione immagini precedentemente descritto e i questionari (MCDASf, CFSS-DS, TAD). Studio 3. 104 bambini (64 maschi and 40 femmine) (range di età: 5-14 anni) e uno dei genitori (19 padri and 69 madri). Sono stati somministrati i questionari MCDASf, CFSS-DS, TAD ai bambini e FDPQ, STAI-Y1, Y2-BDI-II ai genitori. Risultati: il contesto odontoiatrico ha una caratterizzazione affettiva distinta rispetto a contesti piacevoli, spiacevoli o neutri; specifici quadri patologici (EDs e PSC) non sembrano modulare il tipo di valutazione affettiva del contesto odontoiatrico; le femmine, attribuiscono al contesto odontoiatrico una valenza significativamente più spiacevole e una maggiore attivazione emotiva rispetto ai maschi; la paura del dolore odontoiatrico del genitore ha una correlazione con l’ansia dei bambini. Conclusione: è importante che l’odontoiatra consideri che la risposta emotiva delle bambine può essere caratterizzata da vissuti di paura con tendenza a comportamenti di allontanamento e valuti se la figura genitoriale rappresenta una risorsa o un elemento disturbante nella corso della seduta stessa.

Stress effects on working memory, explicit memory, and implicit memory for neutral and emotional stimuli in healthy men

Stress is a strong modulator of memory function. However, memory is not a unitary process and stress seems to exert different effects depending on the memory type under study. Here, we explored the impact of social stress on different aspects of human memory, including tests for explicit memory and working memory (for neutral materials), as well as implicit memory (perceptual priming, contextual priming and classical conditioning for emotional stimuli). A total of 35 young adult male students were randomly assigned to either the stress or the control group, with stress being induced by the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Salivary cortisol levels were assessed repeatedly throughout the experiment to validate stress effects. The results support previous evidence indicating complex effects of stress on different types of memory: A pronounced working memory deficit was associated with exposure to stress. No performance differences between groups of stressed and unstressed subjects were observed in verbal explicit memory (but note that learning and recall took place within 1 h and immediately following stress) or in implicit memory for neutral stimuli. Stress enhanced classical conditioning for negative but not positive stimuli. In addition, stress improved spatial explicit memory. These results reinforce the view that acute stress can be highly disruptive for working memory processing. They provide new evidence for the facilitating effects of stress on implicit memory for negative emotional materials. Our findings are discussed with respect to their potential relevance for psychiatric disorders, such as post traumatic stress disorder.

Experimental induction of psychotherapeutically relevant emotional states

Background: Emotion research in neuroscience targets brain structures and processes involved in discrete emotion categories (e.g. anger, fear, sadness) or dimensions (e.g. valence, arousal, approach-avoidance), and usually relies on carefully controlled experimental paradigms with standardized and often simple emotion-eliciting stimuli like e.g. unpleasant pictures. Emotion research in clinical psychology and psychotherapy is often interested in very subtle differences between emotional states, e.g. differences within emotion categories (e.g. assertive, self-protecting vs. rejecting, protesting anger or specific grief vs. global sadness), and/or the biographical, social, situational, or motivational contexts of the emotional experience, which are desired to be minimized in experimental neuroscientific research. Objective: In order to facilitate the experimental and neurophysiological investigation of psychotherapeutically relevant emotional experiences, the present study aims at developing a priming procedure to induce specific, therapeutically and biographically relevant emotional states under controlled experimental conditions. Methodology: N = 50 participants who reported negative feelings towards another close person were randomly assigned to 2 different conditions. They fulfilled 2 different sentence completion tasks that were supposed to prime either ‘therapeutically productive’ or ‘therapeutically unproductive’ emotional states and completed an expressive writing task and several self-report measures of specific emotion-related constructs. The sentence completion task consisted in max. 22 sentence stems drawn from psychotherapy patients’ statements that have been shown to be typical for productive or unproductive therapy sessions. The subjects of the present study completed these sentence stems with regard to their own negative feelings towards the close person. Results: There were a substantial inter-individual variability concerning the number of completed sentences, and significant correlations between number of completed sentences and problem activation in both conditions. No differences were observed in general mood or problem activation between both groups after priming. Descriptively, there were differences between groups concerning emotion regulation aspects. Significant differences between groups in resolution of negative feelings towards the other person were found. Discussion: The results point in the expected direction, however the small sample sizes (after exclusion of several subjects) and low power hinder the detection of convincing significant effects. More data is needed in order to evaluate the efficacy of this emotional priming procedure.

Plays pleasant and unpleasant /

v.1. The three unpleasant plays.--v.2 The four pleasant plays.

Plays: pleasant and unpleasant,

v. 1. Containing the three unpleasant plays: Widower's houses. The philanderer. Mrs. Warren's profession.-- v.2. Containing the four pleasant plays: You never can tell. Arms and the man. Candida. The man of destiny.

Plays : pleasant and unpleasant /

v. 1. Containing the three unpleasant plays: Widowers' houses. The philanderer. Mrs. Warren's profession.--v. 2. Containing the four pleasant plays: Arms and the man. Candida. The man of destiny. You never can tell.

The effects of affective picture stimuli on blink modulation in adults and children

Two experiments examined blink modulation during viewing of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant picture stimuli in non-selected adults (N = 21) and children (N = 60) and children with anxiety disorders (N = 12). Blink reflexes were elicited by a white noise probe of 105 dB at lead stimulus intervals of 60, 240, 3500, and 5000 ms and during intertrial intervals. Blink modulation during unpleasant pictures was significantly different from blink modulation during neutral pictures at the 60 ms lead interval in children whereas adults showed no significant differences. Picture content had no differential effect on the extent of blink modulation for adults or children at the 240 ms lead interval. At the long lead intervals, blink modulation during unpleasant and pleasant pictures was significantly larger than during neutral pictures in adults. Picture valence did not differentially affect the extent of blink modulation at long lead intervals in children. Comparing the extent of blink modulation in anxious and non-selected children, blinks were significantly modulated during unpleasant pictures at the 60 ms lead interval for both groups. However, the extent of blink modulation was larger overall at this very short lead interval in anxious children. Children did not differ at other lead intervals. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.