Emotion knowledge in design

Transcription

Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion
Book of abstracts
Geneva, July 8-10, 2015
Welcome to ISRE 2015 in Geneva!
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
We are extremely pleased to welcome the community of affective scientists to Geneva for the conference of
the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE).
Emotion research has never been so flourishing, with original interdisciplinary integrations, new theoretical developments, and
innovative methods. This is reflected not only in the impressive increase of research groups and centers that focus on emotion, but
also in journals that publish high level emotion research and in
the growing impact our findings are having on society in general.
Our goal in putting together ISRE 2015 is to provide the most vibrant
environment to present your work, to offer a thorough overview of
ongoing developments in the study of emotion, and to showcase
the latest discoveries in all disciplines with an interest in emotions
broadly understood. During these 3 days, around 500 participants
from over 33 countries will meet at the University of Geneva: ISRE
2015 offers more than 380 scientific communications, distributed over 3 plenary lectures, 150 symposium presentations, 81 individual talks and 146 posters. We are proud that the presentations
cover so many relevant disciplines including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, affective computing, history, anthropology, the humanities and the social sciences at large.
We believe that ISRE 2015 is a unique opportunity to present research activities, to learn about advances in other
fields, and to debate emotions from the uniquely interdisciplinary
angle
that
characterizes
our
association.
We dedicate ISRE 2015 to the memory of our colleague and friend
Nico Frijda. A founding member of ISRE, Nico Frijda was always
close to the heart of the association, and he will be sorely missed.
ISRE 2015 Program and Organizing Committees
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Program and organizing committees
Prof Andrew Beatty, Brunel University London, program committee
Prof Fabrice Clement, University of Neuchâtel, program committee
Prof Giorgio Coricelli, University of Southern California, program
committee
Prof Julien Deonna, University of Geneva, program & organizing
committee
Prof Ronnie de Sousa, University of Toronto, program committee
Prof Didier Grandjean, University of Geneva, program & organizing
committee
Mrs Marion Gumy, University of Geneva, organizing committee
Prof David Konstan, New York University, program committee
Prof Patrizia Lombardo, University of Geneva, program & organizing
committee
Prof Tony Manstead, Cardiff University, program committee
Dr Marcello Mortillaro, University of Geneva, program & organizing
committee
Prof Thierry Pun, University of Geneva, program committee
Mrs Frédérique Rapaccioli, University of Geneva, organizing
committee
Prof David Sander, University of Geneva, chair, program &
organizing committee
Mrs Daniela Sauge, University of Geneva, organizing committee
Prof Marianne Schmid Mast, University of Lausanne, program
committee
Dr Cristina Soriano, University of Geneva, program & organizing
committee
Prof Jan Stets, University of California, Riverside, program
committee
Prof Carien van Reekum, University of Reading, program committee
Mrs Carole Varone, University of Geneva, organizing committee
Prof Patrik Vuilleumier, University of Geneva, program & organizing
committee
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The program committee gratefully acknowledges the contribution
of the following additional reviewers:
Dr Ursula Beermann
Dr Tobias Brosch
Dr Elena Canadas
Prof Agnès Celle
Dr Leonardo Ceravolo
Dr Guillaume Chanel
Dr Géraldine Coppin
Dr Florian Cova
Dr Sylvain Delplanque
Dr Richard Dub
Prof Malgorzata Fabiszak
Prof Johnny Fontaine
Dr Sascha Fruehholz
Prof Edouard Gentaz
Dr Kornelia Gentsch
Dr Olga Klimecki
Dr Federico Lauria
Dr Viridiana Mazzola
Dr Alessia Pannese
Dr Marco Pedrotti
Dr Julie Peron
Dr Andrea Samson
Dr Lingdan Wu
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Contents
Wednesday, July 8
Plenary lecture 15
Presidential symposium
17
Symposium session 1
18
Poster session 1
50
Symposium session 2
105
Oral session 1134
Thursday, July 9
Plenary lecture165
Symposium session 3
167
Poster session 2199
Symposium session 4
247
Oral session 2280
Friday, July 10
Plenary lecture305
Symposium in honor of Nico Frijda
307
Symposium session 5
308
Poster session 3342
Symposium session 6
390
Oral session 3424
7
Program overview
Tuesday 7 July
Wednesday 8 July
Thursday 9 July
Friday 10 July
08:00
Registration
Uni Bastions
09:00
Jennifer Lerner
Plenary lecture
Uni Dufour
Tania Singer
Plenary lecture
Uni Dufour
Justin d’Arms
Plenary lecture
Uni Dufour
10:00
Presidential
symposium
Uni Dufour
ISRE Meeting
Uni Dufour
Symposium in
honor of Nico
Frijda
Uni Dufour
11:00
Coffee break
Uni Bastions
Coffee break
Uni Bastions
Coffee break
Uni Bastions
11:20
Symposium
session 1
Uni Bastions
Symposium
session 3
Uni Bastions
Symposium
session 5
Uni Bastions
13:00
Lunch break
Lunch break
Lunch break
14:00
Poster session 1
Uni Bastions
Poster session 2
Uni Bastions
Poster session 3
Uni Bastions
15:00
Symposium
session 2
Uni Bastions
Symposium
session 4
Uni Bastions
Symposium
session 6
Uni Bastions
16:40
Coffee break
Uni Bastions
Coffee break
Uni Bastions
Coffee break
Uni Bastions
17:00
Oral session 1
Uni Bastions
Oral session 2
Uni Bastions
Oral session 3
Uni Bastions
17:30
Registration
Uni Bastions
18:20
18:30
End of Oral
session 2
Welcome drink
Restaurant du
Parc des Bastions
18:40
End of Oral
session 1
19:00
20:30
End of Oral
session 3
Conference
dinner
Hotel Kempinsky
Closing drink
Restaurant du
Parc des Bastions
End of
registration
9
10
O1.1 - Room B106
End of the oral sessions
17:00
18:40
O1.2 - Room B101
Coffee break, Uni Bastions
16:40
S2.2 - Room B101
Beyond mean
levels of one
emotion category:
New insights from
an emotional patterns approach
J. De Leersnyder,
M. Boiger
S2.1 - Room B106
An interdisciplinary investigation
into the effects of
nine months of
mental training
P. Kanske
Poster session 1, Uni Bastions
14:00
15:00
Lunch break
13:00
S1.2 - Room B101
The Self, Identity,
and Positive and
Negative Emotions
J. Stets
S1.1 - Room B106
The use, application and measurement of emotion
knowledge:
interdisciplinary
perspectives
A. Fischer, D. Sauter
11:00
11:20
Presidential symposium, Uni Dufour
10:00
O1.3 - Room B111
S2.3 - Room B111
Recent Research
on Emotion in
Organizations
N. M. Ashkanasy
S1.3 - Room B111
Recognizing Emotions from Voices
A. Pinheiro
09:00 Jennifer Lerner - Plenary lecture, Uni Dufour
Wednesday 8 July
O1.4 - Room B112
S2.4 - Room B112
How emotions
make us tick: A
multi-method
approach to
understanding the
relation between
emotions and
subjective time
T. Penney,
A. Schirmer
S1.4 - Room B112
Love and Reason
H. Naar
O1.5 - Room B109
S2.5 - Room B109
Meta-emotions,
self-awareness,
and self-regulation
C. Jäger
S1.5 - Room B109
Iram non novit
ius? (Law does
not know anger?)
Emotions and
legal judgment
across disciplines
G. M. Vidor
O1.6 - Room B302
S2.6 - Room B302
Social Norms and
Emotions
C. von Scheve,
F. Minner
S1.6 - Room B302
Studies on the
inter-individual
effects of tears
A. Gracanin
Wednesday 8 July
O2.1 - Room B106
Conference dinner, Grand Hôtel Kempinski
17:00
18:20
19:00
O2.2 - Room B101
16:40
S4.2 - Room B101
The Role of Emotions in Negotiation and Conflict
Resolution
O. Klimecki
S4.1 - Room B106
Integrative theories of emotion:
The wave of the
future?
A. Moors
14:00
15:00
Lunch break
13:00
S3.2 - Room B101
It’s Not (Just)
Contagion: Different Approaches
to Emotional
Spread in Interpersonal, Group and
Cultural Contexts
B. Mesquita
S3.1 - Room B106
The Psychology of
Facial Expressions:
Evidence from
Western, Eastern,
and Indigenous
Societies
J. Russell, C. Crivelli
11:00
11:20
ISRE Meeting, Uni Dufour
10:00
09:00 Tania Singer - Plenary lecture, Uni Dufour
Thursday 9 July
O2.3 - Room B111
S4.3 - Room B111
Assessing Emotional Intelligence/
Competence:
Towards a new
future
J. Fontaine
S3.3 - Room B111
Inter-individual
differences in
emotion regulation abilities
P. Hot
O2.4 - Room B112
S4.4 - Room B112
What emotions
can tell us about
social life
U. Hess, S. Hareli
S3.4 - Room B112
Dynamic Systems
Approaches to
Emotion
B. Meuleman,
W. Cunningham
O2.5 - Room B109
S4.5 - Room B109
New conceptualisations of an
old emotion: The
feeling of being
moved
B. Seibt
S3.5 - Room B109
History of emotions and emotions in history:
How this emerging field can feed
the psychology of
emotions?
R. Spijkerman,
O. Luminet
O2.6 - Room B302
S4.6 - Room B302
Emotions, Dangers
and Crises in the
Metropolis
A. Brooks
S3.6 - Room B302
Collective Emotions and Social
Identities
M. Salmela,
C. von Scheve
Thursday 9 July
11
12
S5.1 - Room B106
Executive Functions and Emotions
M. Pe, P. Kuppens
Lunch break
S6.1 - Room B106
The rapid processing of motivationally relevant
information:
Psychological,
neurophysiological
and endocrinological mechanisms
J. Lobmaier, T. Brosch
O3.1 - Room B106
Closing drink, Restaurant du Parc des Bastions
11:20
13:00
14:00
15:00
16:40
17:00
18:40
19:00
O3.2 - Room B101
S6.2 - Room B101
Emotions across
Adulthood: The
Role of Cognition,
Motivation, and
Culture
A. M. Freund,
I. Grossmann
O3.3 - Room B111
S6.3 - Room B111
Emotion Reactivity
and Regulation in
Individuals with
Autism Spectrum
Disorder
A. Hardan
S5.3 - Room B111
Exploring the motivational diversity
of envy: Destructive and constructive emotional
reactions toward
the better-off
J. Lange, J. Crusius
11:00
S5.2 - Room B101
Connecting
Identity and Emotion as Affective
Experiences
A. Schneider,
T. Schröder
Symposium in honor of Nico Frijda, Uni Dufour
10:00
09:00 Justin d’Arms - Plenary lecture, Uni Dufour
Friday 10 July
O3.4 - Room B112
S6.4 - Room B112
What do language
patterns reveal
about emotion
concepts?
A. Ogarkova
S5.4 - Room B112
Dynamic Systems
Emotions, values
and energy technology acceptance:
Bringing together
psychological
and philosophical
perspectives
N. Huijts
O3.5 - Room B109
S6.5 - Room B109
In Defense of
William James
J. Robinson
S5.5 - Room B109
The Epistemic
Value of Emotions
F. Teroni
O3.6 - Room B302
S6.6 - Room B302
Gender Beyond
Difference: Gender Constructs
Emotion, Emotion
Constructs Gender
S. Shields,
H. MacArthur
S5.6 - Room B302
Semantic analysis
of emotion words
using the GRID paradigm: Validation
and application of
a brief version of
the instrument
K. Scherer
Friday 10 July
Plenary lecture - 8.7.2015
Emotion and Decision Making
Jennifer Lerner
Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge USA
A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the
potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that
emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence
judgments and choices. In this talk, I will organize and analyze what has been
learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making, drawing
closely from our review (Lerner, Li, Valdesolo, & Kassam, 2015) in the Annual Review
of Psychology. In so doing, I will highlight key empirical findings, and propose the
emotion-imbued choice (EIC) model, a model that accounts for inputs from traditional rational-choice theory as well as from newer emotion research, synthesizing models in decision theory.
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Presidential symposium - 8.7.2015
Wither the golden age of emotion research?
Prof. Ross Buck, University of Connecticut
Prof. Jon Gratch, University of Southern California
Prof. Agnes Moors, University of Leuven
Prof. Andrea Scarantino, Georgia State University
Organised by: Prof Arvid Kappas, Jacobs University Bremen
In his ISRE Matters column, in the recent Musical Emotions issue of
the Emotion Researcher, President Arvid Kappas pondered whether the
golden age of emotion research might be over. On the one hand, it appears that emotion research has arrived: affective phenomena now permeate research from neuroscience to human factors, while applied fields,
such as computer engineering, create complex emotion savvy systems. On
the other hand, Kappas wondered whether any truly meaningful theoretical advances have occurred in recent emotion research, and whether the
public understanding of emotions is not based on theories roughly from the time
ISRE was founded.
To encourage a discussion between the members of the society, the
Presidential Symposium involves Ross Buck, Jon Gratch, Agnes Moors,
and Andrea Scarantino, who will each briefly answer a question on their
own approach to emotions, and then discuss, jointly with Arvid Kappas,
the prospects of emotion research writ large. The goal of the session is to
provoke but to be constructive, zoom out from individual studies and focus on
the bigger picture, and ultimately explore what mission statement might be adequate for the next 30 years of ISRE. Do we need more rigorous empirical studies?
More interdisciplinarity? More integration? What are the suggestions for teaching
and communicating about progress in emotion research to the public at large?
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Symposium session 1 - 8.7.2015
Symposium S1.1
The use, application and measurement of emotion knowledge:
interdisciplinary perspectives
Conveners
Agneta Fischer, Disa Sauter
University of Amsterdam
Emotion knowledge can be conceptualized, measured and applied in many different
ways, which makes it an excellent topic for an interdisciplinary approach. Classic approaches to emotion knowledge have shown that knowledge of specific emotions
can be organized in emotion scripts (e.g., Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987),
containing representations of the prototypical events eliciting that emotion, typical
appraisals, expressions and behaviors, but also social norms and regulation strategies. In addition, research on emotion vocabularies (e.g., Russell, 1991) has provided
insight that the concept of emotion should be defined as prototypes, implying that
some emotion words fit better into the emotion concept than others, but also that
emotion words can be organized in emotion clusters, on the basis of their similarities
and differences. Other approaches have emphasized the use of emotion knowledge,
for example as reflected in emotional awareness (Lane, 2000), or various aspects of
emotional intelligence, such as clarity (Salovey & Mayor, 1990; Salovey et al., 1995). This
line of research has shown that individuals differ in how much attention they pay
to their emotions, how much they use their emotions in making decisions, and how
much attention they pay to their emotions.
The focus of this symposium is on one other aspect of emotion knowledge namely the
extent to which individuals differ in the amount of details with which their emotion
knowledge is represented, also referred to as emotion differentiation or emotion granularity (Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001). Thus, here the representation
of specific emotion knowledge is the topic of investigation, although the reflection
and use of emotion knowledge will also feature in some of the talks. The assumption is that individuals who have more fine-grained emotion knowledge are better
able to regulate their emotions, and are therefore less susceptible to various forms of
psychopathology that are characterized by emotion regulation problems. In addition,
individuals with high emotion differentiation would also be better in the recognition
of their own and others’ emotions.
In this symposium we will examine the role of emotion knowledge across a range of
domains, including completely novel areas, such as product design. Russell will examine the ontology of emotion knowledge, describing two lines of research on children’s
associations between emotional expressions and emotion words. Erbas will describe a
study testing the hypothesis that finer grained emotion knowledge is associated with
increased accuracy in perceiving emotions in others, referred to as empathic accuracy.
Luminet will discuss research into the three different facets of alexithymia, a pathological lack of emotion knowledge. Finally, Fokkinga will present work on the applied
use of emotion knowledge in product design, and a test of the plasticity of emotion
knowledge in the form of a training study. One of the red threads of the symposium
will be the definition and measurement of emotion knowledge. This is one of the key
challenges of this field. Distinctions between different facets of emotion knowledge,
such as categorisation and verbal labelling, will be examined. Furthermore, most research to date has studied declarative emotion knowledge, such as explicit knowledge
and beliefs about specific emotions. However, emotion knowledge can also refer to
procedural knowledge, that is, how to use emotion knowledge in different situations.
Both explicit and implicit measures will be discussed. As the presenters are from different disciplines and use different operationalizations and applications of emotion
knowledge, we believe that this symposium is a truly interdisciplinary contribution
able to bring new insights to the study of emotion knowledge.
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Feeling me, feeling you: The relation between emotion
differentiation and empathic accuracy
Yasemin Erbas, Laura Sels, Eva Ceulemans, Peter Kuppens
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Does knowing your own emotions relate to knowing those of others? We argue
that our ability to experience and label our own emotions in a differentiated and
specific manner, something which has been referred to as emotion differentiation
or emotional granularity (Barrett, Gross, Christensen, & Benvenuto, 2001), is related to the ability to accurately perceive emotions in others. A high level of emotion
differentiation implies that a person’s introspective emotional knowledge is very
differentiated and specific, enabling the individual to more adaptively respond
to events and cope with the resulting emotions. Here we argue that individuals
who are high in emotion differentiation may also be able to apply their enhanced
emotional knowledge to the feeling states of other individuals, enabling them
to make more accurate inferences about others’ emotions. In an experience sampling study among 50 romantic couples, we tested the hypothesis that individuals
with higher levels of emotion differentiation are characterized by higher levels of
empathic accuracy (i.e., perceive others’ emotions more accurately [Ickes, 1993]). In
line with expectations, results showed that individuals who differentiate highly
between their negative emotions are more able to accurately predict how pleasant or unpleasant their partners are feeling across daily life, regardless of their
gender, age, the duration of their relationship, and of whether they are together
with their partner or not. This finding establishes a link between perceptions of
our own and others’ emotions, and provides evidence for the notion that the skills
we use to unravel our own emotions may also be relevant for understanding how
others feel.
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Emotion knowledge in design
Steven Fokkinga, Pieter de Smet
Technical University Delft
The last few decades, researchers and practitioners in the field of product design
have increasingly used concepts from emotion theory to understand how everyday products like mobile phones, furniture, and websites can be designed in a
way to evoke the most pleasant or fitting emotional experience in their users (e.g.,
see Desmet, 2008). Emotional granularity is an especially relevant topic for design,
because design practitioners often attempt to fine-tune the emotional impact of
their products. For example, it is relevant for a designer to understand whether a
current website evokes frustration, annoyance, or resentment in users, rather than
just knowing that it makes users generally angry, because each emotion may lead
to a different strategy to improve the website. In practice, however, most designers work with a limited set of emotions, sometimes only distinguishing valence.
We developed and tested a number of tools that aimed to help increase the level
of emotion differentiation in the design process.
First, we developed a set of 25 positive emotions developed through a componential analysis of 150 positive emotion words. A questionnaire study resulted in a
collection of 729 example design cases (Desmet, 2012). For this set of emotions, a
collection of inspiration cards was developed that informs and inspires designers
to specify the positive experience they intend for their designs (Yoon, Desmet, &
Pohlmeyer, 2013). Second, a set of 36 negative emotions was developed from an
analysis of 333 negative emotion words. For these emotions, movie clips and comic
strips were developed and validated, to facilitate the analytical and intuitive understanding of these emotions beyond verbal means (Fokkinga et al., manuscript
in preparation).
Finally, we discuss the results of a design course in which twenty graduate design
students developed new products and services for an airline crew center on the
basis of ten distinct positive emotions (selected from the set of 25). We conclude
that a high level of emotion differentiation is highly beneficial in providing direction and inspiration to the design process.
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Emotion Knowledge in Children
James Russell
Boston College
Early in ontogenesis, the person has no emotion knowledge; later, the person has
considerable emotion knowledge. The developmentalist seeks to understand how
this change comes about. Exploring one corner of this process, our lab uncovered
a paradox. On the one hand, children acquire knowledge about specific emotions
gradually and slowly. For example, not until 9 years of age do the majority of
children in our studies freely label the “disgust face” as disgust rather than as anger. On the other hand, children associate a new emotion label with a novel facial
expression after 2 trials. For example, the majority of 4-year-olds freely label a
“puffed cheeks” expression as pax after 2 trials in which they are asked to find the
person who feels pax. We interpret these findings as fitting a framework in which
the child is constructing a script for each emotion, with the script specifying antecedents, appraisals, feelings, and behavioral consequences.
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Deficits in categorizing, labeling, and thinking
about emotional situations
Olivier Luminet
Universite Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve
The construct of alexithymia centers upon three deficits in emotion knowledge:
categorization, labeling, and abstract thinking. I will show how complementary
approaches can be used to assess these deficits. For the categorization deficit, we
used ERPs techniques to show that people identified as high alexithymia scorers
(HA) are slower in the categorical perception of emotional face expressions of anger and disgust (Vermeulen & al., 2008). The delays in recognizing anger and disgust are detrimental for adaptation, because highly salient events involving anger
and disgust require quick self-regulation in order to cope with future threats.
Regarding labeling, there is evidence that a shift occurs between the knowledge
of emotional semantics, which is preserved, and the labeling of emotional states
that could not be recollected when talking about an emotional situation (Luminet
et al., 2004). This deficit may actually originate from a lack of auto noetic awareness when encoding the information (Luminet et al., 2006). HA do not consider
emotion words as more conceptually salient than neutral words and therefore
may experience events more neutrally. A deficit in the ability to consciously access
emotional and meaningful recollections may render the regulation of intense emotional states more difficult for HA, since the ability to represent emotions symbolically, especially through emotion language, and to associate them meaningfully
with past emotional experiences, facilitates the modulation of such states (e.g.,
Bucci, 1997a, 1997b; Taylor, 2000). The impaired ability of HA to recognize, reflect
on, and regulate their emotional states is thought to contribute to the strong
associations that have been found between alexithymia and a variety of medical
and psychiatric disorders (Taylor et al., 1997). 3) Regarding the ability for abstract
thinking, we will report data on alexithymia and rumination. Earlier studies found
that the propensity for externally-oriented thinking inhibited the processing of
the meaning attributed to emotional events and also protected against intrusive
ruminations (Luminet et al., 2004). More recently, we showed that high externally-oriented thinking was associated with the inability to adopt an experiential
mode of thinking (Di Schiena et al., 2011). In other words, the more people focus
their thinking outward, the less they recognize their own experiences in emotional situations. I will discuss the possible interrelations between these three key
factors for the study of emotion knowledge and how these factors can impact on
emotion regulation.
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Symposium S1.2
The Self, Identity, and Positive and Negative Emotions
Conveners
Jan Stets
University of California, Riverside
This session by sociologists focuses on individual processes that help us understand
emotions in situations. Across the papers in this session, a range of specific emotions
are examined including happiness, anger, fear, sadness, and depression. The first three
papers bring together scholars in sociological social psychology who use identity theory to understand individuals’ experiences of positive and negative emotions such as
happiness and sadness/depression. The fourth paper discusses the classic concern in
justice theory about the emotions associated with an over-reward and examines the
feeling of fear. The last paper continues an analysis of depression by bringing together
sociologists who are studying the mediating effects of epigenetics on neighborhood
disorder and depression.
In Paper 1, Stets and Trettevik examine the impact of moral identity verification/nonverification on happiness when individuals are asked to carry out a task alone or in
a group setting. As anticipated, identity verification is associated with happiness irrespective of the context (alone or in a group), but immoral behavior (here, having
the opportunity to cheat) reduces happiness only when people are alone. Apparently,
when individuals are in a group, they become emotionally unaffected by their immoral
behavior.
In Paper 2, Burke and Cerven study the outcomes of identity verification not only for
happiness but also for sadness. Additionally, they investigate the emotional effects of
identity accumulation. Their results show that identity accumulation increases happiness and decreases sadness, but only if those identities are highly verified. Additionally, identity accumulation decreases happiness and increases sadness and anger if
those identities are not verified.
In Paper 3, Clay-Warner and her collaborators examine the emotional outcomes associated with an over-reward. Consistent with justice theory, they predict that those who
receive an over-reward in public (vs. private) and who expect future interaction with
an under-rewarded partner will be more likely to report feelings of fear because both
of these situations introduce the possibility that others will retaliate given the overreward. Their findings support these predictions. Thus, their research calls attention to
the important role that fear may have in linking justice and emotions.
Finally, in Paper 4, Simons and his colleagues tackle the classic issue of why neighborhood disorder is related to depression. While this finding is robust, there is variation
in depression among individuals living in the same neighborhood. Simons and his
colleagues study epigenetic changes that might mediate the relationship between
neighborhood disorder and depression. Specifically, they examine whether environmental adversity (such as neighborhood disorder) increases methylation of the serotonin transporter gene, which thereby stimulates the release of cortisol and depression. Additionally, they investigate the role of a short allele (vs. a long allele) in the
highly polymorphic region of the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene.
They anticipate that those with a short allele will show greater emotional responses
to neighborhood disorder in the form of depression compared to those with the long
allele. Their results show evidence that neighborhood disorder does impact gene
methylation, and the response of depression is more common among those with a
short allele in the serotonin transporter gene.
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Morality, Identity Verification, and Happiness
Jan Stets, Ryan Trettevik
University of California, Riverside
In identity theory, when individuals think that others see them in the same way
they see themselves, their identity is verified, and they will feel positive emotions
such as happiness (Burke and Stets 2009). When their identity is not verified, they
will feel bad or unhappy. Most research testing the relationship between the identity verification process and one’s emotional reactions has examined it for individuals. We know less about people’s emotional reactions to identify verification (or
the lack thereof) when they are members of a group. While we would not expect
this theoretical process to be different when one is acting alone compared to interacting in a group, empirical evidence is needed to verify this. We do that in this
study.
An experiment is conducted in which individuals complete a task over a computer
by themselves (alone condition) or with two other individuals (group condition). In
each condition, the person has the opportunity to cheat in order to obtain higher
outcomes for themselves (alone condition) or for their team (group condition).
Prior to the task, we measure people’s emotions and their moral identity. During
the task, we measure people’s moral behavior, that is, the frequency of cheating
on the task. Following the task, we measure people’s experience of moral identity
verification/non-verification. We also measure their current state of happiness.
As expected, people report reduced happiness if their moral identity is not verified
irrespective of whether they are acting along or as part of a group. Interestingly,
people report reduced happiness for cheating in the alone condition, but not the
group condition. This suggests that in a group, people may not take responsibility for bad behavior because they think that others will not be able to trace this
behavior back to them. If they may think that they are unlikely to be identified as
the carrier of bad behavior, this may be what makes them emotionally unaffected
by their behavior. Alternatively, they may believe that the means (cheating) justifies the ends (helping one’s group obtain a better outcome). More generally, while
the findings support the idea that identity verification is associated with positive
feelings irrespective of the context (alone or in a group), more research is needed
regarding other factors that influence how individuals feel following engaging in
a task that is morally challenging.
24
Happiness, Sadness, and Anger from Identity Verification and
Accumulation
Peter Burke, Chrissy Cerven
University of California - Riverside, University of Chicago
Within identity theory, there are two theoretical approaches that can be used
to link identity processes to outcomes of psychological well-being including increased happiness and decreased sadness and anger. The first approach, structural symbolic interaction theory (Stryker 1980), ties people to others through the
roles they play. Using this approach, Thoits (1983, 1986, 2003) explains how people
derive self-meanings (i.e. identities) from the social positions they hold. These
self-meanings, she suggests, provide an ontological anchoring and increased
well-being for individuals, with more identities increasing the happiness and wellbeing of those individuals. This is the “identity accumulation” hypothesis. The second approach, the “identity verification” hypothesis (Burke and Stets 2009), links
positive emotions and distress to identity verification and non-verification. This
approach suggests that it is not necessarily the number of identities that one has
that influences emotions and well-being, but whether those identities are verified
in the sense that others affirm the self-meanings that the individual holds. Greater identity verification should result in greater positive emotion (Stets and Burke
2014). The present paper, for the first time, brings data together to simultaneously
examine the merits of both approaches. Results show that identity accumulation
increases happiness and decreases sadness, but only if those identities are highly
verified. Identity accumulation decreases happiness and increases sadness and
anger if those identities are not verified. The implications of these results for identity theory in general are discussed.
25
Why Does One Feel Bad for Receiving Too Much?
Guilt and Fear in Response to Over-reward
Jody Clay-Warner1, Dawn Robinson1, Lynn Smith-Lovin2
University of Georgia1, Duke University2
Though emotion plays a key role in justice theories, many of the assumptions
regarding the relationship between justice and emotion remain untested. For
example, the prediction that over-reward leads to negative emotion is based on
the assumption that benefiting from the violation of the fairness norm threatens
one’s self-image, which produces guilt, and also introduces the potential for retaliation, which leads to fear (Homans 1974). Empirical research is mixed, however,
regarding the relationship between over-reward and guilt, and very little research
examines fear (e.g., Stets 2005; Weiss, Suckow, and Cropanzano 1999). As a result,
it is unclear what underlying mechanisms link over-reward and emotion. To address this issue, we present the results of two laboratory experiments. In both experiments, participants are either over- or under-rewarded for their performance
on a task relative to an interaction partner. In the first experiment we vary the
public nature of the reward (public vs. private). In the second experiment we vary
the expectation for future interaction (future interaction vs. no future interaction).
Following the manipulations, participants completed a series of emotion questions. In keeping with the core assumptions of justice theory, we predict that overreward will be more likely to lead to fear when the outcome distribution is public,
as well as when an over-rewarded individual expects to interact in the future with
an under-rewarded partner, because both of these situations introduce the possibility of retaliation. Because guilt and shame are self-focused emotions, we do
not expect their levels to differ depending upon whether the outcomes are public
or whether future interaction is expected. We find support for our hypotheses in
both experiments, with significantly higher levels of fear among those in the public condition and in the future interaction condition. As predicted, levels of guilt
did not vary across either the public/private or the future interaction dimension.
Levels of guilt were generally low among all over-rewarded participants, however.
This suggests that potential retaliation may be a primary mechanism linking justice and emotions and indicates that justice researchers should give more attention to the motivational power of fear in justice theorizing.
26
Biosocial Mechanisms Linking Neighborhood Disorder and
Depressed Mood: Genetic Moderation and Epigenetic Mediation
Ronald Simons, Leslie Simons, Man Lei
University of Georgia
Although past research has shown that neighborhood social disorder increases
feelings of emotional distress, little is known about the biosocial mechanisms
involved in this association. The present study examined the extent to which
epigenetic changes mediate this relationship. Epigenetic studies focus on the biochemical mechanisms whereby gene expression is influenced by environmental
context. The most widely studied epigenetic process is DNA methylation which
results in down regulation (decreased expression) of a gene. The neurotransmitter
serotonin has been shown to influence mood and there is evidence that environmental adversity can increase methylation of the serotonin transporter gene (5HTT) which, in turn, stimulates release of cortisol and depressed mood. Building
upon this literature, the first hypothesis tested in the present study is that methylation of the serotonin transporter gene mediates the effect of neighborhood
disorder on emotional distress.
Although the association between neighborhood disorder and depressed mood
is robust, there is much heterogeneity in mood among individuals living in the
same neighborhood. Recent studies indicate that some individuals are genetically
predisposed to be more sensitive to the social environment than others. There is
evidence that a common polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin
transporter gene is important in this regard as it influences sensitivity to punishment and displeasure. Our second hypothesis was that individuals with the less
efficient short allele of this gene will show greater emotional response to neighborhood disorder than those with the long allele. Linking this prediction to our
first hypothesis, we also posited that this moderating effect would be explained
(mediated) by expression (methylation) of the serotonin transporter gene.
Summarizing, we predicted that neighborhood disorder leads to depressed mood
in large measure because it enhances methylation of the serotonin transporter
gene (5-HTT). Further, we expected that this pattern would be more pronounced
for individuals with the short allele in the highly polymorphic region of the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR).
We tested these hypotheses using interview, census, genotype, and methylation
data obtained over two waves from a sample of 100 African American women.
Mplus statistical software was used to run OLS and Poisson hierarchical models
that included a number of statistical controls. The results provided strong support
for the hypotheses. They indicated that the effect of neighborhood disorder on
depressed mood is moderated by genetic variation and is mediated by its impact
on gene methylation.
27
Symposium S1.3
Recognizing Emotions from Voices
Convener
Ana Pinheiro
University of Minho
Emotional states affect not only a person’s overt movements as seen in facial expressions or body posture, they also affect the functioning of the vocal apparatus and thus
the way a person speaks. Acoustic studies identified physical speech differences involving, among other things, pitch, intensity and temporal parameters that discriminate
between emotions. Whether and how interaction partners exploit these differences
has been subject to much scientific scrutiny with a major emphasis on examining
healthy, young and college educated individuals. While this approach advanced our
understanding of vocal emotional communication, investigating so-called “special”
populations (e.g., older adults, experts, individuals with neuropathological conditions)
adds crucial insights for current theoretical models regarding the neurocognitive organization of vocal affect. The presenters in this symposium pursued «special» populations and will share some unique findings.
Specifically, Lima and colleagues studied musicians, non-musicians and individuals
with congenital amusia, a condition characterized by deficits in the perception of music, or pitch more specifically. In line with research pointing to processing similarities
between speech and music, they found that musicians excelled in vocal emotion identification relative to non-musicians. Moreover, amusics performed more poorly than
healthy individuals.
Work by Sen and colleagues tackled vocal emotional processing by comparing young
and old listeners. In an emotion categorization task, participants heard neutral sentences spoken in a happy, neutral, sad or angry voice by both young and old speakers.
Categorization results indicated an age related deficit that was buffered when listening to age-matched peers.
Studies by Grandjean and colleagues explored epileptic patients undergoing pre-surgical intracranial recordings. These patients offered the possibility to record oscillatory activity in amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex and to examine how this activity
is modulated by the presentation of angry and neutral exclamations. Compared with
neutral vocalizations, angry vocalizations increased frequency coupling between both
regions suggesting that they jointly support emotion recognition.
Pell and colleagues examined patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a condition
that is characterized by the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia. Across
multiple studies they found vocal emotion recognition impaired and could contrast
this with a relative preservation of emotion recognition from alternative or multimodal cues. Pell’s work thus implicates the basal ganglia and dopaminergic signaling in
the cognitive aspects of vocal emotion processing.
Last, studies by Pinheiro and colleagues compared the behavioral and neural responses of healthy individuals with individuals suffering from schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder with abnormal dopaminergic activity in fronto-striatal networks. Compared to healthy controls, patients had greater difficulty recognizing vocal emotions and
showed increased amplitudes for the P200 - an event-related potential component
previously linked to vocal emotional processing. This data implies an over-activity of
associated neural sources.
Taken together, the presentations detailed here take advantage of investigating different groups to shed new light on the mechanisms by which listeners exploit speech
acoustics and infer speaker emotions. They point to similarities with musical processing, demonstrate their dynamism across the human lifespan, and highlight important brain structures and neurotransmitter systems.
28
Vocal emotional recognition and musicianship:
Explorations in musicians and congenital amusics
César Lima12, Olivia Brancatisano3, Amy Fancourt3, Lauren Stewart3
University of Porto1, University College London2
Goldsmiths University of London3
Central to our understanding of vocal communication is the question of how we
process vocally expressed emotional states in social interactions. The neurocognitive architecture of vocal emotional recognition has been explored, but relatively
little is known about inter-individual differences in these abilities, and about how
they may reveal sensory and cognitive commonalities to other communicative
channels. Some strands of prior work have highlighted similarities between the
processing of voice and language and the processing of music, a channel specialized for emotional expression. A basic prediction of this idea is that vocal emotion
recognition may vary among individuals as a function of their ability to process
music. In this talk we will address the links between vocal emotions and musicianship, discussing insights from studies with highly trained musicians and with
individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized
by impaired music perception abilities. We report evidence that musicians (n = 40)
have enhanced performance than untrained controls (n = 40) in the recognition
of emotional speech prosody (tone of voice), using sentences conveying emotional information by prosodic cues alone, i.e., with neutral semantic content. This
expertise effect is observed for different age groups, remains significant after
accounting for domain-general factors such as executive functioning, and generalizes across emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). By contrast, research with congenital amusics (n = 12; matched controls, n
= 12) reveals an association between impaired processing of music and impaired
recognition of emotional speech prosody for happiness, tenderness, irritation, and
sadness. These complementary findings demonstrate an intimate link between
speech prosody and music capacities, which we take as evidence for shared mechanisms across modalities. A further investigation with amusics (n = 13; matched
controls, n = 11) examines whether music-voice associations generalize across different types of vocal cues, to purely nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter; crying),
and extend to processes beyond emotion category recognition, specifically to the
evaluation of emotional authenticity. Associations and dissociations between
low-level pitch discrimination and emotion processing abilities are explored. The
findings of these studies will be discussed in the context of related neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence, and wider implications for models of vocal
affect will be considered.
29
Age-related changes in the expression and recognition of vocal
emotions: Effects of sex and peer culture
Annettt Schirmer1, Antarika Sen1, Heng Wai Yuen2,
Steven Lee2, Derek Isaacowitz3
National University of Singapore1, Changi General Hospital2,
Northeastern University3
There is much research documenting that, with age, emotion recognition abilities
decline. We sought to replicate this phenomenon, to explore a possible extension
to emotion expression and to elucidate the roles of sex and peer culture. In a first
phase, we asked young and older adults of both sexes to read neutral sentences
with happy, neutral, sad and angry intonation. In a second phase, we presented
their readings in an emotion categorization task to a naive group of listeners
equally comprised of young and old, male and female individuals. We found that
the expressions of young and female speakers were more accurately categorized
than the expressions of old and male speakers. Additionally, young and female
listeners were more accurate in their categorizations than old and male listeners.
Notably, however, the listener age effect differed as a function of speaker age and
emotion. It was significant only for expressions from young but not old individuals for happy expression and irrespective of speaker age for neutral expressions. A listener age effect was absent for sad and angry expressions. Together,
these results imply important contributions of sex and peer culture to modulating
emotion expression and recognition abilities across the lifespan. Moreover, they
suggest that interactions with age-matched peers buffer against previously established age-related deficits.
30
Cortical and subcortical neuronal synchronization in emotional
voice processing
Didier Grandjean
University of Geneva
Using local field potentials (LFPs) recordings in humans, we investigated whether
anatomical connections between amygdala (AMY) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
underlie the functional integration of attended and unattended processing of emotional voices. In two studies, we presented emotional voices bilaterally or dichotically to five epileptic patients in a gender decision task. The first study allowed us
to investigate how neuronal activity was modulated by emotion within the AMY
and the OFC regions. Furthermore, we were able to test the increase of neuronal
coupling between these two regions in response to emotional voices compared to
neutral voices. The second study allowed us to investigate how unattended and
attended emotional voices modulate selectively the neuronal coupling between
the AMY and the OFC regions. Our results showed that the processing of unattended emotional prosody compared to attended emotional prosody and triggered an onset-locked enhanced functional coupling between AMG and medial OFC
mainly in the beta frequencies band. In contrast, our data revealed a significant
early increase in phase-locking synchronization between these two regions in the
alpha and theta frequency range for attended angry prosody compared to both
unattended angry and neutral prosodies. These results highlight the functional
selectivity of different frequency bands within the AMG-medial OFC network in
response to attended or unattended emotional stimuli. An oscillatory model will
be discussed in emotional processing of human voices.
31
Vocal communication in Parkinson’s disease
Marc D. Pell
McGill University
Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) is often associated with marked difficulties in
the processing of vocal cues that convey a speaker’s emotions, mental state, and
interpersonal stance toward the listener (e.g., how confident or polite the speaker
means to be). Adults with PD are also constrained in the ability to vocally express
their emotions in an appropriate manner, with important negative repercussions
for how these individuals are understood and socially perceived by others. This
presentation will review studies that shed light on the underlying source(s) of difficulty in how vocal cues are processed by Parkinsonian adults, when presented
unimodal or multimodal social stimuli. Specifically, I will show that PD patients
are poor at recognizing emotions from isolated vocal cues in forced-choice recognition tasks, although they can often access these meanings successfully from
isolated facial or lexical cues, from enriched multimodal stimuli, or contextual
information that does not overload available executive resources. These data
point to a critical role of the basal ganglia in cognitive sequencing operations that
facilitate emotion perception, while highlighting ways that emotion perception is
dependent on executive control in PD. This talk will then provide evidence of the
social barriers that exist when the ability to vocally convey emotions is impaired in
PD, based on the perspective of naïve listeners. Perceptual studies show that when
naïve listeners hear emotional utterances produced by adults with or without
PD, they are selectively hampered in the ability to detect certain vocal meanings
conveyed by PD patients. Moreover, when asked to rate their social impressions of
speakers with and without PD based solely on their speaking voice, patients are
judged to be less friendly, happy, interested, and involved when compared to healthy age-matched peers. These negative social impressions of PD patients based
on their speaking voice affect the psychosocial well-being of PD patients and limit
further opportunities for socialization.
32
How do patients with schizophrenia perceive the melody of
speech? Insights from event-related potentials
Ana Pinheiro, Margaret Niznikiewicz
University of Minho, Harvard Medical School
Being able to successfully decode emotion from speech vocal cues – emotional
prosody – is one of the cornerstones of effective functioning in social environments. However, alterations in emotional prosody perception and recognition
have been observed in schizophrenia and were related to poor social outcomes.
While it is fairly well established that emotional prosody processing (EPP) abnormalities are present in schizophrenia, it is still unclear which stages of processing
prosody are abnormal. Moreover, the relative contributions of prosodic cues, semantic cues and stimulus complexity are still poorly understood. We probed these
questions using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) methodology. In our first experiment, sentences with neutral semantic content (semantic content condition-SCC)
were generated by a female speaker (with happy, angry, and neutral intonation).
The same sentences were synthesized and presented in the ‘pure prosody’ (PPC)
condition where semantic content was unintelligible. In our second experiment,
we followed the same procedure with word stimuli. In both experiments, a group
of chronic schizophrenia patients and a group of healthy controls were asked to
make an overt decision whether the sentence/word was spoken with a neutral,
happy, or angry tone of voice.
Our first experiment demonstrated group differences in N100 and P200 amplitude. Compared to controls, patients exhibited a more negative N100 for SCC
sentences, as well as more positive P200 for angry and happy SCC sentences and
happy PPC sentences. In our second experiment, reduced N100 amplitude for
both neutral and emotional SCC words and for neutral PPC stimuli was observed
in schizophrenia patients relative to healthy controls, as well as increased P200
for happy prosody in the SCC only. Behaviorally, patients were less accurate than
controls in the recognition of emotional prosody in both experiments (Experiment
1 – angry SCC sentences; Experiment 2 – angry SCC and happy PPC words).
Together, these findings demonstrate the interactions between abnormal sensory
processes and higher-order processes in bringing about emotional prosody processing dysfunction in schizophrenia. They further suggest that impaired emotional prosody processing is dependent on stimulus complexity.
33
Symposium S1.4
Love and Reason
Convener
Hichem Naar
University of Montreal
What is love, and is it the kind of thing that can be justified? In this symposium,
researchers from both philosophy and neuroscience will talk about the various
ways love can be justified and what in the nature of love can ground this justification. One way to approach this issue is by studying the biological underpinnings of love and their relationship with the biological underpinnings of similar
mental states, such as lust. As Stephanie Cacioppo argues, knowing the role love
plays at the neurobiological level can increase our understanding of the role it
plays in our lives. Another, complementary, approach to the question of the value
and rationality of love is psychological in that it claims that love is an affective
state that essentially involves an appraisal about its object (usually a person). On
such a view, love is an evaluative attitude that is justified just in case its object is
valuable in some way. The question then is whether a plausible understanding of
the features of the loved object can be cited as adequate reasons for one’s love. As
the contributions of Chris Grau and Arina Pismenny reveal, this question is harder
to answer than it might seem at first sight. According to Grau, rationalism about
love – the view that we have reasons to love some people and not others – is
in tension with the thought that the people we love are in some sense irreplaceable: we do not take ourselves to be justified in stopping to love them and love
someone else with similar, or even better, features instead. Given that, according
to rationalism, it may seem that reasons to love someone should be reasons for
everyone to love that person (reasons, as Grau says, tend to generalize), it should
be rationally required to love anyone relevantly similar to the people we love.
However, the intuition goes, it is not. This intuition, Grau suggests, casts doubt
on rationalism. In her contribution, Pismenny further argues that rationalism is
inadequate because it fails to have an adequate account of lovability. On her view,
lovability should be conceived as a property that depends not only on the properties of the loved object but also on the properties of the lover: lovability, she
argues, is a response-dependent property. This property, Pismenny suggests, is not
the sort of thing to justify one’s love. In his contribution, Hichem Naar proposes to
reconceive the rationalist view, not as claiming that love’s reasons must be general, subject-neutral, but as claiming that love’s reasons – like reasons for certain
actions – can be indexed to the particular context of the lovers. After motivating
an analogy between love and actions of a certain kind, Naar suggests that his
version of rationalism can both claim that a person’s properties can justify one’s
love and deny that the relevant reasons generalize (thereby accommodating our
intuitions of irreplaceability).
34
Demystifying the Neuroscience of Love
Stephanie Cacioppo
University of Chicago
Scholars from different disciplines have investigated the nature of love for centuries. In 250 BCE, for instance, physician Erasistratos accurately diagnosed Antiochus’ ailment as lovesickness, marking the beginning of the first neurological
case report of love. It is only 2 millennia later that social psychologists have begun
to systematically investigate the complexity of love in comparison with other
emotions (Hatfield & Rapson, 2009). In the last decade, neuroscientists have also
contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of love by demonstrating
that: 1) each subtype of love has specific neural correlates (Ortigue et al., 2010),
and 2) passionate love has different neural correlates than lust (S. Cacioppo et al.,
2012, Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2013). Because the low statistical power characteristic
of contemporary neuroimaging studies not only reduces the chance of detecting
true effect but reduces the likelihood that a statistically significant result reflects
a true effect (S. Cacioppo et al., 2013), we recently performed quantitative metaanalyses (S. Caciopppo et al., 2012; Ortigue et al., 2010) to obtain a better indication
of the brain regions activated by love than those provided in any single empirical
investigation. I will present these findings in this symposium. The better is our
understanding of love the greater is our respect for its significant role in mental
and physical health.
35
Love, Reason & Irreplaceability
Christopher Grau
Clemson University
It is not uncommon to find philosophers claiming that their own preferred account of the nature of love recognizes the irreplaceability of the beloved. Upon
closer inspection, however, it is sometimes the case that the actual notion of irreplaceability that is defended is surprisingly weak: the claim ends up being, in the
end, that the beloved is irreplaceable simply because there currently happens to
be nobody else around quite like them. (Call this “‘matter of fact’ irreplaceability”)
The reasons for only recognizing such a weak notion are usually left opaque, but
it appears that there are worries that any more robust notion would be in tension
with a conception of love by which there can be normative (justificatory) reasons
for why one loves the particular individual one does. (Reasons, after all, tend to
generalize, and it would appear that any such reasons for loving one person could,
at least in principle, extend to another.) In this paper I want to focus on several recent examples of philosophers (Badhwar 2005, Matthes 2013, Bagley 2015) shying
away from what I’ll call «strong” irreplaceability, and I will argue that this evasion
is misguided. At the same time, I will acknowledge that such irreplaceability poses
a deep challenge for excessively rationalistic accounts of love and attachment. To
help make my case I’ll be drawing on recent empirical work (Grau & Pury, 2014)
which indicates that many of us view both persons and objects as irreplaceable
in a manner which cannot be adequately captured by the weaker “matter of fact”
notion, and I’ll argue that this aspect of our thought is tied to deeper essentialist
tendencies. I’ll conclude by suggesting that while these more general essentialist
tendencies have recently been the focus of illuminating work by psychologists (e.g.
Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman), there is a need for more interdisciplinary work by
both philosophers and psychologists on both the nature of our judgments regarding fungibility as well as their possible justification.
36
The Arationality of Romantic Love
Arina Pismenny
CUNY Graduate Center
What could count as a reason for love? When philosophers ask themselves this
question, they are usually asking whether or not there are justificatory reasons
for love, that is, normative pro tanto reasons that would warrant love. The absence
of such reasons would show love to be unjustifiable. Ordinary language seems
to support this assumption, for people tend to provide answers for why they love
and criticize those whose loves they think deficient in some way. But what way?
Although love can be evaluated from moral and practical perspectives, are these
sorts of concerns the right ones for justifying love for particular individuals? What
is love tracking? Does it have a formal object like some other mental phenomena?
Can love be apt or inapt? To answer these questions it is necessary to understand
what makes someone lovable. Various accounts have been given of the lovability of the beloved. Some appeal to the intrinsic properties of persons like beauty
and virtue (cf. Abramson & Leite, 2011.) Others argue that relational properties of
beloveds such as shared history justify one’s love (Kolodny, 2003.) I will argue that
none of these accounts can adequately account for lovability; for the intrinsicproperty view implies the universalizability of reasons for love, and the relational
account seems circular in that it essentially attempts to justify love by pointing to
its presence. I will argue that lovability is a response-dependent property that is
lover-specific. Essentially it is that property which elicits love. But it is not a property that always elicits love for the lover with respect to all her beloveds, and
certainly not a property that elicits love in all lovers. The objectivity of such a property can be shown by appealing to its causal role of eliciting love. However, this
response-dependent property is not the kind of property that can justify love. For
this reason, there are no reasons for love that could account for its aptness. Love
is arational.
37
Towards A Sensible Rationalism about Love
Hichem Naar
University of Manchester
Rationalism about love is the view that love is an attitude for which reasons can
be provided. On this view, there are features of certain persons and/or of our relationship with them that justifies our loving them. There are various versions of
rationalism one might put forward depending on one’s answer to each of these
questions (distinguished in Helm, 2010):
(1) What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
(2) What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than
someone else?
(3) What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given
the changes – both in him and me and in the overall circumstances – that have
occurred since I began loving him?
Is rationalist any position that attempts to answer at least one these questions
(and is ‘anti-rationalist’ any position that denies that there is an answer to each of
these questions). A rationalist, for instance, might say that although we can justify loving a particular person rather than not loving her by appeal to properties
of hers (e.g., her capacity for reason), we cannot justify loving that person instead
of someone else and we cannot justify continuing to love that person rather than
stopping loving her or coming to love someone else instead (Velleman, 1999). Call
‘weak rationalism’ any view – such as the one just sketched – that provides an
answer to at least one of the questions but not to all of them and ‘strong rationalism’ any view that provides an answer to all the questions. In this presentation,
my aim is to defend a version of strong rationalism. After discussing two extant
versions of strong rationalism – one that takes the relevant reasons to be intrinsic
properties and one that takes them to be relational properties of the beloved – I
will reject them on the basis that they face two significant problems. Such views,
I will ultimately argue, are inadequate, not because they fail to point to adequate
justifying reasons for love, but because they presuppose a mistaken conception of
such reasons. I will suggest that, even if we think that love has correctness conditions, we should conceive of love’s reasons, not as analogous to those of evaluative judgments, but as analogous to certain sorts of action. Once we realize this,
the prospects of providing a positive answer to the above three questions do not
seem so bleak.
38
Symposium S1.5
Iram non novit ius? (Law does not know anger?)
Emotions and legal judgment across disciplines
Conveners
Gian Marco Vidor
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
The proposed symposium is devoted to the role of emotions in legal judging, incorporating recent
perspectives from three different disciplines - law, sociology and history, and dealing with legal
cultures of five different countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden and the USA. In the Western juridical
tradition – encompassing both the continental and the common law traditions – legal institutions
and legal professionals have perceived themselves and promoted an image of their role and activity as
essentially ‘rational’. Emotions have often been seen as a catch-all category for what law is supposed
to counteract or even to avoid: that which is subjective, partial, prejudicial and intangible. Emotions
are ancillaries, circumstances, contingencies which do not reach the essence of law itself. On the other
hand, emotions are taken (explicitly or implicitly) into consideration as facts in legal debates, in lawmaking, in the codified norms, especially in relation to paramount categories such as free will, individual responsibility and culpability, or the aggravating and mitigating circumstances of a crime.
But it is especially the emotions of the legal professionals that have been traditionally seen as something problematic or even dangerous. Judges, in particular, have strongly embodied the view of the
law as fundamentally based on objectivity and rationality. Legal norms, legal rhetoric, legal rituals have
played an important role in maintaining this general – even if never monolithic – persistent cultural
script of the emotionally detached and objective judge.
It must be underlined that legal scholars in the past did not totally shun the complex relationship
between law and emotions. Yet in the last two decades there has been an increasing and lively scholarly interest in unravelling the role played by emotional phenomena in law in general and in judicial
decision-making in particular. These specialists come from different disciplines: legal theory, law and
criminology (Susan Bandes; Jeremy Blumenthal; Terry Maroney; Alexandre Flueckiger; Robert Roth; Vincente Fortier, Susanne Karstedt); psychology (Kees van den Bos; Mary R. Rose; Gerd Gigerenzer); philosophy (Alain Papaux), anthropology (Carolina Kobelinsky); and sociology (Mathieu Deflem).
The legal scholar participating in the panel will investigate the cognitive and affective dimensions
of empathy: its role, its limits, and the necessity and possibilities of regulating the selective use of
empathy and improving the capacity for empathy in a contemporary legal system. Like other legal professionals, judges have received specific academic education and professional training. How was the
question of emotions approached in these formative stages? Secondly, the sociologist on the panel will
explore what role emotions play in the normative ideas of objectivity and professionalism transmitted
in legal education. How and to what extent are contemporary law students trained to deal with their
own and others’ emotions? When should emotions be used and how? What is the role of legal rhetoric
and narrative in dealing with the professional’s emotions?
Only recently have historians begun to analyze in depth the relationship between law and emotions
more systematically – but the field still remains largely unexplored. In the proposed panel, the three
historians – inspired by the debate within the social sciences - will discuss the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century’s debates concerning the relationship between emotional phenomena and judicial practices. Which emotions or sets of emotions were considered useful, and at what degree of
intensity? In which circumstances and for which purposes? Which on the contrary were considered
dangerous? How do emotions relate with concepts of rationality? To what level were these emotions
considered innate, acquirable and trainable? How were these emotions theorized and what was the
influence of other disciplines like psychology, anthropology and medicine? And how did this relate to
broader concepts of modernity, nation-building, bourgeois culture, and political revolution?
The symposium thus aspires to highlight and demonstrate the diverse roles that emotions play in judicial judgment. It further enhances the law-and-emotion literature by considering a wide array of legal
traditions. Additionally, the symposium brings the contemporary discussions on judging in the social
sciences and legal studies together with the emerging historical scholarship on law and emotions.
39
The Debate Over Empathy in Judging
Susan Bandes
DePaul University College of Law, Chicago
In the last decade, the role of empathy in judging has become a topic of contentious debate in the United States. As this debate reveals, widely shared conceptions about empathy and rationality help shape expectations about the judicial
role. This paper focuses on what role empathy plays—and ought to play-- in judging. It will draw on empathy literature from the cognitive and affective sciences,
from the accounts of judges, and from existing legal literature on judging, rationality and emotion.
C. Daniel Batson identified eight related but distinct phenomena called “empathy.” I will illustrate how these definitional ambiguities have bedeviled the debate
about empathy in judging. My point is not that there is one correct definition,
but that the ambiguity helps identify some difficult issues, both philosophical
and political, about rational deliberation in judging and the role of common law
courts. Much of the legal literature addressing the current debate, including my
own previous work on the topic, has emphasized the distinction between empathy and sympathy (or compassion), arguing that empathy is a cognitive capacity
that can be exercised on behalf of all litigants without favor. Yet this account is
incomplete. The affective as well as the cognitive dimensions of empathy are needed for engaged judging.
The questions I will address include: what components of empathy enable deliberation that is evenhanded but also engaged and open-minded? Assuming
empathy is usually partial, and flows most easily toward those with similar backgrounds, how can legal institutions correct for this partiality? Specifically, to what
extent can legal institutions be reformed to help bridge empathic divides based
on race, class, gender, and other characteristics?
40
Feeling the Law? German debates over “Rechtsgefühl”
in the late 19th and early 20th century
Sandra Schnädelbach
Humboldt Universität
Writing in 1914, the German jurist Gustav Radbruch continued the long-spun
cultural narrative of western tradition that connects law with reason and puts
emotions in a juridical danger zone: When thinking about law, what first comes
to mind is ‘ponderous reasoning, sharp will, but certainly not warm feeling’. Until
today this narrative is dominant in the legal field, although legal theory has started to take emotions into account some time ago. (Maroney 2011, Bandes 1999)
It is thus all the more notable and interesting for the history of law and emotions
that during the late 19th and early 20th century a variety of juristic texts were
published in Germany that focus on the role of “Rechtsgefühl” in law and legal
practice. In my talk I first would like to inquire into the meanings of this term,
asking whether it denotes an innate sense of justice, a common feeling for the
law, or a trained juristic intuition. This opens up the question of how the relation
between law and emotions was conceived. As I would like to show, the debate
about “Rechtsgefühl” mirrors the influence of changing interpretive patterns for
the definition of law as well as that of emotion, which were adapted from the
newly developing natural sciences. Changing definitions also shaped what function was attributed to “Rechtsgefühl” in juridical practice. Further, I will argue that
bourgeois culture strongly defined the way the jurist was required to treat his
“Rechtsgefühl” and his emotions in general. Departing from the thoughts of the
sociologist Arlie Hochschild, I would like to show that the correct treatment of
emotions for the judge meant to be a “manager of emotions”.
41
The (un)emotional law student
Lisa Flower
Lund University
Objectivity is central to many professions, ensuring legitimacy via impartiality
and the detachment of emotional involvement (Weber, 1978). This presentation
is interested in analysing the emotion talk about objectivity in order to reveal
how emotions are discussed in a profession viewed to be particularly objective,
namely the legal profession (Bladini, 2013). The focus here will be on law students
and how objectivity and emotions are discussed on a law degree program. What
is revealed is an on-going reconstruction of an emotional regime of objectivity
using discursive emotion management strategies in order to create distance from
emotions (cf. Jacobsson, 2008; Wettergren, 2010). The emotion socialisation of
law students encourages emotions to remain balanced and controlled in order to
maintain objectivity however emotions may also be used instrumentally as tool
in order to create a professional relationship. A division is thus drawn between
the subjective, seen here as the personal, and the objective considered to be the
professional. When this boundary is crossed, paralinguistic markers may be used
to highlight this deviance with this study finding a new paralinguistic marker
named the emotional sniff (cf. Bloch, 1996). Emotions and emotion work are thus
seen by law students as central to legal work and consequently emotions constitute an integral component of objectivity, a quality deemed to be central to the
work of judges.
42
Revolutionary Law and Revolutionary Feeling: Emotions and
the Administration of Justice in the Early Soviet Period
Pavel Vasilyev
The role of emotions in the administration of justice is a major issue in the law and
emotions literature – and yet relatively unexplored from a historical point of view.
A very particular feature of the early Soviet period that is relevant for the history of
law and emotions is the idea of ‘revolutionary justice’ that was confirmed by highprofile Soviet politicians and the decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars –
the idea that the judges should be guided by their revolutionary feeling of justice,
and not be confined by the formal ‘bourgeois law’. The first decree ‘On Courts’ that
was issued in November 1917 proclaimed that local courts can consider the laws
of the ‘overthrown governments’ only insofar as they do not contradict ‘revolutionary conscience’ (sovest’) and ‘revolutionary legal consciousness’ (pravosoznanie).
Later legal scholars also stressed the importance of ‘revolutionary consciousness’
(soznanie) and ‘revolutionary feeling’ (chuvstvo) for the administration of law in
the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1917. While these ‘emotion words’
do not necessarily mean ‘emotion’ in the contemporary psychological or neuroscientific understanding, they clearly appealed to the emotional sphere of the
judge and took departure from the traditional view that praised the superiority
of rationality in judicial decisions. I seek to pinpoint and classify these appeals by
examining various advice literature (instruction to the judges, circular letters) and
job descriptions, as well as ego-documents such as judges’ memoirs which can
point to the internalization of a new legal model.
While the paper’s focus is on the formative years of the early Soviet legal system
(1917-1922), it is also concerned with the legal transformations and the dynamics
of emotions in the courtroom in the wake of the gradual codification of Soviet law
in 1922-23, since the transition to a different legal model was clearly not achieved
overnight.
43
Debating the role of emotions in the administration of justice in
the post-unification Italy (1861-1930)
Gian Marco Vidor
In the decades following the unification of Italy (1861), the political and social role
of judges, the organization of their careers, the methods for their designation
were widely debated. Grounded on a rigorous knowledge of the law and a solid
general culture, judging was traditionally seen as a rational evaluation of facts
in which the role of emotions was at best marginal. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, positivist thinkers questioned the figure of the judge and
what was seen as his traditional resistance to acquire the “scientific progresses” of
his profession. The vision of the judge as an erudite inflexible bureaucrat was seen
as inadequate by some professionals. In their view, the “modern judge” should
have a deep knowledge of the heart of men and the different forms of moral and
emotional “degeneration.” This knowledge was seen as acquirable mainly outside
the court, visiting the prisons and the lunatic asylums, and having familiarity with
the local culture in which he practises his profession. The “modern judge” should
use the new forms of scientific knowledge—in particular psychology—and the
most recent techniques to better understand and evaluate not only the “heart of
others” but also his own personality. Furthermore, “to be complete” the modern
judge should not only know himself but also cultivate a certain “sense of humanity” and “charity”: only in this way he could avoid the danger of being a sterile
“bureaucratic mechanism.”
44
Symposium S1.6
Studies on the inter-individual effects of tears
Conveners
Asmir Gracanin
Tilburg University
Tearful crying is a universal emotional expression that is evoked by plethora of positive and negative events, usually accompanied by feelings of helplessness in the expressing individual. Crying
is proposed to serve two major functions: intra-individual, focusing on the effects on the expressing individual him/herself, and inter-individual, with the emphasis on the effects on observers.
The tearing effect describes the relevance of tears as an important visual cue adding meaning
to human facial expression. Tears convey information about the crying individual to the observer
and may influence his/her behavior towards the crying person. For example, they may decrease
aggressive behavior. These reactions to tears are proposed to be dependent on various perceptual and cognitive processes, contextual clues, as well as the observers’ states and traits. For their
understanding one can thus focus on the analysis of automatic responses to tears as well as to
more elaborate processes and behaviors. In this symposium the emphasis will be on the effects
of exposure to tears on basic processing of visual cues as well as on the resulting attribution of
states and traits to a crying person and behavior of the observers.
In a previous series of experiments, the authors of the first contribution found that tears facilitate the recognition of sadness and the amount of perceived need of support, at a pre-attentive
level. In the current study, they investigated these effects among in and outgroup members. Sad
and happy faces were presented for 50 milliseconds, with digitally added tears in half of the
cases. Participants reported the perceived need for support, amount of sympathy and the likelihood of becoming friends with the depicted person. A tearing effect was found only in sad looking outgroup members regarding perceived need for support. This positive moderating effect
of tears on empathic behavior, that transcends group membership, also supports the view of
emotional tears as important visual cues at an early pre-attentive level.
The second contribution addressed the question whether tears may affect the perception of
gender and age in a way that is congruent with emotional stereotypes. In three experiments,
tears were added to artificially created faces. In study 1, participants viewed tearful vs. tearless
faces that were morphed from female to male. Tears were found to increase perceived sadness
and similarity to oneself. Study 2, in which facial age was morphed, suggested that tears make
female faces to appear younger. In the third experiment tears showed main and interactive effects with disgust-eliciting manipulations on self-reports of disgust, sadness, and moral concern.
Overall, results suggest that the addition of tears to artificially created faces may help understanding emotional stereotypes and provide insight into the capacity of tears to increase prosocial responses, including situations where empathy may initially have to overcome a disgust
response.
The third contribution examined the reactions to and evaluations of Dutch (individualistic)
and Turkish (collectivistic) respondents to the crying of athletes after a defeat or after a victory.
Turkish and Dutch participants were exposed to the same four pictures of crying athletes. The
reason of the tears (a defeat or a victory in the final of an international tournament) and the
ethnicity of the depicted athletes (Turkish or Dutch) were systematically manipulated. Dutch
and Turkish respondents answered questions addressing the induced empathy as well as positive (e.g., I am proud of this person) and negative (e.g., I feel ashamed for this person) reactions
to the crying athletes. Findings strongly suggest that culture seems to have a major impact on
the reactions to crying athletes. As expected, a collectivistic culture seems to enhance positive
and empathy feelings towards crying winners. On the other hand, in the case of a negative result,
negative feelings are less strongly experienced and expressed in a collectivistic culture.
The authors of the fourth contribution investigated how the presence of tears on the face of
a transgressor affects the attributed agreeableness and reliability of the transgressor, his/her
remorse, and the proposed sentencing. Participants read four crime vignettes, followed by a
picture of the transgressor, with or without visible tears. They were asked to decide about the
sentence and to rate agreeableness, reliability, and remorse of each depicted individual. Tears
positively and strongly influenced all attributions in all four conditions. The presence of tears
and the sex of the suspect additionally significantly influenced the severity of punishment only
in one vignette. It is concluded that tears strongly influence how we perceive individuals who
made various types of transgressions, but this does not necessarily imply that sentencing decisions are likewise affected.
45
Pro-social effects of ingroup and outgroup tears
Martijn J. H. Balsters
Tilburg University
The tearing effect describes the relevance of tears as an important visual cue adding meaning to human facial expression. So far, little is known about how people
process these visual cues and about their mediating role in terms of emotion perception and person judgment.
In a previous series of behavioral experiments, we investigated the effects of tears
as salient visual cues at an early perceptual stage. Results showed that tears facilitated the recognition of sadness and the amount of perceived need of support.
In the current study, we compared the effects of crying between in and outgroup
members, again at a pre-attentive level. Sad and happy faces (belonging to in or
outgroup members) were presented for 50 milliseconds, with digitally added tears
to both emotion categories in half of the cases. After this, participants had to indicate the perceived need for support, amount of sympathy and the likelihood of becoming friends with the person presented. Results showed that faces of ingroup
members scored significantly higher on attributed need for support, sympathy
and friendship. Nevertheless, a tearing effect was found in sad looking outgroup
members regarding perceived need for support.
Despite reported behavior of in-group favoritism, our results indicate a positive
moderating effect of tears on empathic behavior, transcending group membership. In addition to our previous findings, this study once again supports the view
that emotional tears serve as important visual cues at an early pre-attentive level.
46
Tears in the study of emotional stereotypes and empathy:
How tears change our perception of gender, age, and disgust
Dennis Küster
Jacobs University Bremen
While the presence of tears has been shown to amplify perceived sadness, e.g.,
when presented in conjunction with sad facial expressions, some of the most
intriguing functions that have been attributed to tears relate to their social ramifications. For example, previous research on emotional stereotypes has suggested
that facial appearance markers for gender may be confounded with markers for
emotional expressions, raising the question if tears might be used to disambiguate both factors. Likewise, emotional stereotypes might explain age-related
changes in the potential of tears to convey sadness. Across three experiments,
tears were added to artificially created faces showing neutral facial expressions. In
study 1 (N = 59), participants viewed tearful vs. tearless faces that were morphed
from female to male, and evaluated perceived sadness and gender using visualanalogue scales. Study 2 (N = 82) used the same type of manipulation for facial
age instead of gender. Finally, in experiment 3 (N = 60), facial electromyography
and skin conductance were recorded to investigate the potential of tears to modify bodily responses towards faces that were manipulated to elicit disgust via an
addition of wounds and reduction of human-likeness. Study 1 found significant
effects suggesting that male faces were perceived as linearly more sad, that tears
increased perceived sadness by similar amounts across the morph continuum,
and that tears may increase perceived similarity to oneself. Study 2 partially replicated these findings, and additionally suggested that tears may make female
faces appear to be significantly younger (study 2) – in particular when perceived
by male participants. Initial results of the self-report data from study 3 further
suggest the presence of substantial effects of tears on disgust, sadness, and moral concern that interacted significantly with the disgust-eliciting manipulations.
These results will be discussed in the context of the results of the physiological
and facial response data, as well as in comparison to control stimuli. Overall, results suggest that the addition of tears to artificially created faces with neutral
expressions may help to shed further light on emotional stereotypes as well as on
the social capacity of tears to tie into our social bonds with others who are in need
of support or protection, including situations where empathy may initially have to
overcome a disgust response.
47
Reactions to the tears of athletes: A comparison of Dutch and
Turkish respondents
Ad J. J. M. Vingerhoets, Büsra Ay
Tilburg University
This study examined the reactions to and evaluations of Dutch (individualistic)
and Turkish (collectivistic) respondents to the crying of athletes after a defeat or
after a victory.
Using an experimental design, 132 participants (77 Turkish, 55 Dutch) were exposed
to the same four pictures of crying athletes. The ethnicity of the depicted sports
people was manipulated in an accompanying vignette and by the addition of the
Dutch or Turkish flag on the picture. The vignette also explained the background
of the tears: a defeat or a victory in the final of an international tournament.
Respondents answered questions addressing the induced empathy (e.g., I sympathize with this person), as well as positive (e.g., I am proud of this person) and
negative (e.g., I feel ashamed for this person) reactions to the crying athletes.
The results indicated that the Turkish respondents expressed more empathy
to the tearful athletes than the Dutch respondents (M=53.55, SD=18.38 versus
M=46.09, SD=14.88; F(1,130) = 6.22 ; p < 0,05). Further, Turkish respondents reacted more positively after a victory (M=30. 67, SD=9.98 versus M=20.73, SD=6.91;
F(1,130) = 41.012; p < 0.001) and less negatively after a defeat (M=12.20, SD=5,177
versus M=14.14, SD= 5.140; F(1,130) = 4.581 ; p < 0.05 ) to the tears of an athlete than
the Dutch respondents do.
The current findings strongly suggest that culture seems to have a major impact
on the reactions to crying athletes. As expected, a collectivistic culture seems to
enhance positive and empathy feelings, probably related to a stronger feeling of
social connectedness. However, in the case of a negative result, negative feelings
are also more strongly experienced and expressed.
48
The effects of visible tears on transgressor evaluation
and sentencing decisions
Asmir Gracanin, Andrea Boeren, Ad J. J. M. Vingerhoets
Tilburg University
We investigated how the presence of tears on the face of a transgressor affects
the attributed personality traits and the proposed sentencing. We expected that
the tears shown by a transgressor would positively influence the attribution of
remorse, agreeableness and reliability and that they would result in less harsh
sentencing. In addition, the influence of participants’ empathy levels and attachment style on both the attribution and the sentencing was examined. Participants (N=359, 166 male, 193 female, mean age 38 years) each read four crime
vignettes (drunk driving car accident, murder, hard drug trafficking, and a crime
passionelle), followed by a photograph of the transgressor. The pictures included
male and female transgressors, with or without visible tears. Participants were
asked to decide about the sentence and to rate kindness, reliability, and remorse
of each depicted individual. Hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that
tears positively and strongly influenced kindness, reliability, and remorse ratings
in all four conditions. Only in the drunk driving vignette, the presence of tears
and the sex of the suspect additionally significantly influenced the severity of punishment. Observers’ empathy and attachment style failed to affect transgressor
judgments and the sentencing. It is concluded that tears strongly influence how
we perceive individuals who made various types of transgressions, but this does
not necessarily imply that sentencing decisions are likewise affected. We discuss
possible explanations for our findings and propose the use of behavioral measures of punishment in future studies.
49
Poster session 1 - 8.7.2015
P1.1 Testing evaluative asymmetry through text responses in online
communities
Adiya Abisheva, David Garcia, Frank Schweitzer
ETH Zurich
Evaluative processes in human beings are organized around a cardinal principle
of evaluative bivalence with separable positive and negative substrates [3]. This
allows individuals to distinguish and respond appropriately to the stimuli that are
rewarding and healthy, or positive, and to the stimuli that are aversive and detrimental, or negative. Furthermore, the positive and negative disposition is asymmetrical [2] and is characterized by the presence of the positivity offset and the
negativity bias [1]. In the context of social interaction, the coexistence of these two
modes of emotion dynamics lead to the hypothesis that emotional expression
has a positivity baseline, but negative stimuli elicit faster and stronger responses.
We test the evaluative asymmetry of user emotional expression on the large-scale
Internet data of text replies (16-24 Million) of three popular online communities
YouTube, Reddit and 4chan. We quantify the emotions expressed in all these messages through a state-of-the-art sentiment analysis technique, and measure response times as the time intervals between the creation of a message and the posting of a reply. Our results reveal a subtle positive mean of the emotions expressed
in all the messages, but that messages that elicit replies are more emotionally
charged and exhibit stronger negative emotions. However, the distributions of
the time to respond to negative messages does not statistically differ from the
response time to positive messages.
These results support the hypothesis of a presence of a positivity offset and a negativity bias in online interaction, and that the Internet medium – the component
constituting the online communication – changes the timescale of emotional
interaction in a way such that very fast emotional responses are not observable.
Our analysis shows that what makes us react online is more salient than when we
react, highlighting the difference of emotional interaction in offline face-to-face
interaction [3] and online computer mediated communication.
50
P1.2 How effective is emotion manipulation? a meta-analysis
Alexandra Antonesei, Kou Murayama, Ciara McCabe
University of Reading
Emotional states are thought to be derived from synchronized cognitive, affective,
motivational and somatic responses to the appraisal of both external and/or internal events. Further it has also been proposed that emotional states are derived
from well-operationalized events, such as instrumental reinforcers. The study of
emotion utilizes various methods to manipulate emotional states, however specific studies vary by task and by type(s) of emotion studied and are limited in both
statistical power and sensitivity.
By examining findings across different perspectives on emotion, we conducted
a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of emotional state manipulation in healthy
adults. Alongside the traditional affective induction procedures (e.g., emotional
scenes, words, clips, music, faces, imagery, hypnosis, drugs), we included studies
manipulating primary (e.g., food, juice, erotic pictures, electric shock, social pressure) and secondary (money ) value-based reinforcers. We also included studies
examining approach/avoidance methodology, as well as emotional decision-making tasks from (neuro)economics.
Manipulations on emotional states were selected as long as they provided a valid
measure of at least one affective component: subjective reports, physiological
measures, behavioural measures, the startle response magnitude, electroencephalography, neuroimaging data, choice/preference. Cohen d size effects were
derived for pleasure, elation/happiness, apprehension/fear, sadness, stress/frustration, anger, pride, shame, guilt, disgust, relief, preference (like/dislike) based on
the difference between the affective states at baseline/resting state or the neutral condition/control group and after the experimental induction for within-subject and between-subject designs, respectively. Mixed-effects models are run to
account for the impact of moderator variables, such as manipulation methods,
categories of emotional states, age, gender, on affective outcomes.
This review provides a critical comparison of valence and arousal –based emotion
elicitation on one hand and reinforcement and preference/decision-based emotional consequences on the other hand. Such a conceptualization of emotional
states as part of adaptive circuits is a step ahead in improving the methodology
of emotion-cognition interaction tasks. This interdisciplinary approach might emphasize their functionalistic role in interpreting and successfully adjusting to the
environment.
51
P1.3 The display (or masking) of emotions during computermediated interaction: A relationship with reappraisal
Sunny AVRY1,2, Gaelle Molinari1,2, Guillaume Chanel2,
Mireille Betrancourt2, Thierry Pun2
Distance Learning University Switzerland1, University of Geneva2
The literature has shown that emotions felt during collaboration can be different
from those displayed to the partners. Emotions can be expressed to influence
others, or masked for self-protective, pro-social or task management purposes
(Cahour, 2013). In this study, we compared emotions expressed during a computer-mediated collaborative task versus emotions reported while participants watched the video of the collaboration. We also investigated whether the display of
emotion was related to emotion regulation strategies; in particular, we studied
individuals’ tendency to either inhibit the expression of emotions (suppression),
or reinterpret the situation so as to modify the resulting emotional impact (reappraisal; Gross & John, 2003). Participants of this study collaborated remotely in
dyads, and built together a violence prevention slogan. They were asked to (orally)
debate and organize their ideas using voice-conferencing and argumentation
graph tools. Half of the dyads were provided with an emotion awareness tool
(EAT), which gave members the possibility to 1) communicate their emotions to
their partner using a predefined list of 10 positive and 10 negative emotions and 2)
visualize their partner’s emotions throughout the interaction. After collaboration,
they completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003). They
were then provided with a video of their group work, and were asked to annotate moments when they felt an emotion (debriefing). Results showed that the
percentage of negative emotions expressed via the EAT (14% against 86% for positive emotions) was lower than the percentage of negative emotions reported during the debriefing (28.7% against 71.3% for positive emotions) (p < .001). Moreover,
the difference in percentage between expressed and reported negative emotions
was positively related to the participants’ tendency to use the reappraisal strategy
(r = +0.5, p < .05), and not related to their tendency to use the suppression strategy
(r = -0.01, p > .05). Thus, the small number of negative emotions communicated
during collaboration would not be due to a strategy of masking their emotional
expression. It would be rather explained by the participants’ tendency to modify
their interpretation of the situation so as to prevent the potential negative impact
of some emotional events on group work.
52
P1.4 Words are not enough: physiological responses to emotional
text paired with human and artificial entity stimuli
Christina A. Basedow, Arvid Kappas
We interact increasingly via information and communication technology (ICT).
As technology advances, the ‘other’ might not even be human. In fact, we progressively interact with autonomous agents in virtual or physical form, and treat
such technology as though it were an ‘equal’ in common interaction (Krämer et al.,
2012). The Media Equation (Reeves & Nass, 1996) argues that we apply social rules
and expectations to our communication with artificial entities and that we assign
agency unconsciously (Nass & Moon, 2000) leading to the adoption of social interaction rules to these technologies (Sundar & Nass, 2000). In addition, affective
and possibly ‘empathic’ responses towards artificial entities, more specifically toy
robots, have been shown in experimental studies where robots were ‘hurt’ (Rosenthal von der Pütten et al., 2013). Recent research indicates that individuals respond
surprisingly similar to emotional images of humans and artificial entities, when
paired with a context, presented as text [Author]. If we treat artificial entities as
‘people’ then it is perhaps not surprising that we react emotionally to artificial
agents as we would to humans, however it is not clear to what degree complex
states of mind would be attributed to robots. What if people are confronted with
neutral still images of artificial entities, only paired with emotional text, such as in
a Goodenough-Tinker paradigm. Would the context suffice to transform the perception of the entities’ affective state? In the present study 64 participants were
presented with neutral human faces from the Radboud Faces Database (Langner
et al., 2010) and artificial entity faces of the NAO robot paired with emotional
vignettes depicting anger, sadness, happiness and pride used in a previous experiment [Author]. Psychophysiological responses to stimuli were measured using
facial EMG (Corrugator supercilii, Zygomaticus major) and skin conductance. In
addition, participants completed the PANAS mood scale (Watson & Clark, 1988) at
three experimental intervals and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983),
post experiment. Results of facial EMG indicate significant increases of Corrugator supercilli activity in response to the onset of the images, with no systematic
difference in response to the addition of textual content. Few significant results
for Zygomaticus major and none for skin conductance emerged. The results are
characterized by complex interactions between target (human-robot), emotion
and epoch and suggest that emotional context was not sufficient to clearly elicit
expressive and physiological responses when paired with neutral stimuli.
53
P1.5 Specification for a productive practice app to assess and
improve psychological treatments for romantic grief and other
tertiary emotions
Luc Beaudoin
Simon Fraser University
This paper specifies the functionality of an iOS® app (“RFB”) being designed to help
researchers develop and experimentally contrast emotion regulation treatments
(e.g., acceptance and commitment, Hayes, 2011) for romantic grief and other forms
of perturbance (Beaudoin, 1994) by using productive practice (Beaudoin, 2014b)
While RFB will be used to test multiple theories of emotion and study various emotions, we will describe our plan to test, extend refine and apply to romantic grief
the H-CogAff affective information-processing architecture (Beaudoin 2014b; Sloman, 2003). H-CogAff architecturally distinguishes between primary, secondary
and tertiary emotions (perturbance). In perturbance, internal motivators tend
to disrupt executive processes (Beaudoin, 1994). Perturbance is characteristic of
romantic grief, wherein rejected lovers tend to experience intrusive rumination
(Wrape, 2014).
Harvey et al (2014) and Beaudoin (2014b) called for evidence-based psychological treatments leveraging cognitive principles and technology. Beaudoin (2014b,
2014c) developed the concept of productive practice: software-driven test-enhanced learning and deliberate practice. Our goal with RFB is to do for romantic grief what we are doing for several university research groups with H-CogAffbased mySleepButton™ in insomnia (Beaudoin, 2014a): accelerate research and
development of emotion theory and regulation strategies.
54
P1.6 Emotion and emotion regulation in forgiveness
Luisa Bonfiglioli, Elisa Forlani, Pio Enrico Ricci Bitti
Department of Psychology, University of Bologna
Background
Forgiveness process involves a change in emotion, cognition, motivation and
behavior. Authors distinguish between emotional and decisional forgiveness
(Worthington et al., 2007) and consider forgiveness an emotion-focused coping
strategy (Worthington & Scherer, 2004). Studies analysed the role of emotion in
forgiveness process in terms of emotional intelligence abilities (Rey & Extremera,
2014), considering the role of emotion regulation strategies in conflict resolution
(Halperin, 2014) or in psychophisiology (Witvliet et al. 2014).
Main aim
The main aim of the study is to analyse the role of emotional regulation strategies
of negative emotions in forgiveness following a past interpersonal offense.
Method
143 adults (mean age = 21,3 +/- 3.77) filled in a questionnaire that inquired about
an autobiographic interpersonal offense and investigated emotions involved in
forgiveness process. Participants completed also the italian version of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ, Balzarotti, John & Gross, 2010) and the Trait
Forgiveness Scale (TFS, Berry, et al., 2005).
Results
Anger, sadness and rancour are most common emotions experienced after offense and emotion intensity rating decreases after forgiveness. Data shows significant correlation between ERQ scores and forgiveness phenomenology (duration
time and emotion involved) and between TFS scores and rancour (presence and
duration time)
55
P1.7 Individual differences in the instructed regulation
of positive affect
Jo Bower, Anastasia Christakou, Craig Steel
Regulation of positive affect is under-researched, despite evidence linking dysregulation to several mental health conditions(1). Evidence from healthy populations
suggests longer-term benefits of positive emotions e.g. building resilience(2). Experimental research into regulation of positive affect is often uses clinical populations, with limited data from healthy volunteers. This project addressed this shortfall by studying instructed regulation of positive affect in healthy participants.
76 undergraduates were allocated to 1 of 3 conditions. After completing trait mood
and emotion regulation measures, participants watched a short mood induction
video. They were instructed to: (a) up-regulate their emotional responses (enhance
condition), (b) down-regulate their emotional responses (minimise condition), or
(c) simply watch the video (watch condition). Analysis assessed individual differences in how instructions to regulate positive affect impacted emotion regulation strategies adopted and the magnitude of mood change reported.
The increase in positive mood following the video was significantly smaller in the
minimise condition than in enhance and watch conditions. Additionally, participants in the minimise condition employed different emotion regulation strategies. Several significant relationships with trait measures emerged, for example
higher self-reported depression significantly increased suppression use in both
watch and minimise conditions. Higher levels of hypomania were also significantly associated with increased use of suppression in the watch condition.
Two online replications (student and community samples) assessed the feasibility
of internet data collection in emotion regulation research. The inter-relationships
between trait measures (e.g. significant association between depression score
and dampening of positive affect) were broadly replicated in online samples. The
mood induction successfully increased positive affect and instructions influenced
emotion regulation strategies adopted during the online mood induction. However, mood change was not significantly different across conditions in either online
study. Relationships between trait measures and emotion regulation strategies
adopted were partially preserved in online replications.
This project provides insight into regulation of positive affect in healthy volunteers,
complementing existing research with clinical populations. Our replications highlight challenges of online data collection in detecting changes in emotional
responding. Such challenges were overcome when detecting emotion regulation
strategy use or studying relationships between self-report trait measures.
56
P1.8 Neural bases of emotional and motivational appraisals on
processing of emotional visual scenes depending on spatial
frequencies
Aurélie CAMPAGNE, Benoit FRADCOURT, Monica BACIU, Cédric PICHAT,
Carole PEYRIN
Université de Grenoble, CNRS
Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the cognitive appraisals type such as identifying the self-emotional experience or emotional state of
others. Moreover, each particular affective appraisal may be driven by a specific
spatial frequency content in emotional stimuli. The present fMRI study aimed to
investigate the brain regions involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes
during two distinct affective appraisal tasks, one emotional based on the self-emotional experience and one motivational based on the tendency to action. The relative role of spatial frequency content of visual stimuli during each of these two
appraisal tasks was also explored by using scenes filtered in low spatial frequencies (LSF) and high spatial frequencies (HSF). Results showed a greater activation
of the visual regions and amygdala in the motivational task compared to the emotional task. Motivational task also induced specific activations of motor areas
(premotor cortex and supplementary motor area) and parietal regions (precuneus, superior and inferior parietal lobules and angular gyrus) although required
motor response was similar in the two tasks. Parietal activations were particularly
obtained in appraisal of a tendency to approach a pleasant scene. These results
suggest that the identification of a tendency to action specifically involves motor
and navigation processes. Furthermore, cerebral activations in the motivational
task were mostly greater for HSF scenes compared to LSF scenes suggesting that
the tendency to action is mainly driven by the detailed information in scenes. In
the emotional task, only the visual regions showed a role of the spatial frequencies with greater activity for HSF scenes (compared to LSF scenes) to evaluate the
unpleasant experience and for LSF scenes (compared to HSF scenes) to evaluate
the pleasant experience. Our study stresses distinct processing for identifying the
tendency to action and the self-emotional experience on emotional visual scenes,
and illustrates the flexible use of spatial frequency content in scenes depending
on the task demands.
57
P1.9 A map of the affective semantic space related to various
different types of wine
Cristina Carbognin, Riccardo Sartori, Roberto Ferrarini,
Anna Maria Meneghini
University of Verona
Even if there are incidental factors that can modify emotions and attitudes towards foods and beverages (e.g. purchase environment, packaging, mood), some
products are more associated with emotional experiences than others. Wine, for
example, is an “emotional” product, at least in some cultures including Italy.
Previous studies have shown that the lexicon used to describe the affective space
of life experiences is not the same as that which is used to describe individual
reactions to foods and odours (Delplanque et al., 2012). This also applies to wine
(Author, 2010), where the semantic space suffers from “hedonic asymmetry”.
This study aimed to select a list of adjectives in Italian to describe different intensities of emotions elicited during the tasting of various wines.
88 wine consumers assessed the intensities of their feelings in a testing situation
using a list of 31 adjectives. 23 of these adjectives were selected from past studies
on imagined emotions (Author, 2010) associated with wine and 8 were selected
from research on the emotions elicited by odours and foods (Chrea et al., 2009;
King, Meiselman, 2010). A Visual Analogue Scale was used. The types of wines
used as stimuli varied in terms of colour and enological characteristics in order to
represent the wide range of products available.
While some terms proved to be more useful to describe the tasting experience,
others appeared to be especially useful to discriminate between the various different types of wine.
This is the first time that there has been evidence that a specific set of terms is
needed to report the feelings elicited by wine tasting efficiently. It also supports
the hypothesis that specific emotional profiles can be attributed to different types
of wine. Emotions elicited by products are becoming more and more important in
terms of product differentiation. In the field of wine, emotional profiles, associated with the traditional sensory profiles, can offer useful additional and attractive
information.
58
P1.10 Audiomotor integration of angry and happy prosodies
Sélim Coll, Didier Grandjean
The primate brain codes the features of perceptual events in a distributed fashion.
Thus, color, form and location of an object for example are represented in different
brain regions in the cortex. This phenomenon is related to the binding problem:
how does the brain integrate the information belonging to the same event without mixing them up with features form other, concurrently processed events.
Hommel (1998) suggested the “event file” concept: an episodic memory trace
binding together perceptual features and actions related to an event. This idea
emerged after an experiment where Hommel showed that reaction time benefits
associated to the repetition of the relevant feature and the location of a stimulus
depended on response repetition. Using a similar paradigm we designed one pilot
and four studies to investigate if emotion, like other perceptual represented features, can be bound with motor responses when it is relevant versus irrelevant for
the task. By using angry and fearful faces expressed by avatars and real humans,
we showed the co-existence of three degrees of visuomotor bindings: a strong
level implicating the relevant feature for the task, a significant smaller one implicating the location, and an even smaller one implicating irrelevant features, in
which emotion can play a role.
With four new studies using the same paradigm we sought for replicating our
results with angry and happy prosodies. The same three degrees of bindings were
observed. Moreover, the emotion always integrated a binding with the motor response when task-relevant (study 1 and 2). In a loudness task, emotion also bound
even when irrelevant for the task (study 4), it was not the case in a location task
(study 3).
Knowing more precisely the behavioral impact of the emotion in the visuo and
audio-motor binding we plan to study now the neural underpinnings of these
phenomena by using brain imaging techniques.
59
P1.11 Oxytocin increases empathy for an ostracised other:
A Cyberball study
Katie Daughters, Antony Manstead, Kelly Hubble, Aled Rees,
Anita Thapar, Stephanie van Goozen
Cardiff University
It is known that the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) can increase an individual’s awareness of social cues, and that the social effects of OXT depend upon the social
context of a situation. It has also been suggested that OXT affects empathy, but
to date little research has investigated whether social context can influence OXT
affects on empathy. In a double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled, withinsubjects trial, 40 male participants played the virtual ball-tossing game Cyberball.
Here they witnessed either an ingroup or outgroup member being excluded by
other players. Participants then rated their own emotions and the presumed emotions of the excluded player. We anticipated that participants in the OXT condition
would report greater empathy for the excluded player, compared to the placebo
condition. We also anticipated that this effect might be moderated by whether the
excluded player was ostensibly an ingroup or outgroup member, which was manipulated by giving the excluded other an ingroup or outgroup name. Participants
in the OXT condition reported that the excluded player felt less positive, compared to their own emotional state, demonstrating cognitive empathy. A marginally
significant interaction reflected the fact that this difference was more evident for
the excluded ingroup member than for the excluded outgroup member. Correlational analysis also suggested that the effects of OXT on empathy were moderated by group membership. This study provides initial evidence that the effects of
OXT on empathy are moderated by social context. More research is required to
investigate the effect of ingroup/outgroup contexts on OXT-related behaviours.
60
P1.12 Military and civilians: Detection of aggression by emotional
facial expressions
Hugues Delmas1, Sophie Valentin2, Maxime Bonet3,
Samuel Demarchi2, Charles Tijus2, Isabel Urdapilleta2
Paris 8 University, ADN Research1, Paris 8 University2,
Paris 8 University, Military3
Assume a boxer’s stance, invade personal space, clench hands and make threats
are perceived as behavioral indicators of imminent acts of violence (Johson
& Aaron, 2013). Derivatives of anger, two facial expressions precursors of aggression, perceived as warning signs of imminent violence, have been identified by Matsumoto and Hwang (2014). These expressions are better identified
by persons frequently confronted with situations of assault like policemen.
During their in the field peacekeeping missions, military agents are faced with
situations of danger and assault. However, are they better than civilians in identifying emotional facial expressions precursors of assault? To our knowledge,
no-one has investigated the ability of soldiers to detect facial expressions precursors of aggression (A Signal Detection Theory task, Green & Swets, 1966), and
whether they process these specific emotions better and faster than civilians.
Standardized pictures of 6 posed emotional facial expressions were used as stimuli (premeditated assault [PA], loss of control assault [LCA], anger-joy [AJ], angercontempt [AC], anger-disgust [AD] and neutral expressions [NE]). Conformity of
emotional expressions have been evaluated by two Facial Action Coding System
coders. Faces were presented sequentially to 47 participants - military and civilians.
Their task was to determine as fast as possible if the emotional facial expression represents a person who will attack them. Responses and reaction time were recorded.
Concerning SDT indexes, military agents were more conservative (more misses
and correct rejections, p < .001) and less efficient in detecting assault expressions
(p < .001). Our results are consistent with facial expressions of assault identified
by Matsumoto and Hwang (2014). Detection rates for PA and LCA were more associated with aggression than other expressions. We also observed higher detection rates of aggression for LCA than for PA. AD were identified as more dangerous than other ones. AC, AJ, and NE have very low rates of assault, which means
that they were clearly identified as displaying non-dangerous facial expressions.
Concerning reaction time, there was no difference between military and civilians.
However, overall participants reacted to expressions precursors of assault (PA & LCA)
slower than both chimera (AJ, AC & AD) and NE (ps < .001). Expressions precursors of
assault seem to have a longer cognitive processing whatever the response given. On
the field, this latency isn’t optimal behavior in a dangerous situation. There is leeway
to improve ability of detecting emotional facial expressions precursors of assault.
61
P1.13 The appraisal structure of types of interest as measured in
self-determined ecological events
Daniel Dukes1,2, Marcello Mortillaro2, Catherine Audrin2,
Fabrice Clement1,2
Neuchâtel University1, University of Geneva2
In 2005, Silvia postulated that two appraisals, novelty/complexity and coping potential, were predictive of episodes of the emotion of interest. However, in 2013, Fontaine, Scherer and Soriano (eds.) provided evidence to suggest that other appraisals
were involved. Neither of these studies took into account people’s spontaneous
real-life experiences of episodes of interest. The goal of this study was to establish which appraisals best predict ecologically self-determined events of interest.
Forty French-speaking participants (29 women) aged on average 31 years
old, were asked every day to note two or three episodes of interest that
they had experienced, for seven days. Using a Likert scale (1-7) participants
were asked to rate each event using several appraisal-based questions
concerning novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal attainment, coping potential and norm compatibility (Leventhal and Scherer, 1987). These results
were compared and contrasted with scores for reported ‘event interest’(1-7).
Multilevel analyses were performed on the ‘event interest’ variable. The appraisals
were entered into the model as the fixed effects, while the subjects’ intercepts
were the random effects. In order to relate our results to Silvia’s proposed model,
we compared a two-appraisal model (comprised of novelty and coping potential)
with a full five-appraisal model. Results suggest that the larger model improved the prediction of interest, as this model fitted the data significantly better,
(χ2(3)=394.85, p<.001), while the three added appraisals were statistically significant.
Post-hoc analysis of emergent categories of the events led to the postulation of 5 different types of interest: esthetic, cognitive, voyeuristic, instrumental and social. Of these 5 types, none were predicted by the same
combination of appraisals as ‘event interest’ and there were also differences between the combinations of appraisals that predicted each type.
These results seem to show that the emotion of interest cannot be reduced to
one type of phenomenon, and, as such, interest requires more subtle explanations that a two-appraisal model, as Silvia himself suggested (2005). Thus, further research is more than ever necessary to investigate the nature of interest(s).
62
P1.14 The adverse effect of social sharing of negative emotional
events on a social networking service
Hiroko Endo, Kei Fuji
University of Tsukuba
With the growth of social networking service (SNS) penetration, many people are
starting to share personal emotional events, including those that inspire negative emotions, with others anytime and anywhere—even immediately after the
events. Although such behavior is considered a form of the social sharing of emotion (Rime, 1989), there are insufficient empirical studies of social sharing on SNS.
Contrary to what people generally believe, social sharing behavior is irrelevant
to emotional recovery (e.g. Finkeneuer & Rime, 1998; Zech & Rime, 2005); most
people, in the immediate aftermath of an emotional event, find it difficult to
accomplish the associated cognitive processing involving recreation of meaning,
reframing, or reappraisal of the experience even though such processing assumes
a crucial role in emotional recovery (Rime, 2007, 2009). Based on this concept, we
predicted that social sharing of negative emotional events on SNS also has little
contribution to emotional recovery because of the instantaneousness involved,
which would result in a deficiency of cognitive processing compared to face-toface sharing. We conducted a survey with Japanese undergraduates, obtaining 413
responses (230 men, 177 women, and 6 non-respondent; mean age = 19.67). At the
beginning of the survey, respondents were instructed to recall and describe the
most negative emotional events they had experienced in the past month. They
were then asked to respond to a questionnaire measuring negative emotional
state not only immediately after the event but also at the time of answering
(now), the experience of social sharing behavior on SNS as well as face to face,
and the frequency of rumination about the event. The results of the covariance
structural analysis indicated that, as predicted, social sharing on SNS has no significant effect on emotional recovery, similar to face-to-face sharing. The results also
showed that, whether on SNS or not, sharing behavior focused on the emotional
aspects of the event increases the frequency of rumination, resulting in maintaining negative emotional states, especially sadness. This study supported the
earlier findings about social sharing of negative emotional events and provided
new insight for understanding the relationship between the immediacy of SNS
in sharing negative emotional experience with others and the ineffectiveness of
new emotional regulation strategy.
63
P1.15 The effect of laughter expression modulation on emotional
experience in 4 to 10 years old children
Nawelle Famelart, Michèle Guidetti
University of Toulouse
Facial expressions play a fundamental role in communication and one regulates
them permanently in order to control what to communicate to others. But the
control of facial expressions is also an emotion regulation strategy which has an
interest for the organism (Darwin, 2001; Gross, 1999). The aim of the current study
is to understand the impact of facial expression control on subjective experience
of situation. More precisely, we want to know how laughter expression modulation may lead children to change their emotional experience. According to the
literature, in adulthood, the facial expression control generates unconsciously a
congruent change of emotional experience (facial feedback). Although only few
studies have been made on this phenomenon with children, it could be probable
that the strength of the link between facial expressions and emotional experiences
diminishes with age, and consequently, the facial feedback effect could decrease
with age (Ceschi & Scherer, 2001; Izard, 1990). In order to test this hypothesis,
we used an emotional induction paradigm (funny video-clip) with an expressive
change paradigm (free expression vs. laugh restriction vs. laugh exaggeration). We
have used a new method to assess a posteriori the emotional experience of 4 to 10
aged children based on analyses of narrative speech about funny video-clip. The
results indicate that this phenomenon in children is moderate and similar to the
one that has been observed in studies with adults. More precisely, children has
benefited from a facial feedback effect on their emotional experiences without an
age effect. Indeed, the children’s narrative speech has been longer (i.e. time speech
and number of video-clip’s events related) in the condition of laugh exaggeration,
showing indirectly there is a modification of the experience about an emotional
situation. This study show that laughing had an important role on organism and
cognitive functioning from childhood so far and fully contribute to emotional
regulation everyday. But the lack of age effect observed also suggests that facial
feedback could be rather dependent of personal expressivity characteristics than
developmental characteristics.
64
P1.16 An examination of regulation needs after negative emotional
experiences
Kei Fuji, Hiroko Endo
Previous studies have shown that, in general, negative emotional experiences
have a harmful and multifaceted impact. Simultaneously, various needs for regulating and overcoming this impact are aroused (e.g., Rime, 2007). These needs are
referred to as ‘regulation needs’ and categorized under three classes: socioaffective, cognitive, and action needs. Among them, socioaffective needs are considered as the needs for social integration, support, and comfort by others, and the
factor that contributes to sharing negative emotional experiences with others,
referred to as ‘social sharing’. However, researchers are yet to develop psychological scales to measure regulation needs. Therefore, the relationship between regulation needs and social sharing behaviour has not yet been examined empirically.
Thus, we conducted a web survey with Japanese high school students, undergraduates, and office workers, obtaining 443 responses (163 men and 280 women;
mean age = 25.28 years). At the beginning of the survey, respondents were instructed to recall and describe the most negative emotional events they had experienced in the past month. They were then asked to respond to a questionnaire
on their negative emotional state immediately after the event, the three classes
of regulation needs, and the experience of sharing the events with others. An
exploratory factor analysis of the items on regulation needs revealed six factors,
namely, needs for ‘acceptance and understanding’, ‘response from others’‘, ‘reframing the experience from a new perspective’, ‘confronting and reflection’, ‘taking
action’, and ‘distraction and refreshing’. In addition, a confirmatory factor analysis
suggested a good model fit and showed that these factors were organized into
three higher order factors, similar to the three classes discussed in Rime (2007).
Furthermore, a covariance structural analysis indicated that, as predicted, socioaffective needs elicited by negative emotion after the events promoted social sharing behaviour of the negative emotional experience. In addition, findings indicated that although action needs facilitated sharing of the factual aspects of the
experience, cognitive needs had an inhibitory effect on social sharing behaviour.
This study empirically supported the earlier discussion about regulation needs,
revealed their detailed structure, and their relationship to social sharing. These
findings are a progress on the clarification of the process of emotion regulation
and the cultural differences involved.
65
P.17 Evaluating emotional expression in music context:
the role of visual dynamic and form information
Donald Glowinski1, Sascha Fruehholz1, Marc-André Rappaz2,
Didier Grandjean1
University of Geneva1, Geneva University of Music2
This study has been conducted to investigate expressive coordination processes
in music ensemble. A main focus has been on the musician’s capacity to anticipate others’ emotional expression (EE) in an extremely short delay (< 1s). Wöllner
showed that this capacity is key for ensuring robust coordination and time alignment in a music ensemble (Wollner et al. 2010). Aglioti revealed that expert
skills in anticipating others’ intention and successful outcomes are based on the
detection of a minimal set of movement features and postural details (Aglioti et
al. 2008). Our study investigated EE in a music context with the specific aim to
understand which movement and form features of the musician performance
may impact upon the perception by expert and naïve observers. Seventeen participants (F=53%, mean age 28±12 years, musicians=52%), were assigned to watch
point-light display movies based on the collected motion capture of a violinist in
a string quartet indicating forte and piano entries to the other performers. In a
random half of the trials only the preparation part of the musician’s gesture was
shown, in the other half the full sequence was shown. A control condition was
inserted consisting in a non-anthropomorphic display of the performance where
the dynamic of each body marker was maintained but where relative distance
between body limbs was scrambled. After each trial, participants had to report
whether they thought the performance was forte or piano. Linear mixed modeling revealed that expert observers tended to perceive with higher accuracy and
higher responsiveness the levels of EE than naïve observers in both full and short
sequences, and that control condition using non-anthropomorphic is decremental for their performances. These results show that evaluation of EE in music may
depend upon the expertise and that movement cues can be further informative
when a human form is identified.
66
P1.18 Rhythm in vocal emotional expressions: the normalized
pairwise variability index differentiates emotions across languages
Martijn Goudbeek, Mirjam Broersma
Tilburg University, Radboud University Nijmegen
The voice is an important channel for emotional expression. Emotions are often
characterized by differences in pitch, loudness, the duration of segments, and
spectral characteristics (Scherer, 2003). The rhythmic aspect of emotional speech
has been largely neglected, most studies limit themselves to segment duration
and speech rate. Since languages are often characterized by their rhythmic class
(as either “stress timed” or “syllable timed”), we wanted to know whether the
rhythmic structure plays a role in vocal emotional expressions. To characterize the
rhythmic structure, we used the normalized pairwise variability index. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) characterizes the rhythm of a language
in a more continuous way (Grabe & Low, 2002). Quinto, Thompson, and Keating
(2013) found that the nPVI differentiated emotional expressions from non-emotional ones. However, their study was limited to English (a stress timed language)
and their nonsensical carrier sentence contained real words, possibly influencing
the role of speech rhythm. This contribution investigates whether the nPVI can
be used to characterize the possible rhythmic differences between emotions in
a stress timed and a syllable timed language (Dutch and Korean). We do so by
using an existing corpus (Goudbeek & Broersma, 2010) of eight posed emotional
expressions (balanced for valance and arousal) by speakers of Dutch and Korean.
The findings show, as expected, that Dutch and Korean differ in their nPVI, but,
importantly, that the different emotions in the corpus also differ in their nPVI. Further analysis shows that emotional valence is an important contributor to these
differences. Finally, the effects are different for Dutch and Korean, indicating the
importance of studying different languages when investigating vocal emotional
expression.
67
P1.19 I feel Compassion when I think
William Hagman, Daniel Vastfjall
Linkopoing University
Goal:
Which Impact does the reflection- and expectation of donations have on compassion and do compassion lead to donations? These questions was investigated
with a web-survey (n = 600 that expands previous research on escaping affect
(Cameron & Payne 2011).
Method:
A 2x2x2 Participants was either giving explicit instruction just to experience their
feelings toward a child (or eight children) in Darfur or experience their feelings
and later in the experiment rate how much money they would be willing to donate. The order of the questions in the measure of compassion was given in two
variations, since one of the items was explicitly related to donations. In addition
to this manipulations an explicit questions regarding expectations to be asked to
donate and reflections about donation was added. After all the rating participants
was asked a hypothetical donation question “Imagine you had $25 dollars in your
wallet right now. Would you be willing to donate money to donate money to the
child (children)?”.
Results:
In contrast with the previous result of Cameron and Payne a significant main
effects of help request and number of victims was found, but no significant interaction between help request and number of victims. The order of the items in
the compassion-measure had significant interaction effect with help request. The
results indicates that when the reflection was perceived as self-generated by the
participant it increases the compassion towards the victim(s).
However, compassion decreases when participants believe that they are expected
to donate. Participants that scored higher on the compassion-measure did choose
to donate more often than participants with a lower compassion score. Moreover, participants that did donated did significantly increase their positive feelings
after the donation compared to the participants that did not chose to donate.
These findings suggest that reflection upon donation have different effects on
compassion if the reflection is self-generated or generated by the expectations
of others.
68
P1.20 Exploring In-group, Stereotyping and Memory Effects of Basic
and Self-conscious Emotions in Children
Elizabeth Hilvert1, Denise Davidson1, Sandra Vanegas2,
Ieva Misiunaite1
Loyola University Chicago1, University of Illinois at Chicago2
Several compelling investigations have found that adults more readily identify
emotion in others who are similar to themselves, such as those of the same race,
than in those of a different race (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003, for a review). Several
hypotheses have been given to explain this effect. One is that subtle, but real,
physical differences may exist in the expression of emotion across cultures, which
are more readily visible to in-group than out-group members. In-group effects
may also stem from an increased motivation to understand emotions in in-group
versus out-group members. Individuals may also be more motivated to decode
the expressions of members they identify with and spend the most time with,
and thus be more accurate in doing so. Few studies, however, have assessed these
effects in children, although Tuminello and Davidson (2011) showed that in-group
effects begin early and are affected by minority/majority group membership, as 5to 7-year-old European-American children were better at recognizing emotions in
other European-American faces, whereas African-American children were equally
good at recognizing emotion in European- and African-American faces.
In this research, we examined in-group, stereotyping and memory effects of emotion in 38 African-American and 40 European-American children (Mage = 4.6, age
range 3.1-6.7 years). Line drawings and brief vignettes of basic and self-conscious
emotions were shown to children, who were asked to identify the emotions in
the protagonist with free and cued response formats. Line drawings eliminated
individual differences that might be present in photographs so that only racial or
sex differences were altered.
European-American children showed an in-group advantage, recognizing emotions more accurately on drawings of European-Americans (92% correct) than
on drawings of African-Americans (81%). African-American children recognized
emotions equally well in African-American (79% correct) and European-American
faces (81%). These results are consistent with Tuminello and Davidson (2011) with
photographed faces. Neutral female drawings were more likely labeled “sad” by
boys than girls, and African-American children were more likely to label neutral
African-American drawings as “guilty,” although no such effect was found in European-American children. Recognition rates were significantly better for basic
than self-conscious emotions, the latter of which children had significant difficulty with identifying. All children remembered the drawings equally well, regardless
of the race or sex of the protagonist. These results, and their implications, will be
discussed in terms of in-group, stereotyping and memory effects of emotion and
how those effects manifest and develop in young children.
69
P1.21 Transcript Analysis as an alternative tool for emotional
intelligence measurement
Aleksandra Jasielska
Institute of Psychology, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan
The presentation describes the method for measuring one branch of emotional intelligence - skills in perception, appraisal and expression of emotion. The
method uses the emotional-cognitive task. The performance of the task was
interpreted by the transcript analysis (Krystal, 1988) – the quality method originally designed for assessing speech of alexithymic patients. The coders assessed
subjects’ notes for the affective content in two groups – with high and low levels
of emotional intelligence measured by The Polish adaptation of the Schutte SelfReport Inventory (Schutte, Malouff, Hall, Haggerty, Cooper, Gloden, Dornheim,
1998)- INTE Questionnaire (Ciechanowicz, Jaworowska, Matczak, 2001). Over 500
volunteers between 20 and 93 years of age took part in this study. The research
results supported difference in style of speaking about emotional topic between
people with high and low level of emotional intelligence and indicated higher
tendency to desymbolization of emotional experience by emotionally intelligent
people. The task performance can serve as a good indicator of differences in processing emotional information in everyday situations depending on the level of
emotional intelligence.
70
P1.22 Self-Modification and Empathy in Romantic Passion
Berenice Jiménez Rodríguez, Pérez Pérez Alejandra Elizabeth, Sánchez
Aragón Rozzana
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Romantic passion is an emotion characterized by the desire of complete union
with another (Hatfield, 1996). Sánchez Aragón (2007) pointed out that passionate
love has four phases: the first phase “Attraction” refers to the beginning to the
period in which individual wants to be close and to know another person who is
attractive; next phase “Infatuation” includes an special link with the other person
full of fantasy, sexual attraction and the experience of complete realization; third
phase “Obsessive Love” because an important cognitive process is being used to
think, be worried and imagine being with a person the most of the time although
the person is not there; and the last phase “Desperate Love” is defined by apprehensive and anxious behavior toward the person in order to obtain closeness
and reciprocity. Passion implies, in whose experience it, some stress that makes
necessary to choose between modify their environment or do themselves. In this
regard, Díaz Guerrero (1994) showed that Mexicans prefer to cope with the tension
thru self-modification (SM), it is mean; change their attitude/conduct instead of
other’s attitudes/conduct in order to avoid relationship difficulties. In this context,
thru interaction between the dyad empathy develops and depending of that, the
SM will take place. Empathy is a personal trait with cognitive and emotional characteristics that permeates the interaction, dynamic of the romantic relationship
(Sánchez Aragón & Martinez Pérez, 2012). For this, the objectives of this study are:
1) to find the relationship between SM, Empathy and Passionate Love, 2) to explore
if these relationships are different between men and women. In order to do so, we
worked with 400 participants (192 men, 208 women) whose responded voluntary
to three scales: 1. Self-Modification in Romantic Relationship (Jiménez Rodríguez
& Sánchez Aragón, 2012) with two dimensions SM to Agree and SM by Respect; 2.
Empathy in Romantic Relationship (Sánchez Aragón & Martinez Pérez, 2012) with
four dimensions: Cognitive Empathy of Emotions, Compassionate care, Self-disturbance and Taking perspective, and 3. Passionate Love Multiphasic Scale (Sánchez Aragón, 2007) with four dimensions: Attraction, Infatuation, Obsessive Love
and Desperate Love. Findings confirm the important role self-modification plays in
passionate love phases in Mexico. The relationships among empathy and phases
of passionate love show interesting effects depending of their phases. Regarding
gender differences, results show that men and women respond similarly. Findings
will be discussed in terms of their implications, social psychology theories and
cross cultural approaches.
71
P1.23 Context-emotion match shapes social judgments of emotion
expression and suppression
Elise Kalokerinos, Katharine Greenaway
KU Leuven, The University of Queensland
Positive emotion expression is often associated with positive social outcomes (e.g.
Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005), and emotion suppression comes with social
costs (e.g. Butler et al., 2003). However, we argue that these common findings are
moderated by social context. More specifically, we argue that when an emotion is
expressed that is incongruous with the context, it is likely to appear socially inappropriate and would be better suppressed. We tested these ideas across 4 experiments, and hypothesized that when there was an emotion-context mismatch,
targets who suppressed their emotion would be rated as more appropriate, and
those who expressed their emotion would be rated as more inappropriate. In Experiment 1, we filmed stimuli for use in the subsequent experiments of targets
suppressing or expressing their emotion after watching a positive or negative
film clip. In Experiment 2, new participants were randomly assigned to view either
expressing or suppressing positive or negative targets, and rate these targets on
appropriateness. In an additional context manipulation, prior to rating the targets
participants were randomly assigned to view a positive or negative film clip, and
were told that the targets had watched that same film. This manipulation created
either a context-expression match (e.g., expressing positive emotion after watching a positive film) or a context-expression mismatch (e.g., expressing positive
emotion after watching a negative film). Our results supported the hypotheses
– reflecting an emotion-context match, targets who expressed positive emotion
after supposedly watching a positive film were perceived as more appropriate
than targets who suppressed positive emotion. Reflecting an emotion-context
mismatch, targets who expressed negative emotion after supposedly watching
a positive film were perceived as less appropriate than targets who suppressed
negative emotion. The inverse results were observed in the negative context
condition: Reflecting an emotion-context mismatch, targets who expressed positive emotion after supposedly watching a negative film were perceived as less appropriate than those who suppressed positive emotion. Experiment 3 replicated
these results with a refined stimuli set and an extended set of appropriateness
dependent variables. Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that the results were
due to context-match, rather than any affective changes brought on by the films
used to establish the context. These results highlight the importance of considering context as a moderator of the social effects of emotion regulation: Even
though suppression is usually associated with negative social outcomes, when
there is an emotion-context mismatch, it is a beneficial social strategy.
72
P1.24 The body language: The spontaneous influence of congruent
bodily arousal on the awareness of emotional words
Anne Kever, Delphine Grynberg, Nicolas Vermeulen
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)
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 is not reducible to
an abstract description but 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 physiological arousal) and once after a relaxation session (reduced physiological arousal). Concretely, participants were asked to detect and
report two target words (T1 and T2) presented for 67 ms each among a series of
nonword distractors. The SOA between target words was set to 268 ms. T1 were
always neutral (e.g., chair) whereas T2 were either neutral, high arousal (e.g., orgasm, herpes) or low arousal (e.g., friend, tear) words. Results revealed that increased physiological arousal led to improved reports of high arousal T2 words,
while 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.
Of interest too, results showed that heart rate variability measures (i.e., RMSSD
and HF index) significantly predict the magnitude of the observed interaction
between the physiological arousal condition (cycling vs. relaxation) and the type
of words reported (high arousal vs. low arousal vs. neutral). Heart rate variability
provides information about autonomic flexibility and thereby represents a physiological index of emotion regulation ability. Consequently, it can be assumed
that better capacities for adaptive and regulated emotional responding allow for
a better detection of emotionally arousing stimuli that are congruent with ones
level of physiological arousal.
73
P1.25 Positive Emoticons and the Words of Love
Zuzana Komrsková
Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague
The poster deals with the structures called emoticons (or smileys) that are specific to computer-mediated communication. There are many types and forms of
emoticons which are based on the cultural background (e. g. Western and Eastern
emoticons) but the set of expressed meanings should be the same. The primary
meaning of emoticons is said to be expression of emotion (e. g. Wolf, 2000), although other additional functions could be included, e. g. to highlight the most
important word in the message, to express irony or humour, to substitute punctuation. (Dresner – Herring, 2010; Yus, unpub.)
The main goal of the poster is to show how are Western emoticons joined to expression positive emotions in tweets. The data material is focused on Czech expression of love (miluju/miluji [I love], mám rád/ráda [I like]). All data were annotated in relation to gender, form of emoticon, position of emoticon to the expression
of love and to other emoticons. The results summarizes this variables and also
contribute to the diskussion about gender differencies in the use of emoticons (e.
g. Walther – D’Addario, 2001; Baron, 2004; Tossell et al., 2012).
74
P1.26 Moral emotions and social cohesion: a moral identity as a
condition in /of social functions of moral emotions
Maria Kozlova, Olga Simonova
National Research University - Higher School of Economics, Moscow
The rapid development of the sociology of emotions gave a new impetus for the
revival of the sociology of morality [Hitlin, Vaisey]. The focus of modern sociology
of morality is directed to the moral mechanisms of social cohesion and wellbeing
of social groups. We are based on the results of the analytical review of the current
approaches to the study of morality and emotions and make an attempt to integrate sociological, psychological, anthropological and neurophysiological considerations to explore the role of moral emotions in the formation of social cohesion.
In contrast to the theory of moral grounds of J. Haidt, the latest data in ethology
and anthropology shows that the moral grounds focused on maintaining the integrity of the group are not hardwired. According to the results of neurobiological
research the phase of self-examination is an intermediate link between social emotions and moral action [Damasio, Meyer]. Hence we can suppose that the neurobiological mechanisms of self-identification and emotions are genetically fixed.
We assume that in a collectivist culture individuals have group-oriented identity
that becomes a «starting point» in arousing of moral emotions. In individualistic cultures, «self-identity» is based on individualizing moral grounds of care and
justice and becomes the basis of moral emotions and individual moral behaviour.
Moral order functions through the internal moral control or self-control, where
the moral emotions play the essential role. Individuals in become the agents of
moral action, forming moral identity and putting this identity in the first place in
the structure of their self-identity. From the perspective of sociology, in modern
societies moral emotions should be studied from the point of view of the concept
of moral identity [Turner, Burke, Stets, Stryker]. Emotions are driving force of moral
action moral and signalling mechanisms about violations of moral norms. The negative moral emotions – primarily, shame, guilt, envy, jealousy and resentment –
are of particular interest in this regard. From a sociological point of view, emotions
and feelings that are considered negative, also contribute to the different types of
social cohesion at the micro and macro level, as well as positive moral emotions.
It is important to understand that moral self-identity and moral emotions play a
major role in the formation of social cohesion.
75
P1.27 What doesn’t kill you makes you exhausted. Or mobilized.
Exertion characteristics of selected emotion regulation strategies
Karol Lewczuk, Dorota Kobylinska
University of Warsaw, Warsaw
Our ability to regulate emotions can have enormous impact on our functioning
in many areas of life. However, as the strenght model of self-control suggests,
this ability is limited after initial exertions (this effect is called “ego depletion”),
because all forms of conscious self-regulation rely upon a common and limited inner resource (Muraven, Baumeister, 2000). Research on this phenomenon is substantially based on “two task” paradigm – participants engage in a depleting task
requiering self-control, for example suppressing emotions (for the experimental
group) or engage in a task that is less self-control demanding (control group).
Subsequently, all participants involve in the second self-control task, addressing
another domain of self-control, for example thought suppression. Performance
of experimental group in the second task is very often impaired relative to that of
control group participants (Baumeister, Vohs, Tice, 2007). But does ego depletion
also occurs when both task address the same domain of self control, but characteristic of tasks is different - specifically for consequtive emotion regulation episodes, when self-regulation involves different strategies and addresses different
emotions? Present study, based on a modified “two task” paradigm, addressed this
issue. In the first task, participants were regulating their emotions using suppression or perspective taking strategies (2 experimental groups) or expressed emotions naturally (control group) while watching short clip invoking amusement. In
the second task, all participants were asked to regulate their emotions using reappraisal (Webb, Miles, Scheeran, 2012; Gross, 2013 ) while watching film invoking
anger. Opposite to ego depletion, present study shows the effect of mobilization
for both experimental groups – during the second task both experimental groups
regulated their emotions more effectively than the control group. Our study is
consistent with recent research indicating that not limited resource, but dissimilarity of self-regulatory conflicts between tasks is responsible for the depletion
effect (Dewitte, Bruyneel, Geyskens, 2009). In addition to that, our findings indicate some interesting differences in the effectivenes of suppression and perspective taking. Although suppression and perspective taking strategies were similarly
effective in controlling positive emotions during the first task, using perspective
taking also had a “calming” effect and reduced negative emotions. Our study is
the first to show the role of similarity of response conflicts for exertion characteristc of emtion self-regulation and provide an important insight into depletion
mechanism.
76
P1.28 Biases in emotion perception: Emotion congruency and
emotion complementarity effects
Dmitry Lyusin
Higher School of Economics, Moscow
The present study aims to reveal the correspondence between perceivers’ emotional traits and their sensitivity to particular types of emotions in other people.
Sensitivity is defined here as a tendency to overestimate or underestimate particular types of emotions. Literature on emotional information processing shows
the existence of the emotion congruency effect. It consists in the facilitation of
processing of positive stimuli while in positive mood and the facilitation of processing of negative stimuli while in negative mood (Rusting,1998; Niedenthal et
al., 2000; Schmid, Schmid Mast, 2010). This effect occurs both for state emotions
and trait emotions. I suggested that two different principles could underlie the
relationships between the perceivers’ emotional traits and their sensitivity to various emotion types. According to the congruency principle individuals are more
sensitive to those types of emotions that are consistent with their own emotional
traits. On the contrary, complementarity principle suggests that certain pairs of
emotions are in the complementary relations in the sense that the individual’s
sensitivity to one type of emotion corresponds to his or her own emotional traits
of another type. For example, higher sensitivity to anger might correlate with
higher trait anxiety of the perceiver.
It was hypothesized that this correspondence would be either congruent or complementary depending on emotion types. More specifically, Hypothesis 1 predicted
that the congruency principle would hold for the pair happiness – sadness, whereas Hypothesis 2 predicted that the complementarity principle would hold for
the pair fear – anger.
These hypotheses were tested in two studies. Sensitivity of 140 participants from
a community sample to particular emotion types was measured with specially
developed video tests that consisted of sets of short videos. Trait emotions were
measured with self-report questionnaires.
The congruency hypothesis for the emotion pair happiness – sadness and the complementarity hypothesis for the pair fear – anger were confirmed. Trait happiness
and trait sadness facilitated the recognition of congruent emotions and hampered the recognition of incongruent emotions. On the contrary, trait fear and trait
anger facilitated the recognition of complementary emotions, but did not hamper
the recognition of congruent emotions. Therefore, the congruency principle is not
sufficient for understanding the relationship between perceivers’ emotional traits
and their emotion perception. Probably, this relationship can be explained by the
relevance principle (Scherer et al., 2001). The results can be also explained by the
idea that the valence dimension underlies the congruency effect, whereas the
approach-avoidance dimension underlies the complementarity effect.
77
P1.29 Assessing Emotional Intelligence as criteria: theoretical and
research implications
Jose M. Mestre1, Rocio Guil1, Jose Rodriguez-Cordon1,
Juan C. Prez-Gonzalez2, Javier Cejudo3
Universidad de Cadiz1, UNED, Madrid2,
Universidad de Castilla- La Mancha, Ciudad Real3
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a set of abilities (perceiving, using, understanding,
and managing) for the emotional information processing. This point of view
belongs to the four-branches ability model (Mayer & Salovey, 1997); others approaches describe EI as a set of personality traits rather than abilities (v.g. Petrides
& Furnham, 2000). The main discussion between both approaches was to determine whether EI is an intelligence or not without a «winner» approach (Stough,
Saklofske, & Parker, 2009). This investigation is focused in the ability EI approach;
also, it tests if EI (measured with the MSCEIT –Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional
Intelligence Test, 2002) finds some new explanations about this construct. For
first time, MSCEIT scores are considered as criteria, and not as predictive variables,
in order to check whether EI is (or not) an intelligence construct. In a sample of
1064 Spanish undergraduates (73.9% females; age: M= 24.06; SD= 6.74; ranged
from 18 to 54 y. o.) filled MSCEIT and other measures. Personality (BFQ, Big Five
Questionnaire (Spanish), Caprara, Barbaranelli, & Borgogni, 1993); General Intelligence (verbal and non-verbal intelligence) (IGF, Inteligencia General Factorial-5-R,
Yuste, 2002); Attention (d2, Brickenkamp, 2002); Emotion Regulation (ERQ, John
& Gross, 2003), and Affective Style (ASQ, affective style questionnaire, Hoffman
& Kashdam, 2010). Using AMOS program the main findings show that EI should
be encompassed from a broader intelligence perspective rather than a traditional
psychometrical intelligence. MSCEIT finds an accuracy construct validity and reliability. Age and gender are related to the scores of the MSCEIT. Verbal intelligence
is moderate related to MSCEIT (especially Understanding Emotions); nonverbal
intelligence and attention presented a low significance relationship with MSCEIT
scores. Emotion regulation strategies and affective styles present low but significance relationship with MSCEIT scores. Among personality traits, especially openness, show that EI (even measured with a performance test) depends on personality (at least moderately). Findings push to the ability model of EI to consider
how personality traits are involved in the development of EI. Also EI needs a multimethod-multitrait evaluation approach to assess how the kind of measurement
(performance vs. self-report) is involved in the results.
78
P1.30 The mixed blessings of agreeableness in moderating
neuroticism-related response tendencies: greater speed but more
mental noise
Marcel Meyer1, Natalia Lawrence2, Chris Chambers3,
Andrew Lawrence3
Ruhr-Universität Bochum1, University of Exeter2, Cardiff University3
Agreeableness has been linked to improved effortful control (Jensen-Campbell et
al., 2002). Agreeableness has also been shown to buffer the impact of neuroticism on response tendencies (Ode, Robinson, & Wilkowski, 2008; Ode & Robinson,
2009). Neuroticism, in turn, is positively associated with variability in response latencies or mental noise (Robinson & Tamir, 2005). Building on this work, we examined the regulatory function of agreeableness on neuroticism in a speeded choice
task (affective Word-Face Stroop paradigm). Results showed that individuals high
in agreeableness exhibited faster performance, but also more response variability.
These findings constitute an important extension to the mental noise hypothesis,
in showing that neuroticism is not only directly related to performance variability,
but that agreeableness moderates this association. Furthermore, our data lend
support to accounts postulating a facilitatory role of agreeableness in effortful
control.
79
P1.31 The role of facial expression of emotion while eating-together: Preliminary analysis of Japanese female college students
Makoto Nakamura, Nobuyuki Sakai
Utsunomiya University, Tohoku University
Only a limited number of studies investigated the role of facial expression of emotion while eating-together (e.g., Nakamura & Sakai, 2013). This study examined
the relationships among the frequency of smiles, the number of participants, emotions of participants, impressions of the experience and those of an interviewer,
and food and eating-related factors.
Sixteen individuals and eight pairs of Japanese female college students participated in lunch interviews. Before starting the interview, participants were asked to
report the extent of hungriness and health condition. Before, after, and 2-week
after the interview, participants were asked to rate their emotional states along
eleven 7-point scales and impression of the interviewer (present first author)
along three 7-point scales such as familiar, cheerful, and warm. During the interview, the interviewer who ate together with the participant(s) asked them several
questions on food and eating habits. After the interview, participants were again
asked to rate the impression of the experience, that is the lunch interview, along
five 7-point scales such as cheerful, warm, enjoyable, good, and relaxed.
Preliminary analysis of correlations among the variables revealed that hungriness
were negatively correlated to overall frequency of smiles (OFS) for those who participated in the interview as pairs (r = -.553*), while the correlation for the individual participants was positive (r = .356, ns). The rating of warmness of interviewer
before the lunch tended to be positively related to OFS (r = .306). OFS was also
positively related to the satisfaction and favorable impressions of the experience
(r = .347 ~ .700). The correlations among OFS and emotions rated after the interview were relatively complicated but positive correlations were found between
OFS and pleasantness and between OFS and excitement. The correlation between
OFS and the rating of warmness of interviewer after the interview tended to be
positive (r = .343). Interestingly, the positive correlation between OFS and warmness of interviewer was not observed 2-week after the interview.
These results suggest that the smiles during eating-together indicated not only
the physiological and emotional states of the participants but also the impressions of the experience and the interviewer. Further analyses of positive facial
expressions are needed to investigate their function to construct positive relationships among participants while eating-together.
Nakamura, M. & Sakai, N. (2013). The impact of eating-together on facial expression of emotion. Poster presented at 2013 ISRE conference at UC Berkeley.
80
P1.32 Zygomaticus major muscle activity: a measure of
positive emotions?
Nishi Pegwal, Ratna Sharma
Department of Physiology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi
Zygomaticus major muscle has been suggested to be involved in producing the
facial expression of smiling (Tassinary et al., 1989). The use of zygomaticus major
to study affect originated with pioneering research by Schwartz (1976). Since then
there has been mixed reports (e.g., Lang et. al., 1993) questioning the sensitivity of
zygomaticus major muscle as a marker of affect.The purpose of the current study
was to study the effect of different emotional states over facial EMG measured
from zygomaticus major. High arousing negative and positive and low arousing
neutral IAPS (Lange et al., 2008) pictures were used for inducing emotion in normal healthy subjects (n=22). Each subject was exposed to three blocks of emotional pictures (one block each of negative, positive and neutral pictures). The picture
presentation in each block was continuous, with a set of 20 pictures in each block,
each picture being projected for 5 sec. Facial EMG was measured from zygomaticus major at baseline eyes open (100 sec) condition and picture viewing (100 sec)
condition. For quantitative comparison of muscular activity between baseline and
affective picture viewing condition, 100 epochs of 1 sec duration in each condition of artifact free EMG were selected and area under curve was calculated. No
statistically significant difference was found in the extent of muscle contraction
when EMG was recorded during positive, negative or neutral emotional activation,
compared with baseline. These results suggest that there was no distinct effect of
different emotional activation on zygomaticus major muscle and thus this muscle
can not be used as a reliable marker of emotional activation.
81
P1.33 Perceived Self-Society Moral Discrepancies Predict
Depression, but Not Anxiety
Mujde Peker, Nurdan Gundogdu, Rob Booth
Isik University, Istanbul
Discrepancies between one’s own beliefs, standards and practices and the standards expected by others are associated with increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety (see e.g. Higgins, 1987; Tangney, Niedenthal, Covert, & Hill Barlow,
1998). Analogously, second-generation immigrants show increased vulnerability
to depression because of discrepancies between their beliefs, and those of their
parents and/or the society (Céspedes & Huey, 2008; Salant & Lauderdale, 2003).
Perhaps the most important personal standard is morality, one’s standard of acceptable behaviour. We therefore reasoned that perceived discrepancies between
one’s own moral standards and those of society would predict anxious and depressed mood. We tested this hypothesis for the first time, in a sample of 99 female Turkish students. Moral discrepancies were assessed using an adapted moral foundations scale (Graham & Haidt, 2011): participants were asked how much
payment they would require to perform a series of potentially immoral acts, and
how much payment they thought the average person in society would require.
Participants also completed questionnaire measures of depression and anxiety.
Perceived self-society moral discrepancies were significantly related to depression scores, but not to anxiety scores. Furthermore, only discrepancies related to
the moral dimensions of respect for ingroups and avoiding harm were related to
depression. We argue that perceiving a discrepancy between one’s own standards
of behaviour and those of society can increase vulnerability to depression, much
as other kinds of self-other discrepancies can; however, the specific moral standards which predict depression may vary with culture and the characteristics of
the sample.
82
P1.34 Gender differences in emotional response to female perfume
commercials through automatic facial expression analysis
Irene Petratou
PhD candidate
Women and men can emotionally respond differently in emotionally stimulating
commercials. Research has shown that women have more extreme emotional responses to advertising with emotional content than men (Allen and Dorothy, 1976).
In addition, consistent support has been found, also, with regards to gender differences in emotional expression. Specifically, women are more willing to express,
both verbally and implicitly, their inner positive & negative emotions & feelings
than men (Fischer & Dubé, 2005).
Female perfume commercials are emotionally stimulating for men & women. As
a matter of fact, perfume itself is a product that requires special visual cues in
order to be promoted effectively through the visual communication of advertising. Thus, the current study focuses on gender differences in emotional response
to a variety of female perfume commercials through automatic facial expression
analysis.
The method used for this study is Noldus FaceReader6 tool a facial recognition
software that measures and analyzes automatically the 6 basic facial expressions:
happiness, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, as well as, neutral and contempt.
Faces of women and men have been analyzed during exposure to a sample of
female perfume commercials.
The overall emotional response to each commercial has been investigated as well
as the emotion arousal to specific film scenes and the meanings they elicit to
the viewers. In addition, gender differences in specific emotions, such as “anger”,
have been identified with regards to film scenes that communicate sexuality and
sensuality.
A combination of the FaceReader results and the data obtained from self- report
questionnaires shows gender differences in the emotion expression and the
overall emotion arousal towards each different female perfume commercial. In
addition, this study reveals areas for investigation since it sheds light to the parameters & factors that can influence women’s and men’s affective responses to
perfume advertising.
83
P1.35 Awe: A positive emotion, but tinged with sadness
Claire Prade, Vassilis Saroglou
Université de Louvain
Awe is defined as the positive emotion elicited by vast stimuli such as natural
landscapes, sunsets, or impressive pieces of art. However, awe is theorized to be
a complex emotion, possibly combining positive with less positive components
(Otto, 1970; see also Keltner, 2003). What these components are? To analyze the affective components of awe, we gathered data of five studies in which participants
were asked to evaluate their affective states on the same each time 10-item scale.
Data of 1168 participants (age: M = 23.76, SD = 8.84; 916 women; 96% Europeans)
initially distributed in five studies (n1 = 269, n2 = 127, n3 = 170, n4 = 392, n5 = 210)
were gathered. Participants across studies were randomly assigned to one of several conditions, i.e. awe (n = 326), joy (n = 229), amusement (n = 263), or neutral (n =
350). In each condition, participants were asked to either recall a past experience
or to watch a short video, designed to elicit the target emotion (i.e. awe, joy, or
amusement) or no specific emotion (neutral). Afterwards they were asked to indicate how strongly they felt 10 affective states (awe, fascination, curiosity, sadness,
amusement, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, pride, determination). Results showed
that in the awe condition, participants experienced more awe, but also more fascination, curiosity, and interestingly more sadness, compared to joy, amusement,
or neutral conditions, and this among both men and women. However, in the awe
condition, the intensity with which participants felt each of these affective states
depended on gender. Whereas after awe induction women reported to have felt
awe and fascination more intensively than men, the latter reported more curiosity and determination than women. These results provide considerable insight
into the possible complexity of the emotion of awe and its affective components,
which also include a key negative component: sadness. Finally, though both men
and women similarly experience awe as a specific emotion, i.e. different from
other positive ones, they seem differently affected by its specific components.
84
P1.36 Correspondence between emotional states and levels of
visual information processing
Tatiana Pryakhina
Emotion influence on the focus of attention is well documented in the literature
on affective modulation of cognitive processes. According to Fredrickson, positive
emotions broaden the scope of attention, cognition, and action (Fredrickson &
Branigan 2005). However, the role of negative emotions, which can narrow the
focus of attention, is controversial. Gable and Harmon-Jones suggest that motivational intensity, not valence, influences the focus of attention (Gable & HarmonJones, 2010). In our study, we tested predictions of these two theories. Participants
(n=50) were given questionnaires that measured motivational intensity and valence of their emotional states, than they performed cognitive task on levels of
visual information processing (Kimchi & Palmer, 1982). No significant correlations
were found between motivational intensity and a local level of visual information
processing, as well as between positive emotions and a global level of visual information processing. These results show that variability of everyday moods is not
sufficient for finding emotion influence on the scope of attention. Larger effects
of emotions on cognitive processes can be obtained with the use of mood induction procedures.
85
P1.37 Does gaze direction serve an emotion regulatory goal in
older adults?
Alejandra Rodriguez, Sandrine Vieillard
Laboratoire de Psychologie, University of Franche-Comté, Besançon
Important changes in emotional information processing [1, 2] have been described to take place in advancing age. For instance, it has been reported that older
adults display attentional preferences in favor of positive over negative information [3, 4, 5]. An important question nowadays is whether these positivity effects
in attention could constitute a strategy for emotion regulation in older adults [6]
since in contrast with more cognitive costly strategies such as reappraisal, looking away from sources of negative emotion could be a successful way to diminish their emotional impact. The present study aimed to examine age-related
changes in gaze direction as an emotion regulation tool by extending Isaacowitz’s
[7] findings with a new procedure that controlled more accurately the emotional
congruence link between the visual targets (happy vs. scared vs. neutral faces) and
the emotional congruence/non-congruence context (happy music vs. scary music
vs. silence) as well as the personal relevance of the visual stimuli (young faces vs.
older faces). Forty-eight young adults and 45 older adults were instructed to look
at triads of facial expressions while listening to music and their eye movements
were tracked. Participants’ emotional ratings (intensity of emotional feeling) and
physiological arousal (SCL) in response to the musical excerpts were also collected. Results indicated that older adults reported experiencing more happiness
than their younger counterparts when listening to happy musical excerpts. As
expected, both younger and older adults showed higher physiological response in
music condition than in silence condition that was similar regardless of the musical emotion (happy/scary). Eye-tracking analyses revealed that, as expected, older
adults displayed positivity effects during the silence condition. While listening to
happy excerpts, both age groups displayed a congruence effect that translated
into a preference for the same expression of emotion category. During scary music, the same pattern was observed, but only for young adults. In older adults, gaze
patterns did not serve an active strategy of emotion regulation by diminishing
the impact of the scary music while preferentially looking at happy faces. These
findings are in line with recent findings [8] and challenge Socioemotional Selectivity Theory’s postulate of direct causal link between positivity effect and emotion
regulation in older adults.
86
P1.38 ‘Lovecircles’ - Emotions Based Professional Development
Programme for Educators
HIily Rosenblum
Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.
This study critiques ‘Lovecircles’, an original emotions-based professional development programme for educators. The education programme is grounded in
holistic-humanistic theories (Buber, 1965; Vygotsky, 1991; Maslow, 1998) aiming to
achieve educators’ personal-emotional empowerment for their professional development. This approach views integration of emotions in teacher education as an
integral part of their overall growth, essential for creating an atmosphere of trust
with pupils as well as conducting an empathetic and respectful teacher-pupil dialogue (Korthagen, 2010; Hargreaves, 2011; Oplatka, 2011; Day, 2012) .
The research is an evaluative phenomenological research study focusing on the
experiences and perceptions of the educators from their own perspectives. The
research evaluates the impact of the ‘Lovecircles’ programme on eleven educators
participating in a one-year programme. The main research tools are in-depth interviews, reflective diaries of the participants and the researcher as well as observations by video and stills photographs.
The key research findings indicate that participants overcame emotional barriers during the programme, developed attention to themselves and to others
and developed self-expression of emotions by integrating arts into learning. This
empowered them on the personal level and as educators. The main factors facilitating the participants’ personal and professional development seem to be the
programme tutors’ attention to personal and professional dimensions of participants, the use of varied and creative teaching methods of integrating modalities
from Expressive Art Therapy - plastic art, movement and drama.
This study contributes to debate on the place of emotions within professional
development programmes and therefore has a universal contribution, as it suits
other cultures in other countries. Therefore, looking ahead, further research needs
to encourage research of teachers’ emotions in Israel, both for in-service and preservice teachers, and create theoretical-empirical knowledge based on teachers’
emotions.
Significant dilemmas regarding teachers’ emotions have been addressed in this
study. Yet, in order to further develop teachers’ emotional awareness, further research is suggested concerning the relationship between emotions and learning
such as the means to promote emotional communication in the classroom. In this
light the factors facilitating and inhibiting displays of emotion among teachers
and how the lack of regard for emotional development and management of this
can be addressed in the era of accountability.
87
P1.39 The social influence of competitive and cooperative emotions
in interpersonal and nested social dilemmas
Magdalena Rychlowska, Job van der Schalk, Antony Manstead
Cardiff University
The present research investigates whether and how emotions may promote fairness and cooperation in both interpersonal and nested social dilemmas. In a first
set of studies, participants were exposed to an exemplar who made a fair or unfair
division in a resource allocation game and expressed pride or regret about this
decision. Participants then made their own resource allocation decisions. Participants’ own allocations were significantly affected by these emotional expressions, such that the exemplar’s competitive emotions (regret about fair decisions,
pride about unfair decisions) decreased the likelihood of participants making fair
decisions. Conversely, the exemplar’s cooperative emotions (regret about unfair
decisions, pride about fair decisions) increased participants’ fairness. The effects
of emotional expressions on subsequent resource allocations were mediated by
observers’ anticipated emotions of pride and regret. This suggests that exemplars’ emotions influence observers’ fairness by affecting how observers think
they will feel if they behave fairly or unfairly. The second set of studies builds on
these findings by investigating the effects of cooperative and competitive emotions in intergroup nested social dilemmas, where individual interests are at odds
with the interests of a group or of a larger collective. We examine how emotions
interact with self-categorization in two different scenarios (adapted from Wit &
Kerr, 2002): one referring to the Ebola epidemic, and the other to a neighbourhood
improvement scheme. Participants were led to categorize themselves as individuals, members of subgroups, or members of a larger collective, and then exposed
to out-group exemplars who displayed cooperative or competitive emotions in
relation to allocation decisions that did not benefit the superordinate collective.
Together, the studies reveal that other people’s emotions shape observers’ greed
or fairness.
88
P1.40 Worry, rumination, and temporal focus: investigating
psychiatric questions using large-scale online data
Simon Schweighofer, David Garcia, Adiya Abisheva, Frank Schweitzer
ETH Zurich
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depression (MD) are both characterized by the presence of repetitive thought. It has been hypothesized that repetitive thought is rather future-oriented in GAD (‘worry’) and past oriented in MD
(‘rumination’; [1,2]). We explored the connection between sadness, anxiety, and
temporal orientation by analyzing a large-scale sample of natural language expression, namely 9 million Twitter public messages (tweets), posted between 2010
and 2012. We processed each tweet through the LIWC psycholinguistics method,
to detect tweets that signal states of anxiety and sadness, as well as references
to the future and to the past. We found that sad and anxious tweets both have a
higher focus on the past, a lower focus on the present, and a similar focus on the
future compared to tweets in general. This is in keeping with studies showing
that negative events can cause a shift of attention towards the past, which in
turn impedes coping with those events [3,4]. Sad and anxious tweets however
can barely be differentiated regarding their temporal orientation. Either sub-clinical anxiousness and sadness have different temporal-focus signatures than GAD
and MD, or the hypothesis of different temporal foci in worry and rumination can
simply not be upheld, in line with previous findings [5,6]. Besides presenting our
results, we would like to discuss the design of an algorithm to detect rumination
and worry in text.
89
P1.41 Subtle facial expressions convey information about cognitive
appraisals of emotion-eliciting situations
Ilaria Sergi1, Chiara Fiorentini1, Susanna Schmidt3,
Ben Meuleman1, Klaus Scherer1
University of Geneva1, University of Turin3
Facial expressions represent important cues for social interaction, allowing us
to adapt our behavior to widely varying situational demands. A long-standing
debate concerns the kind of information that we can gather from others’ facial
expressions. So far, research on this topic has largely relied on forced-choice paradigms, applying broad categorical emotion labels (e.g., happy), but this approach
assumes that we read others’ expressions in a holistic fashion from the whole
face. However, by adopting a basic emotions approach, other important cues carried by facial actions might be neglected. Componential emotion theories argue
that individual elements facial actions are determined by appraisal results and
their effects on motor behavior. Specifically, it is assumed that individual facial
actions convey information about the expresser’s cognitive appraisal of an emotional-eliciting situation and that these internal appraisals can thus be inferred
by observers. The Component Process Model (CPM; Scherer, 1984, 2009) provides a
theoretical framework about the nature of facial expression of emotions and their
underlying mechanisms, linking specific appraisal criteria to specific facial actions.
In the present study, we conducted empirical tests of this hypothesis, validating
the CPM predictions. We identified 42 combinations of facial actions (Action Units,
AUs), and created dynamic facial expressions with the FACSGen software (Roesch
et al., 2011). Fifteen judges rated each of the resulting 126 facial expression videoclips in terms of eight appraisal dimensions on continuous scales. Results showed
that observers were capable of inferring some appraisal dimensions reliably from
facial expression but generally resorted to more undifferentiated positive-negative distinctions. Correlational and cluster analysis showed that the appraisal
ratings were strongly dominated by the valence dimension. When controlling for
this valence effect, ANOVAs and stepwise regression models supported configurational hypotheses (differences in ratings between groups of combinations) as well
as one-to-one links between specific AUs and specific appraisal criteria. However,
in this study individual appraisal categories cannot be fully discriminated, even if
most CPM’s predictions are confirmed, because of the lack of specificity of appraisals inferred from AU combinations. Therefore, we decided to design a new study
to avoid some limitations of the earlier study by presenting participants with a
forced-choice between appraisal categories, controlling for differences in valence.
We expect that subjects’ ratings will gravitate toward the most salient alternative
in a multiple choice list, regardless of subtle valence differences they might perceive, allowing to determine whether subjects can actually differentiate between
the major appraisal dimensions of interest.
90
P1.42 Is sadness only one emotion?
Mariko Shirai, Naoto Suzuki
Doshisha University, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Sadness occurs when one losses a valued person or when one isn’t able to achieve
a goal. Are these really same? In Shirai and Suzuki (2014), the same emotional
category of sadness had different characteristics based on subjective ratings.
In addition, many studies have tried to reveal the specific autonomic responses
among emotions, while sadness is still an uncertainty and results are inconsistent
(Cacioppo, Bernston, Larsen, Poehlmann, & Ito, 2000). One possibility is that the
different sadness shown at subjective level reflects a difference in physiological
responses. We examined whether sadness elicited by two different situations has
different physiological response or not.
In present study, seventy-two subjects performed an imaginary task. Each subject
was asked to imagine one situation of three; “loss”, “unable to achieve a goal” and
“daily” situations for about four minutes. Subjective emotional ratings and physiological measures were assessed. Heart rate (HR), systolic and diastolic arterial
pressure (SBP & DBP), skin conductance level (SCL) and Heart rate variability were
measured during the imaginary task. The results of subjective ratings indicated
that sadness and anxiety were mixed in “loss” condition, while sadness, anger and
disgust were mixed in “unable to achieve a goal” condition. As for the results of
physiological measures, SCL in “loss” condition was higher than in “daily” condition. Also, DBP increased only in “loss” condition during the task. The other ratings
didn’t show any changes among the three conditions.
Findings suggest that sadness elicited by two different situations has the slight
different response in subjective ratings and physiological measures (SCL & DBP).
However a clear difference was not found in physiological measures among these
sadness situations. To clarify the difference within sadness as the same emotional
categories, we need to further explore by using another physiological measures.
91
P1.43 The subjective representation of happiness and unhappiness
Igor Sotgiu
University of Bergamo
While most happiness scholars are devoting their efforts to develop empirical
indicators of how citizens from various countries feel satisfied with their lives, in
the past decade several researchers have started to investigate the folk psychology of happiness, namely how common people represent the concept of happiness and its semantic space (e.g., Lu & Gilmour, 2004; Pflug, 2009). The present
study extends previous research in this field by jointly investigating the naive
conceptions of both happiness and unhappiness in a sample of Italian undergraduates. One hundred and seventy-eight psychology students (29 males, 149
females) participated in a questionnaire study. The questionnaire had two sections, which were administered in a counterbalanced order across respondents.
More specifically, in one section, participants were asked to write down at least
five things that made them feel happy (“happiness components”); by contrast, in
the other section, they were asked to write down at least five things that made
them feel unhappy (“unhappiness components”). Importantly, in both sections,
participants were asked to evaluate to what extent each component of happiness/unhappiness was present in their life at the time of the investigation. Two
single items measuring the participants’ levels of overall happiness/unhappiness
were also administered. The qualitative analysis of free responses given by participants yielded to the identification of 26 categories of happiness components and
25 categories of unhappiness components. When looking at the semantic content
of these categories, it emerges that the participants’ representation of happiness
and unhappiness was organized around similar themes (e.g., family, love, health).
However, the perceived salience of some of these themes − assessed in terms of
frequency of citation and average ranking of happiness and unhappiness components − significantly varied between the two investigated concepts. With regard
to the measurement of participants’ levels of happiness and unhappiness, on average, respondents considered themselves as moderately happy and only scarcely
unhappy. Notably, participants assessed their life as less unhappy when providing
a global evaluation about it as opposed to when they rated a list of specific selfreported unhappiness components. Theoretical and empirical implications of the
study are discussed.
92
P1.44 Expressions of pride and personal triumph:
An investigation of natural expressions when achieving and
celebrating long-term goal
Gavin Sullivan
Coventry University
Prototypical expressions of pride are reliably identified in images as a combination
of several components: a small smile, direct gaze, head raised at a 15 degree angle,
chest out and arms akimbo or raised in the air (Tracy & Robins, 2004). Research on
expressions of personal triumph highlights the importance of making a fist and
what appears to be anger as central features of this expressive form (Matsumoto
& Hwang, 2012). Accordingly, while the positive emotions that occur in contexts of
personal achievement can broadly be described as pride rather than joy, happiness
or relief, there are complex combinations of natural expressions which suggest
the importance of dynamic combinations of components (sometimes including
those associated with components of shame) over time in non-prototypical mixed
forms. The outcomes and implications of three studies are described: The first study investigated naturalistic expressions of emotion at the end of a marathon. The
second study examined the bodily and facial expressions of Olympic gold medal
winners at three key points: the moment of victory, the presentation of the medal
and during the playing of the winning athlete’s national anthem. A third study
which explores the identification of selected instances of emotions in these two
situations is outlined. The interpretation of the results of these studies is presented in terms of the implications for theories of emotion expression in which
dynamic displays convey complex information about the person, the strength of
their motivation, and the importance of the goal. The emotional impact on the observer is also discussed and some recommendations are made for future research
in which qualitative and discursive single case designs are also used to generate
new social and relational theories.
93
P1.45 Remembering and forgetting emotional faces
Peter KC Tay, Hwajin Yang
Singapore Management University
Review and goals
Intentional forgetting—which refers to the ability to forget information that is
designated as unimportant—has been studied empirically using the directed forgetting (DF) paradigm. In this, participants are presented with a series of items
that are cued to either remember or forget during the study phase, and their
memory for all is tested subsequently. Research using this paradigm has typically demonstrated forgetting costs, which refer to the impaired memory for the
to-be-forgotten items relative to the to-be-remembered items (for a review, see
MacLeod, 1998). The literature on DF suggests that negatively charged emotional
material (e.g., pictorial or verbal stimuli) are resistant to forgetting (i.e., attenuated forgetting costs) as they are perceptually more salient and easier to capture
attention, all of which will lead to better memory retention. Given that the literature has almost exclusively focused on either emotional words or pictures, however, the question arises as to whether such resistance to forgetting can similarly
observed for other types of material such as emotional faces (e.g., happy, angry)
which are complex and unique, requiring different cognitive processes compared
to words and pictures.
Methods
146 participants (73 females) were presented with 48 emotional faces with equal
number of happy and angry, and male and female faces. Following the typical DF
paradigm, half the faces were followed by a cue to remember and the remaining
half a cue to forget. After that, all participants were given a surprise recognition
memory test for 96 neutral faces and asked to indicate if they had seen the face
(“OLD”) or not (“NEW”), including those cued to forget.
Results
We found that forgetting costs were moderated by the facial emotion (happy,
angry), F(1, 144)=6.19, p=.01, and sex of the participant, F(1, 144)=3.79, p=.05. Specifically, these indicate that (a) angry faces were resistant to forgetting, while happy
faces were not and (b) forgetting costs were evident among female participants
only. Overall, angry male faces were recognized more frequently than happy male
faces, while happy female faces were recognized more frequently angry female
faces.
Discussion
Together, our findings suggest that forgetting emotional faces may implicate
different mechanisms from those underlying remembering. Our study also underscores the importance of sex differences when processing emotional faces in
directed forgetting.
94
P1.46 Employee-Customer Emotion Fit:
Implications for Service Interactions
Veronique Tran
ESCP Europe, Business School, Paris
Extant research has largely situated service employees as the primary regulator
and transmitter of emotion (see Bono & Vey, 2005 for a review). Yet, customers
may play a more central role in the emotional exchange during service encounters.
Given the dynamic, reciprocal nature of most interpersonal exchanges, employees
and customers both perform emotional regulation to adjust and respond to the
situation and to the interaction partner. This may result in emotional convergence
or divergence, a process that can not only shape subsequent interactions but also
yield positive or negative outcomes, such as employee satisfaction or stress, customer satisfaction/loyalty or stress.
Building on emotion regulation research (Grandey, 2000; 2003; Gross & Thompson, 2007), and social interaction models of emotion regulation (Côté, 2005), this
paper discusses the concept of emotion fit.
We propose the term emotion fit to refer to the ability of one individual to influence the emotional state of another, depending on the valence of emotions,
on the authenticity of the display, and on each individual’s preference for - or tolerance of – the other person’s particular emotional “style”. Emotion fit reflects the
ability of an individual to anticipate and respond to the emotional preferences of
their interaction partner.
Our claims have significant implications for the emotion regulation literature, as
they suggest the management of feeling will be most effective when matched to
meet, or fit with, the characteristics of one’s interaction partner. In this conceptual work, we will focus on further defining the emotion fit construct as well as on
delineating different types of fit.
95
P1.47 The impact of interpersonal emotion dysregulation in people
experiencing homelessness
Zoe Walter, Genevieve Dingle, Jolanda Jetten
University of Queensland
The ability to regulate emotions appropriately in response to situational demands
may be particularly important for the mental wellbeing of people experiencing
homelessness. Homelessness is a time of stress and uncertainty, and people experiencing homelessness have an increased risk of developing mental health problems and social isolation (Busch-Geertsema, Edgar, O’Sullivan, & Pleace, 2010).
However, the role of emotion regulation for people’s health and wellbeing during
homelessness is an unexplored area. The current study focuses on clients of homeless accommodation services (N = 119) while they are residing at the service,
after leaving the service (or three months after initial time-point) and a year after
initial time-point. In the current study we aimed to examine the relationships
between emotion regulation, social support, and wellbeing outcomes. In particular, we examined how emotion regulation could affect social support outcomes,
and the relationship between social support and wellbeing. Additionally, we also
examined how social support can influence emotion regulation. This conceptualisation of interpersonal emotion regulation processes incorporates the view
that our emotions and subsequent behaviours occur in a social context: others
can influence our emotions and emotion regulation, and in turn these factors
can influence others. There are various models of assessing emotion dysregulation; in this study we used the well-established six factor model assessed by
the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Results
showed that emotion dysregulation was higher in the current sample compared
to published norms, and emotion regulation difficulties were associated with less
perceived social support and life satisfaction, and higher rates of social isolation,
negative mood, and alcohol abuse across time. Using linear multilevel models for
longitudinal data, we found evidence that emotion regulation plays both a direct
and indirect role in wellbeing, with social support as a mediator. Interestingly,
we also found support for the reverse mediation – higher social support predicts
lower levels of emotion dysregulation at the subsequent time point, and this is
an indirect pathway through which social support can influence wellbeing. We
conclude that emotion dysregulation may provide a target for prevention and intervention programs for people who are experiencing homelessness and extends
social psychological theorising in homelessness by demonstrating an interplay
between emotion regulation and social factors in this disadvantaged population.
96
P1.48 Evidence and a Potential Explanation of Collective Emotions
in Sport Teams
Svenja Anna Wolf1, Jens Kleinert2
University of British Columbia1, German Sport University Cologne, German Research Centre of Elite Sport (momentum)2
Collective emotions can be desirable or undesirable, depending on their specific
type and context. For example, in sport a whole team of athletes exhibiting precompetitive anxiety would be undesirable because such a state is likely to inhibit
performance. To avoid such a situation we need to know how it initially develops.
As one of the avenues suggested by von Scheve and Ismer (2013), in the present
study, we explored if common environmental factors accounted for teammates’
convergence in precompetitive feeling states. In this context, 386 intercollegiate
athletes from 27 integrated sport teams completed a measure of precompetitive
anxiety symptom intensity and interpretation of these symptoms as facilitative or
debilitative to performance (Jones & Swain, 1992; Martens, Burton, Vealey, Bump,
& Smith, 1990). As environmental factors, we recorded game location (home vs.
away), previous team performance (team-ranking), and opponent-strength (opponent-ranking). Unconditional intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) indicated
similarities in teammates’ symptom intensity (somatic r = .086, SE = 0.01, p = .040;
cognitive r = .083, SE = 0.03, p = .043) but not symptom interpretation (somatic
and cognitive r = 0.00, SE = 0.00). Multilevel regression analyses showed opponent-strength was the main factor that accounted for these similarities (conditional ICCs somatic r = .049, SE = 0.01, p = .219; cognitive r = .020, SE = 0.01, p =
.480). Results therefore support common environmental factors, such as facing
the same opponent in a team-competition, as potential contributors to the intensity of collective emotions in sport. However, results also suggest that not all
components of athletes’ precompetitive feeling states are subject to convergence
effects. Consequently, when trying to optimize teams’ emotional states we should
focus on both collective strategies that address the environment (e.g., through
simulation) as well as individual strategies that address more personal concerns
and resources.
97
P1.49 Does social exclusion lead to eating unhealthy food?
Giorgia Zamariola, Olivier Luminet, Olivier Corneille
Université Catholique de Louvain
Introduction
In psychosomatic theory, emotional eating is described as the tendency to overeat, in particular unhealthy food (Macht, 2008), in response to negative emotions
(Bruch, 1973; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1975). This behavior could be due to a difficulty
in distinguishing hunger from other internal states or using food to reduce emotional distress. Other authors suggested that it could be a consequence of the
inability to regulate negative emotions (Evers et al., 2010).
Aim of the study
The main goal of the study was to see if social exclusion, and the negative emotions experienced after such context, are more likely to lead the participants to
choose unhealthy (comfort) food instead of healthy (non-comfort) food. Moreover, we hypothesized that socially excluded participants, compared to the social
included ones, would focus more attention on unhealthy food in an implicit visual
task. We also tested whether emotional eating can act as moderator in the relation between social exclusion and food choice.
Methods
50 healthy participants took part in the study. In order to induce social exclusion,
the Cyberball software was used. Participants were assigned, in counterbalanced
order, to the exclusion or inclusion conditions. After the Cyberball, participants
were invited to choose a gift from two bowls, one with chocolate bars and one
with apple bars. In the second part of the experiment, a manipulation check questionnaire was administered and then participants performed an implicit visual
task with pictures of objects, animals, healthy and unhealthy food. Participants
had 1 second to look at the pictures and 25 seconds to write down as many images
as they could remember. Lastly, the French version of the Eating Behavior Questionnaire to assess emotional eating (Bailly et al., 2012) and the Nutrition Involvement Scale (Chandon and Wansink, 2007) were administered.
Results
We expect to find that people in the exclusion condition, compared to the subjects in the inclusion one, will choose in higher percentage the chocolate (comfort) bar and they will report more names of unhealthy, instead of healthy, food in
the visual task. People who will score higher in the Eating Behavior Questionnaire
will be more likely to show this emotional eating behavior.
Discussion
These findings could increase our knowledge on eating behavior and emotional
eating and help us understand which kind of negative emotions can lead to overeat unhealthy food.
98
P1.50 Age-related changes in brain activity during implicit and
explicit processing of fearful facial expressions
Isabella Zsoldos1, Emilie Cousin2, Yanica Klein-Koerkamp2,
Cédric Pichat2, Pascal Hot1
Université de Savoie1, Université Pierre Mendès2
By taking into account the distinction between explicit and implicit brain processing of emotional information, growing evidence suggests that healthy old adults
[HOA] have difficulties recognizing some emotional facial expressions such as
fear, anger and sadness (Calder et al., 2003; Isaacowitz et al., 2007), while their
ability to unconsciously process emotions seems preserved (Garcia Rodriguez et
al., 2009; LaBar et al., 2005). Changes with aging have been reported in the brain
substrates of conscious recognition of emotional expressions (Gunning-Dixon et
al., 2003; Fusar-Poli et al., 2009), but it remains largely unknown whether automatic processing relies on a similar functional network in older and young adults.
By comparing cerebral activity during explicit and implicit processing of emotional facial expressions in young and older adults, we expected to show a similar
cerebral network activated between the two groups during implicit processing,
and we expected less structures activated in HOA than in young adults during
explicit processing, accounting for a worse recognition of fear in HOA.
14 young (mean age= 23.9) and 13 older (mean age= 70) adults took part in the
experiment. During fMRI acquisition, the participants were presented with fearful
and neutral faces and performed two tasks using a GO/NOGO paradigm. During
the ‘implicit’ task, participants were instructed to judge the gender of the faces. In
the ‘explicit’ task, they had to judge the emotion displayed by the faces.
The behavioral results suggest that HOA make more mistakes than young adults
while recognizing fear explicitly.
Analysis of functional data showed that a large frontal, temporal and parietal
network was activated in young adults for the two tasks combined, compared to
HOA. No specific activation was observed for HOA when compared to the young
adults.
Interaction showed that frontal regions (inferior frontal gyrus and left insula)
were more activated in the explicit than in the implicit task in young adults compared to HOA, who activated these regions more in the implicit condition.
In parallel, temporal structures (left and right hippocampus and left amygdala)
were more activated in the implicit than in the explicit condition in young adults
compared to HOA, who activated these regions more in the explicit task.
Our results suggest a reversed pattern for cerebral functionality between young
and older adults, when comparing conscious and automatic processing of fear.
This functional modification is accompanied by a worse recognition of fear in
HOA compared with young adults.
99
Symposium S2.1
An interdisciplinary investigation into the effects
of nine months of mental training
Conveners
Philipp Kanske
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
The ReSource Project is a large-scale longitudinal study on the effects of meditation and mental training on brain, physiology, subjective experience, decision
making and prosocial behavior. Over nine months, 180 participants went through
intensive training in various contemplative practices, including multiple retreats,
weekly instructions, and daily exercises resulting in over 10 000 hours of practice.
This panel will be a comprehensive and interdisciplinary presentation of the training-related changes.
Participants underwent a structured curriculum in three different 3-months training modules. All participants were first trained in breath and body focused meditations that emphasize interoceptive awareness and attentional skills (Presence
Module). Subsequently, half of the participants were trained in mental techniques
that cultivate affective and motivational dispositions such as loving-kindness and
compassion (Affective Module). This training was followed by a third module targeting metacognitive dispositions such as awareness of thoughts and cognitive
perspective taking on self and others (Perspective Module). The other half of the
participants completed the Affective and Perspective Modules in the reversed order. Importantly, the Affective and Perspective Modules included structured dyadic exercises in addition to classic meditation techniques.
Results show differential training effects of the different modules. First we report
findings of daily practice related subjective experience in affect, warmth, thought
contents, meta-cognitive abilities, present-focus, and body awareness. Second, we
identified different forces underlying human social behavior, such as prosocial
motivation, norm compliance and strategizing. The different training modules
induced differential effects on these sub-components of human prosociality: the
Affect Module was particularly effective in enhancing prosocial motivation whereas the Perspective Module led to strongest decreases in norm-driven punishment behavior. Third, mental training reduced stress assessed on the subjective,
sympathetic, and endocrine (i.e. cortisol) level, with the Affective Module yielding
the strongest stress-buffering effect. Finally, using a newly developed video task,
the EmpaToM, we found evidence for module-specific behavioral and neural plasticity in affective and cognitive capacities of social cognition (empathy, compassion, Theory of Mind).
Together, the presented data comprehensively characterize mental training-related changes on the level of subjective experience, brain, hormones and behavior
elicited through a nine months long training. The modular structure of the ReSource curriculum allows studying the specific effects of different types of mental training practices. Whereas some practices are more efficient in influencing
Theory of Mind abilities and norm-driven behavior, others are most efficient in
increasing positive affect, warmth and prosocial behavior while at the same time
decreasing stress. These findings have not only important implications for the basic understanding of mechanisms underlying the plasticity of the social brain as
well as human physiology, prosociality, and subjective well-being, but also for the
construction of intervention programs aiming at fostering mental and physical
health in education, clinical settings, and society in general.
100
Differential Psychological Fingerprints of Reported Subjective
Experiences During and After Four Types of Mental Practices
Bethany Kok, Tania Singer
An important frontier in the scientific study of meditation is to go beyond studying the global training effects of single practices to explore whether different
meditative practices have specific, differentiated effects.
Here we compare the day-to-day reports of 180 participants (mean age 41, age
range 20 to 55, 61% female) in a 9-month long mental training study, the ReSource
Project. Participants were asked to meditate 5 times a week, using guided recordings provided online. Before and after each meditation session, questions assessed affect, warmth, thought contents, meta-cognitive abilities, present-focus,
and body awareness.
Using multilevel modeling to analyze a total of almost 29,000 daily reports representing over 10,000 hours of meditation, we found that the four core meditations were characterized by specific patterns of experience. All four practices
were characterized by increased positive affect and energy, a greater experience of
presence and body awareness, and an improved ability to detach from thoughts.
Practicing body scan led to the greatest increase in body awareness and the greatest decrease in thought content. Loving-kindness practice increased feelings of
warmth and positive thoughts. Observing thoughts increased meta-cognitive
awareness of mental activities. These findings suggest that although different
types of meditation may share joint experiences, each practice also comes with
distinct psychological fingerprint.
The observed differences among the practices carry significant implications for
the use of meditation as an applied intervention. For example, the body scan
seems best suited to cultivate body awareness and may be useful for treatment
of body dysmorphic disorders. Loving kindness is better able to improve positive
affect and thoughts, and thus may be an appropriate therapy for depression or anxiety. Observing thoughts, in contrast, may be preferred if the focus is to increase
awareness of the contents of mind without changing that content, as in some
forms of cognitive-based therapy.
101
The Structure of Human Prosociality and its Plasticity:
Module-Specific Changes in Subcomponents of Social Behavior
Anne Böckler1, Anita Tusche2, Tania Singer1
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences1,
California Institute of Technology2
Prosocial behavior is at the heart of functioning societies. In order to investigate
the structure of human prosociality, approaches from different research traditions were integrated, ranging from self-reports to economic games and computer-based psychological experiments. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor
analyses in 187 participants (mean age 41, age range 20 to 55, 61% female) we
identified four reliable and independent factors of human social behavior: prosocial motivation, norm driven behavior, strategizing and self-reported prosociality.
After having identified these four subcomponents, we investigated how these
changed as a function of subjects practicing different types of mental training
techniques throughout three different 3-month long training modules focusing
on a) attention and interoceptive awareness (Presence), b) loving kindness and
prosocial motivation (Affective), and c) metacognitive skills as well as perspective
taking on self and others (Perspective). Results revealed that prosocial motivation
was enhanced by all three modules, but most efficiently after the affect-based
training. Norm-driven behavior in contrast was reduced by all practices, but mostly so by the metacognition and perspective taking based training. Interestingly,
changes in self-reported prosociality did not correlate with changes in actually
observed prosocial or norm-driven behavior. Thus, the present results provide
evidence that the tendency to consider oneself as prosocial does not necessarily
relate to one’s actual prosocial behavior neither before nor after training. Moreover, we show that prosocial preferences and behavior are not stable, but can be
differentially altered by engaging some months in specific mental training practices. This has theoretical and practical implications for economical and psychological research as well as for large-scale trainings that aim for societal changes and
caring economics.
102
Different Types of Mental Training are More or Less Efficient in
Reducing Stress on the Subjective and Hormonal Level
Veronika Engert, Bethany Kok, Tania Singer
Stress has become a major health threat in today’s fast-paced society. Emerging
research indicates that meditation and mental training may have beneficial effects across a spectrum of stress-related health conditions. When investigating
the effects of meditation training, most studies have however limited their focus
to the effect of mindfulness practice on the basal regulation of stress-reactive
systems. In the scope of the ReSource Project, a large-scale longitudinal study with
187 participants (mean age 41, age range 20 to 55, 61% female), we investigated
how endocrine (cortisol), sympathetic (alpha-amylase) and subjective-psychological responses to acute psychosocial stress change due to specific contemplative
practices that emphasize a) attention and interoceptive awareness (Presence), b)
loving kindness and prosocial motivation (Affective), and c) metacognitive skills as
well as perspective taking on self and others (Perspective). Results revealed that
while a 3-month inaugural training of interoceptive body awareness and attention failed to have an effect on acute stress reactivity, the Affective and Perspective Modules significantly reduced cortisol, alpha-amylase and subjective-psychological stress responses. Overall, participants showed the lowest stress-induced
rise in cortisol, subjective arousal, anxiety and depressed mood after a 3-month
training of loving kindness and prosocial motivation. The present results provide
evidence that stress reactivity is differentially affected by different types of mental training practice, whereby techniques focusing on improving loving kindness
and compassion seem to be most promising in buffering stress.
103
Training Compassion and Theory of Mind Separately:
Differential Effects on Socio-Affective & Socio-Cognitive Abilities
Philipp Kanske, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein, Anne Böckler, Tania Singer
Social neuroscience has identified different neural networks, a more affective
(empathy and compassion) and a more cognitive route (Theory of Mind (ToM))
to the understanding of others. While the anterior insula (AI) is critically involved
when empathizing with the pain of another person, experiencing compassion for
another’s suffering activates a different network including the ventral striatum.
ToM tasks, in contrast, engage the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), temporal poles
(TP) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). To study the separability and interrelations of these neural networks as well as their plasticity, we developed a novel
paradigm, the EmpaToM.
In the EmpaToM task, participants were presented with naturalistic video stimuli
in which people recount autobiographical episodes that are either emotional or
neutral. Each video is followed by empathy and compassion ratings and questions
about the content of the video that probe ToM. Participants were tested before
and after each training module in a 3T Scanner.
At baseline, emotional vs. neutral videos increased activity in bilateral AI, which
parametrically modulated with subjective empathy ratings. Compassion ratings,
in contrast, covaried with activity in the ventral striatum. ToM activated bilateral TPJ, TP and MPFC. Inter-individual differences in the activity of these networks
were uncorrelated, suggesting independence of these socio-affective and -cognitive abilities. Training in the Perspective, but not the Presence or Affective Module,
enhanced performance in ToM questions. The compassion ratings, in contrast, increased more after the Affective and Perspective module, not so however after the
Presence module. Similarly, differential change was also observed with regards to
the neural networks underlying compassion and ToM.
The present results confirm that the neural networks underlying empathy, compassion and ToM can be reliably identified within a single task and also demonstrate their independence on an inter-individual level – strong empathizers are
not (necessarily) good mentalizers. Most critically, the training-related changes
indicate that Theory of Mind can be trained by specific practices implemented in
the Perspective Module. Surprisingly, there was an increase in experienced compassion after both, the Affective and the Perspective Modules. As no effect was
observed after the Presence Module, which focused on attention and interoceptive awareness, the readiness to experience compassion seems to only increase
after modules involving intersubjective exercises focusing on prosocial affect and
motivation (Affective) or cognitive perspective taking of self and others (Perspective). In conclusion, these results provide first evidence that we can induce plasticity in socio-affective and socio-cognitive capacities through specifically designed
mental training programs.
104
Symposium S2.2
Beyond mean levels of one emotion category:
New insights from an emotional patterns approach
Conveners
Jozefien De Leersnyder, Michael Boiger
University of Leuven
Within one emotion episode, people may experience a wide array of emotions. This means
that although two people may experience the same primary and, therefore, most intense
emotion, they may still differ in their patterns of co-occurring emotions. For instance, experiencing anger as a primary emotion in a conflict situation may reflect a different meaning
of the situation depending on whether you additionally describe your experience in terms of
shame, disappointment, pride or respect.
To date, most research has focused on mean levels of people’s primary emotional experience,
thereby ignoring a vast source of potentially meaningful variation. Indeed, whether anger
co-occurs with shame or pride may be associated with meaningful individual or cultural
differences in how people make sense of a specific situation at hand or how they structure
their emotional universe in general. Investigating the patterns of co-occurring emotions may
thus reveal more individual or cultural variation in emotional experiences than has been acknowledged until now.
In the current symposium, we aim to bring together several studies that have taken the patterns of emotion as their focus of analysis. Each study did so in its specific way. First, Alexander
Kirchner will present a study in which he and his colleagues focused on the co-occurrences
of anger and shame in the United States and Japan. Whereas vignettes made sure that the
primary emotion (either anger or shame) was similar across both cultural contexts, the secondary emotion (i.e., the other emotion) pointed to cultural differences that could be understood from the emotion’s functionality to the culture’s respective relationship goals. Next,
Yukiko Uchida will shed light on cultural variation in patterns of wellbeing and happiness,
focusing on the collectively shared concept of wellbeing across cultures. She will illustrate
the considerable variation in how people construe wellbeing and happiness and show how
focusing on the relative importance of positive and negative affect reveals cultural differences
in how well-being and happiness are culturally construed. Building upon these ideas, Jozefien
De Leersnyder will present the results of a Multi-Block Simultaneous Component Analysis on
4100 emotional patterns that were collected from 1595 individuals across different majority
and minority cultural groups. This analysis revealed that the emotional patterns of different
majority cultural groups are best captured by different underlying factors structures, implying
that the patterning of emotional experiences was different between these cultures. Yet, the
factor structures capturing minorities’ emotional patterns could be clustered together with
those of either their new or their heritage culture depending on the generational status of
the minority sample, suggesting that the overall patterning of emotions is subject to acculturation.Finally, Maria Gendron and Lisa Feldman Barrett will extend the emotional patterns
approach from group-level patterns of emotion based on retrospective data, to individuallevel variety in everyday patterns of emotion measured with electronic momentary assessment. Their data point to certain retrospective emotional patterns that can characterize a
large majority of emotional instances sampled as well as to individual differences in how
well group-level retrospective patterns capture the patterning of individual emotional events.
Together, the talks in the current symposium highlight how relevant information about emotional experience is not only located ‘within’ the primary emotion, but is also ‘in-between’
emotions, that is, in the pattern of emotional experience. Although analyses of the patterning of emotions may be somewhat more complex and less straightforward than analyses
of mean levels of primary emotions, we do believe that the current approach comes closer to
how people actually experience and describe their emotional episodes; only rarely will one
emotion capture all meaning associated with an emotional episode. The current symposium
hopes to inspire future research on the patterning of emotions as well as the development of
new methodologies that can better account for the complexities that are inherent to people’s
daily emotional experience.
105
Mixed feelings: Patterns of anger and shame in
the United States and Japan
Alexander Kirchner1, Michael Boiger1, Yukiko Uchida2,
Vinai Norasakkunkit3, Batja Mesquita1
University of Leuven1, Kyoto University2, Gonzaga University3,
While some emotions are condoned and esteemed in one culture, they are
condemned and avoided in another culture. For example, anger—an emotion
that communicates personal desires and self-assertion—is a condoned and common experience in cultures that highlight individual autonomy (the U.S.), while
being condemned and less common in cultures that highlight interpersonal relatedness (Japan). In contrast, shame—an emotion that emphasizes concern for
others and for social rules—is a more common experience in the Japanese than
the U.S. context (Boiger, Mesquita, Uchida, & Barrett, 2013). The goal of the present
study was to explore if these cultural differences in condoned and condemned
emotions extend beyond people’s primary emotions to their secondary emotional experiences. More specifically, we expected that Americans would show
significantly higher amounts of anger in shame situations than Japanese, while
Japanese would show higher amounts of shame in anger situations than Americans. Additionally, we expected that shame would predict anger in shame situations for Americans, but not Japanese, while anger would predict shame in anger
situations for Japanese, but not Americans.
474 Participants from the US and Japan read 15 vignettes describing either angeror shame-eliciting situations and indicated to what extent they would feel both
emotions if they had experienced the situation themselves. Multilevel modeling
was used to compare mean emotion ratings across cultures as well as to predict
condoned emotions from condemned counterparts within cultures. In line with
our predictions, U.S. compared to Japanese participants reported relatively more
anger in shame situations, and their experience of anger became more intense
with increasing levels of shame. However, contrary to our expectations, U.S. participants also reported more shame in anger situations and their experience of
shame was positively related to experienced anger intensity. Japanese participants did not show significant relationships between the emotions in neither
anger nor shame situations.
Our findings only partially support the idea that condoned emotions are also
powerful secondary emotional experiences. Whereas anger readily co-occurred
with shame in the U.S. (possibly because the condemned emotion shame was
re-appraised into the condoned emotion anger), we could not find support for
the expected, analogous process in Japan: For Japanese participants, shame does
not more readily co-occur with anger. In contrast, the experience of anger and
shame appeared to be generally more interconnected in the U.S. context, such
that shame also co-occurred with anger in anger situations. Future directions as
well as possible explanations for the unexpected Japanese findings are discussed.
106
What constitutes a good life? Cultural variation in the emotional
patterns of happiness and well-being
Yukiko Uchida, Yuji Ogihara, Shintaro Fukushima
Kyoto University
Recent cross-cultural evidence suggests that what people consider a good and
valuable life varies substantially across cultures. This talk will review cultural psychological research to illustrate the considerable variation in how people construe
wellbeing and happiness at both the micro and macro levels. We will show how
taking an emotional patterns approach and focusing on the relative importance
that people pay to positive versus negative emotional states can reveal cultural
variation in how well-being and happiness are construed. In European-American
cultural contexts, happiness is defined as a positive emotional state that is typically construed as a state contingent on both personal achievement and maximized positivity of personal attributes. Negative features of the self, including
negative emotional states, are perceived to be a hindrance to happiness. Furthermore, a sense of happiness and subjective wellbeing is based on the incremental
model; positive situations are thought to invite more positive outcomes. Individuals within these cultures are motivated to maximize the experience of positive
affect. Therefore, individuals are highly motivated to find and affirm the positive
aspects of themselves or their life circumstances. In contrast, in the Japanese
context, wellbeing and happiness are construed as balance of positive and negative emotional states and is achieved collectively. The dominant view on life, and
consequently on what constitutes a good life, is a dialectical world order where
everything is assumed to be connected with everything else—good feelings with
bad feelings as well as individual well-being with collective well-being. In support
of these ideas, we will argue that multi-level analyses have shown the importance
of capturing collectively achieved patterns of wellbeing and happiness.
107
Cultural differences in the underlying structure of emotional
patterns
Jozefien De Leersnyder1, Kim De Roover1, Eva Ceulemans1,
Heejung Kim2, Batja Mesquita1
University of Leuven1, University of California - Santa Barbara2
Patterns of emotional experience not only provide insight into the meaning of the
situation at hand, but may also enhance our insight in the meaning of emotion
concepts themselves. This is so, because the systematic co-occurrence of particular emotion terms provides information about the meaning of the emotions itself.
For example, whether ‘feeling resigned’ systematically co-occurs with ‘frustration’
and ‘ill feelings’ or with ‘feeling relieved’ and ‘strong’ provides information about
the meaning people attribute to ‘feeling resigned’. To capture cultural similarities
and differences in these rather implicit meanings of emotions, we investigated
cultural differences in the underlying structure of emotion concepts, because
these should reflect the systematic co-occurrences of emotions.
In the current study, we analyzed the emotional patterns 1595 participants from
Flemish, Turkish, European American and Korean majority groups, or Turkish and
Korean minority groups in Belgium and the US, respectively. In total, participants
reported on 4100 emotional situations, each time making use of the Emotional
Patterns Questionnaire to describe their experience (EPQ, De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011). In the EPQ, participants first describe a recently encountered
situation that matches a specific prompt and then they rate their experience on
30 emotion terms.
We analyzed these data with Multi-Block Simultaneous Component Analysis
(MB-SCA; De Roover, Ceulemans, Timmerman, Vansteelandt, Stouten, & Onghena,
2012) – a technique that identifies clusters of samples with different underlying
structures of emotion (i.e., different emotional meanings) in a bottom-up way.
The results pointed at three different clusters, corresponding to a Belgian, Turkish,
and European American plus Korean cluster. Whereas Korean minorities in the US
clustered together with their majority groups, Turkish minority samples clustered
differently depending on their generational status: First generation Turkish Belgians had a structure similar to Turks and second generation Turkish Belgians had
a structure similar to Belgians, suggesting that the overall patterning of emotions
is subject to acculturation.
When scrutinizing differences in the culturally defined component structures, we
found that the emotion terms of ‘feeling resigned’, ‘feeling like relying on another’,
and ‘feeling indebted’ loaded on different components in culturally meaningful
ways. Differences in the systematic co-occurrences of emotions, as captured by
people’s emotional patterns, may thus translate into different component structures that in turn reveal cultural differences in the connotations of emotions.
108
Completing the Pattern: What emotional patterns are
manifested in momentary experience?
Maria Gendron, Lisa Feldman Barrett
Northeastern University
Emotions often occur in complex patterns that reflect the distinct affordances of
situations. This is consistent with a situated view of emotion conceptualization
(Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011), where concepts can highlight distinct meanings
or aspects of emotion (e.g., depending on the goal of the person experiencing
the emotion). Prior research has demonstrated that patterns of emotion appear
to have some consistency across individuals (within given cultural contexts), but
that individuals vary in how well their individual experiences map on to cultural
patterns (De Leersnyder et al., 2011). In this talk, we will describe work that attempts to characterize group-level patterns of emotion based on retrospective
data and compare these patterns to those that occur in everyday experiences of
emotion measured with electronic momentary assessment. Participants were
54 undergraduate university students located in Boston, USA and completed an
online version of the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire (De Leersnyder et al., 2011)
and 7 days of electronic momentary assessment, with 10 sampling instances per
day. In both measures, participants endorse emotion adjectives and patterns of
endorsement within an instance are examined. Our data indicates that certain
retrospective emotional patterns characterized a large majority of emotional
instances sampled. For example, a pattern of emotion that was associated with
positive affect occurring when an individual was alone and avoidant appeared to
capture much of the patterning in everyday experiences (an average of 36.48% of
emotional instances). In addition, we found evidence of individual differences in
how well group-level retrospective patterns capture patterning of individual emotional events, consistent with prior research. Overall, these findings indicate that
patterns of emotions can capture meaningful variation in everyday experiences
of emotion, but that individual differences are also present and warrant further
exploration.
109
Symposium S2.3
Recent Research on Emotion in Organizations
Conveners
Neal M. Ashkanasy
The study of emotions in organizational settings is today a vibrant and exciting field of
research. A Web of Science search for “(emotion or emotions or emotional or affect) and
organization* for the 20 years prior to 2014 finds 1257 hits, with 859 of these in the past 10
years. This is also reflected in the active role played by organizational scholars in ISRE and
the activities of the Emonet group (see http://www.emotionsnet.org), which sponsors a
successful biannual conference series and an annual book series, Research on Emotion in
Organizations.” In this symposium, five high-profile international scholars of emotion in
organizations will present their work.
The symposium will open with a paper by Prof. Anat Rafaeli, who will outlie a program
of research she and her colleagues have conducted looking at the deleterious effects of
negative emotions, particular in the context of customer service. In particular, when anger
and other hostile expressions are perceived, observers’ mental capacities become restricted, leading to negative effects on productivity and well-being. She will also report on the
complicated situation regarding rewards for hostile emotions, wherein people report that
they personally do not reward anger and other hostile expressions yet maintain perceptions that other people do reward the same expressions.
In the next presentation, Prof. Tina Kiefer will describe a daily-diary study of the effects of
organizational change on emotional expression. Data collected from 485 UK public sector employees revealed a preponderance of negative expressions on a daily basis, but also
showed that the number of positive change events rather than negative ones predicted
engagement in the job three months later.
Prof. Neal Ashkanasy will follow by outlining an experience sampling study involving 59 office employees, who reported their emotional reactions to working on an open-plan office
setting. In the study, employees completed twice-daily event sampling measures detailing
their emotional reactions to working with others in this setting. Results were consistent
with territoriality theory, where employees seem to mark and defend their territory, and
react negatively to violations of their space.
Prof. Hillary Anger Elfenbein will next present a theoretical model introducing the idea
of “emotional division-of-labor.” In this theory, which is based in the concepts underlying
emotional intelligence, team members are seen to delegate and craft their roles to divide
emotion-related activities as a means to maximize team effectiveness. Within this model,
employees prefer to perform roles where they believe they have strengths and look for coworkers to offset their weaknesses.
Personality and emotional intelligence are individual differences that figure strongly in the
field of organizational behavior. In the final presentation, Prof. Ross Buck will outline a radical new approach to understanding these concepts, suggesting that the Big Five personally
model can be construed as a measure of social effectiveness analogous to the notion of
emotional intelligence. He and his co-author advance the idea further that perception and
communication of emotional expressivity may be a key to understanding personal interactions in organizational settings.
In summary, the five presentations in the proposed symposium represent a variety of different perspectives on the role played by emotions at different levels organization. Moreover, the theories and data which will be presented bridge macro (organizational change;
physical environment of work) and micro (personality, emotional expressiveness) levels of
analysis. As such, they represent further validation of the overarching characterization of
emotion in organizations as a set of ubiquitous multi-level phenomena, reaching into every
facet of organizational life.
110
Hostile emotions in the workplace:
Their effects and consequences
Anat Rafaeli
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
In a series of studies I have examined the effects of hostile emotions expressed by
one person on other people. A highly relevant context is customer service, where
employees are repeatedly subjected to hostile emotions, notably anger and rudeness, expressed by customers. The reported data and findings are relevant to
various organizational interactions, notably between employees and managers,
or between co-workers. Findings show slower and less accurate immediate work
performance and weaker performance on various subsequent tasks, in addition
to expected effects on negative emotion and stress. Encounters with hostility,
even when it is expressed in a relatively inane fashion, seem to evoke a kind of
automatic and most likely unconscious emotion regulation process that limits the
mental resources available for other tasks. Anger expressions of people relatively
important to the target individuals are particularly costly and damaging, even
if the reward for complying with (the hostile) request is potentially greater. The
question of whether expressions of hostile emotions are rewarded is particularly
complicated: Data finds that people report that they personally do not reward
anger and other hostile expressions, yet people universally maintain perceptions
that other people do reward the same expressions.
In only a minimal set of circumstances people’s anger seems to have a motivating effect: People seem to perform better in creative tasks (as compared to relatively routine, well-rehearsed tasks) after they have encountered a hostile (angry or
rude) person. And encounters with one hostile person in the context of generally
calm others, seems to enhance task performance. Thus, the presentation will reveal a fascinating picture of the damage that displays of anger rudeness can have
in the workplace, and suggest that -- although people are not always conscious of
their own responses – it is critical for researchers to develop a deep understanding
of the effects of anger and other hostile expressions on performance of organizational employees.
111
Feeling bad and good. The daily emotional experience of
organizational change
Tina Kiefer, Neil Conway
University of Warwick, University of London
Negative emotional experiences in change have been related to a number of dysfunctional individual and organizational outcomes (e.g. Kiefer, 2005). The understanding of emotions in those studies is, however, often limited, as the majority
of those studies focus of on retrospective and generalized accounts of emotional
reactions to a change. Furthermore, the role of positive emotions has largely been
neglected. The aim of this paper is to shift focus to how organizational change
trickles down to daily emotional experiences. Drawing on self-regulation theory
(Vancouver & Day, 2005), we theoretically and empirically investigate the differential effects of daily positive and negative emotional experiences of change events
and explore their interplay over time.
Data was collected from 485 UK public-sector employees, using an event-based,
daily diary approach. Participants completed a diary for 10 working days, capturing
experienced change events and event-related emotions. Employee behavioural
outcomes (i.e. engagement in job, loyalty and counterproductive work behaviours)
were also measured daily. A follow-up survey was employeed three months later.
Results showed that negative change experiences were more frequent than positive ones (2:1). Within-person analysis revealed that (a) positive and negative daily
change events predicted end of day outcomes differentially; (b) not the experience
of a positive or negative change event per se predicted end of day behavioural outcomes, but the intensity of emotions reported; and (c) negative emotional reactions to a change event were a stronger predictor of end of day outcomes than
positive ones. Over time, however, it was the accumulation of positive emotional
change events, but not negative ones that predicated engagement in the job.
Results suggest that within-person and on a daily bases, negative emotional experience of change events predict daily fluctuations in behaviours more strongly
(Baumeister et al., 2001), while between-people and over time, positive change
experiences may be a stronger predictor of some outcomes, which supports Fredrickson’s (1998) notion of broaden-and-build.
112
Territoriality and emotion in the open-plan office:
An experience sampling study
Neal M. Ashkanasy1, Oluremi B. Ayoko1, Karen A. Jehn2
University of Queensland1, University of Malbourne2
Modern organizations are increasingly moving to more open-plan office settings, which are supposed to offer both economic and productivity advantages.
Research into the benefits of such work arrangements, however, has been mixed
(Elsbach & Pratt, 2009). While benefits in terms of improved communication and
collaboration are often touted, employees report dissatisfaction with distractions
and privacy. In this research, we approach this topic from the perspective of a
need for personal territory, or territoriality (Brown, Lawrence, & Robinson, 2005).
Thus, individuals seek first to mark their territory and, once marked, to defend
their territory. As a consequence, the physical environment of work can be seen
to be full of paradoxes and tensions, which we argue become drivers of “affective events” in the workplace that in determine, in part, employees’ behaviors
and attitudes. In particular, we propose that circumstances in the environment
(e.g. spatial density, office configurations, lack of privacy) lead directly to affective
reactions resulting in anger and frustration (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). In turn,
these affective reactions are likely to lead to affect driven behaviors such as withdrawal, territoriality and conflict and judgment driven behaviors such as turnover
and low performance. To test this model, we conducted an experience-sampling
method (ESM: Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983) study, were 59 employees, working in open-plan offices, reported their reactions to affective events resulting
from their workspace, including their emotions and productivity. Consistant with
territoriality theory, results supported the idea that distractions in open office settings result in anger and frustration that in turn determine work behaviors and
attitudes.
113
Towards the validity of Emotional Intelligence:
Testing the positive manifold with emotion recognition
Smaranda Boros, Noah Eisenkraft, Petri Laukka,
Nutankumar S. Thingujam, Hillary Anger Elfenbein
Vlerick Business School, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill,
Stockholm University, Sikkim University, Washington University in St. Louis
Emotional Intelligence (EI) captures attention from scholars, practitioners, educators, and the public, and much evidence is still needed to establish its scientific validity. Central to the debate is whether EI is a coherent new construct vs.
a repackaging of diverse existing social psychological factors such as emotion
recognition, expression, awareness, and management. A recent research stream
tests the extent to which EI has a positive manifold, namely that these various
branches of EI converge with each other, as components of an “intelligence”
should. Four recent studies focus on emotion recognition (ER), a core component
of EI that involves the ability to detect emotional states from nonverbal behavior.
For decades, the association between emotion recognition and expression accuracy was a much-discussed mystery. A recent meta-analysis found positive associations when expression was measured with deliberate performance instead
of unobtrusive observation (Elfenbein & Eisenkraft, 2010). Follow-up work using
updated measures revealed strong convergence (Elfenbein et al., 2010). A new test
of emotional understanding, i.e., recognizing relationships and transitions among
emotions, also converges strongly with ER (Thingujam, Laukka, & Elfenbein, 2012).
Finally, work-in-progress on an Emotions Stroop task that assesses self-regulation
also appears to converge with ER (Jang, Elfenbein, Sharma, & Sanchez-Burks, 2015).
These data suggest promise for EI’s validity.
114
Emotional intelligence in interaction:
The role of emotional expressivity
Ross Buck, R. Thomas Boone
University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts
Big-Five (B5) characteristics (conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, extraversion: CANOE) emerged from factor analyses of personality traits.
Recent psychometric research suggests the B5 can be subsumed by higher order
factors. The BIG-Two (B2) comprise Alpha or Stability (subsuming C, A, and N) and
Beta or Plasticity (subsuming O and E); and furthermore a BIG One (B1) can subsume the B2. B1 is advanced as a general factor of personality termed Social Effectiveness; and it is suggested that the B1 is actually Emotional Intelligence (EI).
This development has important implications for emotion research, particularly
research in workplace settings that has widely used the EI concept, because it
brings emotion to the forefront of personality (Perez-Gonzales & Sanchez-Ruiz,
2014). On the other hand, there are several conceptual and measurement models
of EI based primarily upon self-reports, and there are no objectively correct answers to EI questions. An alternative approach views social effectiveness in terms
of abilities to deal with emotions in interaction. Boone and Buck (2004) noted
the value of emotional expressivity, or emotion sending accuracy, in interactive
situations. First, being a good sender is the most effective way to be a good receiver in interactive situations, because it encourages expressivity in the interaction
partner. Expressivity acts like emotional sonar, in that it tends to be reflected back
by the partner, so good senders in effect carry around a “bubble of expressivity”
wherever they go. This also functions as emotional IFF (Identification of Friend or
Foe), because the reflected expression carries information about the cooperativeness or competitiveness of the interaction partner (Boone & Buck, 2003). Second,
sending accuracy maximizes the instructive feedback that the sender receives
about emotion (social biofeedback). Communicative feedback fosters emotional
education (labeling, understanding, and controlling the expression of one’s feelings and desires) and consequent emotional competence (knowing what to do
when feelings and desires occur).
115
Symposium S2.4
How emotions make us tick: A multi-method approach to understanding the relation between emotions and subjective time
Conveners
Trevor Penney, Annett Schirmer
National University of Singapore
Our time judgments are not perfectly accurate, but instead are influenced by contextual
and situational factors such as emotion. Indeed, most of us can probably recall emotionally
provoking events that seemed longer or shorter than they actually were. The contributors
to this symposium share a common interest in studying the impact of emotion on timing,
but take different methodological approaches. They use different timing tasks (e.g., explicit
vs. implicit), stimulus durations (tens of milliseconds to seconds), stimulus modalities (auditory, visual, tactile), and dependent measures (behavioral, skin conductance, EEG, fMRI),
but together present complementary views that reveal the different aspects of the relationship between emotions and time.
In research by Tipples and colleagues, spider-fearing individuals compared the duration of
spider and bird pictures to a short and long anchor duration in a bisection task. Spider
pictures were judged longer than equivalent duration bird pictures and this temporal overestimation was accompanied by reaction time differences. Drift-diffusion modeling of the
data supports the notion that arousing emotions like fear speed up temporal accumulation.
Along similar lines, Droit-Volet and colleagues used a duration bisection procedure in which
they presented timing stimuli with and without electric shock. Participants judged timing
stimuli with electric shock longer than timing stimuli without electric shock and this difference increased with the duration of the timing stimulus. Thus, like fear of spiders, fear of
pain seems to speed up temporal accumulation.
Work by Lake and colleagues again complements this work. Using electric shocks in a fear
conditioning procedure, they varied whether participants expected a shock immediately
or after a temporal gap following a conditioned stimulus that served as the first or second
duration in an ordinal comparison task. They found that arousal and attentional demands
associated with the conditioned stimulus independently contributed to ensuing temporal
judgments making time seem both longer and shorter, respectively.
Adding neural evidence to the picture, Schirmer and colleagues applied the duration bisection procedure in an event-related potential study with neutral and disgusted exclamations as timing stimuli. Participants judged stimuli in the former condition as longer than
those in the latter condition. Moreover, this behavioral effect was accompanied by an early
positivity in the ERP that together with an acoustic analysis implied a role for auditory
markers of information rate in auditory timing.
Finally, an fMRI study by Trost and colleagues explored the effect of musical emotions on
temporal processing. Specifically, they showed that musical rhythms entrain temporal expectations and that pleasant music is more effective than unpleasant music in this regard.
Additionally, they identified contributions of the basal ganglia and fronto-parietal attentional networks in these effects.
Taken together, the research outlined here reveals a complex interplay of emotional and
temporal processing. In addition to showing an arousal effect on the speed of temporal
accumulation, the results imply that emotions modulate how individuals attend to time
and the rate at which they gather timing relevant information. Moreover, these mechanisms are differentially employed as a function of stimulus modality, the goal relevance of
the stimuli, and the nature of the experienced emotion. As such this symposium presents
important novel discoveries showing how emotions make our perception of time variable
and indicating why this variability may be adaptive.
116
Rapid temporal accumulation in spider fear:
Evidence from Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling
Jason Tipples
University of Hull
Fear can distort our sense of time – making time seem slow or even stand still.
Here, I used Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling (HDDM; Vandekerckhove, Tuerlinckx, & Lee, 2011; Wiecki, Sofer, & Frank, 2013) to test the idea that temporal accumulation speeds up during fear. In drift diffusion models of two-alternative forced
choice data (e.g., Ratcliff, 1978) the rate of accumulation of information is called
the drift rate. The drift rate is calculated from both reaction times and choice
proportion data. The central hypothesis was that fear would increase temporal
accumulation leading to higher drift rates for feared stimuli. To test this idea 18
high fearful and 23 low fearful participants judged the duration of both feared stimuli (spiders) and non-feared stimuli (birds) in a modified version of the temporal
bisection task. High but not low fearful individuals overestimated the duration of
spiders compared to bird stimuli - they produced a higher proportion of “long” responses to spiders. The drift diffusion modelling offers direct support for the temporal accumulation speeding account. In high but not low fearful individuals, the
overall drift rates were higher for spiders compared to birds. The results highlight
the value of using both RTs and choice proportion data in the context of diffusion
modelling to study the effects of emotion on time perception. Further results were
interpreted in the context of a recent two-stage model of time perception (Balci
& Simen, 2014). The results highlight the usefulness of diffusion modelling to test
process-based explanations of disordered cognition in emotional disorders.
117
Fear and time: Fear speeds up the internal clock
Sylvie Droit-Volet12, Sandrine Gil3, Sophie Fayolle12
Clermont Université1, Université Blaise Pascal2, University of Poitiers3
The last decade has seen a huge growth in research into the effect of emotions on
the perception of time in human adults, but the question of mechanisms underlying this effect is always a subject of debate. In order to settle the debate, this
study tested humans’ time judgment in bisection with a wide range of stimulus durations from hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds (0.2/0.8, 0.4/1.6,
1.2/4.8, 2.0/8.0-s) by using an electric shock procedure to induce fearful state in
participants. In addition, self-report questionnaire responses and skin conductance responses were assessed to measure emotional reactivity. Results clearly
demonstrated an emotion-related time distortion such that the elapsed stimulus
duration was judged longer on the trials with than without electric shock. In addition, there was a significant linear relation between the length of durations tested
and the magnitude of differences in time judgment between the trials with and
without electric shock. These findings validated the arousal-based hypothesis on
the speeding up of an internal clock system. The rapid change of the internal clock
rate in emotional contexts is discussed as a highly adaptive mechanism.
118
Contributions of Arousal and Attention to Threat-Driven
Distortions in Time Perception
Jessica Lake, Kevin LaBar, Warren Meck
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
The anticipation of an aversive outcome is known to elicit distortions in the perception of time. While studies of emotional distortions in time perception have
suggested arousal and attention as potential mechanisms of such distortions,
previous investigations have not allowed for the possibility that both mechanisms
might contribute simultaneously to resulting distortions in perceived time. In a
series of experiments, we examined the influence of threat anticipation on time
perception using aversive conditioned stimuli intermittently associated with electrical stimulation within the context of a temporal ordinal-comparison task. By
relying on the well-established difference in the ability of delay and trace conditioned stimuli to modulate attention, we demonstrated that attentional demands
during threat anticipation modulated the perception of time. In addition, we recorded skin conductance responses as a measure of arousal to demonstrate that
changes in arousal act simultaneously to modulate the perception of time. Across
a series of experiments, we found that the influences of arousal and attention on
time perception are temporally dependent, consistent with theories of emotional
processing that suggest emotion-driven changes in arousal and attention over
time. Our findings support independent, but not mutually exclusive, influences of
arousal and attention in driving temporal distortions during threat anticipation.
Given the importance of temporal relationships in learning and conditioning, we
propose that threat-driven temporal distortions may have important implications
for our understanding of deficits in fear conditioning, particularly in individuals
with fear and anxiety disorders.
119
Mistaking fast for short: Emotional sound characteristics
produce temporal underestimations
Annett Schirmer, Di Mo, Trevor Penney
National University of Singapore
Observers typically give shorter duration estimates for disgusting as compared to
neutral images. We used a duration bisection task in conjunction with event related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether this phenomenon extends to sounds
and to explore its underlying mechanisms.
Disgust and neutral vocalizations were obtained from the Montreal Affective
Voices stimulus set and a stimulus set created in our laboratory. These vocalizations were manipulated using the “Lengthen (PSOLA)” function in Praat to create
stimuli of 378, 476, 600, 756, and 952 milliseconds in duration. Participants learned
that the 378 ms and 952 ms stimuli were the long and short anchors, respectively,
in an initial training phase. In the subsequent test phase, they classified each of
the probe stimuli (378ms, 476ms, 600ms, 756ms, 952ms) as closer in duration to
the short or long anchor.
The results of the bisection taks revealed that disgust vocalizations were judged
short more frequently than neutral vocalizations. Additionally, the ERP analysis
revelaed that disgust vocalizations elicited a greater P200 than neutral vocalizations. Notably, P200 amplitude also varied as a function of stimulus duration
with shorter durations eliciting larger amplitudes than longer durations implying
a sensitivity to rate of change. Moreover, acoustic analysis of the stimuli revealed
that accoustic change was faster for disgust relative to neutral vocalizations.
That disgust sounds reduce duration estimates suggests that the influence of
emotion on time perception (i.e., compression or expansion of time) compares
across the sensory channels. The mechanisms underpinning this influence, however, may differ. In the case of sounds, they may relate to the early integration of
acoustic information that changes faster for emotional as compared to neutral
stimuli. Thus, when sounds are emotional, listeners mistake fast for short.
120
The impact of musical emotions on rhythmic entrainment
Wiebke Trost
Music represents a powerful emotional stimulus and it is known that emotions
influence timing mechanisms. Furthermore, perceiving the musical structure
requires fine perceptual timing skills, such as an entrainment of attentional
resources. The goal of the presented research was to investigate how emotions
induced by music influence the temporal processing of the musical temporal
structure. Moreover, the neural substrates of attentional entrainment processes
to the meter of the music remain sparsely understood. Therefore, we designed a
study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test whether the
metric structure of music entrains attention and how the pleasantness of the
music influences these processes. Piano music was presented while participants
were performing a speeded response detection task in which targets appeared
time-locked to either a strong or a weak beat of the musical meter. Each musical piece was presented both in a consonant/pleasant and dissonant/unpleasant
version. Reaction time results show that consonant music facilitated target detection and targets presented time-locked to strong beats were detected faster. FMRI
results showed that targets on strong beats increase the activation of bilateral
caudate nucleus, whereas targets presented in consonant music enhanced activity in attentional networks. Beat position and consonance interacted in the caudate nucleus, with a greater influence of meter during dissonant than consonant
music. These results reveal that even in an implicit emotion induction paradigm
the involvement of the caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia, known to be implicated in timing, rhythm and emotion processing, can be modulated by the metrical
structure and the emotional tone of the music.
121
Symposium S2.5
Meta-emotions, self-awareness, and self-regulation
Conveners
Christoph Jäger
University of Innsbruck
One can be afraid of one’s fears, ashamed of losing one’s temper, or enjoy moments of bittersweet melancholy. Call such higher-order affective states and episodes “meta-emotions”. This notion was prominently introduced by developmental psychologists such as John Gottman and collaborators to describe feedback
effects between parental and child emotions. In this context a “meta-emotion
structure” is defined as “an organized and structured set of emotions and cognitions about ... both one’s own emotions and the emotions of others” (Gottman,
Katz, and Hooven 1997, p. 7). However, in recent years philosophers and psychologists have begun to explore the notion in a more specific sense, applying it mainly
to intrapersonal phenomena and restricting it to affective higher-order states
and episodes (Jäger & Bartsch 2006; Mitmansgruber et al. 2009; Mendonça 2013;
Jäger & Bänninger-Huber 2014; Norman & Furnes 2014). Meta-emotions are emotions people have about their own emotions, and they constitute an important
mechanism of self-appraisal and intrapsychic affect-regulation. The symposium
explores various aspects and applications of the notion of meta-emotion from
philosophical and psychological perspectives; one paper also analyses religious
emotions from a philosophical and partly theological viewpoint. The symposium
focuses on the following topics.
(1) Anne Bartsch investigates to what extent, and in what way, the occurrence of
meta-emotions can be explained by psychological appraisal theories, especially
regarding the principal appraisal criterion of “goal conduciveness”. Her paper investigates the hypothesis that striving toward eudaimonic goals such as meaning
or personal growth explains why first-order emotions can be goal conducive, and
she presents data from qualitative interviews, surveys, and experimental research
that support this thesis. (2) Michael Lacewing explores the role of meta-emotions
in processes of psychological defence and self-discovery. A prominent explanation
of defence mechanisms is that people’s desire to avoid psychic dissonance and
pain motivates them to distort their psychological experience and sense of self.
We tend to avoid being aware of negative meta-emotions (such as anxiety, fear,
shame), but tolerating them leads to self-knowledge. (3) Christoph Jäger explains
(away) the apparent irrationality of central aspects of survivor’s guilt, arguing that
those who experience it often feel guilty not for some culpable action but for
having positive emotions (such as gratitude or joy) about being more fortunate
than the other victims. The experience of guilt can in such cases be interpreted as
a higher-order psychic mechanism regulating first-order emotions which the subject perceives as normatively inappropriate. (4) Dina Mendonça contrasts metaemotions occurring in aesthetic contexts with those occurring in non-aesthetic,
“everyday” contexts. She describes linguistic mechanisms by which meta-emotions are identified, and argues that aesthetic contexts provide a privileged space
for becoming aware of meta-emotional processes. (5) Finally, Amber Griffioen investigates the meta-emotional self-reflectivity of certain religious emotions, e. g.,
feelings of “creatureliness”, sinfulness, and Sehnsucht (or longing).
122
Meta-emotions and appraisals of goal conduciveness
Anne Bartsch
LMU Munich
Meta-emotions and appraisals of goal conduciveness. Are emotions good for anything beyond solving the emotion eliciting situation?
Within the theoretical framework of appraisal theories, meta-emotions can be
described as the outcome of appraisal processes that evaluate the person’s own
emotions (Jäger & Bartsch, 2006). This raises the question whether the same appraisal criteria that give rise to emotions when applied to environmental situations are also applicable when the objects of appraisal are one’s own emotions.
Can emotions per se be novel, pleasant, goal conducive, controllable, or normatively adequate? In the case of secondary appraisal criteria such as controllability
and normative adequacy the answer is relatively clear, given that losing control or
being ashamed of one’s own emotions are commonplace human experiences. But
what about goal relevance – the primary appraisal criterion that Lazarus (1991)
identified as both necessary and sufficient condition for emotion elicitation?
A seemingly straightforward answer is that emotions can be helpful or harmful in
terms of solving the emotion eliciting situation. This argument is rather circular,
however, because it does not distinguish the goals and concerns that give rise
to the meta-emotion from the goals and concerns that give rise to the primary
emotion – which leads to the somewhat tautological conclusion that emotions
are goal conducive to the extent that they render themselves unnecessary. Hence,
the informative value of the meta-emotion concept critically depends on the relevance of emotions with regard to goals that go beyond the concerns that gave rise
to the emotion in the first place.
Eudaimonic goals such as individuals’ seeking of meaning, insight, cognitive challenge, and personal growth (Waterman, 1993) might explain why emotions can be
goal conducive beyond hedonic affect regulation and instrumental goals associated with the primary emotion. Data from qualitative interviews, surveys and experimental research are presented to substantiate the assumption that emotions
be conducive to subjectively meaningful and thought-provoking experiences, and
that such experiences can be gratifying even when the valence of the primary
emotion is negative.
123
Metaemotions, psychological defence and self-knowledge
Michael Lacewing
Heythrop College, London, UK
In this paper, I argue that metaemotions play a central role in processes of psychological defence, which involves motivated distortions in the subject’s conscious
understanding and experience that are caused unconsciously and unintentionally. The motivation for defence can be understood broadly to refer to the desire
hold attitudes that are congruent with one’s interests as well as one’s sense of self
(Chen & Chaiken 1999). I focus primarily on the latter, and characterise defence as
motivated by the wish to avoid psychological pain (Vaillant 2000). Such processes
are used universally in childhood and adolescence, as they are entirely necessary
in psychological development, while few people succeed in giving up psychological defences in early adulthood (Vaillant 1993; Cramer 2006). Understanding the
structure and operation of such processes is, therefore, important.
It is rarely recognised or commented upon that in many cases, and especially in
relation to questions of self-esteem, the pain the subject seeks to avoid is that of
a metaemotion, i.e. it is an emotional response, such as anxiety, fear, guilt, shame,
to the subject’s own emotions (and affectively charged desires). As a result, one of
the central distortions that occurs in psychological defence is in one’s knowledge
of one’s emotions. If the subject can develop their awareness and understanding
of these metaemotions, they are able to gain self-knowledge of the emotional
states that are defended against. However, rejecting both Cartesian and thirdpersonal models of self-knowledge (e.g. Wilson 2002), I argue that the necessary
development in the metaemotional understanding normally requires a form of
interpersonal relationship.
124
Meta-emotions and survivor’s guilt
Christoph Jäger
University of Innsbruck
So-called survivor’s guilt is an experience of guilt in survivors of genocide, terrorism, natural catastrophes, war, car accidents, etc. It comes in various forms, yet
in paradigm cases subjects lack – and know that they lack – responsibility for the
tragic events (Matsakis 1999). So why do they feel guilty? At first glance their guilt
experience seems wholly irrational. On the other hand, the subjects are typically
more or less rational people and understand the concept of guilt, including being
aware that one is guilty of something only if one is, at least in part, responsible for
it. Several explanations have been suggested.
Velleman (2004) proposes explaining survivor’s guilt by suggesting that survivors
“rationally feel anxiety about providing grounds for … vicarious or sympathetic
resentment” on the part of friends or relatives of the victims. The survivor feels
she has to justify that resentment”. Griffieon (2014) suggests that survivor’s guilt
is a coping mechanism, helping the subject to maintain a sense of agency via selfattributing some “kind of ‘magical’ causality to herself as a response to the shame
that arises from the perceived lack of autonomy”. Both approaches may highlight
certain phenomena associated with survivor’s guilt; yet they leave some crucial
aspects unexplained. I suggest that the phenomenon can often be understood
as essentially consisting of a negative meta-emotion (see Jäger & Bartsch 1996;
Jäger & Bänninger-Huber 2014) directed at the positive emotions that survivors
experience in response to their perceived privileges. There is evidence that survivors experience feelings of relief, gratitude, or joy about having survived or been
less adversely affected than others. However, at the same time they feel guilty for
having such positive emotions in connection with the catastrophe. The meta-emotional feeling of guilt often seems to serve as a higher-order process regulating
positive feelings which the subject perceives as normatively inappropriate.
125
Meta-emotions in aesthetic contexts and ordinary life situations
Dina Mendonca
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
The paper compares meta-emotions in aesthetics with meta-emotions in ordinary contexts in order to provide further insight into their role in self-awareness and
emotional development. In “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” Susan Feagin states that
one of the difficulties with meta-emotions is that it may be hard to clearly distinguish the first-order from the second-order emotions because we use the same
words to describe emotional responses at both levels (Feagin 1995, p. 208). To grasp
the difference requires us to identify emotions using not the simple and compact
nouns we have for them (pride, shame), but longer descriptions, indicating the
structure of the layered emotion (pride about jealousy, shame about fear). The
paper explores such descriptions by comparing ordinary with aesthetic contexts.
It discusses how time works differently in the two contexts, and how they involve
both different connections to action and a different kind of part-whole awareness.
The paper argues that these differences enable aesthetic contexts to serve as privileged spaces for the identification of meta-emotions, making aesthetic contexts
prone to promote emotional self-awareness and emotional learning.
126
Religious meta-emotions
Amber Griffioen
University of Konstanz
This paper examines the heretofore overlooked presence of meta-emotions in the
religious affective repertoire. I focus primarily on three types of meta-emotional
religious attitudes. My claim is that understanding the second-order nature of
these feelings may actually play a role in the way we treat them theologically.
The first type of meta-feeling is what Rudolf Otto calls the “creature-feeling”
(Kreaturgefühl). Such feelings have to do with the ways in which we react affectively to certain conditions and feelings we have in regard to God and our place in
creation. Otto notes that the creature-feeling is not the primary religious emotion,
but rather represents a reflexive feeling in response to some other affective religious experience. (For Otto this first-order feeling will be that of the mysterium
tremendum et fascinans, though we can imagine other attitudes that creaturefeelings could take as their object.)
A second kind of meta-emotion might be the sense the religious subject has of
her own sinfulness. If, with St. Augustine, we understand sin as a kind of misdirected love, our emotional apprehension of our sinfulness may take the form of a
feeling of shame regarding this love, when we realize that our love is, in fact, misdirected. Thus, a sense of sinfulness will be both cognitive and affective.
A final type of meta-emotional religious attitude is one which occurs in the
context of religious Sehnsucht, or longing. Although C.S. Lewis speaks of longing
as a kind of desire, it is not clear that this correctly characterizes Sehnsucht. It is
perhaps better understood as a kind of “affectively apprehended emptiness”, one
Lewis maintains we nevertheless value and even long for in its absence. Yet whether longing itself should be understood as meta-emotional, or whether it instead
represents the target of another kind of meta-emotional valuing will be discussed
in more detail.
127
Symposium S2.6
Social Norms and Emotions
Conveners
Christian von Scheve, Frédéric Minner
Freie Universität, University of Geneva
Emotion researchers from different disciplines have identified at least two major
links between emotions and norms. First, emotions contribute to the enforcement
and maintenance of social norms through negative feelings signifying the punishment of deviant behavior and positive feelings experienced in cases of conformity. Punishment is constituted by feelings of contempt, disgust or indignation
towards deviant individuals or by shame, guilt, and embarrassment experienced
by deviant individuals. Reward is constituted through elevation, admiration or gratitude towards individuals acting in line with prevailing norms or through pride or
contentment felt by those who act in line with norms. Emotions therefore contribute to the social control of behavior on individual as well as social interactive
levels. The second relationship between emotions and norms is evident in social
norms and conventions that circumscribe which emotions and emotion expressions are considered appropriate or inappropriate in a given social context. Norms
of this type go by various names, for instance “feeling rules” (Hochschild) or “display rules” (Ekman) and proscribe the type of emotion that one ought to feel,
who should feel a particular emotion, at what occasion, towards whom, for how
long, etc. In this sense, emotion norms define obligations and duties that govern
emotional arousal, expression, and behavior. They imply standards of comparison
between what an individual is feeling and what he or she ought to feel in a given
social context. Emotion norms thus aide in evaluating the social appropriateness
or inappropriateness of an emotion. This difference between what is actually felt
and what ought to be felt is also captured in the concept of “ideal affect” (Tsai)
that reflects individual as well as social standards of comparison.
Although the notion of emotion norms is well established in theory and research,
various questions and unresolved issues arise: How do institutions, ideologies and
cultural influences shape the regulation of emotion? How do emotion norms relate to the normative order of a society? What are the relations between societal
values, social norms and emotions? Why and how do emotion norms emerge in
a society? How to articulate the collective and public nature of emotion norms
and the individual and private experience of emotions? The symposium therefore
aims at bringing together researchers from different disciplines to shed light on
the nature of emotion norms, and the ways by which they relate to the normative
order of societies and affect human emotional experience as a tool of social regulation.
128
What kinds of norms are emotion norms?
Christian von Scheve
Freie Universität
In many disciplines of emotion research, for instance psychology, sociology and
anthropology, there is widespread use of the concept emotion norms. Emotion
norms come in various fashions and go by various labels, for example “display
rules” (Ekman, 1972), “feeling rules”, or “expression norms” (Hochschild 1979). Emotion norms are said to substantially influence affective experience and a broad
range of emotion-related behaviors, such as facial expressions, vocalizations, and
gestures, primarily through socialization and different efforts at emotion regulation. In this way, emotion norms are also thought to be essential components
of “culture” or of specific “emotion cultures” and are closely related to emotion
values or “ideal affect” (Kim-Prieto & Eid, 2007; Tsai, 2007). In sociology, some have
even said that one of the most studied topics is in fact „the effect of emotion
norms upon experience and expression” (Gordon, 1990, p. 163). Given this prevalence of emotion norms in research and everyday life, it is surprising that “emotion
norms” often remain conceptually hollow and refer to very different phenomena.
At the very least, uses of the concept have not kept pace with theoretical advances
regarding social and moral norms and values more generally. In this contribution,
I seek to disentangle some of the conceptual confusions surrounding emotion
norms (and rules). First, I wish to discuss emotion norms against the backdrop
of (a) social norms as situation-specific conventions and coordination equilibria,
and (b) moral norms regarding foundational moral principles of action. Second,
may aim is to clarify the question whether emotion norms are primarily injunctive
norms or whether they can also be understood as descriptive norms. Finally, I wish
to further disclose the relationship between emotion values and emotion norms.
129
What public emotions do, and what we do with them
Laurence Kaufmann, Philippe Gonzalez
University of Lausanne
To avoid being sanctioned for misfeeling, the sentient self must satisfy the felicity
conditions of the public expression of emotions, that is, the relevance of the emotional self-labeling, the adjustment of the emotional expression to the situation,
the adequacy between the expression of the emotion and the intended audience,
and the authority and credibility of the emotional subject, that is, its « prior ethos
» (Amossy, 2001). We will explore further these felicity conditions and emotional
fallacies by focusing in particular on indignation, indeed a particularly interesting
emotion. For if any emotion can be said « social » in the sense that it is subject
to social and moral accountability, indignation seems more social than others:
not only indignation responds to felicity conditions that establish which event or
behavior counts as a justified object of indignation and which individual has the
right to be indignant, but it also supposes and calls for the existence of a public,
moral or political, that sustains its enunciation.
By focusing on empirical cases drawn from media interactions where a public
expression of indignation is uttered by a French public figure (S. Royal, E. Béart, D.
Strauss-Kahn), this paper will highlight the kinds of constraints, semiotic, social,
and moral, that rule indignation and on the types of publics that it summons. We
will focus in particular, thanks to a sociosemiotic analysis, on the media uptake.
Such an uptake reveals what the public, starting with the journalists, considers
more or less consensually as «worthy of affect» and whom it deems to have the
right to be affected. More generally, the analysis of the uptake reveals the «feeling rules» that the public expressions of indignation must satisfy (Hochschild,
2003; Goffman, 1983). As we will show, these «feeling rules» or felicity conditions
that specify what is acceptable at a given time can be formalised in a grammatical form. But the grammar of indignation goes beyond the mere rules of public
enunciation: by revealing the system of norms that binds society together, it gives
a glimpse of the «grammar of society» (Bicchieri, 2006).
130
Norms and values in emotional experience
Ian Burkitt
University of Bradford
In this paper I will make a distinction between norms and values. Norms are standards or patterns of behaviour that are typical or expected in society or in particular situations, which form a required standard. However, values are the regard
in which something is held, the worth or importance it is judged to have. Thus values and norms can differ across a culture, especially cultures composed of diverse
groups who may value things differently. In terms of emotion, values are close to
our emotions as they determine what we feel to be important, what we highly
regard or love. For various subgroups this can differ and they may challenge or
oppose what William Reddy has called the ‘emotion regime’ dominant in society
at any given time and place. I will also say how this ties in with my view that emotions are relational phenomena: they are about the social groups we are related
to or identify with or against, and this conditions how we will feel in particular
circumstances, whether that is for or against the emotion rules or norms of an
emotional regime or just a particular social situation. As relational phenomena,
emotions and values place us differentially within the social order and make social
life highly personal.
131
The temporalities of (studying) feeling and display rules –
an anthropological perspective
Thomas Stodulka
Freie Universität
Drawing on an extended case study from my long-term research on the coming
of age of street-related adolescents in the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia,
this paper highlights three intertwined temporalities related to the research of
the emergence and transformation of feeling and display rules: first, the maturing
actors’ alteration of their bodies and related changing social and cultural role ascriptions over their life course; second, the social changes occurring in the actors’
environments, a rather slow but steady transformation of a place’s architectures,
cultural values, beliefs, and norms. I argue that feeling and display rules are best
studied in a long-term (life course) perspective that centers on how cultural beliefs and social norms are embodied and negotiated in the interaction between
actors of differing social and ‘emotional positions’. The dynamic and interactive
disposition of the phenomena studied (feeling and display rules) and the understanding of the epistemology that scientifically attends to these (ethnographic
fieldwork and more broadly speaking most qualitative research approaches) as
encounters between people within particular social spaces, requires the inclusion
of a third temporal dimension: the researcher’s position as it relates to the longitudinal study of those he encounters, observes, talks and listens to (Stodulka 2015).
So far, anthropologists have defined what I shall describe as ‘emotional positions’
as ‘subjectivity’ (Biehl, Good and Kleinman 2007) or ‘positionality’ (Rosaldo 1989),
marginalizing emotions as object of study (Beatty 2013), epistemological category,
and relational ethnographic data (Davies and Spencer 2010). The paper adds to (1)
trailblazing studies on feeling and display rules (von Scheve 2014), and (2) thriving
debates on the socio-cultural construction and affective dimensions of academic
knowledge production (Barbalet 2004; Favret-Saada 2012).
The research underlying this presentation is based on an ongoing longitudinal
ethnographic study (2001–2015) of the coming of age of street-related adolescents (now young men). Research methods include collaborative action research
and actor-centered ethnography based on life story interviews and the systematic
exploration of extended case studies. The study is grounded in four years of participant observation and part-time co-habitation with two street communities.
132
The emergence of norms in Occupy Geneva
Frédéric Minner
Emotion norms have diverse forms and occur in various social situations. They
prescribe the type of emotion that one ought to feel and display (e.g. sadness
during funerals or happiness during a marriage) (Hochschild 2003; Mauss 196869). But how do emotion norms emerge and how can we explain their forms? The
first answer is that they emerge according to the appraisal of concrete situations
that exemplify the core relational theme of a type of emotion; the second is that
the form of the norms depends on the structure (appraisal, intentionality, action
tendencies, etc.) of the related emotion; the third is that they are collectively adopted inside the institutions of the society in which they emerge. For example, punishment in criminal law may emerge from indignation (Durkheim 2007 [1893];
Ranulf 1933). Indeed, third-parties indignant at an injustice are inclined to punish
those responsible for it; and, according to the institutions (justice, tribunals) and
the history of the society in scrutiny, a law against the injustice exemplified by the
situation (e.g. murder or rape) may emerge from the collective indignation felt
toward it.
Following this line of thought, I will show in my study of the political collective
Occupy Geneva how specific norms emerged from different emotions. Indeed,
after two sexual aggressions and other forms of disrespect that occurred in their
camp, the members of the collective initiated, during a general assembly, a debate
about unjustified violence. The collective deliberation, led along the institutional
principles of deliberative and participatory democracy, was principally shaped by
indignation, contempt, compassion and fear. It resulted in the adoption of norms
that prohibited disrespect, permitted to punish and expel aggressors, and ensured
the protection of potential victims.
The ethnography consisted in participatory observation and semi-structured
interviews. The data are analyzed according to social interactions and content
analysis. This study may lead to further research on the affective foundations of
norms, – a topic relatively neglected at the moment.
133
Oral session 1 - 8.7.2015
O1.1 Curvilinear relationship between the intensity of emotions
and the needed response time: Three experience sampling studies
Charlotte Arndt1, Tanja Lischetzke1, Claudia Crayen2, Michael Eid2
University of Koblenz-Landau1, Free University of Berlin2
Latencies of responses are used in attitude research as an indirect measure of attitude strength (Bassili, 1996; Fazio, 1995) or in emotion research as an indirect measure of clarity of feelings (Lischetzke et al., 2005). In the latter one, response times
(RT) for emotion items are used: The longer someone needs to respond to such an
item, the lower is the clarity about the current affective state. There is empirical
evidence for convergent and predictive validity of this indirect measure of clarity
of feelings (Lischetzke et al., 2005, 2011): Studies have shown that RT for affect
items is lower when the directly measured certainty about the current affect is
high (Lischetzke et al., 2005). Moreover, RT for affect items predicted mood regulation success (Lischetzke et al., 2011). However, it is still an open question how the
intensity of the experienced affective state is related to momentary clarity (as indicated by RT for affect items). It can be assumed that it is easier to be clear about
a very weak or a very strong emotion which results in a faster rating. In contrast,
an emotion with a moderate intensity is more difficult to judge and thus, the
rating is slower. Hence, we expected an inverted u-shaped relationship between
momentary emotion intensity and RT for these emotion items. We conducted
three experience sampling studies with different samples (N1 = 51, N2 = 138, N3 =
84), different number of measurement occasions and different response formats.
In two of these studies, the response format ranged from 0 (emotion was absent) to 4 (emotion was very strong). In the third study, we first asked participants
to decide whether the emotion was experienced. Only when this question was
answered with affirmative, the intensity was rated on a scale from 1 (very weak)
to 4 (very strong). The data were analyzed by means of multilevel models with
emotions, measurement occasions, and persons as three levels. Positive and negative emotions were analyzed separately. We found the expected curvilinear relationship between the intensity of emotions and the RT for these items for both
response formats and for both, negative and positive emotions (t ranged from
-2.48 to -4.86). The practical implication of this finding is to include the intensity
(linear and quadratic) when using RT as a predictor. Different processes between
an absent versus an experienced emotion are discussed.
134
O1.1 On the innocence of measurement:
The case of self-report of emotions
Omesh Johar
University of St. Thomas
It is generally accepted that measurements are not perfect; there is always room
for greater validity. In the context of self-reports, the obvious limitation is that
people do not necessarily have insights into their true experience. Social desirability or demand characteristics also raise concerns about the validity of (self)
responses. However, such concerns suggest a restricted view of the power of
measurements. A common underlying assumption is that self-reports are merely
incapable of assessing the true experience that exists “out there”. Four experiments showed that measurements can, indeed, alter the true experience. Participants in all experiments completed an emotion-induction paradigm followed
by the manipulation (presence or absence) of measurement. Finally, after some
irrelevant filler tasks, all participants reported the intensity of their emotions. In
all experiments, a numbing effect of measurements was observed, i.e., preceding
measurements of emotions led to weaker final intensity of emotion. The numbing effect was observed regardless of the overt induction and measurement in
Experiment 1 (sadness, N=170, d=.43) and 2 (guilt, N=180, d=.54), and the covert
induction and measurement in Experiment 3 (envy, N=136, d=.58). Experiment 4
showed that the numbing effect occurs in case of negative affect, but not positive affect (standardized betas of -.31 and -.02, respectively). It is suspected that a
simple measurement can serve to regulate negative emotion by forcing attention
toward the emotion in a non-ruminative fashion.
135
O1.1 Individual difference correlates of emotion recognition ability
Petri Laukka12, Tanja Bänziger34, Diana S. Cortes1, Christina Lindahl1, Klaus
R. Scherer4, Hakan Fischer1
Stockholm University1, Södertörn University2, Mid Sweden University3
University of Geneva4
Background: The ability to accurately recognize others’ nonverbal emotional signals is important for successful social functioning. Although studies have often
noted large individual differences in emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), these
differences remain poorly understood.
Method: We assessed ERA in a sample of 600 Swedish participants (age range
18-36 years) using a test based on video clips from the GEMEP emotion portrayal
database (T. Bänziger, D. Grandjean, & K. R. Scherer, 2009, Emotion, 9, 691-704).
Test items included 12 different expressions, covering both basic and more subtle
emotions and both positive and negative states, presented in 3 conditions (video
only, audio only, and audio-visual). Participants were further administered a large
battery of self-report tests measuring emotional competencies, personality, and
socio-emotional dysfunction.
Results: Results showed that participants varied in ERA, with overall recognition
rates (% correct response) ranging from 19.4% to 77.8% (M = 55.8, SD = 0.10). ERAs
for the visual, auditory, and audio-visual modalities were substantially correlated
(r = .41 to .52). We observed small but significant gender differences in overall ERA,
with women achieving higher accuracy than men (d = .23). Correlations between
ERA and self-report variables were generally small. For measures of emotional
competencies, high levels of overall ERA were associated with high levels of emotional understanding and empathy, and with low levels of expressive suppression.
Overall ERA was further positively correlated with the personality factor openness,
and negatively correlated with symptoms of alexithymia, autism, and psychopathic traits.
Significance of the findings: Findings provide new data on the individual difference correlates of ERA, using a large sample of participants and an ERA test which
included dynamic stimuli and a wider than usual set of emotions.
136
O1.1 Development of a Self-Report Measure of Emotion
Functionality
W. Gerrod Parrott
Georgetown University
To assess the functionality of emotions in everyday settings, it would be helpful
to have a self-report questionnaire that could be completed by non-researchers,
but several difficulties confront any attempt to develop such a questionnaire. For
example, most people do not know the mental, social, behavioral, and physical effects of emotions that are postulated by contemporary emotion theory. Furthermore, social norms and folk theories may incline respondents to misunderstand
how emotions function. This paper reports a series of four studies (N=354) used
to develop a self-report questionnaire for describing the functionality of everyday
emotions. The questionnaire asks participants to recall and describe a recent
experience of emotion. It requests ratings of intensity, regulation, pleasantness,
and overall beneficial and harmful effect, and employs several strategies to circumvent difficulties inherent in such an instrument. First, in addition to asking
about the overall benefit and harm of the emotional state, the questionnaire lists
28 specific effects that emotions may have; this list was derived from the literature on emotional functions and was adapted for questionnaire usage by selecting effects that people can be aware of and by eliminating items that were selected only rarely by participants. The questionnaire allows participants to indicate
whether each effect occurred or not, and to rate how functional and dysfunctional
each effect was in a particular emotional episode. Second, a strong tendency was
observed for participants (a convenience sample of American college students) to
judge pleasant emotions as functional and unpleasant emotions as dysfunctional, so the questionnaire includes instructions explaining that pleasant emotions
can have dysfunctional effects, that unpleasant emotions can have functional
effects, and that a single emotion can have both functional and dysfunctional
effects at the same time. The inclusion of this instruction after participants recall
the emotion and rate its pleasantness, but before they rate its functionality, minimizes demand characteristics while improving the reportage of costs and benefits of particular emotional responses in everyday life. These findings suggest that
the emotion researchers’ conception of emotions’ functionality is not prevalent
among contemporary college students, but that it can be taught relatively quickly.
The resulting questionnaire may be useful to other researchers.
137
O1.1 Surprise! I’m not actually surprised – the ability to fake an
emotion
Mircea Zloteanu, Daniel Richardson
University College London
How do people fake emotions, and how convincing are they? Participants were
recorded reacting to a surprising stimulus, a vampire jack-in-the-box, and faking
surprise to a neutral stimulus, a countdown timer. Half the participants faked surprise before experiencing genuine surprise (improvise condition), and the other
half afterwards (rehearse condition). These recordings were shown to other participants who tried to identify which were genuine. The improvised surprise was
easier to classify as fake, compared to rehearsed surprise, which was indistinguishable from genuine surprise. The improvised and rehearsed expressions were
rated as equally intense, and both less so than the genuine surprise. These results
show that the experience of surprise helps participants convincingly portray that
emotion later. Further experiments will reveal what aspects of rehearsal aid performance, whether participants are drawing on their recent internal experience
of genuine surprise, or a motor memory of their recent behaviour when genuinely
surprised.
138
O1.2 Fitting Feelings and Elegant Proofs
Cain Todd
Lancaster University
This paper explores the role of aesthetic affective states and epistemic feelings in
mathematical reasoning. Drawing on the psychological hypothesis that the function of epistemic feelings is to monitor certain sub-personal cognitive processes,
I examine the role these play in mathematics. In particular, I argue that particular
epistemic feelings – such as the feeling of knowing (Koriat 2000) – are valenced,
determinate manifestations of an underlying determinable state which I will call
the ‘feeling of fittingness’. This state, I will suggest, is itself an experiential manifestation of certain sub-personal processes of representing and assessing a) explanatory coherence, b) simplicity, and c) salience, which together constitute what
will be broadly referred to as ‘cognitive consonance’. I then argue that we should
identify this state with the notion of aesthetic experience, and that by doing
so we can account for the purported aesthetic judgements of mathematicians
concerning the beauty and elegance of theorems and proofs, which are otherwise
in certain respects problematic. Drawing on the research of Gopnik (2000) I thus
argue for a naturalistic account of mathematical reasoning and for the idea that
aesthetic affective experience plays a fundamental role in cognition.
139
O1.2 Emotion and Appreciation in Neuroaesthetics
Joerg Fingerhut
Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Neuroaesthetics engages in the project of identifying the networks and subsystems of the brain that are involved in the experience and evaluation of art. In
my paper I will review some of the recent literature that purportedly sustains a
version of sentimentalism in the appreciation of art. These studies establish that
subjects that were asked to judge objects aesthetically show differential activation in core emotional centers as well as reward-related centers (Brown et al. 2011;
Cela-Conde et al. 2011).
Such research has been used by Jesse Prinz (2011) as one line of evidence in favor
of the claim that emotions underlie our evaluative judgments of artworks as artworks. He additionally identifies “wonder” as the key emotion employed in art
appreciation. Wonder is not a sui generis emotion for aesthetic features but one
that has evolved to track the core relation theme of ‘the extraordinary’. Wonder
also is a blended emotion and therefore not easily identifiable, which accounts for
the fact that it yet has not been prominently addressed in the literature.
I will compare and contrast Prinz’ account with alternative ways to assess the role
of emotions in our encounters with works of art. These are (1) accounts that do not
highlight one specific emotion that might be underlying all our aesthetic evaluations but rather identify a certain mode in which different emotions are employed
in aesthetic engagements, and (2) accounts that see the evaluation of an artwork
as based in the amount of aesthetic experience it is able to elicit in which emotions may or may not play a distinctive role. I will argue that both alternatives fail
on the count that they do not directly address the psychological processes underlying our aesthetic appreciation of art as art.
140
O1.2 On Aesthetic Resonance
Angelika Krebs
University of Basel
When you resonate aesthetically with the world and “find the magic word,” the
world resonates back and “begins to sing” (Eichendorff). Aesthetic resonance is
one of the most joyful and meaningful experiences to which human beings can
aspire, although it is by no means easy to achieve. Three conditions are necessary
for it to occur: The presence of a certain kind of world that does not look the same
everywhere, or is barren and regulated, but has an individual face that arrests our
attention; a certain kind of subject that is not engrossed in his or her desires, but is
free and open to encountering the “other” and sympathizing with it; and a certain
kind of culture that is not reduced to use only, but has a sense of the “gymnastics
of attention” and the magic word. Global consumerism threatens all three these
conditions.
In resonating aesthetically – for example, with the sad façade of a derelict house or
the serenity of a valley – you respond emotionally to the atmosphere of the world
around you. Aesthetic resonance is an emotional experience, a kind of sympathy
or compassion; it is intentional and not causal like infection; and it is more than
empathy that can be cold (see for example, Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der
Sympathie, 1999; Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 2012 for the distinctions between infection, empathy, and sympathy). Aesthetic resonance involves
the cognition, evaluation, and feeling typical of sympathy, but not its motivation.
You do not feel the urge to help the derelict house, because you know that the
house is not literally sad – believing it to be literally sad would be bad metaphysics; you know that the house is sad only in a metaphorical sense, as music might
be sad (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 1997).
Perfect aesthetic sympathy feels like unity, although strictly speaking it is only an
instance of perfect harmony. When open to the beauty of nature, you can feel one
with the eternal cycle of life and death; when encountering beautiful architecture,
you feel unified with the human community across time. Feeling at home in the
world is essential for the good of human life, which means that safeguarding the
“face” of our earth and of our cities is a human imperative. A new urbanism is called for to protect the environment in which we live from further suburbanization.
141
O1.2 Musical emotions in amusia: dissociation between emotion
recognition and intensity judgments
Yohana Leveque, Barbara Tillmann, Anne Caclin
Lyon Neursoscience Research Center - CNRS - INSERM - Lyon I University
Two survey studies have suggested that musical emotions may be reduced in
congenital amusia (MacDonald & Stewart 2008, Omigie et al. 2012), a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by an impairment of music processing. However, preliminary studies failed to show differences in emotional responses or emotion recognition in amusic individuals compared to controls (posters of Gosselin
et al. and Paquette et al. at Neuroscience & Music 2011). In acquired amusia cases,
musical anhedonia is sometimes reported along with perceptual impairments.
We present here three experiments investigating musical emotions in congenital
and acquired amusia, using faces as control stimuli. The same task was used in all
experiments: Participants were asked to indicate the emotion that was evoked by
real musical recordings (joy, sadness, fear or serenity) and faces (joy, sadness, fear
or neutral) and to rate the intensity of this emotion on a subjective scale.
The first experiment involved 13 congenital amusic and 13 control participants. For
the face material, both groups showed similar response patterns for both recognition and intensity ratings. For the musical material, amusics and controls rated
the intensity of the emotion in a similar way, but the amusic participants were
significantly impaired in emotion recognition in comparison to the controls. These
results suggest that amusics’ impairments in pitch and timbre processing and
memory, linked to fronto-temporal anomalies, have an impact on emotion recognition but not on subjective emotion quantification.
Experiment 2 investigated a single case with a right temporal lesion, who showed
an acquired amusia of music perception. The patient showed an opposite result
pattern in the musical emotion task (intact processing for faces), notably with
a preserved ability to recognize emotions, but significantly reduced intensity ratings, revealing a musical anhedonia.
In Experiment 3, three cases of patients with Landau-Kleffner Syndrome were
investigated in comparison with a matched control group. The patients’ performance revealed impairments in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks,
correlated to the syndrome severity. Interestingly, music enjoyment was preserved,
even in the case with the severest amusia including emotion recognition deficits.
These result patterns demonstrate that emotion recognition and emotional intensity evaluation can be selectively altered in congenital and acquired amusia.
They more generally provide new insights on potential interactions between emotional, perceptual and evaluative processes during music listening in the normally
functioning and the injured brain.
142
O1.2 The social function of emotional expressions in mixed motive,
face-to-face, dyadic negotiation
Marc Mehu1, Katja Schlegel2, Jacobien Van Peer3, Benoit Bediou4,
Leonie Koban5, Vera Shuman4
Webster Vienna Private University1, Northeastern University2, Radboud
University3, University of Geneva4, University of Colorado Boulder5
Bi-dimensional models of sociability postulate that social behavior is organized
around two main strategies: dominance (competition) and affiliation (cooperation). Past research has shown that emotional expressions play a central role in
implementing these two strategies in everyday interactions. For example, the perception of dominance and affiliation in faces is heavily influenced by the type of
emotional expression displayed (Hess, Blairy, & Kleck, 2000). In social interactions,
expressions of positive emotion are related to pro-social intentions and cooperative contexts (Brown, Palameta, & Moore, 2002; Mehu, Grammer, & Dunbar, 2007).
In the present study, we investigate whether elements of emotional expressions
are functional in face-to-face negotiations in which both competitive and cooperative tendencies are relevant. We hypothesize that facial movements usually
associated with anger (e.g. frown) and happiness (e.g. smiles) are displayed at
different rates in competitive and cooperative contexts, respectively, and that
they are associated with adaptive interpersonal consequences. Sixty-five pairs of
same-sex individuals were video recorded while they were engaged in a scripted
mixed motive negotiation task (Pinkley, Neale, & Bennett, 1994). Participants also
completed self-report scales aimed at measuring affiliative and dominance traits.
Facial behavior was coded using the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman, Friesen,
& Hager, 2002). Results show that people with higher (self-reported) prosocial
orientation tend to smile more in cooperative contexts and that smiling expressivity during the first 30 seconds of the negotiation is positively associated with
joint gains in the negotiation. We also find that individuals with lower levels of
testosterone, i.e. individuals who may be less dominant, tend to smile more at the
beginning of the interaction. We conclude that the relationship between smiling
and self-reported personality depends on the conversational context (competitive
or cooperative), and that the outcome of negotiation can be, to some extent, predicted by emotional expressions displayed during the interaction.
143
O1.3 Classifying Emotion-Antecedent Appraisal in Brain Activity
using Machine Learning Methods
Kornelia Gentsch1, Eduardo Coutinho2,1, Florian Eyben3, Bjorn Schuller4,5,1,
Klaus R. Scherer1
University of Geneva1, Imperial College London2, Technische Universität München3,
University of Passau4, Imperial College London5
Electroencephalographic (EEG) data offer extraordinary challenges to data analysis. EEG signals are non-stationary, characterized by trial-to-trial and subjectto-subject variability, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high-dimensionality. Classical
EEG analysis uses averaging methods (typically the grand average over trials, subjects and sessions) to eliminate variability. But this approach, although valuable,
is experimentally time-consuming (e.g., a minimum number of trial repetition
is necessary to reduce noise), expensive, and discards possibly relevant dynamic
information in the analyzed signals. In this context, machine learning methods
provide particularly useful tools due to their high potential to deal with the challenges of EEG signals.
In this paper, we explore the use of Support Vector Machines (SVM) to the classification of averaged EEG data: Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). The data set
consisted of ERPs related to the processing of Goal Conduciveness, Control, and
Power Appraisal in the context of a gambling task. Our goal was to classify the
ERP of each subject for each experimental condition (“8-class problem”: win/high
control/high power, win/high control/low power, win/low control/high power,
win/low control/low power, loss/high control/high power, loss/high control/low
power, loss/low control/high power, loss/low control/low power) and to investigate the impact on classification performance when using ERPs from single-trials
and the averaged ERPs across different numbers of trials (2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, and all
trials).
Using subject-independent cross-validation we show that all classification tests
are significantly above chance level (12.5%), that the classification performance
of single-trials (13.7%) is significantly worse than the classification of the average
of two or more trials (ranging between 17.8% and 24.8%), and that there were
no statistically significant differences between the classification performances of
the ERP signals averaged across different numbers of trials. In relation to the EEG
channels used, we show that using the signals from 4 channels of interest for the
gambling task (Fz, FCz, Pz, and POz) we achieve a better performance than using
all 64 EEG channels. Taken together these results demonstrate the usefulness of
machine learning methods for the classification of ERP signals by showing preliminary evidence that with only two trials it is possible to classify EEG patterns
with respect to emotion-antecedent appraisal checks. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the importance of theoretically-driven channel selection for a successful classification.
144
O1.3 Being hungry makes the arousal system less effective at
highlighting emotional or high priority stimuli
Alison Montagrin1, Bruna Martins2, David Sander1, Mara Mather2
University of Geneva1, University of Southern California2
Arousal enhances processing of high priority information at the expense of lower
priority information (Mather & Sutherland, 2011). Because food has been a biologically relevant stimulus in primates through evolution, detecting it in the environment and remembering its location is relevant for the needs of individual. Thus
food stimuli tend to have high priority. Here in the current study, we examined
how emotional arousal would influence processing of food stimuli. Because food
stimuli have high priority, we predicted that attention to food would be enhanced
under emotional arousal. In addition, we manipulated whether participants were
hungry or sated. The release of noradrenaline under arousal is likely to be a key
determinant of enhanced priority information. Increasing glucose levels increases
circulating noradrenaline, thus the effects of emotional arousal may be more
potent when sated than when hungry. To induce a perceptual situation with competition between high and low priority stimuli, participants did an adjusted dotprobe task consisting in the detection of a dot placed on the food or household
images. We manipulated emotional arousal with the presentation of emotional
or neutral sounds before the images. We predicted that attention to high priority
stimuli (i.e. food images) would be enhanced by arousing sounds compared with
neutral sounds. In addition, to assess the arousal response to the arousing and
neutral sounds, we measured both pupil dilation and subjective arousal ratings.
Pupil dilation for sated participants showed a larger response to the emotional
sounds as compared to neutral sounds but did not show different responses to
emotional and neutral sounds among hungry participants. Likewise, sated participants showed greater differences in their own arousal ratings of emotional
versus neutral pictures than hungry participants did. These findings indicate that
emotional system of hungry people is less effective at differentiating the intensity
of arousal responses to emotional versus neutral stimuli. Secondly, dot probe performance showed that, in general, everyone responded faster to dots presented
on food images than on household images. However, arousing sounds further enhanced attention to subsequent food stimuli, especially when participants were
sated. Thus, consistent with other studies manipulating priority in other ways
(e.g., Sutherland and Mather, 2012; Sakaki, Fryer, & Mather, 2014) arousal enhances
processing of high priority information (in this case, food stimuli). In addition,
the current findings indicate that arousal is less effective at helping important
or emotionally relevant information stand out from mundane information when
people are hungry.
145
O1.3 Appraisal patterns of five respect-related emotions in
Japanese university students
Sera Muto
The University of Tokyo - Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Respect is considered as one of the “other-praising” emotions (Haidt, 2003; Schindler, Zink, Windrich, & Menninghaus, 2013), but there are few empirical studies
that show how this emotion is different from other related emotions such as
admiration, adoration, or awe. Japanese people experience respect as an emotion
frequently because of their interdependent self-construal (Kitayama, Mesquita,
& Karasawa, 2006). According to [Author] (2014), in Japanese university students,
there were basic five categories of respect-related emotions: (1) respect mingled
with mild love (prototypical respect); (2) idolatry (worship and adoration); (3) respect mingled with fear (awe); (4) admiration; and (5) respect mingled with surprise (wonder). These five emotions may arise from different cognitive appraisal
of antecedent events. Thus, this study builds on these findings to examine the
appraisal patterns of prototypical respect and other related emotions in Japanese
university students.
In this study, 828 Japanese university students were randomly selected and received one of five questionnaires that were categorized by the above emotion
conditions. Within each questionnaire, they read a set of two vignettes which
were intended to elicit the one of the five corresponding emotions of that category. Based on impression of the vignettes, the students then rated the intensity
of their subjective feelings of eight different emotions (five respect-related emotions mentioned above and three negative social emotions potentially related to
respect) and 23 appraisal scale items common to every questionnaire (e.g., causal
attribution and coping potential).
Analysis of variance revealed that each emotion condition made participants feel
corresponding respect-related emotion. Furthermore, overall, clear differences
existed within the appraisals of the five emotion conditions. For example, in the
prototypical respect condition, the target persons in the vignettes were strongly
perceived to be a person who shows consistent excellence, close with participants
and an attainable role model for them. In contrast, the target persons which elicit
idolatry were strongly perceived to be given an innate ability, distant from participants, overwhelmingly superior to them, and represented unattainable ideals
for them. Moreover, for admiration and wonder, the target persons were strongly
perceived to be excellent because of temporal behaviors and skills, rather than
because of consistent good qualities.
These findings suggest that in Japanese university students, five respect-related
emotions have shared and unshared appraisal patterns. The empirical finding
that prototypical respect in Japanese could be discriminated from other related
emotions is remarkable because previous studies sometimes considered respect
and admiration as almost same emotion.
146
O1.3 The neural underpinnings of habitual and goal-directed
food-seeking during satiation
Henk van Steenbergen1, Poppy Watson2, Reinout Wiers2,
Bernhard Hommel1, Sanne de Wit2
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition - Leiden1, University of Amsterdam2
Why do we often engage in food-seeking and eating behaviors at times when we
are already fully sated? In the present fMRI study we investigated the hypothesis that food-associated cues in the environment can interfere with goal-directed
action by involving striatal habit pathways that elicit food-seeking which is independent of the current desirability of the outcome. Employing a computerized
task recently developed by Watson et al. (2014), participants learned to press keys
for chocolate and popcorn rewards. In a subsequent test phase in the scanner we
investigated whether satiation on one of these rewards would bias choice towards
the other, still desirable, food reward in the presence or absence of food-associated cues. Satiation was seen to reduce responding for the devalued food when no
food-associated cues were present. This effect was associated with activation in
the medial orbitofrontal cortex. In contrast, satiation failed to reduce cue-elicited
food-seeking. In line with our hypothesis, cues that had previously been paired
with chocolate and popcorn led to increased responding for the signaled food
reward (Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer, PIT), independently of satiation. These
findings point to the underlying neural mechanism that may underlie the powerful control that cues in our obesogenic environment exert over our behavior.
147
O1.3 An Appraisal Theory of Emotions for Others
Joshua D. Wondra, Phoebe C. Ellsworth
University of Michigan
Emotions for others are a problem because they defy the assumption that emotions are about our own personal concerns. Emotion theorists have dealt with the
problem by saying little about how we feel emotions for others. Empathy theorists, who do study emotions for others, have dealt with the problem by proposing
processes that either link emotions for others to past personal emotional experiences or that ignore the emotional context so that personal concerns are irrelevant (Gallese, 2003; Hoffman, 2000; Keysers & Gazzola, 2009; Preston & de Waal,
2002). These empathy theories treat emotions for others as disconnected from
the processes that are involved in normal emotional experiences. Additionally,
they do a good job explaining how we could feel the same emotion for someone
else, such as feeling sad for someone who is sad, but they do a poor job explaining
how we could feel a different emotion for someone else, such as feeling angry
for someone who is sad or embarrassed for someone who appears to be relatively unemotional. This is because empathy theories emphasize that emotions for
others are based on what we think they are feeling. In contrast, appraisal theories
of emotion emphasize that emotions are based on appraisals of situations (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). We present an appraisal theory of emotions for others
and argue that emotions for others are based on appraisals of their situations,
just like firsthand emotions are based on appraisals of our own situations. Subjects read a story about a poor high school student who applied to college and
was rejected from every school. The student feels sad at the end of the story. Half
of the subjects learned that the student’s disadvantaged circumstances were responsible for the rejections (situational control condition) and the other half of the
subjects learned that, though the student did not know it, his friend intentionally
sabotaged his application (other-agency condition). Consistent with an appraisal
theory of emotions for others, subjects in the other-agency condition felt angrier
than those in the situational control condition. The difference in anger was mediated by appraisals that the student’s friend was to blame for the rejections. This
research unites theories of empathy and theories of emotion and treats emotions
for others as a part of normal emotional processes.
148
O1.4 What goes around comes around: The implicit intergroup
dynamics of schadenfreude expressions
Alexandra Hall, Eric Vanman
From enjoying the loss of a rival sports team to taking pleasure in the gaffe of an
opponent political party, deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of other groups
is a common occurrence. These experiences often bring us a feeling of schadenfreude—pleasure derived from the suffering or misfortune of others. And sometimes we even outwardly communicate this emotion to members of the other
group in the form of ‘schadenfreude expressions.’ Team sporting events provide a
typical example of this behavior, with players and fans alike often seen to be smiling and cheering at the mistakes or misfortunes of the rival team. Not all displays
of schadenfreude, however, take place in the comparatively safe and lower-stakes
context of a sporting event. For example, outward expressions of schadenfreude
have also been reported in the recent escalation of the Gaza-Israel conflict. The
potential for this emotion and behavior to fuel intergroup conflict makes it particularly important to understand.
Current research investigating intergroup schadenfreude has predominately focused on examining the conditions likely to elicit the emotion. Very little research
has directly considered the outward expressions of schadenfreude that occur in
intergroup contexts (but see Leach & Spears, 2002; Leach, Spears, & Manstead,
2014, for an examination of the gloating emotion). Thus, the current research
aims to examine these outward expressions, and more specifically, examine the
effects these expressions have on the target group. That is, how does one respond
when one’s group becomes the target of intergroup schadenfreude?
To assess this question, we developed a novel paradigm, in which participants
viewed misfortunes suffered by ingroup and outgroup members. Additionally,
some participants’ ingroup became the target of intergroup schadenfreude—outgroup members were consistently seen to be enjoying the misfortunes of the participants’ fellow ingroup members. Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to
examine whether becoming the target of schadenfreude influenced participants’
affective reactions to ingroup and outgroup misfortunes. We found that participants whose group became the target of intergroup schadenfreude demonstrated an implicit retaliatory response, whereby they selectively smiled at the misfortunes of outgroup members. As control condition participants did not display
this retaliatory response, simple mimicry effects or emotion contagion could not
explain the findings. Rather, it was the specific occurrence of outgroup members
smiling at one’s ingroup that resulted in the greater display of smiling in response
to outgroup members’ misfortunes. We utilize a functional framework of intergroup schadenfreude to discuss these findings.
149
O1.4 Others’ outcomes and moral norms in third-party anger
Helen Landmann
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Researchers disagree on whether anger is elicited by negative outcomes (e.g. Batson et al., 2007; Dollard et al., 1939), moral violation (e.g. Averill, 1983; Montada,
2003) or a combination of both (e.g. Scherer, 1999). We tested these different approaches for situations in which moral violations (of bankers or pharmaceutical
researchers) do not affect the own person but others (an unfamiliar couple or a
certain group of patients). In two studies, we manipulated the degree of moral
violation and the degree of others’ outcome independently. Although the participants cared about the others’ outcome (they reported more compassion when
the negative outcome was severe than when it was mild), anger depended on the
degree of moral violation only. This supports the central role of moral violation for
third-party anger.
Anger that is elicited by moral violation, so called moral outrage or indignation,
is argued to be a noble feeling that is neither connected to aggression nor retribution (Batson et al., 2007). In three studies, we manipulated the degree of moral
violation independent from the outcome, before the participants were asked to
make hypothetical economic decisions. Moral violation affected altruistic punishment of the perpetrator but not cooperation with the victims. This effect was
mediated by appraisals or self-reported anger. In situations in which one is not
affected personally, the decision for punishment is driven by the appraised or felt
moral violation.
150
O1.4 Shame and genocide: placing “survivor shame” in a broader
emotional context
Alba Montes Sanchez, Dan Zahavi
University of Copenhagen
Shame, the so-called “survivor shame,” is one of the central emotions associated
with the plight of genocide survivors and victims of abuse. This, to a large extent,
is baffling: it seems that nobody ought to reproach themselves for having been
victims of abuse. Yet we argue that even if survivor shame is morally unjustified, it
is not irrational: it is intelligible and it connects a world of moral value. We argue
that in order to understand what the shame of trauma victims means, we need
to distinguish different varieties of shame, how they arise and how they are experienced. We also need to distinguish the emotional responses elicited by the
abuses as they happen, from the subsequent phenomenon of survivor shame.
Analysing carefully the possible range of immediate shame-related responses
can help clarify some puzzles about survivor shame. In this sense, we argue that
the difference between being shamed and being ashamed is crucial. The relation
between both phenomena is not entirely straightforward: being shamed can elicit a wide range of emotional responses, and shame is not always one of them.
Indeed, in the debates shame often gets confused with the feeling of humiliation.
While shame and humiliation share some similarities, there are important differences between them. Both involve a negative assessment of ourselves, but in
humiliation, as opposed to shame, this assessment is perceived as external and
undeserved. We discuss whether, and to what extent, the shamed has to recognize and respect the evaluation of the shamer in order for the shame experience
to occur. We argue that the self-evaluation in shame is complex, and the shamer’s
evaluation is one of its elements, but not the only one. In the light of this, we offer
some thoughts on the contrast established by some theorists between survivor
shame and survivor guilt, and argue that even if survivor shame might be morally
unjustified, it is not irrational and it points to a world of moral value.
151
O1.4 Moralised Eating Behaviour and Moral Cleansing
Thea Schei, Simone Schnall
University of Cambridge
People tend to adapt their behavior to reach a moral equilibrium (Inbar, Pizarro, Gilovich & Ariely, 2012; Nelissen & Zeelenberg, 2009; Sachdeva, Illiev & Medin, 2009;
Zhong, Liljenquist & Cain, 2009). For example, after an ‘immoral’ act, they attempt
to compensate for their transgression by engaging in a ‘moral’ act in order to reestablish their moral self-image. This compensation – named moral cleansing – often consists of increased helping (e.g., de Hooge, Zeelenberg & Breugelman, 2007)
or self-punishing behaviours (e.g., Bastian, Jetten & Fasoli, 2011). Eating behaviour
is often cast in a moral light (Steim & Nemeroff, 1995): Overeating frequently leads
to increased guilt and shame (Burney & Irvin, 2000), and people view themselves
as ‘good’ if they maintain their diet, but ‘bad’ if they indulge themselves.
We propose that when eating behaviour is moralised, overeating should have
behavioural consequences similar to other perceived ‘immoral’ behaviour. In two
separate studies, we tested whether overeating results in ‘moral cleansing’. In Study 1, we tested whether recall of an overeating episode can motivate painful selfpunishment. After completing either an overeating or neutral recall, 49 female
participants engaged in the cold-pressor task, which is commonly used to test
pain tolerance, and involves submersing one’s arm in ice water. They also reported
positive and negative affect.
We found that in comparison to recalling a neutral memory, recalling an overeating memory made participants feel guiltier, d = .70, and they also engaged in
the painful task for longer, d = .64. This suggests that overeating has taken on an
immoral connotation, therefore leading to self-punishment. To explore whether
overeating recall would also lead to other-directed compensations, we conducted
a follow-up study where participants were given a chance to spontaneously engage in prosocial behavior. In Study 2, 60 female participants completed either an
overeating or neutral recall, and were given the chance to help the experimenter
by completing a tedious mathematics questionnaire. After recalling an overeating
memory participants helped for significantly longer than those recalling a neutral
memory, d = .90.
These results indicate that food consumption, in particular overeating, can take
on a moral meaning, and that ‘moral cleansing’ governs compensatory behaviors
after overeating in the same way as other perceived transgressions (Zhong, et al.,
2009). These findings contribute to the current literature by showing that overeating not only gives rise to negative emotions, but in fact also can have behavioural
consequences, leading to both self-punishment and prosociality.
152
O1.4 Moral integrity and emotional vigilance
Lotte van Dillen, Gabry Vanderveen
Leiden University
Disgust at the crime scene
Forensic investigators and other professionals in the criminal justice system often
deal with evidence that can arouse strong negative emotions. So called gruesome
evidence may influence the assessment of the seriousness of a crime, and accordingly, decisions regarding prosecution and punishment. Especially since technological and legal developments now allow for a more detailed and powerful
visualization of evidence, the question to what extent emotional reactions to this
evidence may play a role in legal decision-making becomes of high importance.
In the current research, over 250 respondents judged a criminal case that contained a description and photos of a crime scene that varied systematically in gruesomeness. Respondents were law students, students of the police academy, and
professionals working as forensic and tactical investigators. All respondents rated
their experienced disgust in response to the material, and made assessments of
the seriousness of the crime as well as punitive judgments. In addition, individual
differences in disgust sensitivity and attentional control were measured. Results
showed that, compared to both student groups, professionals experienced less
intense disgust in response to the gruesome evidence, and scored higher on attentional control. Despite these main effects of professional experience, all groups
however showed a positive relation between individual differences in disgust sensitivity, experienced disgust, and assessments of seriousness of the crime and the
degree of punishment. The findings thus suggest that there exist important individual differences in the extent to which people are influenced by their (disgust)
emotions in response to gruesome evidence that are relatively independent of
professional experience or factual knowledge about the crime scene. Both theoretical and practical implications of this study will be discussed.
153
O1.5 Automatic recognition of human stress during stress-inducing
interactions
Laurence Devillers, Mariette Soury
LIMSI-CNRS
This paper focuses on the automatic recognition of human stress during stressinducing interactions (public speaking, job interview and serious games), using
audio and visual cues. In order to build automatic stress recognition models, we
used audio cues computed from subjects’ voice captured via a lapel microphone,
and visual cues computed either from subjects’ facial expressions captured via
a webcam, or subjects’ posture captured via a Kinect. Part of this work is dedicated to the study of information fusion from these various modalities. Stress
expression and coping are influenced both by interpersonal differences (personality traits, past experiences, cultural background) and contextual differences (type
of stressor, situation’s stakes). We evaluated stress in various populations in data
corpora collected during this work: social phobics in anxiety-inducing situations
in interaction with a machine and with humans; apathologic subjects in a mock
job interview; and apathologic subjects interaction with a computer and with the
humanoid robot Nao. Inter-individual and inter-corpora comparisons highlight
the variability of stress expression. A possible application of this work could be the
elaboration of therapeutic software to learn stress coping strategies, particularly
for social phobics.
Mariette Soury and Laurence Devillers. Stress detection from audio on multiple
window analysis size in a public speaking task. In International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2013), pages 529–533, Geneva,
Switzerland, 02/09 au 05/09 2013. IEEE Computer Society
Mariette Soury and Laurence Devillers. Collecte de données pour la détection du
stress dans les interactions sociales. In Workshop Affects, Compagnons Artificiels
et Interactions (WACAI 2012), 2012.
154
O1.5 The positivity offset and the negativity bias of emotions in
online communities
David Garcia1, Adiya Abisheva1, Arvid Kappas2, Frank Schweitzer1
ETH Zurich1, Jacobs University Bremen2
The interplay between subjective emotional experience and social emotional expression has the potential to create aggregated patterns that shape human communication. One of them is a general tendency towards positive expression, also
known as the Polyanna hypothesis. When formulated as a positive token valence
bias, empirical studies provide conflicting results that reject the hypothesis in
some cases [1] and support it in others [2, 3]. Furthermore, the theory of a linear relation between word valence and frequency poses a very simplified view in which
communication is not more than verbal grooming [4], opposed to the empirical
findings of the relevance of negative emotions in evaluative processes [5], in the
maintenance of social links [6] and in the transmission of information [3]. We
contribute to the empirical analysis of word valence-frequency relationships with
a multilingual approach based on large datasets of textual
expression. First, we validated the existence of a positive bias in token frequencies for 12 languages through diverse valence lexica and verbal expression corpora, finding strong support for the Pollyanna hypothesis as a positivity offset
resulting from increasing frequencies of positive valence words. Second, to test
the relevance of a negativity bias, we integrated more than 250 Billion publicly
available messages from 8 online communities, and processed the data from
large-scale corpora of books and web pages. We found a consistent nonlinear pattern between word valence and frequency in which an increasing trend for positive valence coexists with a second mode in which very negative words are more
frequent than mildly negative ones. Our work
illustrates how large-scale collective emotional phenomena can be analyzed
through observational data, reaching human behavior on the tail of unlikely and
strongly emotional events that are difficult to elicit in experimental studies or
discover through survey methods.
155
O1.5 To tweet or not to tweet: The question of emotion and
excitement about sporting events
Jon Gratch1, Gale Lucas1, Nikolaos Malandrakis1, Evan Szablowski2,
Eli Fessler3
University of Southern California1, University of Oxford2, Pomona College3
Sporting events can serve as laboratories to explore emotion and computational
tools provide new ways to examine emotional processes “in the wild”. Moreover, emotional processes are assumed -but untested- in sports economics. For
example, according to the well-studied uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH),
“close” games are more exciting and therefore better attended. If one team were
certain to win, it would take away a major source of excitement, reducing positive
affect, and therefore decreasing attendance. The role of emotion here is assumed
but has not been tested; furthermore, the measures used (ticket sales, attendance,
TV-viewership) do not allow for such a test because they are devoid of emotional
content. To address this problem, we use tweets per minute (specifically, tweets
posted during 2014 World Cup with official game hashtags). Sentiment analysis
of these tweets can give interesting insights into what emotional processes are
involved. Another benefit of tweets is that they are dynamic, and novel results
from dynamic analyses (of TV-viewership) suggest that the UOH effect can actually reverse as games unfold (people switch channels away from close games).
We therefore also reconsider the UOH, specifically, extending it by both examining
sentiment and dynamic changes during the game. To consider such changes, we
focus on games that could have been close (high in uncertainty), but ended up
being lower in uncertainty. We operationalize such unexpected certainty of outcome as the extent to which games are predicted to be “close” (based on betting
odds), but ended up with a bigger difference between the teams’ scores than was
expected. Statistical analyses revealed that, contrary to the UOH, games with a
bigger difference in score between teams than expected had higher tweets per
minute. We also performed sentiment analysis, categorizing each tweet as positive, negative or neutral, and found that games with higher tweets per minute
also have a higher percentage of negative tweets. Furthermore, games that have
a bigger difference than expected have a higher percentage of negative tweets
(compared to games closer to what is expected). This analysis seems to suggest
that, contrary to assumptions in sports economics, excitement relates to expressions of negative emotion (and not positive emotion). The results are discussed
in terms of innovations in methodology and understanding the role of emotion
for “tuning in” to real world events. Further research could explore the specific
mechanisms that link negative sentiment to excitement, such as worry or outgroup derogation.
156
O1.5 The role of context in the understanding of emotions
Ursula Hess
There exist two extreme views on the understanding of emotion expressions. The
neocultural theory proposed by Ekman and colleagues points to the universality
and prototypicality of emotion expressions. The basic logic of computer sensing is
based on this idea which allows the establishment of a ground truth of emotional
meaning and which limits the source of information to the specific communication channel of interest. By contrast psychological constructionist models point to
the role of language and cultural context as ingredients in constructing the meaning of expressions. According to these views no ground truth can be established,
because the perception outcome is not independent of the perceiver. In my talk
I will consider the influence of social context on emotion communication with
view to understanding the process from both a universal and a culture specific
perspective. In this I will distinguish the role of culture specific perceptual processes as well as cultural display rules and show both universal and specific processes linked to the understanding of emotions and the inferences drawn from
this understanding and consider what this means for emotions in machines.
157
O1.5 Emotional experience in real and virtual social interactions:
An event sampling study
Konstantinos Kafetsios1, Despoina Chatzakou2, Athena Vakali2
University of Crete - Psychology Department1
Aristotle University - Thesaloniki2
Research programs in different countries have consistently found that in naturally occuring face to face social interactions people experience positive emotions
in much higher intensity and frequency in comparison to negative emotions.
The present study aimed to compare the experience of positive and negative
emotions between face to face, and virtual social interactions. Two hundred and
twenty nine participants reported on 7-point likert type scales, how intensely they
experienced 8 negative (anger, anxiety, disgust, fear, nervous, rejected, sad, shame)
and 5 positive (calm, enthusiasm, happiness, interest, surprise) emotions in every
meaningful social interaction they had face to face, online (chat, facebook), and
over the telephone for a period of ten days. Results from multilevel analyses found
that positive -and some negative, anxiety-related- emotions were experienced
significantly more intensely in face to face social interactions than in social interactions on the web. Factor analyses also found a differing structuring of positive
and negative emotions between face to face and virtual social interactions with
negative emotions holding more variance in the affective experience in virtual
as opposed to face to face social interactions. The presentation will discuss the
significance of the social context for the affective experience in real and virtual
social interactions.
158
O1.6 Emotional access in autism
Sarah Arnaud
Universite du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Paris-Sorbonne
My goal in this presentation is to argue that people with autism access their emotions using «cognitive» rather than «phenomenal» access. I analyze the nature of
this emotional particularity and assess its impact on the pathology.
The “emotional deficit” is one of the main cognitive deficits characterizing Autism spectrum disorders (ASD), a diagnostic criterion manifesting itself through
“reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect” (DSM-V). Studies in psychology
have shown the existence of a deficit in emotional “identification and description”
of one’s “own emotions” (Hill, Berthoz, & Frith 2004) in autism, or in emotional
awareness (Silani et al. 2008).
I suggest that these studies indicate problems of «emotional access». This notion
designates the process through which the subject relates to her emotional states.
I show why this notion of «access» is preferable to that of «consciousness» when
it comes to emotional processes. I then use Block’s (2011) terminology to distinguish between «phenomenal access» and «cognitive access». The first refers to
the phenomenology, accompanied by a subjective feeling. It is an automatic and
intuitive process, which consists of a “subjective occurrence of qualitative content”
(Rosenthal 2002). In contrast, «Cognitive access» is a kind of objective understanding, that Rosenthal calls “higher order thought”. It is comparable to a third person access that enables cognitive processing about emotions.
I explain how people with autism are characterized by problems of phenomenal
access to their emotional experience, while conserving a cognitive access to it. I
then analyze the roles and functions of these two forms of access in our emotional lives.
159
O1.6 Reconceptualizing Major Depression as a form of
infectious disease
Turhan Canli
Stony Brook University
In this talk, I argue for a reconceptualization of major depressive disorder (major
depression) as an infectious disease. I suggest that major depression may result
from a parasitic, bacterial, or viral infection and present examples that illustrate
possible pathways by which these microorganisms could contribute to the etiology of major depression. I also argue that the reconceptualization of the human
body as an ecosystem for these microorganisms and the human genome as a host
for non-human exogenous sequences may greatly amplify the
opportunity to discover genetic links to the illness. Deliberately speculative, this
talk is intended to stimulate
novel research approaches and expand the circle of researchers taking aim at this
vexing illness.
(Note to the organizing committee: This talk is based on a recent article I published in the journal Biology of Mood and Anxiety disorders, link to the paper
here: http://www.biolmoodanxietydisord.com/content/4/1/10)
160
O1.6 Depression and emotion
Agnes Celle1, Thomas Desmidt2, Laure Lansari1
Universite Paris Diderot1, CHRU Tours - UMRS INSERM U9302
The aim of this paper is to establish a correlation between depression and emotion, on the basis of tests carried out jointly by psychiatrists and linguists on
depressive patients. Correlations between linguistic data and physiological and
psychometric measures will also be investigated.
75 subjects (female aged 18 to 55) were divided into 3 equal groups - those suffering from ongoing depression, remitted depressives and a control group. Baseline
data include
1) psychometric scales (depression and anxiety severity, retardation assessment,
personality inventory and anhedonic scales to assess reactivity to pleasure, displeasure and anticipation to pleasure) and
2) physiological measures (heart rate variability, ultrasound brain pulsatility, resting fMRI and brain perfusion assessed by ASL-MRI). These tests are in accordance
with the integrative model of emotional emergence put forward by Craig 2009
and Desmidt, Lemoine, Belzung and Depraz 2014.
Linguistic data were collected through the analysis of evaluative interviews performed by a trained psychiatrist. The spontaneous verbal reactions of subjects
presented with 6 emotion-eliciting pictures were also recorded, as the protocol
includes an emotion-eliciting experiment with the continuous recording of heart
and respiratory rates, electrodermal conductance and ultrasound brain pulsatility.
One of the objectives of the larger project this study is part of is to correlate linguistic data with physiological data at baseline and during an emotion-eliciting
situation.
Our hypothesis was that patients from the control group as well as remitted depressives would be linguistically more reactive than the patients with ongoing
depression. They were thus expected to respond verbally when presented with
emotion-eliciting pictures. And yet, whatever the subgroup of patients considered, it appeared that however surprising those pictures were, they did not yield
any appreciable amount of verbal reactions. However, our initial hypothesis was
borne out by the analysis of baseline data. Depressed patients fail to both identify
and express what they feel - I don’t know, a bit are their most frequent replies
when asked about their emotions.
Drawing upon these results, we will first establish a correlation between the physiological startle that occurs along with surprise and the verbal blank or disfluency
associated with it. We will then establish a second correlation between the high
level of depression and the patients’ low degree of awareness of and commitment
to their own emotions.
161
O1.6 Emotional Switching in Borderline Personality Disorder:
A Daily Life Study
Marlies Houben1, Kristof Vansteelandt2, Laurence Claes1,3,4
Ann Berens3,4, Ellen Sleuwaegen3,4, Peter Kuppens1
KU Leuven1, University Psychiatric Center KU Leuven - Campus Kortenberg2, Psychiatrisch Ziekenhuis Duffel - Duffel3, Collaborative Antwerp Psychiatric Research
Institute - University of Antwerp4
In an attempt to better understand emotional instability that is characteristic of
persons with a borderline personality disorder (BPD), we examined the notion of
emotional switching in BPD in daily life, defined as changes between positive and
negative mood states from one time point to the next. The notion that switching
might be particularly characteristic of BPD resonates with the concept of dichotomous thinking that involves the tendency to evaluate or observe the world,
people, and feelings in terms of extreme, dichotomous categories which are mutually exclusive, rather than evaluating in a more gradual manner. As far as we
know, one study has investigated the occurrence of dichotomous affective experiences in daily life of persons with BPD. Coifman, Berenson, Rafaeli and Downey
(2012) showed that BPD patients are characterized by heightened polarity of
their affective experiences in daily life, compared to healthy controls. We extend
this line of research by investigating whether polarized affective experiences
can change from one point to the next in daily life, resulting in abrupt changes
between positive and negative mood states over time, i.e. emotional switching.
We focused on two aspects of emotional switching. First, we investigated the
probability that a switch between a positive and a negative state occurs, independent of the magnitude of the emotional change, reflecting switching propensity. Second, we investigated the magnitude of emotional change in case a person
switched between a positive and a negative state, so-called switch distance. We
conducted an experience sampling study in which 30 BPD patients and 28 healthy controls carried handheld palmtops in their everyday lives and recorded their
emotional states using a bipolar valence scale 10 times a day for 8 consecutive
days. Results showed that while BPD patients did not differ from healthy controls
regarding their propensity to make switches between positive and negative mood
states, they did display emotional changes larger in magnitude if they made such
switches compared to healthy controls. In contrast, changes from one time point
to the next within the negative or positive realm do not seem to be particularly
larger for BPD patients. These results extend previous findings, that characterized
emotional instability in BPD patients mainly in terms of larger overall fluctuations
in positive mood or in negative mood separately. Moreover, the findings provide
insight into possible processes underlying emotion dysregulation in BPD, and can
inform treatment of emotional instability in BPD.
162
Plasticity of the Social Brain: Effects of one-year long Mental
Training on Brain Structure and Function, Social Cognition,
Well-being, Stress, and Prosocial Behavior
Professor Tania Singer
Max Planck Institute, Leipzig Germany
In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental
capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads
to changes in brain functions associated with increases in positive affect, pro-social behavior, and better health. I will introduce the ReSource Project, a large-scale
multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program. Participants
were trained in three separate modules allowing us to distinguish effects based
on a) attention and interoceptive body awareness training (Presence), b) care,
compassion and emotion-regulation training (Affect), and c) Theory of Mind and
meta-cognitive awareness training (Perspective). We assessed data from more
than 300 training and control subjects, with over 90 measures including subjective measures, questionnaires, event-sampling data, a variety of behavioral, brain,
physiological and biological data. I will present first evidence of training-module
specific changes in markers of both, functional and structural brain plasticity,
stress reduction, subjective well-being, mind-wandering, and different psychological as well as economic measures assessing social cognitive capacities and prosocial behavior. These findings will be discussed in relation to their meaning for
models of social cognition, plasticity research in general, and their importance to
initiate societal change.
165
Symposium S3.1
The Psychology of Facial Expressions: Evidence from Western,
Eastern, and Indigenous Societies
Conveners
James Russell, Carlos Crivelli
Boston College, Autonoma University of Madrid
Outside the scientific community, the view that faces are read-outs of emotions
has been established as a folk theory in Western societies. Thus, for much of the
general public, it is beyond question that a smile conveys happiness, a pout sadness, a scowl anger, a gasp fear, and a nose scrunch disgust. Scientific theories
supporting the causal link between emotions and facial expressions have relied
on theory-driven approaches, testing prototypical facial expressions of “emotion”
through recognition studies in Western, Eastern, and indigenous societies (Matsumoto et al., 2008).
The assumption that emotions are produced and recognized pan-culturally (i.e.,
Universality Thesis, UT) hinges upon unbalanced evidence. This imbalance is produced between:
1. The amount and quality of the data gathered in Western, Eastern, and indigenous societies.
2. The different methods used in the recognition paradigm.
3. The theory-driven and data-driven approaches to scientific inquiry.
In this multidisciplinary symposium, the authors will highlight the weaknesses
of the UT by providing evidence from Western, Eastern, and indigenous societies
after restoring the equilibrium to the above imbalances. The first speaker will report how evidence supporting the UT in Western societies has been affected by
method artifacts, showing a series of studies in which children and adults “recognized” a nonsense word from a nonsense and novel face. The second speaker
will address problems of validity in sparse studies conducted in indigenous societies and, to overcome these problems, a general methodological framework and
guidelines for conducting studies in indigenous societies will be presented. The
third speaker will report a series of studies conducted in indigenous societies (the
Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, and the Wamwani of Mozambique), challenging the assumption that facial expressions are read-outs of emotions. The fourth
speaker will demonstrate how data-driven (i.e., objective) approaches can be used
to model facial expressions emotions in different cultures. The fifth speaker, a UT
tenant with research experience in indigenous societies, will act as a discussant.
167
Method artifacts in research on the recognition of
emotion from facial expression
Nicole Nelson1, Marissa DiGirolamo2, James Russell2
University of Queensland1, Boston College2
Is recognition of emotion from facial expression easy, automatic, and universal?
Method artifacts in published evidence mean we simply don’t know the answer.
One series of studies used Izard’s method with children: children chose the predicted face from an array when asked to find the person who feels a certain emotion;
they then freely labeled the face with the predicted emotion term. In our study,
this method showed that children recognized pax (a nonsense word) from a novel
(nonsense) face. Another series of studies used a common method with adults: Six
experiments (total N = 918) showed that, with the commonly used method in this
field, high agreement can be artificially achieved for different faces and different
emotions: the same nonsense facial expression was labeled as disgusted (76%),
annoyed (85%), playful (89%), and mischievous (96%). Three different nonsense
facial expressions were labeled nonplussed (82%, 93%, and 82%). A prototypical
sad expression was labeled disgusted (55%), a prototypical fear expression labeled
surprised (55%). A nonsense facial expression was labeled with a nonsense word
(tolen) (53%).
168
Conducting studies in indigenous societies:
A mixed methods research approach
Carlos Crivelli, Sergio Jarillo
Autonoma University of Madrid, American Museum of Natural History (NY)
This paper calls for a methodological shift in the study of facial expressions in
remote and indigenous societies with two immediate outcomes: (a) multidisciplinary research groups contribute to build a robust descriptive base, diminishing
ethnocentrism and enhancing the quality of the data; and (b) studies devised for
Western societies cannot be readily adapted to the changing settings encountered in the field. We propose the model ETC (Explore, Test, and Control), a model
that relies on the use of mixed methods research as a way to integrate two research traditions of inquiry: qualitative and quantitative methods. On the exploratory phase, the researcher builds a descriptive base through participant observation, getting acquainted with the vernacular, and building rapport with the host
community. In the testing phase—dependent on the exploratory phase—the researcher decides whether to follow a sequential exploratory design or to conduct
more complex mixed methods research designs (e.g., intervention design, multistage design). The control phase allows the researcher to make cross-cultural
comparisons, taking the indigenous society as the “normative” and the Western
society as its control.
169
Universality in the perception of facial expressions:
Which is the right empirical referent?
José Miguel Fernández-Dols
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
A straightforward way to delimit the universality of facial expressions consists in
finding out how people perceive expressions in isolated, remote cultures. This talk
summarizes a series of studies carried out in Papua New Guinea (Trobriand Islands), and Africa (Quirimbas Archipielago) in which participants were requested
to match facial expressions to (a) basic emotion labels (104), (b) normative (by
Western standards) emotional stories (103). Our first finding was that, despite
previous tests showing Trobrianders and Wamwani being capable of categorizing
instances of natural categories, the task of categorizing expressions in terms of
emotions or emotional situations was far from obvious to many participants in
both societies. A second finding was that the pattern of matching facial expressions to emotions or normative situations was, both in Papua New Guinea and in
Africa, significantly different to the pattern observed in European (Spanish) control
groups who were assigned to the same tasks. Trobrianders’ and Wamwani’s matching scores were low, particularly for negative basic emotions such as anger and
disgust. All in all, these findings suggest an alternative empirical referent for the
study of the universality of facial expressions.
170
Using Data-Driven Methods to Identify Diagnostic Social Signals
Transmitted by the Face
Rachael Jack
University of Glasgow
One of the most powerful tools in social communication is the face, from which
observers can quickly and easily extract rich information for various social judgments – e.g., identity, gender/sex, age, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical
health, attractiveness, emotional state, personality traits, states of pain or physical
pleasure, deception and even social status. Yet, since the face comprises a high
dimensional information space, identifying precisely which information subtends
the perception of social categories remains challenging. Understanding this relationship – i.e., between information transmitted in the external environment (i.e.,
objectively measureable physical stimuli, e.g., face color, morphology dynamics)
and its interpretation by an observer (i.e., subjective perception, e.g., social categorizations) – is a central goal of psychophysics. Here, we will demonstrate a key
selection of data-driven methods – each based on the psychophysical method of
reverse correlation – which aims to isolate, in the high dimensional information
space of the face, the precise information that elicits the perception of a given
social category. We will show how such methods can be applied to understand
emotion face signalling within and across cultures.
171
Symposium S3.2
It’s Not (Just) Contagion: Different Approaches to Emotional Spread
in Interpersonal, Group and Cultural Contexts
Conveners
Batja Mesquita
The more time people spend together, the more similar their emotions become;
this is true in dyads, groups and cultures alike (e.g., Anderson, Keltner, & John, 2003;
De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011; George, 1990). Less is known about the processes leading to emotional similarity, but there are different hypotheses about
them. One hypothesis is that of emotional contagion which holds that emotions,
much like diseases, spread whenever individuals come into contact (e.g., Hatfield,
Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Another hypothesis is that emotions spread when
(and to the extent that) they are of shared relevance to the members of dyads,
groups, or cultures. This means that emotions spread from one person to the next
to the extent that they provide useful information about the shared situation.
This account has been coined (among others) as the social appraisal account, and
it implies boundary conditions to emotional spread (e.g., Elfenbein, 2014; Hess &
Fischer, 2013; Parkinson, 2011).
In the current symposium, we present different theoretical perspectives to emotional spread between people as well as research that together supports the social
appraisal account of emotional spread. First, Hillary Anger Elfenbein will discuss
an overarching framework on emotional spread, called “Affective Process Theory”,
that combines different approaches to emotional spread. The “Affective Process
Theory” identifies ten mechanisms for emotional spread that fall into three types,
namely convergent linkage, divergent linkage, and complementary linkage. Second, Danielle Shore will also present different approaches to emotional spread,
focusing on contagion, empathy and social appraisal. She will discuss computermediated interpersonal game interactions as a methodology to disentangle the
different processes leading up to emotional spread and present a range of studies
demonstrating these processes. Third, Agneta Fischer will discuss recent research
that was guided by the idea that emotional mimicry mainly takes place in affiliative contexts (Hess & Fischer, 2013). Although it was expected that disgust would
be mimicked in an affiliative as compared to a non-affiliative context, mimicry
of disgust was not observed, nor in the affiliative context, nor in the non-affiliative context. These findings will be discussed in light of the different perspectives
presented in the symposium. Fourth, Ellen Delvaux will present two longitudinal
studies that compare the spread of self-relevant emotions (i.c., self-pride) versus
group-relevant emotions (i.c., group-pride and gratitude) in groups. Group-relevant emotions were found to spread among group members, whereas self-relevant emotions did not spread. Moreover, group-relevant emotions, but not selfrelevant emotions, predicted central group outcomes. Fifth, Alba Jasini will discuss
research on emotional spread in an acculturation context. Her research shows
that emotional acculturation takes place in minority youth and depends on their
engagement in the host culture. More specifically, minority youth’s emotional
similarity to the host culture –i.e., the concordance of the emotional pattern of a
minority member with the average emotional pattern of the host culture members– was predicted by cultural exposure. Moreover, this association was stronger
in situations where there was more opportunity for cultural learning.
Together, this symposium encourages new ways of studying emotional spread by
focusing on the conditions under which emotional spread takes place in dyads,
groups and cultures.
172
The Many Faces of Emotional Contagion:
An Affective Process Theory of Affective Linkage
Hillary Anger Elfenbein
Washington University in St. Louis
Emotional contagion—which consists of emotions being linked across people—
has captured psychologists’ attention, and yet little is known about its mechanisms. An early treatment of the question that has been highly influential focused on primitive mimicry (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). Later accounts
emphasized (a) social comparison, whereby people compare their feelings with
compatriots’, (b) emotional interpretation, where others’ expressive displays serve
as information, and (c) empathy, or imagining another person’s feelings. This presentation introduces a new framework called affective process theory (APT), which
unifies these mechanisms and identifies others. Using a rule-governed theoretical process, APT reveals ten distinct mechanisms that connect people’s affective states. Relevant to the debate about emotion spread as contagion vs. social
appraisal, analysis using APT demonstrates that the direct interpersonal spread of
emotion from one individual to the next is only one of many mechanisms for emotion spread. Indeed, several mechanisms involve no interpersonal contact, and
actors may not even know that the other party exists. The mechanisms associated
with social appraisal are more prominent and likely to be more common in daily
life. The 10 mechanisms identified by APT fall into three types. Convergent linkage
occurs when individuals share the same vantage point and interpretations of emotionally evocative stimuli. Divergent linkage occurs with a shared vantage point
but different interpretations. Complementary linkage occurs when the other person is itself the stimulus. APT integrates past findings on moderating factors such
as social closeness and cooperation. These moderating factors share the common
feature of suggesting whether the source and recipient of emotional linkage are
experiencing emotionally evocative stimuli from the same vs. different vantage
point.
173
Commonalities and Distinctions between Emotion
Transfer Processes
Danielle Shore, Brian Parkinson
University of Oxford
Social psychologists have considered a variety of explanations for interpersonal
effects of emotions including those relating to contagion, empathy, and social appraisal. However, evidence concerning the distinctness and separability of these
processes is limited. This paper outlines a more integrated conceptual approach to
these phenomena based on the concept of relation alignment and proposes more
systematic distinctions between the possible mechanisms for emotion transfer
based on this perspective. The guiding principle of this relation alignment approach is that emotions embody a person’s evaluative orientation to an object and
that other people respond in many possible ways to their orientation. Processes of
emotion transfer may then be distinguished on the basis of their explicitness (e.g.,
inferential vs. automatic processes, regulated vs. unregulated processes), temporal
characteristics (e.g., sequential vs. concurrent on-line processes), and the specificity of their effects (ranging from co-ordinated object or person appraisals to
more general effects on evaluation or activation). Within this framework, so-called contagious effects involve automatic processes targeting general evaluation
and activation, so called empathic effects involve a range of processes affecting
person- or relation-directed appraisals, and social appraisal effects involve implicit
and explicit processes affecting object appraisals. Our paper will focus on methodologies for distinguishing between the different processes underlying emotion
transfer based on our previous and current research. In particular, we present data
based on studies using interpersonal games where one player’s emotions are systematically manipulated to produce effects on the other player’s behavior, and
from less constrained interactions in which people converse with one another
face-to-face in real time in order to illustrate the range of possible transfer effects.
Further, we consider methods for confirming and disconfirming the operation of
different underlying processes based on the distinctions presented above. In particular, we discuss the use of computer-mediated interpersonal game interactions
that reconcile enhanced control and ecological validity to advance understanding
of interdependent emotional processes.
174
Emotional Mimicry as a Function of Social Context
Agneta Fischer
Previous research has provided evidence for emotional mimicry, that is, the facial
imitation of emotional displays. However, most of this research has been conducted in isolated lab settings, where participants watched static photos displaying
emotions. Emotional mimicry, like behavioral mimicry, however, should be examined in a dyadic setting where one can expect a response from another person. In
a recent review of the literature on facial mimicry, Hess and Fischer (2013) have
argued that emotional mimicry requires shared understanding of an emotional
event, and thus if one of the functions of emotional mimicry is affiliation, then individuals should not mimic emotion displays that can be interpreted as hostile, for
example anger or socio-moral disgust. We hypothesized that individuals do not
mimic antagonistic emotions, unless the emotion display is not directed at them
personally. I will present two studies in which one individual expresses disgust /
anger in different affiliative contexts. In one study, we examined the mimicry of
disgust in an affiliative and non-affiliative context, while the disgust was directed
at an object (smell). In a second study, we examined socio moral disgust directed
at a third person or at the observer. We found no mimicry of disgust and relate
these findings to the different theoretical perspectives discussed in this symposium.
175
Emotions Are Not Always Contagious:
The Longitudinal Spread of Self-Pride, Group-Pride and
Gratitude in Groups, and Their Link
Ellen Delvaux1, Loes Meeussen1, Hans Van Dijk2, Batja Mesquita1
University of Leuven1, Tilburg University2
Group research has suggested that the emotions of group members converge
over time. However, most research on emotions in groups is cross-sectional, inferring convergence from a greater-than-random similarity in the emotions of group
members. Moreover, it is not clear whether just being exposed to other group
members’ emotions is enough to assimilate over time (i.e., a social contagion account), or whether group members’ emotions only converge when the emotions
of the other group members convey relevant information (i.e., a social appraisal
account)? We propose that convergence only occurs when emotions are relevant
and important to the group (Hypothesis 1). Moreover, we propose that when emotions spread, they meaningfully predict group outcomes (Hypothesis 2). To test the
first hypothesis, we compared group members’ feelings of pride about themselves
and about their group, and their feelings of gratitude in two longitudinal studies.
The first study followed 68 task groups (N=295) across four moments. Multilevel
cross-lagged path analyses showed that, across time, group members mutually
influenced each other’s pride and gratitude about their group, but not their pride
about themselves. The second study followed 27 task groups (N=189) across three
moments in time. Longitudinal social network analyses showed that group members adjusted their pride about the group and their gratitude, but not their pride
about themselves, to those members they see as more influential to the group. To
test the second hypothesis, we predicted group performance and group cohesion
from the mean intensity of group members’ self-pride, group-pride and gratitude.
We found that group-pride and gratitude, but not self-pride predicted group performance and group cohesion. In sum, these findings show that group members
converge only in those emotions that are relevant and important to the group,
which may point to a process of shared appraisals rather than social contagion.
Moreover, those emotions in turn predicted group outcomes, suggesting that particularly those emotions that become spread in groups inform group processes.
176
Cultural Exposure and Emotional Acculturation in Minority Youth
Alba Jasini, Jozefien De Leersnyder, Batja Mesquita
The more immigrant minorities engage in their host culture, the more their emotional experiences converge to those of majority members – a phenomenon
we have coined Emotional Acculturation (De Leersnyder, Mesquita, & Kim, 2011).
Although previous research has suggested that minorities’ emotional fit to the
majority culture is linked to cultural exposure, the process may be different for
different types of situations. In the current research, we investigated emotional acculturation in a large sample of immigrant youth in 37 randomly selected
Belgian high schools. First, we examined whether the previous findings on the
association between the cultural exposure and emotional fit would replicate in a
diverse school context. Second, we investigated the types of situations for which
emotions are most likely to acculturate. We expected more learning in disengaging (autonomy-promoting) than engaging (relatedness-promoting) situations
since most of the immigrant youth originate from interdependent cultures where
disengaging situations are less frequent (cf. Kitayama, Mesquita, & Karasawa,
2006).
Our study included 1258 Belgian majority youth, 190 minority youth from neighboring countries, and 980 minority youth from non-neighboring countries. We measured the emotional fit to the Belgian culture by correlating every participant’s
emotional pattern with the average majority culture pattern in comparable situations.
In line with our predictions, we found an association between minorities’ emotional fit and their cultural exposure. Thus, compared to Belgian majority youth
and neighboring minorities, distant minorities had the lowest emotional fit. The
gap in emotional fit between Belgian majority youth and distant minority youth
decreased for every generation minority members’ families had spent in Belgium.
Although distant minorities’ self-reported direct contact with majority members
was not associated with their emotional fit, their use of the heritage culture language was: the more they spoke their heritage language at school, the lower their
emotional fit. Finally, we found that the association between minorities’ cultural exposure and their emotional fit was more pronounced in disengaging than
engaging types of situations.
Our findings show that emotional patterns spread across cultural groups and
that this is a situated process. Although we did not explicitly measured the mechanisms underlying this cultural emotional spread, we argue that the social
appraisal explanation is more likely than the explanation in terms of emotional
contagion: The spread was more pronounced in the disengaging types of situations that i) are less likely to involve others with similar emotions, and ii) are most
informative for the cultural minorities under study.
177
Symposium S3.3
Inter-individual differences in emotion regulation abilities
Conveners
Pascal Hot
Université Savoie Mont Blanc, Chambéry
It is now widely accepted that the ability to regulate our emotions is fundamental
to reacting in an appropriate way to an emotional event, and impaired emotion
regulation processing could be one of the main factors in affect disturbances (depression, anxiety, or pathological stress). A large part of emotion regulation studies has examined cognitive and neural substrates of ‘classical’ regulation strategies (situation selection or modification, attention deployment, cognitive change,
and response modulation). Recent studies complete these researches by examining differences in effectiveness of regulation strategies in function of individual
differences.
This symposium brings together an international group of researchers who take
a variety of methodological approaches from genetic analysis to cohort study to
demonstrate that combining clinical, psychological and lifespan perspectives deepens our understanding of emotion regulation functioning.
First, Moïra Mikolajczak reports data from large cohorts of Belgian adults demonstrating how differences in emotional competencies are one of the main factors of
physical health. Its works clarify the weight of emotional competencies compared
to other factors and, inside emotional competencies, the most relevant dimensions. Second, the team of Andrei Miu reports how gene and environment interact
to modulate the efficiency of reappraisal strategy. In an original approach combining the screening of several genes, and behavioral and brain measures of emotional responses, they show that differences in brain-derived neurotrophic gene
moderate regulation strategy. The third presentation, by Sandrine Vieillard and
coworkers, report a set of behavioral studies examining changes in emotion regulation strategies in older adults. Their results provide original data to discuss the
contribution and limits of main theoretical frame of emotion regulation in aging.
In fourth presentation, Marion Trousselard and coworkers report recent evidence
from experimental, clinical and therapeutic approaches in favor of the relevance
of mindfulness techniques to improve emotion regulation.
178
A nationally representative study of emotional
competencies and health
Moïra Mikolajczak
Université catholique de Louvain
Emotional Competence (EC, also called emotional intelligence, EI) refers to individual differences in the identification, understanding, expression, regulation and
use of one’s emotions and those of others. EC has been found to be an important
predictor of individuals’ adaptation to their environment: Higher EC is associated
with greater happiness, better mental health, more satisfying social and marital
relationships and greater occupational success. Whereas a considerable amount
of research has documented the significance of EC, one domain has been crucially
underinvestigated: the relationship between EC and physical health. We examined the relationship between EC and objective health indicators in two studies
(N1 = 1310; N2 = 9616) conducted in collaboration withthe largest Mutual Benefit
Society in Belgium. These studies allowed us (1) to compare the predictive power
of EC with other well-known predictors of health such as age, sex, Body Mass Index, education level, health behaviors (diet, physical activity, smoking and drinking
habits), positive and negative affect and social support; (2) to clarify the relative
weight of the various EC dimensions in predicting health; and (3) to determine
to what extent EC moderates the effect of already known predictors on health.
Results show that EC is a significant predictor of health that has incremental predictive power over and above other predictors. Findings also show that high EC
significantly attenuates (and sometimes compensates for) the impact of other
risk factors. Therefore, we argue that EC deserves greater interest and attention
from health professionals and governments.
179
Gene-environment interactions in reappraisal ability:
A behavioral and fNIRS study
Andrei Miu1, Mihai Carnuta1, Romana Vulturar2, Adina Chia2,
Aurora Szentagotai-Tatar1, Monica Baciu3
Babes-Bolyai University - Romania1, Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine and
Pharmacy - Romania2, Université Pierre Mendès-France, France3
Background. Based on the observation that the efficiency of emotion regulation
strategies such as reappraisal (i.e., reframing an event to decrease its emotional
impact) is not directly related to their habitual use, recent studies argued that the
former may be conceptualized as emotion regulation ability and assessed using
experimental rather than self-report measures (e.g., Troy, Wilhelm, Shallcross, &
Mauss, 2010).
Aims: This study aimed to investigate gene-environment interactions in reappraisal ability and its potential neural mechanisms.
Methods: N = 204 healthy volunteers were screened for child abuse (Bifulco, Bernazzani, Moran, & Jacobs, 2005) and genotyped for functional polymorphisms in
the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR/rs25531), the brain-derived neurotrophic gene (BDNF Val66Met), and the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene (COMT
Val158Met). Participants underwent a computerized task that involved the presentation of neutral and emotional images, the latter of which were actively reappraised or freely watched. Reappraisal ability was indexed by the magnitude of
emotional responses to negative images during reappraisal relative to passive
viewing trials. To measure cerebral activity in the prefrontal region during the
reappraisal ability task, we used 16-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy
(fNIRS).
Results: Behavioral results confirmed that the use of reappraisal significantly decreased emotional responses to negative images. Moderation analyses indicated
a significant interaction between the BDNF Val66Met genotype and child abuse
on reappraisal ability. Indeed, increased exposure to child abuse was associated
with decreased reappraisal ability only in BDNF Met carriers. fNIRS results showed
that oxygenated hemoglobin levels measured within the prefrontal cortex were
lower during reappraisal compared to passive viewing of negative images. Our
results did not reveal significant effects of child abuse or any of the genotypes on
the prefrontal activity, as reflected by fNIRS measures.
Conclusion: The present results indicate that the BDNF Val66Met genotype is a
significant moderator of the impact of child abuse on reappraisal ability.
180
Emotion Regulation and Aging
Sandrine Vieillard, Alejandra Rodriguez, Jonathan Harm
University of Franche-Comté, France
In the last 15 years, American studies on aging and emotion have shown that advancing age is associated with significant changes in emotion processing. These
age-related changes are characterized by a preference for positive events [1], an
avoidance to process negative stimuli [2] and an increase of emotional well-being
[3]. The main explanatory framework, Socioemotional Selectivity Theory [4], posits
that as time horizons grow shorter, people shift motivational priorities to focus
further on experiencing more positive and less negative emotions with the aim
of maintaining their emotional equilibrium. An important assumption of the SST
model is that older adults’ preference for positive stimuli is a resource-demanding process that would serve emotion regulatory goals [5]. However, findings are
inconsistent [6, 7]. In this research program, we conducted three experiments extending findings from previous works [6, 8, 9] with the aim to test whether compared to their younger counterparts, older adults a) used their visual preference
for positive facial expressions as a tool for emotion regulatory goals b) were better
to regulate their expression of emotion in response to scary auditory stimuli c)
tended to use less costly visual attention redeployment or more costly reappraisal
strategies to reduce negative emotion elicited by unfair pictures. Our main results
indicated that in comparison with younger adults, older adults a) showed a preference for positive information that was not associated with emotion regulatory
skills, b) had preserved abilities to inhibit the expression of negative emotion but
showed subjective and physiological counterparty characterized by high levels
of negative feeling and increased physiological activity, and c) preferred to use
visual attention redeployment rather than more cognitively costly strategies such
as reappraisal to down-regulate negative feeling. Taken together, these findings
challenge the explanatory framework of SST and raise a broader question of whether the inconsistency between our data and those coming from American studies might be accounted for by cultural factors, calling for further examination on
the cross-cultural generalizability of age-related changes in emotion processing.
This research has been supported by a grant from the French National Research
Agency (ANR EMCO 00301).
181
Mindfulness and emotion regulation: existing knowledge
Marion Trousselard1, Dominique Steiler2, Frederic Canini1
Ecole du Val de Grâce, France1, Grenoble Ecole de Management2
Mindfulness is a state of consciousness involving nonjudgmental attention
to present-moment experience [1]. This natural resource of the mind has been
consistently associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety and greater
well-being. The “general tendency to be mindful in daily life” present in all individuals to varying degrees can be improved by meditation interventions. Emotion
regulation which includes the ability to monitor, understand and accept emotions, and to engage in goal directed behavior when emotionally activated [2] may
be one pathway through which Mindfulness promotes mental health.
First, there is increasing evidence amassed mostly from non-clinical community
samples that to be mindful is associated with less use of maladaptive emotion
regulation strategies. In line, neurobiological findings showed that to be mindful is associated with both amygdala deactivation, suggesting a down-regulation
of negative emotion and a decreased mind-wandering. However, the number of
possible interrelations and interactions between mindfulness and emotion regulation skills are still not clear.
Second, in clinical populations, mindfulness might operate through both distinct
and common mechanisms implying positive reappraisal, nonjudgmental stance
toward experience, low rumination, or even low worry depending on anxious or
depressive context. Furthermore, among anxious subjects, a low mindfulness
functioning might operate differently for a common emotional suffering. Worry,
for instance, might be attributed on one hand to individuals with difficulty attending to their present moment experience of their emotions, and then impulsive
emotional responses, which may, in turn, increase worry cycles, and on the others
hand, to individuals with poor understanding of their emotions, and then more
critical and rigid emotional responses without acceptance, which may, in turn,
attend to prompt increased anxiety and worry.
Third, in its therapeutic forms, Mindfulness interventions promote increased tolerance of negative affect and then improved well-being. Limiting cognitive elaboration in favor of momentary awareness appears to reduce automatic negative
self-evaluation, increase tolerance for negative affect.
Whether Mindfulness interventions have been applied to a constellation of problems in the field of mental health in an effort to reduce psychological distress
and emotional suffering, at this time, many aspects of the relationship between
mindfulness and emotion regulation skills still need to be evaluated to better define how interventions may help emotion regulation and improve emotion dysregulation.
182
Symposium S3.4
Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotion
Conveners
Ben Meuleman, William Cunningham
University of Geneva, University of Toronto
This symposium presents recent developments on the application of the dynamic systems perspective to emotion (Lewis & Granic, 2002). According to this perspective, emotional episodes emerge from the time-dynamic interaction between five bodily and
mental subcomponents: appraisal, motivation, physiology, expression, and feeling. Collectively, the changes in these subcomponents are thought to represents states in an
attractor landscape, with attractor basins corresponding to qualitatively distinct states
(e.g., a fear episode) where the subcomponents become relatively synchronized. In this
view, the degree of synchronization of the subcomponents thus serves as a criterion for
demarcating emotional episodes (Lewis, 2005; Scherer, 2009a). The dynamic systems
view offers a framework to bridge competing theories of emotion and potentially solve
fundamental questions such as the nature of emotion episodes (e.g., categorical versus
dimensional), emotion causation (e.g., unidirectional versus multidirectional), emotion
unfolding, and emotion termination. We present recent theoretical and empirical work
on several of these assumptions, as approached through the domains of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and statistics.
From psychology, a theoretical account for dynamic emotion processes is presented, the
component process model (CPM; Scherer, 2009a; 2009b), which proposes that the variable degree of coupling or synchronization of different organismic subsystems underlies emotion episodes. Crucially, the degree of synchronization is expected to be driven by
the cognitive appraisal of pertinence for the individual, eliciting, sustaining, and finally
terminating the emotion over time. Recent evidence for this hypothesis is reviewed from
studies that recorded brain activity (measured via EEG/ERP), autonomic physiology (HR,
SC, temperature), and expressive activity (AU coding, EMG, vocalization).
From neuroscience, a theoretical account for dynamic emotion processes is presented,
the iterative processing model (IPM; Cunningham et al., 2013), which suggests that emotions, at least in part, arise from the processing of dynamical unfolding representations
of valence across time. Critical to this model is the hypothesis that affective trajectories—over time—provide important information that helps build emotional states. Data
from experience sampling of daily experience and functional neuroimaging will be used
to provide additional support for this hypothesis.
From philosophy, the concept of emergence is reviewed within important emotion theories that have utilized the dynamic systems perspective (e.g., Barrett, 2006, 2009, 2011;
Coan, 2010; Cunningham, 2013; Scherer, 2009a, 2009b). Two distinct usages of “emergence” are identified within this literature, epistemological and ontological, and their
relative utility for future scientific research are discussed. In particular, clarifying whether
‘emergence’ is both ontological and epistemological (rather than merely epistemological) will have implications for how dynamic systems models of emotion processes can be
further developed.
From statistics, a concrete simulation of emotion processes with a dynamic statistical
model is presented, using data from an experimental study. Test subjects played an emotion-eliciting videogame while measures of physiological, motor, and motivational responding were recorded on a second-by-second basis. The statistical model was used to
integrate these recordings and to test hypotheses that (a) relations between emotion
components are characterized by both feedforward and feedback processes (Scherer,
2009a), and (b) that emotion components are more synchronized following personally
relevant events (Lewis, 2005; Scherer, 2009a).
183
First Evidence for the Synchronization of
Dynamic Component Processes
Klaus Scherer
Emotions are extraordinarily flexible, dynamic response preparation mechanisms
allowing the organism to adapt optimally to ongoing events that are of major
significance for the well-being of that organism. What are the design features of
the system architecture that underlie this remarkably efficient mechanism? It can
be argued that the key feature is the variable degree of coupling or synchronization of different organismic subsystems during the emotion episode, as driven by
the cognitive appraisal of the pertinence of events for the individual and its ability
to cope with consequences. This process is recursive (with sequential, cumulative
effects) and occurs at several levels of automaticity, effort, and consciousness.
The continuous elaboration of the appraisal, reflecting changing events and evaluations, continuously affects the efferent response patterns in different subsystems such as the endocrine, autonomous, somatic and central nervous systems,
producing the response patterning in emotion components such as changes in
motivation, physiological state, and motor expression. These continuously varying
response configurations, synchronized across components, provide the organism’s
best estimate of an optimal action readiness. The integrated interoception of
these fluctuating component processes provides the basis for conscious subjective feeling. Recent theorizing and research has shown that the temporal unfolding of the emotion process and the dynamic aspects of subjective experience,
largely neglected in past work, are essential to our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. This presentation reviews recent work pertinent to the issue
of the dynamic unfolding of emotion and the synchronization of components, in
particular the sequential-cumulative correlates of results from different appraisal
checks with brain activity (measured via EEG/ERP), autonomic physiology (HR, SC,
temperature), facial activity (AU coding, EMG), and vocalization (acoustic measurement) as well as studies on EEG/EMG coherence and facial/vocal event coordination.
184
Emotional States from Affective Dynamics
William Cunningham
University of Toronto
Many current models propose that emotions arise from the combinations of multiple processes, many of which are not emotion specific. These models attempt
to describe both the homogeneity of instances of an emotional “kind” (why are
fears similar?) and the heterogeneity of instances (why are different fears quite
different?). In this presentation, I will review the iterative reprocessing model of
affect, and suggest that emotions, at least in part, arise from the processing of
dynamical unfolding representations of valence across time. Critical to this model
is the hypothesis that affective trajectories—over time—provide important information that helps build emotional states. Data from experience sampling of daily
experience and functional neuroimaging will be used to provide additional support for this hypothesis.
185
Emotions as Emergent Products: Review of Recent Proposals and
Future Directions
Elena Walsh
University of Sydney
Over the past twenty years it has become increasingly common to characterise
emotional episodes as emergent products of dynamic systems. The dynamic system which produces emotions is conceptualised as a series of domain-general
(non-modular) psychological processes which interact via nonlinear causation
as an emotional episode develops over time. The first part of this article reviews
some recent conceptual proposals (Barrett, 2006, 2009, 2011; Coan, 2010; Cunningham, 2013; Scherer, 2009a, 2009b) in which emotions are conceptualised as
emergent products of dynamic systems. Two main characterisations of ‘emergent
products’ are identified; the first can be called ‘epistemological’ and the second
‘ontological’. The first characterises emergent products as chaotic patterns of
emotion activation and regulation, produced via nonlinear causation between
system components. The second characterisation builds on the first, by describing
the subjective experience of emotion (feeling) as an additional emergent product
of nonlinear causation amongst components (in addition, that is, to the chaotic
patterning produced through the system’s operation). The second part of the article discusses the significance of this recent paradigm shift and describes some
promising future directions for research, along with some potential pitfalls. In
particular, clarifying whether ‘emergence’ is both ontological and epistemological
(rather than merely epistemological) will have implications for how we develop
dynamic systems models of emotion processes.
186
Dynamic Systems Simulation of Emotion
Ben Meuleman1, Klaus Scherer1, Agnes Moors2, Olivier Renaud1
University of Geneva1, University of Leuven2
Emotions are complex processes that involve changes in cognitive appraisal, motivational tendencies, autonomic physiology, motor expression, and subjective feeling (Frijda, 2008). Moreover, these changes are expected to be characterized by (a)
recurrent causality (Scherer, 2009) and (b) synchronization (Lewis, 2005) between
these five components. Testing these two hypotheses requires the time-varying
measurement and modelling of emotion, which has remained an important open
challenge. In this talk we present dynamic systems modelling of emotion using
data from a video game experiment. Participants played a game in which goalblocking events were manipulated on appraisal criteria of fairness (fair or unfair)
and control (high or low). Emotional responding to these 4 types of events was
measured by recording physiological responses (skin conductance, skin temperature, heart rate), motor responses (facial electromyogram), and motivational
intensity (key press rate), on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis. The obtained data
were inputted into a custom statistical model called Emergent Liquid State Affect (ELSA). ELSA operationalizes Scherer’s (2001) theoretical Component Process
Model (CPM) using spatio-temporal artificial neural networks and sparse regression models. This architecture enables the integration of time-series data of all
emotion components, and allows dynamic feedback, delay effects, and nonlinear
processes. Results of modelling showed evidence of significant feedback from
physiological responses on motor responses and motivation responses, and from
motor responses on motivation responses. These findings supported the hypothesis of recurrent causality. Results of modelling also showed evidence of increased
synchronization between emotion components during the game’s goal-blocking
events, as compared to non-blocking events, and that synchronization correlated
with conscious feelings of emotion. These findings supported the hypothesis of
emotional synchronization.
187
Symposium S3.5
History of emotions and emotions in history: How this emerging
field can feed the psychology of emotions?
Conveners
Rose Spijkerman, Olivier Luminet
Ghent University, Universite Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve
This symposium will offer a panorama of the burgeoning research in history in which emotions are
considered as a key explanatory factor. The study of emotions in history is a relatively new and emerging field of historical research. Especially the last decade, this field of research increasingly developed
and expanded. Different methodological approaches have been suggested, which are included in the
studies presented at this symposium.
Annales historian Lucien Febvre already called for the study of emotions in 1941, with the argument
that ‘the history of ideas and the history of institutions (…) are subjects that the historian can neither
understand nor make understood without the primordial interest that I call the psychological.’ (Febre,
1941). However, it was not until the 1980s that the next call was made by Peter and Carol Stearns. Their
focus was the historical analysis of norms and rules within a society towards emotions and appropriate expressions, which was introduced as emotionology (Stearns and Stearns, 1985).
A methodological tool that has been added more recently is William Reddy’s concept of emotives and
emotional regimes. Emotives describe the process in which emotions are controlled and shaped both
by society and individuals, aiming to express feelings. Emotives are both descriptive and performative, simultaneously reﬂecting the experience of a non-verbal emotion like gestures, as well as actively
constructing, shaping, and performing it through language. Emotional regimes, often a foundation of
political regimes, prescribe the dominant norms of emotional life and the official rituals, practices and
emotives to express emotions. (Reddy, 2001).
At the same time, Barbara Rosenwein created the term emotional communities, which she defines as
‘Groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue –
the same related emotions.’ (Rosenwein, 2006). Through the study of emotional communities, underlying systems of feeling can be uncovered: the researcher can analyse what these communities define
and appraise as valuable or harmful to them, the nature of the affective bonds between social groups
and what kind of emotional expression is encouraged, tolerated and inhibited.
The latest approach is Monique Scheers emotional practice. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s practice
theory, Scheer argues that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be
viewed as practices. To study emotions in this way means understanding them as emerging from bodily manifestations – the actual expression of emotions – that are conditioned by a social context, which
always has cultural and historical specificity. Alongside the actual descriptions of feelings, a practice
theory based research considers the acts and settings in which such practices take place (Scheer, 2012).
The symposium will cover emotions in institutions that were and are still very important in society –
religion, education, army and justice – across different periods of time. This will provide a large view of
how emotions were expressed and valued in these institutions in the 19th and 20thcentury. One goal
of the discussion will be to show how these studies help understanding emotions in the historical
context of institutions, and the possible developments and changes with regard to the psychological
function of emotions in institutions today.
Another goal of the symposium will be to show how the notions developed in the history of emotions
can enrich other approaches of emotion research. In particular, the talks address different tensions
that are highly relevant for today’s psychology of emotion. A first one is between feeling an emotion
and the ways to express it (e.g., publicly or in a hidden form) depending of the awareness of current
norms. A second one is related to the way a system can change emotion norms and emotion practices
as a counterweight to repressive norms advocated by an institution. A third one concerns the natural
repression of emotions and the use of them for strategic purposes (instrumentalisation of emotion). A
fourth one examines the subjective feelings reported together with bodily expression, which can reach
some extreme intensity. These tensions will be discussed in the last part of the symposium.
188
Do deviants feel honour? Applying new methods from the
history of emotions to the history of criminal justice
Timon de Groot
In the field of criminal justice, emotions are often treated as mitigating circumstances for an offence. For instance, legal experts or jurors often use the notion of
‘reasonable emotions’ in determining whether the emotional motives of a crime
are justified and are a potential ground for excusing an offence. However, the fact
that emotions are treated as potentially mitigating circumstances implies that
the ‘ordinary offender’ – the one without reasonable emotions – is often constructed as ‘emotion-less’ by the experts.
This paper focusses on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany,
where similarly many legal scholars implicitly presupposed that the ‘ordinary’ offenders lacked certain emotions. This was caused by the way in which the concept
of ‘honourable sentiments’ was used to function as a mitigating circumstance in
criminal trials during this period. The use of this concept as a mitigating circumstance implied in turn that the normal deviant, the one sentenced without regard
to any mitigating circumstances, was often defined by experts as being devoid of
these sentiments.
Although most classic historical narratives about criminal justice give preference
to a model of repression or disciplining of the emotions (Elias, 2000; Foucault,
1979), this paper argues that deviants who were faced with prejudices about their
lack of emotions used different strategies to express emotions, moulding their
emotional language to their specific situation. These actors were, therefore, rather
instrumentalising their emotions than repressing them.
Due to the construction of the deviant by the authorities as devoid of honourable
feelings, convicts were forced to find the middle ground between coping with the
shame of punishment and showing their honourable sentiments to the relevant
authorities. They were therefore forced to invent strategies to express their feelings and to convince the authorities of their honourable character. This paper
analyses these strategies by looking at convicted persons’ search for rehabilitation
in public life after a sentence. It will be argued that in their search for rehabilitation, the formerly convicted had to deploy honourable sentiments which, drawing
on Scheer’s innovative approach to the history of emotions (Scheer, 2012), are best
described by the notion of ‘emotional practices’.
189
Masculinity, Honor and Shame in the SS Leadership Views and Regiments of Punishment
Franziska Anna Karpinski
Loughborough University, UK
Rooted in Holocaust perpetrator research, therein exploring perpetrator peer
dynamics within the SS and based on a close reading of archival material such
SS directives, SS court documents, and internal correspondence amongst the SS
leadership, I illuminate how the concepts of collective and individual honor and
masculinity were defined, negotiated, and practiced within the SS, as well as how
these concepts fuelled violent peer interaction.
This discussion will be embedded into the socio-political conditions of the Third
Reich: The Nazis envisioned the re-structuring of German society among the lines
of a “racially homogenous” Volksgemeinschaft led by an authoritarian leader.
Rooted in an ideology foregrounding extreme nationalism, militarization, genocidal racism, territorial expansion, violence, and collectivism, the Volksgemeinschaft
concept led to a practice of radical inclusion and exclusion dependent on “racial
desirability” (Bajohr/ Wildt 2009; Steber/ Gotto 2010). The Volksgemeinschaft
concept was socially powerful as its appropriation happened through various
definitional approaches available to Volksgemeinschaft members and the ample
opportunity to fulfil personal ambitions and goals (Geyer 1996; Koonz 2003; Wildt
2007; Föllmer 2010, 2013).
These dynamics led to a considerable radicalization of key concepts like honor and
masculinity in terms of their valence, urgency, and definition. Nazism made possessing honor dependent on “German blood”, and linked it to character traits such
as loyalty, camaraderie, obedience, fulfilment of duty (Frevert 1997, 2009, 2011; Brezina 1987; Mommsen 1997). The SS nourished a soldierly and self-sacrificing form
of masculinity, persecuting more civilian patterns of it (Kühne 2006, 2010; Werner
2008; Mühlhäuser 2010; Connell 2013). Moreover, honor and masculinity became
state-sanctioned entities, interwoven with Nazism’s fabric, its judicial, social, and
political institutions, as well as daily interactions.
Within this framework, specific “SS-worthy”, i.e. honorable, behavior and unconditional loyalty to the cause of Nazism was especially demanded within the SS,
which conceived of itself as an elite order of political soldiers in the service of
Nazism (Wegner 2005; Zeck 2002). Particularly, I examine what was considered
“SS-worthy”? What virtues and ideals did the SS leadership prescribe for SS members? How were masculinity and honor appropriated by the SS and weaved into
mandatory SS directives? Why, how, and with what consequences did this appropriation happen? What implementation mechanisms were to translate masculinity and honor into entities informing SS peer interaction? Mechanisms of implementation towards the dishonorable were punitive and shaming in nature and
included SS court-ordered dismissal, expulsion, incarceration, disciplinary measures, and social ostracism. I will also highlight how shame and shaming within
the framework of the SS functioned as a tool of social control and punishment.
An analysis of honor, masculinity, and emotional dynamics within the SS can help
understand its processes of radicalization and both its immensely violent and selfdestructive nature. Hence, this study provides an empirical and conceptual contribution to the extant historiography about what drives Nazi perpetrators.
190
Emotional ‘counterpractices’ in the discipline section of the state
re-education institution for female juvenile delinquents
Laura Nys
Ghent University
In the context of the doctrine of ‘social defence’ and the Belgian Child Protection
Act of 1912, the Établissement d’Éducation de l’État pour filles difficiles et indisciplinées, a discipline section of the state welfare institutions for female juvenile
delinquents, was founded in Bruges in 1927. The archives of the institution offer
a wide range of autobiographical sources, including so-called billet clandestins
–letters secretly exchanged among the inmates. Studying the billets clandestins
reveals the prominence of deep and passionate emotions in the discourse of the
detainees. Massin (2011) stated that the institution can be considered as a ‘total
institution’, controlling every aspect of daily life and imposing a rigid behavioural
regime on the detained girls. I’ll argue that the frequent expression of strong emotions is a consequence of the rigid regulation of the detainees’ behaviour inside
the discipline section.
Building on Scott’s infrapolitics (Scott, 1990) and Reddy’s emotional regime (Reddy,
2001), I argue that the correspondence community of the detained girls is to be interpreted as an emotional refuge, formulating other emotion norms and carrying
out other emotional practices as a counterweight to the repressive emotional
regime advocated by the institution. In a context where absolute self-control was
required of the girls, seemingly uncontrolled discursive and bodily practices (e.g.
enduring collectively shouting, auto-mutilation) gain new meanings when interpreted from the perspective of emotional history. Scheer’s concept of emotional
practices (Scheer, 2012) proves fruitful to include the discursive as well as the bodily aspects.
Comparing the discourse of the girls in the billets clandestins with the discourse
in letters written to the authorities or family members, reveals clear differences in
coping with emotion, suggesting that most of the girls were well aware of the expected norms in the public and hidden transcript and were capable of consciously
discerning between the two, thereby opening the question of interpreting some
of the emotional practices as a form of resistance.
191
Expressions of honour: decorations in the Belgian Army during the
First World War
Rose Spijkerman
Ghent University
At the beginning of the twentieth century, honour played an important social
and cultural role in European society. It was considered a deeply emotional matter
that related to people’s personal integrity and their aspirations to social recognition and reputation (Frevert. 2011). The First World War created a context in which
honour was particularly present. The conditions on the battlefield and the experiences during the four years of war proved to be a fertile soil for the emotional
and behavioural function of honour. Notions of honour where felt and expressed
within the different ranks of the military, from the army command to the common soldier. With regard to the army command, these notions could be useful.
Honour could make combatants fight, enforce discipline and good behaviour and
maintain morale.
The aim of this paper is to approach the ways in which notions of honour functioned on different levels of feeling, expression and practice in the setting of the army
during the First World War. A way to encourage and reward honourable behaviour
was through the assigning of military decorations, and in order to examine these
notions of honour I will present examples from sources concerning decorations
from the Belgian army. The army command regularly published a list with combatants that had acted bravely and therefore received a mark of honour. The list was
accompanied by an account of the act and a character sketch of the decorated
soldier. The bestowing of decorations was a reciprocal ritual: the emotional and
behavioural norms of the army command and the courageous act of the soldier
could influence each other. In addition, it could transform the representations and
behaviour of fellow soldiers towards the soldier being decorated, as well as the
representation of himself and the behaviour he felt obliged to adopt to conform
to that representation (Bourdieu, 1991).
The requirements and conditions in which decorations were given, the kinds of
acts and emotional terminology that was used to characterize the combatant
and his heroic deed, as well as the emotional reactions of soldiers upon receiving
a decoration are interesting parameters of the notions of honourable behaviour.
This paper serves as an example of how to analyse an emotion within a historical
context, since the First World War both challenged the boundaries and functions
of emotions as honour.
192
Impressed by the events: the role of emotions in the evaluation of
modern mystical events
Tine Van Osselaer
University of Antwerp
In the 1930s a series of Marian apparitions swept over Belgium. Reported at circa
forty sites by more than hundred seers, the series was exceptional in its extent
and diversity. The public and serial apparitions of the Virgin triggered responses
from ecclesiastic and medical authorities, but also from numerous laymen who
commented critically and enthusiastically about the phenomena. These lay reports provide us with exceptional insights about laymen’s criteria for evaluating
apparitions, and emotions seem to have played a major role in their appraisal.
This paper will address these emotional norms and ideas formulated in laymen’s
writings.
Both, the emotions of the visionaries and of the bystanders during the events
seem to have been of importance. The faithful reported, for instance, how they felt
compelled to kneel down at certain sites, whilst they experienced no such feeling
at others. Their comments thus not only inform us about the emotions they seemed fit to report, but also about the corporeal language, the emotional practices
and sensational forms they adopted. At the same time, their texts allow us to
study the mediation of religion from an emotional perspective. The public character of the apparitions created very specific expectations about the emotions
of the visionaries. Ideally, their religious feelings changed their faces during the
apparitions and generated a supernatural beauty. Still, the acceptability of visible
emotions also had its limits. Even though these men and women were supposed
to show what they felt during their encounter with Mary and act as mediators,
theatricality and grand gestures were to be avoided.
Studying the emotional aspect of the reports on Marian apparitions will thus
allow us to trace the emotional language linked to modern mystical experiences
and the bodily comportment laymen deemed fit for religious feelings. By doing so
we can add a bottom-up perspective to studies on emotions and Catholic mysticism that up until now have primarily focused on the clerical elite.
193
Symposium S3.6
Collective Emotions and Social Identities
Conveners
Mikko Salmela, Christian von Scheve
University of Helsinki, Freie Universität Berlin
Research on collective emotions has evolved into a bourgeoning field in various disciplines over the
last decade. In philosophy, sociology, psychology, political science and other disciplines, researchers
have begun to uncover the collective dimension of human emotions. Collective emotions are not only
essential in understanding how individuals relate to their social and cultural environments, but also to
gain better insights into key challenges of contemporary societies, as is evident in rapid social change
and political overthrows witnessed across the globe. Although scholarship on individual-level emotions and their intersections with social processes has seen substantial advances, their relations to
collective emotions remain poorly understood. This problem can be seen even in emotion research
that emerges from the social identity approach such as the Intergroup Emotion Theory (Smith, Seger
& Mackie 2007).
The favorite notion in this research is group-based emotion, an emotion felt by individuals on the basis
of a categorization of the self as a member of a socially defined group or category. Accordingly, groupbased emotions are emotions felt by individuals on behalf of a social collective or its other members.
Yet group-based emotions can be elicited in solitude, nor do these emotions require collective effervescence or contagion in physical proximity. However, if convergence and synchrony of individual emotional responses are important for the collectivity of emotions, then group-based emotions are collective
only contingently. Moreover, while group-based emotions are among preconditions of collective emotions, group-based emotions can be of qualitatively different kinds depending on the underlying social
identification, which can rest on a private identification of individuals with a group in an “I mode”, or on
a collective commitment together with other group members in a “we-mode” (Tuomela 2007). These
qualitative differences in social identification, in addition to quantitative differences, may have important consequences for collective emotions and actions motivated by those emotions.
Institutions and companies are among social collectives on behalf of which individual can feel groupbased emotions. However, in some cases, individuals also ascribe emotions such as fears, hopes, worries, regrets, and sympathies to the very institutions or companies for which speak. In a like manner,
leader of countries often express their sympathies and condolences to victims of catastrophes and
their families in the name of the entire nation. An interesting philosophical question is how literally we
should take ascriptions of emotions to corporations or nations. Are these collective emotions comparable to collective emotions within closely connected social groups, or are they something completely
different?
One type of institution in which collective emotions have not been studied yet are academic disciplines. Emotions have become objects of study in academia from the perspective of their management, with focus on their contribution to social bonds, power-relationships and hierarchies, micro-politics, and processes of inclusion and exclusion from an academic career (Bloch 2012). While important,
this role on emotions at different stages of an academic career must be separated from an emotional
commitment to the discipline itself, its core methodological and epistemic principles. These paradigmatically collective emotions are important vehicles in academic socialization into disciplines, and
they also figure centrally in interdisciplinary interaction.
One more collective dimension of emotions concerns their regulation. Not only are emotions often experienced together with others, their regulation is also deeply embedded in and influenced by groupmembership and social interaction, as developmental and social psychologists have pointed out. Still,
existing research has focused on various cognitive and evaluative aspects of social-interactional and
socio-cultural influences such as social appraisal biases in emotion regulation, whereas the affective
and bodily dimension of this regulation is very little understood.
In summary, the proposed symposium attends to questions concerning the nature and types of collective emotions, and provides evidence on the relevance of the mode of social identification for emotional convergence. The social identity approach is extended to disciplinary identities, highlighting
the role of collective and group-based emotions in their emergence, maintenance and reinforcement
as well as in interdisciplinary interaction. Finally, a bodily perspective to interpersonal emotion regulation is opened by showing how socio-cultural influences and intergroup biases are embodied and
habitualized. In these ways, the symposium aims at bringing together both theoretical and empirical
investigations to achieve a better understanding of collective emotions and their ramifications for
social behavior.
194
Collective emotions and group identity:
New directions for social psychology
Gavin Brent Sullivan
Coventry University
Research on collective emotions has been limited until recently to theories of irrational crowds, scepticism about genuinely group-level psychological phenomena,
and analyses of the unconscious or ritual sources of mass affective experience.
However, collective emotion is now a thriving research area that combines studies
from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, social psychology and neuroscience.
This presentation examines neo-Durkheimian theories of collective emotions
and relevant contributions of discursive psychologists and other social scientists
influenced by the “turn to affect.” I argue that future theoretical and empirical investigations in an interdisciplinary and critical social psychology of collective emotion should: 1) critically examine theories focusing on diffuse emotional energy
and discrete collective emotions by also exploring the generation and production
of genuinely collective mixed emotions; 2) clarify problems with “bottom-up” models of causal mechanisms through exploration of “affective practices;” 3) explore
the potential inclusion of Tuomela’s (2013) “top-down” social ontology of “group
agents” in theories and studies of collective emotion; and 4) develop new quantitative and qualitative methods (including pluralistic combinations) to study the
interrelations between group-based and collective emotions.
195
Emotional Convergence Among Protesters
Dunya van Troost, Jacqueline van Stekelenburg
VU University of Amsterdam
People who identify more strongly with a group experience emotions that
converge toward each other (Seger, Smith, & Mackie, 2009). This mechanism of
emotional convergence can explains the heightened sense of collective emotions
during group protests but requires empirical verification among protest participants. The present research examines emotional convergence in a setting where
social identity salience is established, focusing on the relation between the degree of identification and the emotional convergence among protesters emotions
regarding the issue they protested. In line with the study by Seger and colleagues (2009) our expectation was that higher levels of social identification would
lead to greater convergence in emotional response among protesters. Using the
Caught in the act of protest: Contextualizing Contestation survey we examined
differences in variance around emotion means as a function of respondents’
level of social identification and tested these differences with a nonparametric
Levene’s test. The respondents of this survey were approached during either demonstrations on environmental (N = 3058) or distributive (N = 3782) issues. The
total sample comprises twenty-eight demonstrations held in seven European
countries between 2009 and 2012. Results show that respondents who highly
identify with the collective have a more converged response of anger, frustration
and worry then respondents who only identify somewhat with the collective but
a more diverged response of fear in reaction to the issue of the demonstration.
Results are discussed in terms of presence of “I” and “We” mode collectively (von
Scheve & Ismer, 2013) among protest participants and the experience of collective
emotions and emotion category patterns among large social groups.
196
Disciplinary Emotions in Interdisciplinary Interaction
Mikko Salmela, Uskali Mäki
University of Helsinki
Emotions are an important yet largely neglected aspect of scientific work. Little
is known about their role in the constitution and maintenance of disciplines and
disciplinary identities in spite of the earlier work of Fleck (1979[1935]) and Collins
(1998). Combining their ideas with contemporary theorizing on social identities
and their emotional reinforcement, we present a theoretical account of disciplinary emotions and highlight their role in interdisciplinary interaction, focusing
on the phenomenon of scientific imperialism. More precisely, we suggest a model
of disciplines as institutions with a constitutive ‘ethos’ (Tuomela, 2007); a set of
epistemic and methodological core principles, standards, values, and practices
that are widely accepted and consistently applied within the relevant discipline
or its significant subgroups. This core is adopted in the process of academic socialization where the constitutive aspects of a discipline become objects of both
intellectual and emotional commitment to its members. These commitments are
reinforced in seminars and conferences as well as in academic publication and
hiring procedures (Parker & Hackett, 2012; Fourcade, 2006; Collins, 1998). Disciplinary emotions felt for reasons emerging from a disciplinary ethos such as awe of
a new theoretical insight must be distinguished from emotions felt in the social
identity of a researcher such as envy of the proponent of such an insight if it is not
one’s own. In interdisciplinary interaction, disciplinary emotions motivate both
the proponents of scientific imperialism and their opponents in ‘attacked’ disciplines (Mäki, 2013). We propose that the disciplinary ethos of overtly imperialistic
disciplines such as economics and evolutionary psychology contains meta-level
judgments about a universalistic applicability of their epistemic and methodological principles. In contrast, some disciplines and theories such as gender research
and social constructivism may be covertly imperialistic without recognizing this
pattern due to their particularistic and ‘subversive’ meta-understanding of their
epistemic position.
197
Emotional Co-Regulation and Social Identification:
An Embodied Approach
Thomas Szanto, Joel Krueger
University of Copenhagen, University of Exeter
We not only have emotions, we also regulate them. In regulating emotions, we
select or adjust the situations of affective import, or modulate our behavioral or
attention response tendencies (Gross 1998). It is widely agreed among psychologists that the emotion-regulative and emotion-generative processes are inextricable (Frijda 1986; Tomkins 1984). Thus, the way an emotion is experienced, or feels,
reflects the specific ways in which it is regulated. Importantly, emotion-regulative processes do not occur in the social void. Rather, emotion regulation is deeply
embedded in and influenced by group-membership as well as social interaction.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a wide range of empirical work on the
sociocultural aspects, and implications of emotional regulation (Mesquita & Albert 2007; De Leersnyder et al. 2013). The social aspects of emotions regulation
have also been widely studied by developmental psychologists (Eisenberg et al.
1998, 2007; Stegge & Meerum Terwogt 2007), and some have investigated the link
between emotion regulation and the ontogenesis of joint attention (Adamson &
Russell 1999).
Now, whereas the various cognitive and evaluative aspects of social-interactional and socio-cultural influences in emotion regulation (social appraisal biases)
have received considerable attention, somewhat surprisingly, the affective and
bodily dimension of this modulation is very little understood. In our paper, we
shall concentrate on this bodily dimension of social or shared emotion regulation
practices. Building on a minimal phenomenological framework of mutual affective regulation, or emotional co-regulation, in typical infant-caretaker situations
(Krueger 2013) and empirical work on ‘embodying emotions’ (Niedenthal 2007),
we will investigate the ways in which socio-cultural influences and intergroup
biases are, on the affective and emotion-expressive level, embodied. Ultimately,
we will argue that these can become habitualized in something like ‘shared affective body schemas’ (e.g., co-regulated or ritualized facial or kinesthetic emotional
expressions, such as cheering, clapping), or even be robustly sedimented in what
might be called ‘emotional body cultures’.
198
P2.1 Are desires, cognitions and emotions logically related?
Maria Adamos
Georgia Southern University
Although most scholars of emotions agree that emotions involve cognitive evaluative states such as beliefs and judgments, as well as bodily feelings and their
behavioral expressions, only a few pay close enough attention to the desiderative states (i.e. desires and wishes) and their relation to emotions. In this essay
I shall argue that emotions and desires are conceptually connected, because the
cognitive evaluations, which are required for emotions, are also logically related to
desires. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine someone to be afraid and not have the
desire to avoid the danger, be in love and not have the desire to be with the beloved, or be angry and not have the desire to retaliate in some way. I shall attempt
to show through these and other cases of emotions that the conceptual relation
between emotions and desires is that of logical presupposition, in the sense that
an emotion conceptually presupposes some type of desiderative state. However,
the reverse is not the case, as it is certainly possible for one to have a desire specific to an emotion, without having the emotion. For instance, although the desire
for revenge presupposes that one believes that one has been wronged, it does not
necessarily show that one is angry. This is so, because a cognitive evaluative state
does not necessarily entail an emotion, and by logical implication, a desiderative
state does not necessitate an emotion either.
199
P2.2 Does the temporal dynamic of smiles affect their perceived
authenticity?
David Asselin, Pierre Gosselin, Anne-Marie Faltacas(s)
University of Ottawa
Although past research has examined people’s ability to distinguish between enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles, little attention has been given to the effect of
the temporal dynamic on the perceived authenticity of smiles. Enjoyment smiles
have been found to have a more regular temporal pattern than non-enjoyment
smiles, but it is not clear whether people are sensitive to this parameter. In our
previous studies, we found that adults are sensitive to the duration of the offset
but not the onset when judging smiles authenticity. In this study, we investigate
the perceptual capacities of adults regarding the temporal aspect of smiles. We
presented participants (N=37) with Duchenne smiles that differ with respect to
the duration of their onset, offset, or both. Their duration varied between .2 and
1 s. Participants were shown pairs of smiles and had to identify the one with the
longer duration. We believe the results of this study would help us establish a
relation between the temporal dynamic of a facial expression and its perceived
authenticity. Results indicated that participants are sensitive to the duration of
the offset of smiles, F(4, 108) = 11.22, p < .0001 and performed above the chance
level for all four duration comparisons. While not as well as in the offset condition,
participants were also sensitive to the duration of the onset, F(4, 108) = 24.13, p <
.0001, and performed in a similar fashion. They were also able to correctly identify the control smile when both the onset and offset varied, F(4, 108) = 12.76, p <
.0001, with similar performance levels. Altogether, our results suggest adults can
perceive temporal differences as small as .2 s. for all three dynamic component of
the smile, but do not necessarily use it to judge their authenticity. This is an intriguing finding. Future research should examine the factors responsible for this. Do
people have more difficulty perceiving physical changes in the smiles during the
onset than during the offset? Do they pay less attention to the onset of smiles
than to the offset? Is it possible that, contrary to Ekman’s claim (1993), only the
offset is a valid index of the genuineness of smiles?
200
P2.3 Next song playing: Music as a tactic of affect self-regulation
Margarida Baltazar, Suvi Saarikallio
University of Jyväskylä
Music is often used as a tactic of affective self-regulation, i.e., inducement, maintenance or change in affect by the individual (e.g., Schäfer, Sedlmeier, Städtler, &
Huron, 2013). This use involves multiple goals, strategies, tactics and mechanisms,
which have been studied by a growing research field. Data on these different
dimensions are, however, dispersed and there is a need of an integrative work.
This research aims to review the existing research on affective regulation through
music, analyse its results across levels in affective regulation (Goals, Strategies,
Tactics and Mechanisms framework; Van Goethem, 2010), and propose a fitting
model for the phenomenon. An extensive literature review was conducted to collect, screen, analyse and interpret 34 publications. They were collected from online
databases and respected the criteria of being written in English and published
between 1 January 1994 and 30 June 2014, and focusing on at least one dimension
of affective regulation through music. Data were categorised by levels of analysis.
It was possible to find information for all the levels of the GSTM framework from
the selected sample of publications; however, not all the levels received the same
amount of attention from research. There are fewer studies on the mechanisms
underlying affective regulation through music than on strategies, for example.
Moreover, it was found that certain publications label their variables in different
ways (e.g., listening to music was labelled as a tactic by some, and as a strategy by
others). Still, the GSTM framework has shown to be useful for this review, and the
results depict an effective overview of recent research. Additionally, three more
relevant levels of analysis were identified (contextual features, individual features,
and functions of music).
This review successfully portrayed the state of art of research on affective regulation through music. Implications for future research, both in psychology of music
and psychology of emotion, are presented and a more comprehensive framework
for the studied phenomenon is suggested.
201
P2.4 Associative Learning Modulates Early Emotion Effects in
Event-Related Potentials
Mareike Bayer, Annika Grass, Annekathrin Schacht
University Göttingen
Emotion effects in event-related potentials (ERPs) have often been suggested to
reflect attention capture caused by the heightened motivational relevance of emotional stimuli (e.g., Lang & Bradley, 2010, Biol. Psychol.). However, recent studies
also suggested a possible role of associative learning in the emergence of emotion-related ERP effects, especially in early time windows (Schacht et al., 2012, Biol.
Psychol). The present study addressed this question by employing an associative
learning paradigm. In a learning session, pseudowords were associated with positive, neutral or negative valence by means of monetary gratification and punishment. Importantly, half of the pseudowords were learned in the visual modality,
while the other half was presented acoustically, thus allowing for testing the
importance of a visual percept on early emotion effects. In the test session one
day later, pseudowords were presented again in both modalities in an old/new
decision task while event-related potentials were recorded.
Behavioral data show that positively and negatively associated pseudowords
were learned faster than neutral pseudowords; furthermore, they received faster
reaction times in the testing session. Interestingly, early emotion effects in ERPs
were limited to visually learned pseudowords, indicating the importance of visual
percept in the acquisition of valence during associative learning. Taken together,
the results strongly suggest associative learning as a possible source of emotion
effects in visual language processing.
202
P2.5 High frequency heart rate variability is positively associated
with cooperation in a chicken game.
Brice Beffara1, Amélie Bret1, Amélie Baldini1, Nicolas Vermeulen2,
Martial Memillod1
University of Grenoble1, Université catholique de Louvain2
This study explores whether the vagal connection between the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and the brain (via the vagus nerve) is involved in prosocial behaviors.
The Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 1995) postulates that vagal activity underlies prosocial tendencies. Even if several results suggest that vagal activity could be associated with prosocial behaviors, none of them used behavioral measures of prosociality to establish this relationship (Kogan et al., 2014). We recorded the resting
state vagal activity (reflected by High Frequency Heart Rate Variability, HF HRV) of
44 first year psychology students and then measured their level of cooperation
during a social dilemma (chicken game). Linear regression shows that HF HRV is
significantly and positively related to the cooperation level, F(1, 42) = 4.69, p = .03
and accounts for 10% of the variance for the cooperation level. Participants with a
higher HF HRV baseline were more cooperative than participants with a lower HF
HRV baseline. This supports that prosocial behaviors are likely to be somehow linked to the vagal activity. This result corroborates previous studies suggesting that
emotion regulation can influence social behaviors. As a physiological measure
of emotional regulation, HF HRV allows to highlight the links between affective,
physiological and social processes. We discuss this result within the theoretical
framework of the Polyvagal Theory.
203
P2.6 Affective Judgment in Spatial Context
Christophe Blaison, Ursula Hess
This paper is an effort to bring affective issues more strongly into the domain
of spatial cognition. To navigate successfully in the world people have to gauge
the affective value of the environment. Negative value signals threat to survival;
positive value signals opportunities. How do people forecast affective value in the
very frequent case where a target area is unknown to them? (Think about the problem of booking a room in an unknown town!) We assumed that people deduce
the area´s affective value from its position relative to other affectively charged
places or areas. In five studies (60 < N < 288), we investigated how exactly this
deductive process operates. The participants attributed affective value to target
areas in function of the target´s position relative to the “force field” (Lewin, 1936)
generated by an unsafe housing project (force field = people´s estimate of the
area within which a place may affect their well-being; the power of the force field
decreases with distance) and in function of the context of judgment (i.e., the set
of geographical alternatives with which the target area will be compared). Near
the source of the force field, the judgments assimilated toward the judgment of
the source. Farther away, the judgment contrasted as soon as the force field´s
power became tolerable. This assimilation-then-contrast effect that spread throughout the surroundings followed the well-known range-frequency principles of
contextual judgment (Parducci, 1965, 1995) when the force field and the context of
judgment had roughly the same size. When the context of judgment was smaller
than the force field, however, no contrast effect emerged; when it was greater, the
assimilation-then-contrast effect flattened out in the more distant areas. There
was also evidence that greater contexts of judgment produced greater force fields
estimates and that natural obstacles as well as spatial categorization processes
affected the size of the force fields and the associated assimilation-then-contrast
effects. Broader implications for affective judgment in context will be discussed.
204
P2.7 Working Memory Regulates Anxiety-Related Threat
Processing Biases
Rob Booth1, Bundy Mackintosh2, Dinkar Sharma3
Isik University1, Istanbul, University of Essex, UK2, University of Kent, UK3
Anxious individuals tend to show biased processing of threat (e.g. Mathews &
MacLeod, 2005). Executive control could be used to regulate such threat-processing (Schmeichel, Volokhov, & Demaree, 2008), and theorists have suggested that
impaired executive control may be a risk factor for anxiety (Mathews & MacLeod,
2005; Ouimet, Gawronski, & Dozois, 2009). On these bases, we hypothesised that
anxiety-related cognitive biases regarding threat should be more apparent when
executive control is experimentally impaired by loading working memory. In Study 1, 68 undergraduates read ambiguous vignettes under high and low working
memory load; later, their interpretations of these vignettes were assessed via a
recognition test. Trait anxiety predicted biased interpretation of social threat vignettes under high working memory load, but not under low working memory
load. In Study 2, 53 undergraduates completed a dot probe task with fear-conditioned Japanese characters serving as threat stimuli. Trait anxiety predicted attentional bias to the threat stimuli but, again, this only occurred under high working
memory load. Interestingly however, actual eye movements toward the threat
stimuli were associated with state rather than trait anxiety and this relationship
was not moderated by working memory load, suggesting that executive control
regulates biased threat-processing downstream of initial input processes such as
orienting. These results suggest that cognitive loads might be a useful tool for assessing cognitive biases in future research. More importantly, since biased threatprocessing has been implicated in the aetiology and maintenance of anxiety, poor
executive control may indeed be a risk factor for anxiety disorders.
205
P2.8 Effects of learning context on the acquisition and processing
of emotion words in bilinguals
Julia Brase, Nivedita Mani
Georg-August University of Göttingen
Research on bilingual language processing has shown that bilinguals process emotionally valenced words in their first language (L1) slower relative to emotionally
neutral words (e.g., Ayçiçeği & Harris, 2004; Algom, Chajut, & Lev, 2004). Similarly
clear cut effects of emotional valence are hard to come by in second language (L2)
processing (e.g., Anooshian & Hertel, 1994; Colbeck & Bowers, 2012). Normally, a
bilingual’s two languages are acquired in rather different contexts: L1 is typically
acquired in more naturalistic settings (e.g., family) than L2 (e.g., at school) (Harris, Gleason, & Ayçiçeği, 2006). Hence, it could be assumed that more naturalistic
contexts enhance emotion word learning and subsequent processing, whereas
less naturalistic settings hinder it. To examine this issue further, the current study
investigates the extent to which the learning environment influences bilinguals’
processing of emotionally valenced words in their two languages. Here, 100 German-English bilinguals learnt 40 unfamiliar German and 40 unfamiliar English
words varying in their valence (negative and neutral) in four learning conditions.
One group watched videos providing definitions of the words accompanied by
gestural and emotional cues. The second group watched videos in which the same
definitions were presented in a neutral tone lacking gestural cues. The third group
listened to oral definitions of the words in an emotional tone of voice and the
fourth group heard the oral definitions in a neutral tone of voice. Following word
learning, all participants carried out an emotional Stroop, a word transfer and a
free recall task on the words they had just learnt. We replicated the emotional
valence effects across tasks, and all learning conditions in L1. However, only the
emotion video context and partially the emotion audio context showed an effect
of emotional valence in L2, whereas both neutral learning contexts did not. These
results indicate that bilinguals can respond to L2 words in a similar manner as L1
words, provided the learning context is naturalistic and incorporates emotional
and prosodic cues.
206
P2.9 Gender-Emotion Stereotypes And Hiring Decisions
Elena Canadas, Marianne Schmid Mast
Gender and emotion are facial cues that provide the perceivers with sufficient
information to be able to form impressions and to decide how to behave toward
the perceived person (Brody & Hall, 1993; Fischer, 1993, for reviews). A large number of researches have been dedicated to study how accurate and fast perceivers
are to categorize others on the basic of the social group they belong and/or the
emotions they express, but less has been done regarding the social consequences
of those categorizations. The current study investigates within a virtual reality
environment –whether gender-emotion stereotypes can bias hiring decisions for
typically masculine (economist) and feminine (nurse) positions. We developed a
virtual reality office setting in which 6 candidates (3 women and 3 men –avatars-)
applied for the job expressing either an angry, sad, or a neutral non-verbal behavior and were evaluated by 62 participants (recruiters). We registered the interpersonal distance between participants and avatars and we asked participants to
rank the avatars accordingly to their aptitudes for the job. Results showed that sad
women were approached more than neutral and angry women. Sad men were
approached more than angry but not more than neutral men. While sad women
were more approached than sad men, angry avatars (men and women) were approached the same. Regarding the hiring decision, angry women were preferred
compared to angry men, while sad men were preferred compared to sad women.
There was not difference between neutral men and women. Interestingly, hiring
decision was not influenced by the position for which applicants were applying. In
sum, gender and emotion cues are crucial for job applicants and hiring decisions.
Our results suggest that showing gender-stereotypical emotions can be harmful
for hiring decisions.
207
P2.10 Bridging the Emotional Gap: the attitudinal theory of
emotions and justification
Mary Carman
King’s College London / University of the Witwatersrand
A recent addition to the battery of philosophical accounts of emotions is Deonna and Teroni’s (2012) ‘attitudinal theory’ (AT). Deonna and Teroni reject views
according to which emotions have evaluative content; instead, they argue that
emotions are best understood as ‘attitudes directed towards evaluative contents’
(2012, 76). Both Döring and Lutz (2014) and Smith (2014) have criticised the AT for
being incompatible with the additional claim that emotions can justify evaluative
judgements, a claim central to many accounts of emotions including the AT. The
objectors argue that, if the content of an emotion is not evaluative, Deonna and
Teroni’s story for the justification of emotions creates a problematic ‘gap’ between
an evaluative property and an emotional judgement.
I am sympathetic to the AT and believe that it provides a cogent criticism of other
dominant theories, such as perceptual theories. I agree with the objection, however, that it gives the wrong story for emotional content, thereby creating a problem for emotional justification. In this paper, I aim to draw out the insights of the
AT while rejecting that the content of an emotion is not evaluative. I take a similar
starting point to Deonna and Teroni by examining the concept of the ‘formal object’ of an emotion. I argue, however, that the subject’s cares and concerns in part
constitute the evaluative property which is the formal object of an emotion. (It is
important to note that my proposal is not subject to Deonna and Teroni’s rejection of a similar claim in (2012b).) With this basis, I conclude that the emotional
content is evaluative.
Two consequences of my proposal are that (1) like the AT, it fleshes out how emotions cannot be perceptions of value, but (2) while the ‘gap’ is filled, it becomes
apparent that emotions do not provide non-inferential justification for an evaluative judgement. I thus propose a modification of the AT which demystifies justification but in so doing, fleshes out what the limits to justification are, and why.
208
P2.11 A guide to selecting images from the International Affective
Picture System (IAPS) for lab-based emotion elicitation
Alexandra Caterina Constantinescu, Maria Wolters,
Sarah E. MacPherson
University of Edinburgh
Introduction: Experiments frequently rely on subsets of IAPS images (Lang et al,
2008) to elicit emotions, and various methods can be used to “manually” select
these: establishing PAD (Mehrabian, 1996) cut-off points, discretising PAD dimensions etc. Unlike such methods, a standardised selection procedure based on cluster analysis would provide a convenient classification into natural categories and
increase selection efficiency, making images as similar as possible within a given
category and as different as possible between categories – thus preserving statistical power and supporting interpretability of results. Methods: Using the normative data offered with the IAPS database (N=1182), we firstly removed duplicate or
missing value cases. Secondly, we limited our analysis to images whose estimated
population values were included in a 95% confidence interval spanning no more
than 1 point on the 9-point Likert scale used for IAPS ratings. Finally, we applied
different clustering techniques to the remaining data (N=845) and found modelbased clustering (MBC, Fraley & Raftery, 2002) to produce the most appropriate
classification. Results: MBC identified 5 meaningful image groups: 1. very negative
and arousing images, with low dominance (e.g., a cemetery); 2. negative images
with moderate arousing and dominance levels (e.g., a snake); 3. neutral, non-arousing images with slightly elevated dominance (e.g., a basket); 4. positive and arousing with relatively high dominance (e.g., erotic scene); 5. very positive and less
arousing with relatively high dominance (e.g., a baby). As MBC also indicates the
degree of certainty that each image belongs to the cluster it was assigned to, we
were able to flexibly select a number of the most certain cases belonging to each
cluster (i.e., the best representatives), as the stimuli to be used experimentally. Discussion & conclusions: MBC uncovered a clustering solution within the IAPS data
which is meaningful, flexible, efficient and reproducible. This can help researchers
devise an appropriate image sampling strategy and also highlighted areas where
there is a shortage of stimuli (such as very negative, non-arousing). Our method
can be easily applied to other emotion research data sets.
209
P2.12 Proneness to Guilt and Shame and Severity of Social
Responsiveness Symptoms In Children with Autism Spectrum
Disorders
Denise Davidson, Elizabeth Hilvert, Michael Giordano,
Heather Celiz-Yap
Loyola University Chicago
Although basic emotions often involve self-evaluative processes, only selfconscious emotions (e.g., guilt, shame) must involve these processes (Tracy &
Robins, 2007). The study of self-conscious emotions in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is important because it can reveal their capacity for reflecting
upon personal experiences and evaluating them in relation to social norms and
societal standards. The study of self-conscious emotions also provides a window
into how children with ASD evaluate themselves and are aware of other’s evaluations of them. Finally, finding impairments in the recognition and understanding
of self-conscious emotions has important clinical implications. A number of psychologically disruptive or maladaptive behaviors have been found in neurotypical
(NT) individuals who do not adequately experience self-conscious emotions: a lack
of guilt proneness has been found to be positively related to anger and aggression (e.g., Stuewig, et al., 2010), externalizing behavior (Ferguson et al., 1999); and
externalization of blame (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Nineteen children with ASD
(MAge 11.8, SD, 1.9) who were either moderate (66-75T-score; N = 11) or severe (76T
or higher; N = 8) on the Social Responsiveness Scale- 2 (Constantino, 2012) were
compared on a measure of proneness to guilt and shame (TOSCA-C, Tangney &
Dearing, 2002). The SRS-2 measures severity of symptoms rather than presence or
absence of them, capturing the spectrum-like condition of ASD. Children’s ability
to accurately identify guilt-provoking situations, and predict the duration of guilt
was also assessed. In the moderate range, significant relations included proneness to guilt and shame, r = .61, p < .04, duration ratings and proneness to guilt, r =
.67, p < .04, and ratings of duration and intensity of emotions, r = .71, p < .02. In the
severe range, children’s ratings of duration and intensity of guilt was significant, r
= .72, p < .05, and intensity ratings were greater for more intense emotional situations, r = .87, p <. 005. However, no significant differences were found between
moderate and severe groups in terms of proneness to guilt, shame or accuracy in
identifying emotions, t(17) = -.81 -.92, n.s. Although proneness to guilt and shame,
and accuracy in identifying emotions, did not differ between children with moderate and severe SRS scores, a number of significant relations were found, especially
in the moderate group. These results will be compared to NT data at the time of
presentation. Implications of these results will also be presented.
210
P2.13 Lay Theories about Bullying Moderate Linkages of Emotion
Socialization with Peer Victimization
Julie Dunsmore, Rachel Miller, Bryce Riley
Virginia Tech
Being bullied is linked with negative long-term outcomes. In a 50-year prospective study, childhood experience of peer victimization was associated with poorer
mental and physical health in middle adulthood (Takizawa, Maughan, & Arsenault, 2014). The purpose of this study was to examine two predictors of peer
victimization experiences: (1) emotion socialization and (2) lay theories about
bullying. When parents have more supportive responses to children’s negative
emotions, their children enjoy better peer relations (Katz, Maliken, & Stettler,
2012). Though understudied, peer emotion socialization is especially important in
early adolescence, when youth have begun to spend more time with peers (Lam,
McHale, & Crouter, 2014). This study contributes to the field by examining both
peer and parent supportive responses to children’s negative emotions. Entity lay
theories emphasize stable qualities that are difficult to change, whereas incremental lay theories emphasize changeable skills that may be developed (Molden
& Dweck, 2006). Adolescents who hold entity (rather than incremental) lay theories about bullying are more likely to seek revenge after peer conflict (Yeager et
al., 2011), which may contribute to a cycle of negative peer interactions that then
increases experiences of peer victimization. Relatedly, because incremental theories might help youth break cycles of peer conflict, holding an incremental theory
about bullying might enhance benefits of supportive emotion socialization. Thus,
we tested whether lay theories about bullying might moderate associations of
parent and peer emotion socialization with peer victimization. Eighty-two 8th
graders (51% girls) participated as part of a larger study. Children self-reported on
lay theories about bullying (Yeager et al., 2011), parents’ responses to their anger,
sadness, and worry (Magai, 1996), best friends’ responses to their anger, sadness,
and worry (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2014), and their experiences of peer victimization within the last week (Orpinas, 1993). Regression analyses controlling for child
sex showed that youth reporting more supportive parental responses to negative
emotions experienced less peer victimization (omnibus F (6, 65) = 5.51, p < .01; β =
-.44). Lay theories about bullying interacted with friends’ supportive responses to
negative emotions to predict peer victimization (β = .41). When youth held incremental theories about bullying, friends’ supportive responses were unrelated to
their experiences of peer victimization. However, when youth held entity theories
about bullying, friends’ supportive responses were associated with greater peer
victimization. Findings support the importance of youths’ lay theories and peer
emotion socialization in victimization experiences.
211
P2.14 Moderating effects of social support and self-esteem in the
relationship between stress and health problems
Yookyung Eoh, Soo Hyun Park
Yonsei University
Stress negatively affects individual’s mental health (Ciarrochi, Deane, & Anderson, 2002), but there also exist protective factors such as social support and selfesteem that may reduce the adverse effects of stress. Specifically, abundant research shows that social support and self-esteem decrease the risk of emotional
difficulties (Starr, Hammen, Connolly, & Brennan, 2014). They also play an important role in the experience of stress and thought problems such as suspiciousness
or paranoid thinking (Sündermann, Onwumere, Kane, Morgan, & Kuipers, 2014).
Therefore, this study examines how these factors work differently in the relationship between stress and emotional as well as thought problems. The participants
consisted of 161 university students in Korea (male=79, female=82). The mean
ages for women and men were 21.8 (SD=2.0) and 22.6 (SD=2.9) years, respectively.
The following measures were used: Hassles Scale, Symptom Cheklist-90, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and Social Support Scale. Hierarchical multiple regression
using SPSS 21.0 was used to test for main effects of stress, social support and selfesteem, and interaction effect of social support and self-esteem on emotional and
thought problems. We found significant main effects of stress, social support and
self-esteem on both emotional and thought problems. However, the interaction
effect of social support and self-esteem was significant only for thought problems.
The results imply that social support can have different roles in the relationship
between self-esteem and emotional or thought problems in the clinical context.
212
P2.15 Dynamic Emotion Wheel: an Emotional Awareness Tool for
Computer-Supported Collaboration
Mattia A. Fritz, Mireille Betrancourt, Gaëlle Molinari,
Guillaume Chanel, Thierry Pun
The Dynamic Emotion Wheel (DEW) is an Emotion Awareness Tool (EAT) developed
as part of the EATMINT project (Chanel et al., 2013; Molinari et al., 2013), whose
objective is to explore the relationship between emotion – defined accordingly
to appraisal/component theories – and computer-supported collaboration (Eligio
et al., 2012). The DEW is inspired by the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW; see Scherer,
2005), a self-report instrument that arranges a set of modal emotions in a circle
with two appraisal dimensions as axes: coping potential and goal conduciveness.
The DEW is an adaptation of the GEW in the perspective of its co-existence with
another computer-supported task, which means that the EAT must occupy only a
limited part of the screen and should not distract too much from the primary task.
For this reason, the DEW does not show all modal emotions at the same time, but
dynamically compute a subset of emotions according to two range-input values
representing the same appraisal criteria of the GEW. The subset, thus, dynamically updates according to variations in appraisal criteria. Furthermore, the DEW
provides graphical representation of the evolution of registered emotional episodes with respect to both the appraisal dimensions and the resulting subjective feeling. The tool – currently in advanced development and usability testing
– is planned to replace a first version of an EAT used in published pilot EATMINT
experiments (op. cit.). The DEW aims to enhance real time awareness of both self
and other participant’s emotional episodes in an ongoing collaborative task. Data
gathered through the tool may contribute to the research interested in the role of
explicit expressed emotions in social interactions.
213
P2.16 Differences between Spanish and German schizophrenics and
non-schizophrenics in the perception of non-verbal
communication
Roser Gari Perez
Phd Candidate
Using material we developed for this study we analyzed the perception of the
non-verbal communication of two basic emotions (happiness and anger) in schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics from Spain and Germany. A total of 50 short
videos (between 2 to 5 seconds) were presented to 20 Spanish people and 20 German people, Spanish people watched videos of Spanish persons angry or happy,
and German people watched Germans angry or happy. Out of these 24 videos
(plus two examples) were selected. 12 depicting anger in three intensities (low,
medium, high) and 12 depicting happiness in three intensities (low medium, high),
half showing Spanish people and half showing German people. With a computer program the vowels of the sound track were removed thus making it incomprehensible but keeping all the emotional markers (speed, volume…), producing
short videos of facial and vocal expressions combined. These videos were shown
to 46 Spanish and 49 German schizophrenics and 45 Spanish and 45 German nonschizophrenics. Their answers were analyzed to compare the correct identification
of the emotions and the rating of intensity of said emotions. In all four groups
the emotions were mainly correctly identified but there were differences with the
intensity rating, especially across nationalities. Schizophrenics of both countries
performed much better than expected, especially the ones hospitalized on remission or ambulant. This result differs from the literature on the subject (Edwards J,
Jackson HJ, Pattison PE. 2002, Bruce I. Turetsky, Christian G. Kohler, Tim Indersmitten, Mahendra T. Bhati, Dorothy Charbonnier, and Ruben C. Gur. 2007, Barkl SJ, Lah
S, Starling J, Hainsworth C, Harris AW, Williams LM. 2014) We attribute their better
performance to having been shown videos of emotions expressed both facially
and vocally rather than photos and separate audio and we think that further research is necessary. Further research should also be conducted into the differences
in rating the intensity of emotions across nationalities.
214
P2.17 Age effects on the relationships between felt emotions and
cardiovascular and electrodermal reactivity to affective pictures
Patrick Gomez1, Armin von Gunten2, Brigitta Danuser1
Institute for Work and Health1, Lausanne, Lausanne University Hospital2
Knowledge about how the relationship between the emotional experience and
the physiological response to affective stimuli may change during the adult lifespan is sparse. The present study aimed at determining whether age modulates
the relationship between felt emotions (pleasantness and arousal) and the cardiovascular and electrodermal responses to affective pictures. Participants were
212 well-functioning individuals (94 men) ranging in age from 20 to 81 years with
a mean of 47.4 years (SD = 17.3). They watched 14 different one-minute long picture series and gave one valence and one arousal rating for each series. Systolic
blood pressure (SBP) and heart rate (HR) were measured beat-to-beat by fingercuff photoplethysmography with the Finometer. Skin conductance level (SCL) was
recorded with a Psylab device. Change scores for the physiological measures were
computed by subtracting the mean of the 10-s baseline immediately before onset
of each series from the mean of the corresponding 60-s series epoch. Mixed effect
regression modeling was used to determine the relationships between affective
ratings, physiological measures and age. SCL increased with increasing self-rated
arousal ( = 0.19, p < .001). Yet, this relationship was modulated by age (i.e., significant Arousal x Age interaction,  = -0.006, p < .001): Among the older participants
SCL changes were only weakly related to arousal. HR changes were positively related to pleasantness, i.e., HR deceleration became increasingly larger with increasing self-reported unpleasantness ( = 0.12, p < .001). However, this relationship
was modulated by age (i.e., significant Valence x Age interaction,  = -0.003, p <
.05): Among the older participants HR changes did not show a valence-dependent
modulation. SBP increased with both increasing self-rated pleasantness ( = 0.09,
p < .05) and arousal ( = 0.20, p < .001). The Valence x Age and Arousal x Age interactions were not significant (p > .6). Compared to younger adults, older adults
show much weaker relationships between HR and valence and between SCL and
arousal. This may result from blunted parasympathetic output to the heart and
sympathetic outflow to the eccrine glands, respectively, among older adults. On
the contrary, younger and older adults do not differ in their relationship between
self-reported arousal and SBP suggesting that the arousal-dependent sympathetic control of SBP is largely preserved across adulthood. This study suggests that
age effects on the coupling between felt emotions and physiology are not unitary
but rather system- and measure-specific.
215
P2.18 Emotional characteristics of Russian and Swedish women
seeking treatment for alchohol problems
(cross-cultural comparison)
Juliana Granskaya1, Britt af Klinteberg2, Christina Scheffel Birath2, Ulla
Beijer,2 Larisa Tsvetkova1
StPetersburg State University1, Stockholm University2
The objective of the present study was to understand the patterns of risk indications in terms of emotional characteristic in the development of female alcohol
consumption/abuse across two countries. Women seeking treatment for alcohol
problems in Russia and in Sweden were examined concerning emotion and healthrelated aspects with the purpose of focusing on identification of female risk indications. Sample: 153 women seeking for alcohol treatment from both countries
(average age 42,8 ± 8,1) 1) a group of Russian females 28-59 years-old under alcohol treatment recruited from City Addiction Clinic in StPetersburg and rehabilitation center “House of hope on the hill” in the suburb area of St Petersburg (n=80)
2) a group of Swedish females 30-55 years-old voluntarily seeking treatment for
their alcohol problems at a clinic specialized for women with alcohol problems
in Stockholm (n=73) Methods: Karolinska Scales of Personality (KSP/SSP) inventories to measure impulsiveness, monotony avoidance (adventure seeking), somatic anxiety, psychic anxiety, psychasthenia (stress susceptibility), and inhibition
of aggression (lack of assertiveness), socialization (embitterment), verbal aggression, irritability, and suspicion. Also, self-evaluated level of energy, mood, feeling of
stress/nervous and loneliness were used (Health Index scale). Results: Cross-cultural comparisons indicated an universal emotional characteristic pattern among
women seeking treatment for alcohol problems characterized by high level of
somatic and psychic anxiety, psychasthenia, impulsiveness, adventure seeking,
irritability and verbal aggression. At the same time comparative analysis revealed
significant differences in emotional traits among Russian and Swedish women
seeking treatment for alcohol problems. Women from Russia showed higher level
of psychic anxiety, verbal aggression and suspicion measured by KSP and feeling
of stress measured by Health Index compare to Swedish women. In contrast to
Russian women, Swedish women showed higher score for monotony avoidance
and irritability. The biggest difference between the two groups of women was
found in socialization scale where Russian women had significantly low socialization scores compared with their counterparts from Sweden. This means that
Russian alcohol dependent women feel less adjusted and satisfied with people
around them, and may have negative experience with their families and parents
relations. Conclusion: Results indicated that women seeking treatment for alcohol
problems from two different cultures are associated with similar profile for their
emotional characteristics connected to underlying vulnerability mechanisms for
health risk behaviours.
216
P2.19 The effect of aging on abilities to reappraise induced feeling
of unfairness
Jonathan Harm, Sandrine Vieillard
Université de Franche-Comté
It is consistently argued that aging should be related to improved emotion regulation abilities, particularly the use of cognitive reappraisal to cope with negative life
events (Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, [1]). But very few empirical studies have
directly compared younger and older adults on their ability to implement reappraisal [2]. Furthermore, these works have used negatively valenced visual stimuli
that were not controlled for their social significance and relevance. More recently,
empirical evidence have suggested that the older adults’ emotion regulation skills
could be rather based on the preferential use of low resource-demanding attentional deployment [3]. Taken together, these findings raise the question whether
older adults are really better than their younger counterparts to implement reappraisal strategies. The present study purposed to test the life-span trajectory of
the ability to use cognitive reappraisal to down-regulate the moral emotion of
injustice elicited by 20 controlled pictures while recording the participants’ gaze
direction. Twenty-five younger, 25 middle-aged and 25 older adults were asked to
simply watch10 pictures and then, after a training stage, to use cognitive reappraisal with 10 other pictures with the goal to down-regulate negative emotion.
Results showed a similar decrease in each age group during the reappraisal versus
simply watch condition both in subjective feelings of unfairness and skin conductance responses. However, compared to younger adults, older adults’ total fixations time on the pictures area was shorter during the reappraisal condition. In
line with Opitz et al.’s findings [3], our data indicated that older adults’ preserved
capability to regulate the feeling of unfairness were not due to a better use of
reappraisal strategy. It suggests, in contrast with the SST hypothesis, that aging
should not be related to a general improve in emotion regulation, but should be
characterized by a shift in emotion regulation strategies to compensate the cognitive decline .
217
P2.20 Neural correlates of emotional response to taste:
an EEG study
Emily Hird, Deborah Talmi, Olivia Adams, Wael El-Deredy
The brain produces a prediction error (PE) in response to a difference between
expectation and outcome, an important signal for adaptive learning and optimal
decision making. PE signals in EEG are thought to originate in the dopaminergic midbrain and have a source in the anterior cingulate cortex. Previous research
utilized monetary reinforcers to compare rewarding and aversive PE, but in such
research participants can only gain money – they are never really ‘out-of-pocket’.
Here we examined the correlates of personally meaningful aversive PE by using
rewarding and aversive tastes. This methodology allowed us to compare positive
and negative primary reinforcers from the same modality, something that has not
been achieved before.Twenty participants received rewarding (sweet) and aversive
(bitter) tastes, indicated by a cue, while EEG was recorded. Expectations for these
tastes were controlled by giving participants cues before taste administration,
which indicated the type of taste they were about to receive and the likelihood
of receiving this taste (25% or 75%). Preliminary analysis shows unexpected delivery of sweet and bitter taste produces a stronger positive event-related potential
(ERP) than omission of either bitter or sweet taste. This suggests that this neural
response signals delivery and omission of outcome. This challenges the conventional theory of a stronger neural response for rewarding than for aversive outcomes.
The FRN has only been shown to signal valence in the context of monetary loss or
gain, rather than delivery of either rewarding or aversive outcome. This methodology allows direct analysis of whether the FRN signals the emotional valence of
an outcome. Preliminary results suggest an amplitude difference between ERP for
delivery and omission of taste. If the forthcoming main results to follow this trend
to significance, we will be the first study to show the FRN response to rewarding
and aversive taste, using a unimodal stimulus. This is important because using a
single primary modality as a stimulus reduces any source of variability between
stimuli and between participants, providing the most objective method to assess
the function of the FRN. The results challenge the conventional theory that the
FRN signals reward and aversion.
218
P2.21 The moderating effect of mixed emotion awareness in the
relationship between emotional suppression
and depressive symptoms
Eun Young Joe, Soo Hyun Park
Yonsei University
Fundamentally, we feel various emotions that are triggered by internal and/or
external stimuli across variety of situations and we use strategies to regulate
these emotions, especially negative emotions. Among the emotion regulation
strategies, suppression is one of the most maladaptive regulation strategies that
negatively affect depressive symptoms (Szczygiel et al., 2010). The relationship
between depression and emotion regulation is also moderated by one’s capacity
for emotional awareness (Eastabrook, Flynn, & Hollenstein., 2014). Although we
typically experience mixed emotions, previous studies have focused primarily on
the experience of pure single emotions. Recently, research has started to address
the phenomenon of mixed emotional states (Larsen, McGraw, & Cacioppo., 2001).
However, there are only a few studies concerning the relationship between mixed
emotion awareness and psychological factors. Thus, the primary aim of the present study was to test the moderating effect of mixed emotion awareness in the
relationship between emotional suppression and depressive symptoms. Participants were 138 (57 men and 81 women), Korean University students. Their mean
age was 21.56 (SD = 2.09). The measures that were used for this study were the
Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), Korean version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression scale (K-CESD), and emotion-eliciting scenarios. The
scenarios were created to trigger subjective emotional experience of six basic
emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear to measure the degree of mixed emotion awareness through follow-up questions. Hierarchical multiple regression and slope analysis using SPSS.21.0 was used to test
our hypothesis. The interaction effect of mixed emotion awareness and emotional
suppression was significant. The main effect of suppression on depressive symptoms was significant only in the high mixed emotion awareness group according
to the slope analysis. This result suggests that mixed emotion awareness, as a
moderator, plays an important role in the association between suppression and
depressive symptoms. This will help to broaden our understanding of factors that
may influence depression.
219
P2.22 The relationship between cultural self-construal
and interoception
Masato Kanai, Shintaro Yukawa
Many studies have supported the idea that interoception, the sense of the physiological condition of the body, has a close relationship to emotion (e.g., Terasawa,
Moriguchi, Tochizawa, & Umeda, 2014). Ma-Kellams, Blascovich, & McCall (2012)
recently revealed that Asians are relatively insensitive to their visceral states and
attributed their conclusion to the Asian tendency to focus on contextual entities
outside of themselves. Ma-Kellams et al. (2012) said that this tendency was a part
of interdependence, which is one aspect of cultural self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Western people are likely to consider themselves as individuals (independence), whereas Eastern people are likely to consider themselves as combined with others (interdependence). Thus, our study examined the hypothesis that
low independence or high interdependence brought about insensitivity in interoception. Eighty-five graduates and undergraduates initially completed the scale
on cultural self-construal (Park & Kitayama, 2012) and then performed a heartbeat
detection task by Herbert, Ulbrich, & Schandry (2007). Consequently, only in male
samples (n = 35), interdependence significantly correlated with the score of the
heartbeat detection task (r = .33, p = .03). These relationships remained significant
when independence was separated out as a control variable (partial r = .28, p =
.05). Scoring high in the heartbeat detection task indicates insensitivity to their
heart rate. Thus, males who have a high sense of interdependence are possibly
less sensitive to interoception; an important cue for emotional experience.
220
P2.23 The acquisition of ways of expressing happiness through
spontaneous interaction: a longitudinal case study
Fazia Khaled
Paris III, La Sorbonne Nouvelle
Research in the area of Child Language Acquisition has previously sought to understand how children develop knowledge related to specific semantic domains
including that of emotions (Taumopeau, Ruffman, 2006). In the case of the communication of emotions, its multimodal aspect should be taken into account in
order to provide a complete analysis of how emotions are expressed. The markers
employed to identify emotions are based on what has been extensively described
in the literature. As regards happiness, the prototypical markers are composed of
a universal facial expression consisting of genuine smiles (Darwin, 1872; Ekman,
1970), vocalizations, more specifically laughter (Sauter and al., 2010), some gestures which might include dancing about or hand clapping especially in children,
(Darwin, 1872), and the lexicon (Fillenbaum, Rapoport, 1971). In this presentation,
I will present an overview of a child’s communicational model of happiness, and
then relate it to her parents’ ways of expressing happiness. To explore this question,
I conducted a case study analysis of an American child, using a longitudinal corpus
of 12 videos from the CHILDES database, Providence corpus (Demuth et al., 2006).
To analyze how this child acquires the means to express happiness, each utterance
in which at least one of the markers of happiness above mentioned appears was
systematically coded into an Excel file, allowing us to measure how frequently
each modality and marker of communication was used. Her parents’ communicational model of happiness was coded in the same manner.I hypothesized that the
communicational model to which the child is exposed might influence the way
she expresses emotions. In the corpus, the parents displayed happiness through
the use of prototypical markers, specifically the corresponding facial expressions
and vocalisations described in the literature. Analysis of the data related to the
child revealed that she replicated her parents’ mode of communication.
221
P2.24 Identifying aesthetic highlights in movies from physiological
and behavioral synchronization
Theodoros Kostoulas, Guillaume Chanel, Michal Muszynski,
Patrizia Lombardo, Thierry Pun
Motivation: Film represents human emotions and elicits them in the viewers.
Film critics indicate and analyze particular shots or sequences (film highlights)
as being aesthetically powerful. The exploration of the emotional impact of a
film can throw light on both the nature of art and to the audience responses.
This leads to verify or invalidate assumptions of film criticism and theory. Objectively identifying movie highlights can be helpful in film studies in assessing the
aesthetic value of movie scenes. Description of the goals: Within this project we
aim at answering the following research questions:- How to determine the users’
affective state from multi-modal signals, in the context of movie projection? - Are
we able to predict the emotional and aesthetic value of movie scenes (highlights)
based on the information carried out by the physiological and behavioral signals
of multiple spectators? - Would it be possible to use a multi person multi-modal
modeling / highlight detection system in film studies to determine movie scenes
with high aesthetic value? Within this work, we focus on the design, development
and evaluation of a system which detects movie highlights based on the synchronization of physiological and behavioral signals of spectators. The experiments
were carried out in an ecological situation, where the spectators were watching
a movie in a theater. Methods: The physiological data consist of galvanic skin response and the behavioral data correspond to acceleration measurements. The
highlights are characterized in terms of form (spectacular, subtle) and content
(character development, dialog, theme development). We retrieve the affective
reaction of spectators on the basis of their physiological and behavioral synchronization using signal processing and machine learning techniques. We propose
a probabilistic approach to reveal spectators’ reactions. Results and contribution:
Results indicate that affective reactions can be modeled from the synchronization
of the multi-modal signals of the spectators. Initial descriptive characteristics of
highlights are analyzed. The affective reaction of spectators is compared with the
predefined highlights. The proposed method is adaptable and flexible, enabling
utilization of any modality, such as behavioral signals, for the estimation of the
affective reaction of people responding to artistic content.
222
P2.25 Emotion induction and facial reactivity in Human Computer
Interaction in a Wizard of Oz Experiment
Martin Krippl, Matthias Haase, Julia Krüger, Philipp Haendler,
Gerrit Krautz, Martin Wegener, Joerg Frommer
University of Magdeburg
The so called LAST MINUTE corpus (Rösner et al., 2012) consists of data about a human computer interaction (HCI), where the subjects have to pack their things to
start into holidays in several minutes. Emotions should be induced at two points
and measured by FACS (Ekman, Friesen & Hager, 2002). The first point was where
the computer tells the subject that the weight is too high and he has to lower the
weight by putting something out of the bag (weight transgression). The second is
where the computer tells the subjects that their holiday will be on the other side
of the earth (in Waiuku) and therefore it won´t be warm, but cold during the holiday times (Waiuku barrier). Hypotheses were that anger/frustration should have
higher frequencies after both inductions compared to baseline and that fear/
surprise and sadness/disappointment should have higher frequencies after the
Waiuku barrier. Total sample size was 130, with two balanced age groups (18-30
and above 60), which were analyzed together. Five seconds after three time points
(baseline at beginning of experiment, weight transgression, Waiuku barrier) were
FACS-coded. Emotion categorization of facial actions was mostly based on EMFACS, but used also non-prototypical AU-combinations as indicators for emotions.
Preliminary analysis of 43 subjects revealed no full prototypical facial expressions
of emotions according EMFACS (Friesen & Ekman, 1984). The only exception was
smiling, but there was no significant difference. The hypotheses on anger/frustration was supported significantly on weight transgression and in tendency on the
Waiuku barrier. As hypothesized fear/surprise and sadness/disappointment were
significantly higher during the Waiuku barrier. In our study, as in other emotion
induction studies (Reisenzein et al., 2013), prototypical emotion expressions, like
proposed in EMFACS, do not occur often in real life or experimental inductions of
emotions. But the study shows, when we use also non-prototypical expressions,
we can detect emotions in facial behavior. This holds even if a computer induces
emotions.
223
P2.26 Aesthetic emotions induced by TV advertising predict
consumers’ attitudes
Mathieu Lajante, Olivier Droulers, Sophie Lacoste-Badie
University of Rennes 1
Since the 80s, models in marketing have integrated the role of emotions induced
by TV advertising, particularly as an antecedent of attitude toward the advertising (Aad) and attitude toward the brand (Batra and Ray, 1986). Starting from this
point, several studies have been published dealing with the possibility of predicting attitudes from self-report measurements of emotion (e.g., Micu and Plummer, 2010). However, the literature review shows that two main points have often
been avoided by researchers: the nature of emotion elicited by TV advertising as
well as its multicomponential structure. As a result, it is difficult to draw conclusions about how emotions are involved in attitude formation. In order to address
the aforementioned limitations, we suggest studying the link between emotional components aroused by TV advertising and attitudes formation through an
aesthetic approach of the componential appraisal theory (Scherer, 2004). Accordingly, we assume that exposure to TV advertising induces aesthetic emotions,
which “are not in the service of behavioral readiness or the preparation of specific,
adaptive action tendencies” (Scherer, 2004, p. 244), and lead consumers to evaluate the advertising as intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant. Even though these
emotions refer to an aesthetic and a conscious, experiential phenomenon, it is nevertheless agreed that visual and/or auditory stimuli could induce slight changes
in both the peripheral efference and motor expressive components as a result of
appraisal process (Scherer, 2001, 2004). More specifically, and according to the
componential process model, we hypothesize that salient events depicted in the
advertising trigger both novelty and intrinsic pleasantness checks; the associated physiological changes in both the peripheral efference and motor expressive
components will then affect the subjective feelings component that serves as the
basis for attitudes formation (Aaker et al., 1988). 51 healthy students were exposed
to 8 TV advertising during which electrodermal (peripheral efferent component)
and facial EMG (motor expressive component) responses were recorded. After
each advertising, participants were asked to rate first their emotional experience
(subjective feelings component) using the SAM scale (Lang et al., 1993), and then
their Aad using a four-item semantic differential scale (Mitchell and Olson, 1981).
Results indicate that activation of both peripheral efference and motor expressive components are predictive of subjective feelings component which, in turn, is
predictive of Aad. More interestingly, our results indicate that subjective feelings
component serves as a direct mediator between both the peripheral efference
and motor expressive components and Aad.
224
P2.27 The moderating effect of thought suppression on the
relationship between stress and depression
Eun-ji Lee, Soo-hyun Park
Yonsei university
Objectives: Previous research has shown that stressful life events are likely to precipitate depression (Mazure, 1998). When experiencing stress, individuals who
suppress their thoughts can ironically report more negative thoughts, which in
turn increases risk for depression (Wenzlaff & Luxton, 2003). Success of thought
suppression depends on working memory capacity (Brewin & Beaton, 2002), and
higher extraversion is associated with better working memory performance (Liberman & Rosentahal, 2001). Thus, we can expect that degree of extraversion can
have a significant effect on thought suppression, especially when stress undermines mental control. We examined whether the moderating effect of thought
suppression between stress and depression is different depending on degree of
extraversion. Methods: Participants (61 men and 92 women; mean age=20.62,
SD=2.48) completed the Stressful Life Events Scale, Center for Epidemiological
Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), and NEO-PI-R. Out of the 154 participants, we selected participants who scored in the top 75 percentile (high-extraversion group,
n=47) or the bottom 25 percentile (low-extraversion group, n=42) based on their
extraversion scores. In each group, we tested the moderating effect of thought
suppression in the relationship between stress and depression. Results: In the lowextraversion group, moderating effect of thought suppression in the relationship
between stress and depression was significant. More specifically, higher stress
was related to more depressive symptoms with high (+1SD) degree of thought
suppression, while stress was not associated with depressive symptoms when
thought suppression was low (-1SD). In contrast, there was no stress x thought
suppression interaction in the high-extraversion group.Conclusions: These findings suggest that in individuals with low-extraversion who use frequently
thought suppression as a mental control strategy, depressive symptoms can be
predicted by stressful life events. The findings of this study provide an insight to
understanding the relationship between thought suppression and extraversion in
the relationship between stress and depression.
225
P2.28 Emotion perception, prosocial and aggressive behaviors in
action videogame players
Antico Lia, Singer Tania, Bavelier Daphne, Swann Pichon
Videogames are becoming ubiquitous and raise societal concerns among parents,
educators and policy makers. On the one hand, it has been shown that videogames
such as action-packed, first or third shooter games (aka action videogames, AVG)
can enhance some perceptual, attentional and cognitive skills; on the other hand,
playing violent videogames has been associated with negative outcomes such as
increased aggression, decreased prosocial behavior, and desensitization to negative signals conveyed by violent medias. Based on these two lines of research, it
is unclear whether playing AVG, which all contain violent content but have been
previously linked with enhanced sensory processing and improved attentional
control, may improve, leave intact, or diminish the ability to process emotional
signals, and regulate social and emotional behaviors. We recruited 40 (over 50)
AVG players (AVGP) with long-term exposure to AVG (at least 5h per week in the
last two years) and 40 (over 50) non-gamers. We assessed: 1) emotion detection
using 2AFC tasks and faces morphed between neutral and respectively pain, happiness, anger or sadness expressions, 2) emotion discrimination for negative and
positive emotions using respectively morphed faces ranging from pure anger to
pure sadness, and from pure pain to pure happiness. 3) prosocial behavior using
the Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG) which assesses the propensity to help another
player in a non-competitive environment and 4) reactive aggression using the
Competitive Reaction-time Task (CRT) which assesses the propensity to react to an
aggressive provocation in a competitive environment. Preliminary results indicate
that AVGP scored higher in physical aggression on anger questionnaires and were
more aggressive than non-gamers in the CRT task, a result which matches findings from the literature on violent media use. In addition, AVGP, relative to nongamers, have an increased propensity to interpret ambiguous angry-sad morphed
faces as expressing anger. This bias, albeit small, was specific to anger as it was
not observed for ambiguous happy-pain faces. Finally, while we found no group
difference in helping behavior, we observed that the propensity to favor anger
interpretations in ambivalent anger-sad morphs predicted decreased helping in
the ZPG task, while the propensity to detect happiness in happy-neutral morphs
predicted increased helping. These results reinforce the correlational evidence
accumulated in the field of violent media that violent content in videogames influence socio-affective skills. They replicate the previously documented increase in
reactive aggression, and further extend existing work by documenting a bias toward interpreting ambivalent sad-angry faces as angry in AVGP. Interestingly, we
document a new relationship between helping behavior and interpreting positive
and negative ambivalent facial emotions, highlighting the importance of better
understanding the relationship between emotion discrimination and various dimensions of social behavior.
226
P2.29 Physiological effects of art museums on well-being
and emotions
Stefano Mastandrea1, Fridanna Maricchiolo1, Giuseppe Carrus1,
Ilaria Giovannelli1, Valentina Giuliani1, Daniele Berardi2
University of Roma Tre1, University La Sapienza2
Are art museums settings capable to promote the recovery of psychological wellbeing, identified through stress reduction, increase in positive emotions, and
renewal of cognitive resources? Moreover, are there any differences between different art style museums? Only few works dealt with the experience of art museums in relation to stress, psychological restoration and well-being. Clow and
Fredhoi (2006) found a decrease in self-reported stress and the level of cortisol
for a group of participants before and after the visit of an art Gallery. Mastandrea
et. al (2009) found that the level of self report anxiety experienced by a group of
participants during a visit of a museum of modern art was higher compared to
another group of participants who visited a museum of ancient art. A previous
study (Mastandrea, Maricchiolo, 2014), using a virtual slide artwork presentation
(figurative vs. abstract pictures vs. control – urban images), found positive effects
of art experience (figurative more than abstract) on physiological, affective, cognitive, and behavioural measures. We replicated the study in a real museum setting:
the National Gallery of Modern Art located in Rome, which hosts two art collections, figurative and modern art. Physiological features (blood pressure and heart
rate), attentional (Stroop-test) and self-report emotional indicators were measured before and after the visit to the two different art styles collections and to the
museum office (control condition) in order to test the possible different restorative outcomes. Seventy-three participants (University students with no training
in the arts, mean age 22.5) were randomly assigned to 3 conditions, according to
the art style of the museum halls to be visited (24-figurative art, 24-modern art
and 25-control condition, visit to museum office). Preliminary analyses have been
carried out on the difference of the systolic blood pressure before and after the
visit(SBP is an useful index to detect changes on emotional level) . Considering
a difference of 10 mmHg a considerable variation of the SBP, we registered such
a variation in the 48% of the figurative art group, in the 33% of the modern art
group, and only in the 25% of the control group. From these preliminary analyses, a
greater restorative effect and well-being happened after art museum visit – more
figurative than modern art – compared to control condition. The practical and
theoretical implications of the study will be discussed.
227
P2.30 Regular Practice Of Relaxation, With Regard To Positive
Feelings And Cognitive Functioning
Anna Maria Meneghini, Valentina Castaman
According to Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2001), positive
emotions can broaden the individual thought-action repertoire (Fredrickson, Branigan, 2005). This cognitive widening promotes the building of individual psychological resources which can be employed in the future. Moreover, it seems that
people who experience positive feelings recover faster from negative states. In
previous studies we showed that relaxation is a technique that elicits positive
emotions which lead to a temporary broadening of the thought-action repertoire. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether intense positive emotions
induced by means of relaxation cause a momentary widening of thought-action
repertoires and whether those who frequently experience positive emotions as a
result of practicing relaxation recover faster from negative states caused by the
induction feelings of anger. In total, 58 participants took part in the study. Some
participants regularly practised relaxation (Group 1, N=19 people; Group 2, N=20
people) and some never practised (Group 3, N=19). Before inducing two different
emotions (relaxation vs anger ), we assessed the intensity of 16 emotions (5 positive and 11 negative). After this assessment, group 1 relaxed thus eliciting positive
emotions while we asked groups 2 and 3 to remember an event in which they
experienced intense feelings of anger thus inducing a negative state. Then, the 16
emotions (in a different order) and the thought-action repertoires were assessed.
The results of this last assessment showed the expected emotional intensities,
according to the type of induction. After relaxing, Group 1 reported a more broadened cognitive state in comparison to the other two groups who were tested
after the induction of feelings of anger. Specifically, group 2 listed a lower number
of thought-actions in the thought-action repertoire task than group1 but a higher
number than group 3. Moreover, regression analyses revealed that the intensity
of the positive feelings experienced was the best predictor of performance in the
thought-action repertoire task.These results support the hypothesis that positive
emotions affect cognitive functioning and suggest that the positive feelings elicited by the practice of relaxation can lead to better cognitive performance.
228
P2.31 Manifestations Of Physical And Ecstatic Love In Medieval
Passion Plays
Ivan Missoni
University of Zagreb
Expressions of human emotionality have always been interwoven with religious
life. Texts of Passion plays, as one of the most popular and influential dramatic
genres of the Middle Ages, convey a lavish display of affective piety by means of
eliciting the audience’s compassion for the figure of suffering Christ on the cross.
The role of Virgin Mary, as her Son’s co-sufferer, through recursive appeals to the
assembled faithful imploring them to commiserate with her agony, has proven to
be equally crucial, since (according to St. Anselm) her compelling emotional reaction to the Passion forms an ideal model of how every Christian should act. In view
of these facts, the author of this proposed individual talk would covet the chance
to present his historiographical research (the subject-matter of his doctoral dissertation) in which he meticulously analysed the aforementioned literary corpus,
gathered from both his native country – Croatia, and from Western Europe, by
utilising the concepts of ‘’physical’’ and ‘’ecstatic’’ love, devised by a French Jesuit,
Pierre Rousselot, in his ground-breaking study «The Problem of Love in the Middle
Ages» from 1908. Physical love is based on the propensity of natural beings to seek
their own benefit in harmonious love of others and of God, whereas ecstatic love
is characterized by the duality of the lover and the beloved, violence of love, its
irrationality and self-sufficiency. Seeing as the author was able to discern that the
character of Jesus incarnates all the major features of the former concept, whereas the latter concept becomes personified in the character of Virgin Mary, he
strongly feels that this kind of interdisciplinary examination provides us with an
exquisite insight into the underlying framework of Passion plays, hence unravelling a hitherto undetected dramatic tension, enhancing our understanding of the
different rhetorical expressions of love, and helping us uncover the significance
and authenticity of emotions performed on medieval stage and their potential
impact on religious sensibilities.
229
P2.32 Negative and positive thoughts in low- and high-anxious
music students after a public performance
Carole Nielsen, Brigitta Danuser, Regina Studer, Patrick Gomez
Institut universitaire romand de santé au travail
Music Performance anxiety (MPA) is a major problem for a large number of music
students (Studer et al. 2011). Post-event rumination is believed to contribute to the
prolongation of stress responses (Brosschot et al, 2006). The aim of the present study was to investigate ruminative thoughts after a public performance in low- and
high-anxious music students and the relationship between their thoughts, selfevaluated performance and mood. Forty-five (29 females) healthy music students
(mean age=22.6, sd=2.7) performed individually in front of an audience of 11 to 15
people. Ten minutes, 24 and 48 hours after the concert, they judged their performance and assessed the frequency of negative and positive thoughts related to
the concert. We used the Thoughts Questionnaire from Abbott & Rapee (2004)
and adapted it to a soloist music performance. Mood was measured five times per
day with the Multidimensional Mood State Questionnaire Short-scale (Wilhelm
& Schoebi, 2007). The degree of general MPA was assessed with the State Trait
Anxiety Inventory-State (STAI-S) adapted to a soloist music performance. Three
groups were built based on the STAI-S scores: low-anxious (scores 20-44), moderate anxious (45-59) and high-anxious (60-80) music students. Compared to lowanxious music students, high-anxious students judged their performance more
negatively and reported more negative and less positive post-event ruminations
at all three time points. Finally, the students reporting more negative post-event
rumination felt less positive and less energetic immediately after the concert. This
study shows for the first time that MPA has effects that go well beyond the performance situation. Post-concert self-appraised performance, rumination and mood
may be important in understanding how the stress response is prolonged and
how MPA is maintained.
230
P2.33 The structure of emotional concepts in semantic space
viewed from central concepts and peripheral concepts
Eun-joo PARK, Naoto SUZUKI
Doshisha University
We investigated the structure of emotional concepts in the relationship between
concepts of emotion and connotative meaning. Watanabe (1994) suggested that
the independence and coherence of emotional words connect associated words
with basic level concepts. 166 participants were given the 50 cards composed of
5 central concepts of emotions; “sad”, “lonely”, “anger”, “pleasure”, “happy”, and 15
primary-associated and 30 secondary-associated words with the concepts. 159
participants were given the 50 cards composed of 5 peripheral concepts of emotions; “languid”, “affectionate”, “cry”, “surprise”, “boring”. They were performed respectively to select the cards with similar emotion by 5, 7, 10 and 15 groups. Using
MDS and CLUSTAR analysis the results showed that the central concepts were
condensed strongly between the concepts and associated words with the concept
and the peripheral concepts were scattered irregularly between the concepts and
associated words with the concept. These results suggest that the boundary
between the concept and associated words with the concept was considered to
be more flexible and fluid in Peripheral concept. Additionally, central concept was
regarded as basic level concepts. These indicate that the basic level concepts tend
to have a strong independence and coherence between concept and experience
(background) with the emotion (the affective state).
231
P2.34 What can cognitive grammar tell us about emotions:
A constructional model of emotion conceptualization
Benedikt Perak
University of Rijeka
What can cognitive grammar tell us about emotions: A constructional model of
emotion conceptualization. The notion of embodiment and componential nature
of emotion have been instrumental for the development of the linguistic research
on the intersubjective conceptualization of emotion. The epistemological implication of the embodied cognition perspective is that people understand other’s
emotion by simulating one’s own comparable embodied affective state (Rizzolatti
& Sinigaglia 2008). The componential theories assume an emotion to be conceptualized as a multidimensional process consisting of several components such as
bodily changes, expressive behavior, action tendencies, appraisal, and feeling state
that occur as a response to the specific events in the environment with the aim
of quickly preparing the organism for optimal reaction (Scherer 2003; Barrett 2011;
Fontaine, Scherer and Soriano 2013). Based on these theoretical perspectives, the
linguistic communication of emotions involves activation of comparable embodied affective states via cognitive process of conceptualization that is coded in linguistic constructions. This paper presents a model of emotion conceptualization
that is based on the semantic and syntactic analysis of 2000 collostructions (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2006) of the target emotion concepts fear, anger, shame and
jealousy in English and Croatian. The semantic potential of the target concepts is
represented as a network of multidimensional components constructed via the
metonymic and metaphoric processes that facilitate activation of the experiential
content of affective state. By mapping relations between neurobiological mechanisms, cognitive models and symbolic constructions this model reflects the structure of embodied cognition as well as the language-specific conventionalized
patterns of linguistic construal: knowledge of the affective state and knowledge
how to conceptualize this affective state in linguistic constructions. Linguistic
constructions are hierarchically classified into sensory-motor, ontological, spatial,
thematic and agentive patterns of conceptualization, that schematically representing emergent structure of conceptualization. Each new pattern is grounded
on the properties of lower levels, but also presents a new set of semantic and syntactic components that form emergent properties of that construction. The model
demonstrates that properties of emotion concepts do not emerge only from SENSORY-MOTOR components of affective states but also from other cognitive (and
cultural) knowledge about OBJECTS, SPATIAL RELATIONS, EFFECTS OF PROCESSES /
FORCES and AGENTS / INSTRUMENTS that are activated by respective patterns of
language constructions.
232
P2.35 Negative emotional stimuli enhance vestibular processing
Nora Preuss, Andrew Ellis, Fred Mast
University of Bern
Recent studies have shown that vestibular stimulation can influence affective
processes (Dodson, 2004; Levine et al., 2012; Preuss, Hasler, & Mast, 2014; Preuss,
Mast, & Hasler, 2014). In the present study, we examined whether emotional information can also modulate vestibular perception. Processing vestibular information is important in dangerous and threatening situations, as precise vestibular
perception is required for an adaptive motor response (fight or flight) and motoric
feedback. We proposed that negative stimuli would improve vestibular discrimination performance when compared to neutral and positive stimuli. Participants
performed a vestibular discrimination task on a motion platform while viewing
emotional pictures. Six different picture categories were taken from the International Affective Picture System: mutilation, threat, snakes, neutral objects, sports
and erotic pictures. Using a Bayesian hierarchical approach we were able to show
that vestibular discrimination improved when participants viewed emotionally
negative pictures (mutilation, threat, snake) when compared to neutral objects.
There was no difference in vestibular discrimination while viewing emotionally
positive compared to neutral pictures. We conclude that some of the mechanisms
involved in the processing of vestibular information are also sensitive to emotional content. Emotional information signals importance and mobilizes the body
for action (Frijda, 1986, 2007; Lang, 1993). In case of danger, a successful motor
response requires precise vestibular processing. Therefore, negative emotional
information improves processing of vestibular information. The present findings
add to the emerging literature on vestibular-emotional interactions.
233
P2.36 Infant understanding of the causes of emotions: Evidence
among 12-month olds
Peter Reschke1, Eric Walle1, Ross Flom2
UC Merced1, Brigham Young University2
The accurate prediction of others’ likely emotional responses to particular events
is central for adaptive social functioning. However, previous developmental work
does not show such an understanding until the school years (Widen & Russell,
2010, 2011). Such a late unfolding of this foundational ability seems unlikely given
that emotional discrimination is present as young as 4 months (Flom & Bahrick,
2007). Thus, a distinct gap in the developmental literature exists in our understanding of the ontogeny of the child’s expectations of what events are likely to
elicit particular emotions. The present investigation sought to examine the development of cause-effect emotional understanding in 12-month-old infants. A violation-of-expectation paradigm assessed infants’ expectations of which emotion
was likely to follow a particular event. Infants were shown video clips depicting
two females (E1 and E2) engaging in 1 of 3 possible emotion-eliciting events (Give
= E1 gives E2 a toy; Break = E1 breaks E2’s toy; Fight = E1 struggles to steal E2’s toy).
Each video clip was immediately followed by a test trial featuring a still image of
E2 displaying an emotional expression (Happiness, Sadness, or Anger). The emotion-eliciting and emotion-outcome clips were paired to be either contextually
congruent (i.e., Give/Happy; Break/Sad; Fight/Anger) or incongruent (e.g., Give/
Anger). Infants were shown all conditions in three separate blocks (order counterbalanced). The first block also included a baseline trial (order counterbalanced) to
assess infant looking to each emotion expression. Looking behavior was recorded
using a hidden camera and coded for the duration of time spent looking to the
screen for each test trial. Difference scores were calculated by dividing the looking time to test trials by the baseline looking time of the corresponding emotion. Data collection is currently in progress. While the present small sample size
(N=8) prevents meaningful statistical analyses, some differences in infant looking
across conditions are apparent. Infants in the Break conditions look longer to the
incongruent, Break/Anger pairing (+66.33%) than the congruent Break/Sadness
pairing (+7.74%). Additionally, in the Fight conditions, infants look longer to the incongruent Fight/Sadness pairing (+20.66%) than the congruent Fight/Anger pairing (+10.74%) responses. Differences in the Give condition are less pronounced.
The preliminary descriptive analyses of the data provide evidence that 12-monthold infants may have some expectations regarding which emotions are likely to
occur following particular emotion-eliciting events. Data collection will continue
until the target sample size of 24 infants is reached.
234
P2.37 Emotion Regulation Choice in Anger depends on Trait
Reappraisal and Emotional Intensity in Older Adults
Josefin Roebbig1, Miray Erbey1, Michael Gaebler2,
Anahit Babayan2, Arno Villringer2
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig1,
Mind Brain Institute and Berlin School of Mind and Brain2
Successful anger regulation is vital for psychological and cardiovascular health
(e.g., Denson et al., 2012; Suls, 2013). Most studies conceptualized emotion regulation (ER) as a stable personality trait, while recent findings suggest that it rather
is an emotional state’s intensity that determines how it is regulated (Sheppes,
Sheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011). In the current study we investigated whether the preference for ER in anger depends on a relatively stable personality trait, i.e. dispositional ER, or is chosen more flexibly based on the emotional intensity. Further,
considering the aspect of emotional aging (e.g., Urry & Gross, 2010), we examine if
this dynamic changes across the life-span. As a part of the ongoing Leipzig Cohort
for Mind Body Emotion Interactions 56 young (29 males, age: 25.09 ± 3.39 years)
and 32 elderly healthy participants (19 males, age: 66.63 ± 4.16 years) remembered
four recent anger-inducing autobiographical situations of varying intensity and
in randomized order. They were then asked to choose either cognitive reappraisal
(CR) or distraction to regulate their anger during recall. Along with physiological measures we acquired emotional self-reports. The habitual use of CR (i.e., trait
reappraisal) was assessed with the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross
and John, 2003). Generalized estimating equations in a logistic regression setting
(GENLIN) revealed a main effect for anger intensity (Wald-χ²(1) = 15.44, p = .001),
which is interacting with age (Wald-χ²(1) = 13.67, p = .001) and the combination
of age and trait reappraisal (Wald-χ²(1) = 10.10, p = .006). Anger memories of low
intensity were more likely to be regulated with CR. This main effect was qualified
by age and trait reappraisal, indicated by the (triple) interaction, meaning that low
intensity determined reappraisal choice, especially in elderly individuals high in
trait reappraisal. In line with evidence that emotional control improves with age
(e.g., John & Gross, 2004; Kessler & Staudinger, 2009), our results indicate that elderly proactively and flexibly regulate anger according to emotional intensity and
personal psychometric constitution. While this study could not replicate previous
findings on ER choice in negative emotions of young adults, our results shed light
on the dynamic interplay of state, trait and age in anger regulation. It remains to
be clarified whether the differential ER preference in elderly can be explained by
an adaptive shift in ER in healthy emotional aging (Urry & Gross, 2010, Allard &
Kensinger, 2014), taking the aspect of emotion-regulatory success into account.
235
P2.38 Stop if you do not want to go
Mark Rotteveel
Action tendencies to approach or avoid can be affected by affective evaluation.
Former research showed that affect congruent movements (i.e. arm flexion with
positive stimuli; arm extension with negative stimuli) can be initiated faster than
incongruent movements (e.g., Rotteveel & Phaf, 2004). Typically these results are
obtained in early initiation times but not in the actual movement times. The question we want to address in this study is to what extend approach and avoidance
action tendencies can be controlled in response to facial expressions of emotion
and therefore we employed an adapted stop-signal-task. We compared go-signal
response times (GSRT) with estimated stop signal response times (SSRT) for each
movement separately (i.e., arm flexion and arm extension) in response to happy
and angry facial expressions of emotion. Results showed that participants with
congruent instructions responded faster than participants with incongruent instructions in both go as well as stop conditions. This pattern of results is consistent
with literature showing slower stop latencies in incongruent conditions in the
Simon task as well as the flanker task (e.g., Verbruggen, Liefooghe, & Vandierendonck, 2004). Interestingly we did not obtain any valence specific influence of the
stop-signal in avoidance latencies. The latter finding is in contrast with literature
showing affective devaluation due to the stop signal (e.g., Buttaccio and Hahn,
2010) and we will discuss a possible explanation for this.
236
P2.39 The MSCEIT Misses the Mark:
Emotional Intelligence is a Practical Ability
Razia Sahi
Georgia State University
In recent years, researchers have been greatly interested in how differences in
abilities to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions influence personal wellbeing and life success. In investigating these interpersonal differences, researchers coined the term “emotional intelligence” to refer to the capacity to reason
about emotions and use emotions to assist reasoning. Although researchers lack
consensus on the construct of emotional intelligence, or EI, the practical ability to
regulate one’s emotions in order to produce constructive responses to one’s environment seems to be an essential feature of EI and arguably the most important
feature in predicting personal well-being and life success. This paper draws attention to the practical feature of EI by evaluating a popular ability-based measure
of the construct: the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, or MSCEIT
(Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, 2002). Despite widespread controversy surrounding the
validity of emotional intelligence tests and the conceptions of emotional intelligence that they rely on, many organizations are currently using the MSCEIT to
predict workplace performance (Zeider, Matthews, Roberts, 2004). It is argued that
the MSCEIT lacks validity as a measure of EI in so far as it fails to capture its essential practical feature. In support of this argument, it is claimed that the MSCEIT
(a) relies too heavily on participants’ knowledge of a particular set of social norms
and the consensual interpretation of emotional information, (b) does not account
for participants’ relevant interpersonal differences, and (c) does not measure one’s
ability to reason about emotions when one’s emotions are involved. The MSCEIT
may to some extent measure emotional knowledge, or knowledge about emotions, but when it comes to measuring emotional intelligence the MSCEIT misses
the mark.
237
P2.40 Reviving Empathy: Cultivating Moral Salience
Katie Shanker
Washington University in St. Louis
This project is focused on the role of empathy in morality. I challenge recent criticisms by Jesse Prinz (“Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” Empathy: Philosophical
and Psychological Perspectives, 2011), Paul Bloom (Against Empathy, forthcoming),
and others that suggest that empathic emotions should not play a major role
in morality. Bloom, in a recent article for the Boston Review discussing his forthcoming book, Against Empathy, claimed: “if you want to be good and do good,
empathy is a poor guide.” This claim is supported by strong empirical evidence
– countless studies in social psychology have shown that empathy and similar
emotions (e.g. compassion) are not consistent predictors of which individuals will
respond to the perceived suffering of others. I argue that these studies simply are
not creative enough – we ought to assess empathy different stages, tracking the
process from initial awareness of (potential) empathy-evoking stimuli to moral
action/inaction. This kind of comprehensive approach is exemplified recent compassion research by Daryl Cameron and colleagues focusing on emotion regulation (Cameron and Payne, “The Cost of Callousness,” Psychological Science, 2012).
As it turns out, previous findings against empathy demonstrate the phenomenon of empathy suppression. While emotion regulation serves an important role
in our moral lives (e.g. preventing us from lashing out at children when we get
angry), an automated component of this process keeps us from fully experiencing
empathy. For example, many people drive past the man on the corner asking for
money without a second thought. Most of the time it is not the case that we
do not respond to our feelings of empathy for that person. Rather, our emotion
regulation system automatically shuts down the arousal processes before it even
begins. Feeling empathy is exhausting and we are careful to allocate our limited
emotional resources sparingly. In other words, most of us have unconsciously trained ourselves to avoid empathy. I argue that instead of abandoning empathy as
Bloom and others suggest, we ought to cultivate empathy to overcome suppression and maximize our awareness of morally salient situations. I conclude with
a proposal of how to reallocate our emotional resources and use empathy as a
guide to doing and being morally good.
238
P2.41 A Modest Proposal: Men are low in Disgust
Alexander Skolnick
Saint Joseph’s University
When gender is analyzed women almost always self-report higher disgust than
men. Women’s higher disgust levels are explained as an evolved trait functioning to protect her reproductive interests by keeping offspring safe from potential threat of disease. My “modest proposal” suggests the gender exhibiting the
“different” level of disgust is unknown (are women high or are men low?) and
maybe we need to explain why men are lower in disgust rather than explain why
women are higher in disgust. Furthermore, men are likely lower in self-reported
disgust due to gender role conformity, such that men appear emotionally tough
fittingly with being masculine. Three studies will be used to support the thesis
that men know they are expected to be low in their disgust, that this knowledge
may influence one’s own self-reported disgust, and women’s preferences might
motivate men to respond with low disgust. Finally, while proposing a masculinitydisgust relationship, is it possible that uncoupling this link leads to gender equality in disgust? Study1: 36 men and 96 women completed a disgust scale (DS-R)
and rated themselves and a typical representative of each gender for their expectations of disgust sensitivity on a graphical scale (low-end represented “Far less”
disgust, high-end “Far more”). Men rated themselves significantly lower on the
scale in comparison to a typical woman (p<.001) and women rated a “typical man”
similarly (p<.001). Thus, both men and women viewed men as low in disgust. We
also tested whether these stereotypical views of how men and women respond
in regards to disgust mediate the relationship between gender and disgust sensitivity. Mediational analyses with significant Sobel tests (p=.012,p=.002) confirmed partial mediation between these stereotypical views of disgust and gender
differences in disgust. Study2 tested whether women would prefer a dating partner lower in disgust than themselves. 86 men and 117 women rated 17 traits (incl.
easily grossed out) for a hypothetical long-term dating partner. For women: “Easily
grossed out” was significantly less desirable in a dating partner than “easily angered” or “fearful”. There was no difference for “easily grossed out” for men. Thus,
men might be motivated to be low in disgust to attract women. Finally, in the
few studied cultures lacking gender differences in disgust (Study3:Ghanaian disgust), men’s disgust sensitivity levels are high similar to women’s levels and not
the reverse condition. Taken together, these results suggest that focus on men’s
lower disgust is warranted to understand gender and disgust.
239
P2.42 What does emotional coping have to do with talking to
robots? An experimental study.
Marloes L.C. Spekman, Elly A. Konijn, Johan F. Hoorn
VU University Amsterdam
The pressure on healthcare systems increases due to rapidly growing demands.
Therefore, there is a strong need for technological support which enhances the
chances of encountering a healthcare robot. Because many healthcare situations are stressful and involve intense emotions, it is likely that these emotions
influence patients’ perceptions of healthcare robots. It is thus important to understand the effects of emotion on perceptions of healthcare robots, such that the
deployment of such robots can be optimized for patient satisfaction. Based on the
assumptions of the appraisal-tendency framework (Lerner & Keltner, 2000), prior
research showed that especially the appraisal of coping potential affected (unrelated) perceptions of a healthcare robot (authors). Little is known however about
the relationships between emotions, perceived coping potential, actual coping,
and their effects on perceptions of unrelated subjects. The current study aims
to fill this gap by studying emotion-related effects on perceptions of a healthcare robot. Effects of manipulated emotional states and ease-of-coping (induced
through a recall procedure) were tested in a 2 (sad vs. angry) by 2 (hard-to-copewith vs. easy-to-cope-with situation) between-subjects study, including a control
group. Measurements were taken of emotion intensity, perceived coping potential,
actual use of coping strategies, among others. Subsequently, participants interacted with a social healthcare robot about their health and wellbeing. Perceptions
of this robot (e.g., affordances, relevance, involvement, use intentions) were then
measured. Preliminary results showed a tripartite model of coping strategies (i.e.,
problem-focused, emotion-focused blame, and emotion-focused acceptance) and
led us to focus the main analyses on participants who recalled emotions relatively
intense. Results showed that angry participants appraised coping potential and
human agency higher than sad participants. Participants in the easy-to-cope-with
condition appraised coping potential, control, and self-agency stronger than participants in the hard-to-cope-with condition. With regard to actually applied coping
strategies, findings showed that angry participants more often used problemfocused and emotion-focused acceptance strategies than an emotion-focused
blame coping strategy, while no differences between the applied coping strategies was found for the sad participants. Both the appraisal of coping potential
and the use of an emotion-focused acceptance coping strategy directly affected
perceptions of the healthcare robot. Emotions did not directly affect perceptions
of a healthcare robot, but did so indirectly via appraised coping potential and the
use of an emotion-focused acceptance coping strategy. Thus, perceptions were
affected by how individuals (believe they can) cope with their emotions, rather
than by the emotions as such.
240
P2.43 Harm in the Ultimatum Game: Does a disfiguring injury elicit
empathy for us but disgust towards them?
Aleksandra Swiderska, Dennis Kuester, Arvid Kappas
Previous research, e.g., from vignette studies, has demonstrated that people readily imbue non-living entities with human qualities, including a mind capable of
agency and experience, which thus renders these entities worthy of moral consideration. This effect is magnified by harm inflicted upon a victim, as suggested by
the harm-made mind hypothesis (Ward, Olsen, & Wegner, 2013). A question then
arises, what happens when harm has been done and we interact with others in
an economic game without a vignette to explain the prior moral context? Is a
mere presence of harm sufficient to elicit empathy, and therefore a more benign
bargaining style, or does visible harm elicit disgust associated with tougher bargaining? Finally, does harm elicit equal amounts of empathy and disgust towards
characters of varying levels of similarity to us? The purpose of the current study
was twofold. First, we examined whether the decision making process in a bargaining game was shaped by the emotional impact of visible harm, particularly
by disgust and empathy. Second, we investigated the influence of human likeness
of the characters on participants’ decisions. Participants (N = 80) were required
to either accept or reject fair and unfair monetary offers proposed by artificial
humans and humanoid robots depicted as harmed or unharmed via the addition
of a facial injury. The results of the game showed that participants rejected fair
offers coming from the robots more often compared to the same offers made by
the artificial humans. Further, a significant interaction between harm and human
likeness revealed that harm increased empathy toward the more human-like characters, but decreased empathy toward the less human characters. The rejections
of fair offers were significantly predicted by how disgusted participants reported
to have felt by the proposers’ appearance. Although the rejection rates grew as
the offers became more unfair, no significant differences emerged for human likeness. Overall, the findings indicate that the mere presence of a disfiguring injury
may be enough to engender slightly different bargaining styles, especially when
the injury evokes disgust, and when the virtual interaction partner is depicted
as less human. However, most of the findings were limited to responses to fair
offers, suggesting that future research might use a more powerful manipulation
of harm.
241
P2.44 The regulation of emotions in adolescents: Distraction vs.
Reappraisal, a developmental trajectory?
Anne Theurel, Jennifer Malsert, Fleur Lejeune, Edouard Gentaz
Emotional regulation is a crucial, adaptive skill in adulthood. Although efforts
have been made to determine whether cognitive emotional regulation strategies
(e.g, distraction, reappraisal, suppression) engage similar or dissimilar brain mechanisms and whether they have comparable affective consequences (Augustine
& Hemenover, 2009; McRae et al., 2010; Ochsner & Gross, 2005, 2008; Sheppes
& Meiran, 2007) age-related changes in these emotional regulation strategies
during adolescence remain unclear. Several aspects of development during adolescence lead to consider this period as sensitive and critical for a reorganization
of regulatory systems: the role of puberty on restructuration of many body systems (Giedd et al., 2006; Casey, Jones, & Hare, 2008; Spielberg et al. 2014) and as
an influence on social information-processing (Blakemore, 2008; Eisenberg &
Morris, 2004), and the concentration of changes in the prefrontal cortex together
with the enhanced interregional communication between prefrontal cortex and
other brain regions (Sowell et al., 2002; Paus et al. 1999). This study aimed thus to
test for age-related differences in cognitive regulation strategies in adolescence
by assessing the effectiveness of two strategies at distinct ages: reappraisal and
distraction. One hundred and ten 12 year-olds (N = 56) and 15 year-olds (N = 54)
adolescents were asked to look at negative pictures and to respond naturally or to
down-regulate their emotional responses using cognitive reappraisal for half of
them and distraction for the other half. Results showed that regulation success
was higher in the Reappraisal condition than in the Distraction condition but that
strategy effect depended on age: regulation success was equivalent for both strategies in 12 year-olds while a large improvement of regulation success was observed in 15 year-olds in reappraisal compared to distraction condition. Findings allow
a better understanding of the development of emotional regulation processes in
adolescence. Developmental differences in regulation success founded in this
study indicate that regulation training may be useful since early adolescence and
could be critical for preventing dysfunctional regulation in adulthood.
242
P2.45 A cognitive latent variable model for the simultaneous
analysis of behavioral and personality data
Joachim Vandekerckhove
UC Irvine
Cognitive latent variable models are a broad category of formal models that can
be used to aggregate information regarding cognitive parameters across participants and tasks. Latent structures are borrowed from a vast literature in the field
of psychometrics, and robust cognitive process models can be drawn from the
cognitive science literature. The new modeling approach is an extension of hierarchical modeling, allows model fitting with smaller numbers of trials per task
if there are multiple participants, and is ideally suited for uncovering correlations
between latent task abilities as they are expressed in experimental paradigms. An
example applications deals with the structure of an executive functioning task
and its relation to dysphoria.
243
P2.46 Background music influences the evaluation of
emotional facial expressions
Anne Weisgerber, Mathieu Mazy, Nicolas Vermeulen
Université catholique de Louvain
In our daily lives, emotions, which are mostly cross-modal, have a crucial impact.
We are often influenced by music either voluntarily (e.g., MP3 player, concerts) or
not (e.g., musical background in shopping centres, neighbour’s party) (Sloboda,
Lamont & Greasley, 2009). Although, several studies investigated the cross-modal
facilitation effect, only a few of them used music as auditory input on cross-modal affective priming (Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2010; Vermeulen, et al. 2010, Weisgerber et al., in preparation). Furthermore, these researchers usually used emotional
words and static emotional facial expressions (EFE) as stimuli. Nevertheless, our
facial expressions are not static but change in valence and intensity. In the present experiment, we used an affective priming paradigm, i.e. different affective
music samples (happy and sad music) were presented as a musical background
for affective faces presented as targets (happiness and sadness). The goal of this
study was to investigate if music may help people to refine emotion identification
in a more ecological setting. We created 108 videos of facial expression morphing
where faces changed from neutral to 100% of emotion and vice versa (Stimuli
from the Radboud Faces Database, Langner et al., 2010). The music extracts were
chosen from the database from Vieillard & Peretz, 2010. Participants were exposed
to three conditions (congruent, baseline and incongruent music-EFE combinations). They were asked to press the space button when they thought that the
facial emotion expression was at 50% of the emotion expression. We observed
a cross-modal facilitation effect, i.e. a more accurate evaluation when the musical primes and the to-be-evaluated targets shared the same emotional content
(congruency). Concretely, on average participants were significantly closer to the
50% threshold in the congruent condition (59%) versus 70% in the incongruent
condition. We also found that, in the congruent music condition, participants
were more accurate to 50% of the emotion expression when it appeared from
neutral to emotion (54%) than when the emotion expression disappeared (61%).
In conclusion, these observations ascribe an important role to music for the competence of identifying emotions. Furthermore, this study showed that congruent
music helps to enhance precision in emotion identification but interferes in emotion disengagement in moving facial expression.
244
P2.47 Are moods always contagious?
Shared attitudes and the social induction of affect
Monika Wróbel, Klara Królewiak
University of Lodz
In the current research, we investigated the effects of attitude similarity on the
social induction of affect. To manipulate attitude similarity between a sender displaying affect and a receiver observing it, we used software that generated bogus
descriptions of the sender based on the receiver’s prior answers. Then the receiver watched a short video showing the sender displaying happy or sad emotional
expression. The results of Study 1 (N = 86) and Study 2 (N = 82) indicated that
affective reactions to the sender’s happy emotional expression were moderated by attitude similarity: similarity fostered concordant reactions (i.e., receivers’
mood improved after exposure to the similar happy sender), whereas dissimilarity
prevented receivers from “catching” the sender’s affect (i.e., their mood remained
unchanged). Interestingly, sad emotional expression of the sender resulted in
receivers experiencing concordant reactions regardless of attitude similarity (i.e.,
their mood worsened after exposure to both the similar and dissimilar sad sender). Overall, the findings of both studies provide further evidence that individuals
are not equally susceptible to “catching” the feelings of others because the social
induction of affect is not a simple automatic reaction to another person’s emotional expression. It rather involves the interpretation of this expression in a specific
social context.
245
P2.48 Maternal Sadness and Anger Socialization in Children with
an Incarcerated Mother
Janice Zeman, Danielle Dallaire, Sarah Borowski
University of Missouri
An examination of how emotional socialization processes operate for children
who are exposed to atypical environmental contexts that place them at increased
risk for psychosocial maladaptation has received little empirical attention. The
current study investigates maternal anger and sadness socialization processes for
children, ages 6 to 12, who live in the atypical family context of maternal incarceration which has a high probability of placing these children on a trajectory
towards maladaptation in psychological, social, and academic realms The sample
consists of 154 children (53.9% boys, 61.7% Black, M age = 9.38, range: 6 – 12), their
118 currently incarcerated mothers (64.1% Black), and their 118 child caregivers
(74.8% female, 61.9% grandparents, 63.2% Black). Using mother, caregiver, and
child report, seven maternal socialization strategies (i.e., Emotion-focused (EFR),
Problem-focused (PFR), Expressive Encouragement, Distress Reactions, Punitive
Reactions, Minimization Reactions, Neglect) were assessed in their interaction
with incarceration-specific risk experiences (e.g., separation from siblings due to
maternal incarceration) predicting children’s adjustment. For sadness socialization, the results indicated that among children reporting maternal emotion-focused responses, incarceration-specific risk predicted increases in psychological
problems, depressive symptoms, increased emotional lability, and poorer emotion
regulation. For children who perceived a problem-focused response in response
to sadness, incarceration-specific risk did not predict outcomes. There were no
significant interactions with incarceration-specific risk and perceived maternal
anger socialization strategies. From a developmental psychopathology perspective, delineating pathways to competent functioning within conditions of adversity is crucial for understanding the complexities of development (Sroufe, 1990). As
such, maternal emotion socialization as perceived by children at higher incarceration-specific risk does not appear to function in the same way as depicted in the
literature using White, middle-class samples or for children with lower levels of
incarceration-specific risk. Specifically, the results of this research indicated that
for children who perceived that their mothers reacted to their sadness with an
EFR, their functioning within psychological, social, and emotion domains worsened with increasing maternal incarceration-specific experiences. At lower levels
of incarceration risk, the negative sequalae associated for maternal EFR were not
found. The findings from this research also have potentially important implications for emotion socialization researchers who have tended to view these two
strategies (EFR, PFR) as supportive based on theory and/or the combination of
these scales into a single composite scale. These results indicate a critical need to
examine how socialization processes may operate differently for children raised in
atypical socializing contexts.
246
Symposium S4.1
Integrative theories of emotion: The wave of the future?
Conveners
Agnes Moors
It seems clear that the perpetually elusive Jamesian question “What is an emotion?” continues to confront us, despite several decades of attempts to answer
it successfully. No theory of emotions has yet emerged with the unifying power
of Einstein’s relativity theory in physics or Darwin’s theory of natural selection in
biology. Moreover, several theorists have suggested that the very question asked
by James is problematic, because it presupposes that defining emotion is what
affective scientists should be doing. On the contrary, it has been suggested from
numerous quarters that “emotion” is too heterogeneous a category for purposes
of scientific investigation. The same intractable heterogeneity may in principle
apply to categories subordinate to emotion, such as “fear”, “anger”, “shame”,
“guilt” and so on. Despite these caveats, progress has been made since James’
times. Several theories have been developed which account well for at least some
of the available empirical evidence, including appraisal theories, basic emotion
theories, social constructionism, psychological constructionism, perceptual and
cognitive theories in philosophy, and dynamic embodied cognition approaches.
These theories are, or at least appear to be, in fierce disagreement with one another on matters of both substance and methodology. But we think that there is
more commonality amongst them than meets the eye. Researchers from different
research traditions tend to agree on several aspects of emotions, including their
componential nature, their ability to be about the world, their functionality, their
variability, and several other key aspects. In this symposium, we will showcase five
theories of affect (broadly understood) that are theoretically promiscuous, in the
sense that they programmatically attempt to combine insights from different
research traditions. These theories differ on various dimensions, but they share
the methodological presupposition that creative theoretical integration offers us
a better chance to make progress in emotion theory than doctrinaire turf battles.
247
Making Sense of Episodic and Dispositional Emotions:
The Situated Perspective
Achim Stephan
Osnabrueck University
In affective science, there is a remarkable divide between laboratory researchers
on the one hand and philosophers and psychotherapists on the other hand about
the main object of interest. Whereas the former mainly focus on emotional episodes (or: episodic emotions), the latter are mostly concerned with long-lasting
or recurring emotions such as guilt, jealousy, grief (also known as dispositional
emotions). Recent contributions to situational aspects of human affectivity discuss in which sense emotions are embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, or
distributed. Situational aspects of both episodic emotions and dispositional emotions have been discussed, and my initial objective will be to put some taxonomic
order in this fragmented literature. I will first discuss the relationship between
episodic emotions and dispositional emotions (one of the questions being: what
makes several emotional episodes instances of one and the same dispositional
emotion?). Second, I will investigate in which sense these emotions can be said
to be situated in one or more conceptually distinct ways. Third, I will explore whether psychological constructionism may offer the tools to develop an integrative
understanding of both episodic and dispositional emotions.
248
Varieties of Constructionism
Richard Dub
Constructionists about emotion, such as Lisa Barrett and her coauthors, argue
that emotions are psychological constructions. There are a number of different
ways to understand this claim. In this talk, I provide a catalog and taxonomy of
varieties of constructionism, offering a number of ways that constructionist theories can differ from one another. For example, varieties can differ on the temporal
points within an emotional process where interpretation and construction take
place, on the objects of interpretation, or on the form that the interpretive process
can take. Each of these different varieties of constructionism is compatible with
different sorts of other psychological emotion theories, including appraisal theories, core affect theories, and basic emotion theories, as well as philosophical emotion theories, including judgement theories, perceptual theories, and attitudinal
theories. Although constructionism is often thought to be a competitor to many
of these emotion theories, it is not a competitor at all. Barrett holds that constructionism and her core affect theory go hand-in-hand, but many of her arguments
support only a non-specific type of constructionism that can be integrated with
any number of possible emotion theories.
249
The New Basic Emotion Theory: Ekman Meets Frjida
Andrea Scarantino
Georgia State University, USA
Any viable theory of emotions needs to explain the massive variability that characterizes instances of anger, fear, happiness, shame, guilt and so on with respect
to neural, physiological, phenomenological, expressive and behavioral changes.
Traditional basic emotion theory has been powerfully criticized by psychological
constructionists for its inability to account for variability, because it appears to
posit invariant biological markers for each basic emotion. This criticism is well
deserved, but far from fatal to basic emotion theory as a research program. Basic
emotion theory can be modified to reflect three fundamental sources of variability: (a) the structure of folk emotion concepts, (b) the adaptiveness of flexible responding, and (c) the interaction between basic emotions and other mental states.
The resulting New Basic Emotion Theory continues to identify basic emotions
with affect programs, but takes the primary expression of such programs to be
the activation of a Frijdian action tendency with control precedence. On this view,
basic emotion programs solve recurrent evolutionary problems by coordinating, in
a highly context-dependent yet goal-oriented way, clusters of biological markers
driven by underlying neural networks.
250
What’s Different About Different Emotions?
Brian Parkinson
University of Oxford
This paper proposes an integrative approach to issues surrounding emotion differentiation. What makes anger different from fear or shame different from guilt?
What gives each distinct emotion its particular quality? A range of answers have
been proposed. Some theorists attribute emotional differences to felt qualia,
others to bodily changes, patterns of appraisals, or the application of emotion
conceptions. Yet others contend that some of these differences are partly in the
eye of the beholder. A challenge facing many of these accounts is that different
instances of the same emotion often share few structural features. Further, reflective awareness of emotional quality seems not to be a necessary condition for an
emotion’s occurrence. Instead of focusing on internal components or structural
characteristics of individual emotional states, I propose that emotions be distinguished according to their relational functions. Separable emotions are not simply individual reactions to events. Instead, they are best understood as socially
situated and interpersonally distributed dynamic processes that align relations
between people and objects. They differ in terms of the appraisals that they
convey and the evaluative orientations that they embody but these differences
are not directly or consistently reflected in specific cognitive, physiological, or
behavioural patterns. However, humans also apply differentiated cultural representations to their own and other people’s emotions and this can transform their
operation as means of communication and social influence. For example, prototypic facial expressions can convey associated object appraisals thus enhancing the
apparent coherence of emotion syndromes. In other words, socialized emotions
can be distinguished according to both the response characteristics implied by
basic emotions theories and by the evaluative orientations specified by appraisal
theories, but neither of these factors alone fully captures the underlying functional basis of emotional differences.
251
Integrating Appraisal Theory with Psychological
Construction Theory
Agnes Moors, James A. Russell
University of Leuven, Boston College
Progress in the study of emotion requires that the field move toward consensus.
To this end, we undertake an attempt to integrate one version of appraisal theory and one version of psychological construction theory, based on the following
points of agreement: (a) the to-be-explained phenomena are episodes classified
by most people as emotional, (b) these episodes consist of various component,
none of which can be identified as the emotion, (c) the components are not predetermined by an affect program, but constructed on the spot based on several
sources of information, and (d) research should study relations among components instead of relations among emotions and components. Our attempt also
reveals differences and issues that require further empirical testing. Psychological
construction has been vague about how the components are connected, whereas
appraisal theories have ventured concrete hypotheses about relations between
specific appraisal and specific other components. More empirical research is needed, however, to test these and alternative hypotheses, and to contrast the role of
appraisal with the role of other types of information processing.
252
Symposium S4.2
The Role of Emotions in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Conveners
Olga Klimecki
The long-standing view of rational negotiators is increasingly replaced by the realization that emotions play a crucial role in negotiations and conflicts. Important
questions that have emerged over recent years are how and under which circumstances emotions influence negotiations and conflict situations. In this symposium,
researchers with a psychological and neuroscientific background will discuss studies that address these questions. First, Eran Halperin and Ruthie Pliskin will present data on the importance of taking ideology into account when studying the
influence of emotions on intergroup conflict. In the next contribution, Marwan
Sinaceur and Dimitri Vasiljevic will elucidate under which conditions displays of
sadness can augment concessions through the elicitation of concern. The final
two talks will address the role of emotions in conflict from a psychological and
neuroscientific perspective. Gert-Jan Lelieveld will show the different effects of
displays of anger and disappointment in the Ultimatum and the Dictator Game.
Finally, Olga Klimecki will introduce the Inequality Game and discuss the opposing
influence of empathy-related dispositions on conflict behavior. The overall goal
of this symposium is to stimulate a rich discussion about the role of emotions in
negotiations and conflict situations.
253
Ideological Influences on the Outcomes of Emotion and
its Regulation in Intractable Conflicts
Ruthie Pliskin1,2, Eran Halperin2
Tel Aviv University1, IDC Herzliya2
Ideology is an important element of the political context that may shape the emotional process at various points, influencing not only the emotions that people experience, but also the outcomes of these emotions and the manner in which they
are regulated. Drawing on insights from the literature on ideology, we posited that
emotions should differentially influence the support given by ideological leftists
and rightists to different political policies, as well their action intentions. In three
experimental studies and three field studies (Authors et al., in press), we demonstrated that in ideologically-relevant contexts, the clearer and more rigid guidelines
afforded by rightist ideology make rightists (compared to leftists) less susceptible
to the outcomes of emotions, with emotional change associated with changes in
policy support mostly or only among leftists. In ideologically-irrelevant contexts,
however, differences in susceptibility to certain emotions may actually lead these
emotions to have a greater impact on rightists (compared to leftists) behavior
intentions, and this hypothesis was supported in a large experimental study comparing across fear-inducing collective contexts (Authors et al., 2014). Could these
differences in the tendency to be influenced by emotion also indicate differences
in the possible effectiveness of emotion regulation? Initial experimental evidence
indicates a moderating effect for ideology on both the magnitude and direction of
emotional change following the use both cognitive change (Authors et al., 2014)
and attention deployment (Porat et al., in preparation) emotion regulation strategies. We discuss the significance of these findings and the importance of taking
ideology into account in the study of emotions in intergroup conflicts.
254
Weep and Get More: When and Why Sadness Expression
Is Effective in Negotiations
Dimitri Vasiljevic, Marwan Sinaceur
INSEAD, France
Although research has recently accumulated on emotional expressions in negotiations, no research has yet explored whether expressing sadness could have effects
in negotiations. We propose that sadness expressions can increase expressers’
ability to claim value in negotiations because they make recipients experience
greater other-concern for the expresser. However, only when the social situation
provides recipients with reasons to experience concern for the expresser in the
first place, will recipients act upon their other-concern and, eventually, concede
more to a sad expresser. Three experiments tested this proposition by examining
face-to-face, actual negotiations (where participants interacted with each other).
In all three experiments, recipients conceded more to a sad expresser when, but
only when, features of the social situation provided reasons to experience otherconcern for the expresser, namely (a) when recipients perceived the expresser as
low-power (Experiment 1), (b) when recipients anticipated a future interaction
(Experiment 1), (c) when recipients construed the relationship as collaborative in
nature (Experiment 2), or (d) when recipients believed that it was inappropriate to
blame others (Experiment 3). All three experiments showed that the positive effect of sadness expression was mediated by the recipients’ greater other-concern.
These findings extend previous research on emotional expressions in negotiations by emphasizing a distinct psychological mechanism. Implications for our
understanding of sadness, negotiations, and emotions are discussed.
255
Underlying behavioral and neural mechanisms of anger and
disappointment in conflict situations
Gert-Jan Lelieveld
Leiden University
A negotiation is a way of solving conflicts and it is often a very emotional process.
Researchers have come to acknowledge the functional aspects of communicating emotions in negotiations. According to a social-functional perspective, emotions contain crucial information, which has behavioral consequences for others
(Keltner & Haidt, 1999). In the current study we focused on the interpersonal effects of two of the most often communicated negative emotions in interpersonal
decision making: anger and disappointment. Whereas previous research focused
only on the subjective thoughts and feelings that emotions evoke in others, we
are also interested in the underlying neural reactions.
Previous work has shown that to elicit high offers from others in negotiations, it is
often better to communicate disappointment than anger. In two studies we show
that this is not always the case. Moreover, using an fMRI as well as a behavioral study, we show that the interpersonal effects of both emotions have distinct
underlying mechanisms.
In Study 1, participants played a dictator game in the MRI scanner after receiving
angry or disappointed emotional reactions on a previous offer they had made. In
Study 2, participants played an ultimatum game, after receiving angry or disappointed reactions.
Results of Study 1 showed that participants made higher offers to disappointed
than to angry recipients. Moreover, relative to interpersonal disappointment, interpersonal anger was associated with more medial prefrontal cortex (involved
in self-referential thinking), and anterior cingulate cortex (involved in conflict)
activation. Results of Study 2 showed that whereas anger communicated power,
disappointment communicated weakness. Anger elicits high offers in negotiation
because people fear impasse. Disappointment on the other hand, elicits high offers because it evokes guilt.
We showed that although anger and disappointment are both reactions to undesirable outcomes, they have different underlying mechanisms. Whereas anger
communicates power and elicits a focus on the self, disappointment communicates weakness and elicits social responsibility in others. Our findings support the
notion that it is essential to distinguish between different types of discrete emotions. They affect other’s behavior differently, and activate different brain areas in
others.
256
Opposing influence of empathic concern and
empathic distress on conflict behavior
Olga Klimecki, Patrik Vuilleumier, David Sander
Empathy refers to the capacity to share the feelings of others. Although empathy
in general has been associated with reduced aggression (Miller & Eisenberg, 1988),
past research has shown differential effects of empathy-related states on helping
behavior: While compassion (i.e., the feeling of empathic concern for a suffering
person) was related to increased helping behavior, the experience of empathic distress actually predicted less helping behavior (Batson et al., 1983). In spite of these
findings, it was to date unclear to which extent this dissociation can be generalized to situations involving conflict. We tested this relationship in two studies
using a trait questionnaire that distinguishes between empathic concern and distress (Davis, 1983) and a newly developed and validated paradigm called Inequality
Game (Authors). This paradigm relies on repeated interactions involving monetary allocation or feedback selection. In each round of the game, the participant
is paired with an alleged fair or unfair other person, who engage in collaborative
as opposed to competitive behavior, respectively. During these interactions, the
participant is either passively receiving the others’ choices (low power position)
or actively engaging in monetary allocations and feedback choices (high power
position). A behavioral study with 40 participants revealed that participants’ disposition to experience personal distress indeed predicted the engagement in
antisocial behavior, even towards the fair other. Conversely, the tendency to experience empathic concern predicted forgiveness behavior towards the unfair other
in a subsequent situation related to food allocation. Corroborating these findings,
a second study with 25 participants undergoing functional magnetic resonance
imaging showed that empathic concern predicted forgiveness behavior towards
the unfair other in the Inequality Game (Authors). Taken together, the results of
these studies reveal that empathy-related traits can indeed have opposing effects
on social behavior, even in situations involving conflict.
257
Symposium S4.3
Assessing Emotional Intelligence/Competence:
Towards a new future
Conveners
Johnny Fontaine
Ghent University, North West University - South Africa
The concept of emotional intelligence has been proposed more than 25 years ago
in the scientific literature. Ever since it has attracted keen interest both in the
scientific world and applied domains. The idea that persons differ in their ability
to recognize, understand, and manage emotional processes in themselves and
others is theoretically appealing and practically relevant. Yet, since its emergence
in the scientific domain there have been vigorous debates on how this construct
should be conceptualized, and especially how it should be assessed in a valid and
psychometrically sound fashion up to the level that the scientific value of the
construct itself has been questioned. A first debate centres on whether emotional
intelligence should be measured as a typical performance construct using self-report or as a maximum performance construct using ability testing. While the former approach is psychometrically more straightforward, the latter approach has
demonstrated the most evidence for discriminant validity. The maximum performance approach, however, has been severely criticised for its scoring. Responses
need to be scored in terms of correctness, but for emotions it has been claimed
that there does not exist a clear criterion for correctness. The most frequently
used scoring approach is consensus scoring that scores responses according to
what a representative sample of respondents think what is correct. From the perspective of fundamental emotion research, the lack of theoretical grounding of the
existing maximum performance emotional intelligence measures is criticised. In
the current symposium we discuss the critiques on the emotional intelligence/
competence construct and how it is currently being measured. We also propose
new approaches that overcome these critiques and open the way for a new future for emotional intelligence/competence as a sound scientific construct with
practical relevance. The first presentation discusses the differences between the
typical and the maximum performance approaches, and demonstrates that the
maximum performance approach shows substantial positive relationships with
general cognitive ability as should be theoretically expected from an “intelligence”
construct. The second presentation focuses on the scoring problem. It presents
the consensus scoring method as well as other scoring methods that can be used
to score emotional intelligence/competence items. The usefulness and the potential limitations of each of the scoring methods is discussed. The third contribution
presents the construction and first validation of a new emotion knowledge instrument. Emotion knowledge is a key aspect of the emotional intelligence/competence construct. The development of this instrument is rooted in the componential emotion approach which conceptualizes an emotion as a situationally elicited
synchronization of the five emotion components of appraisal, action tendencies,
bodily reactions, expressions, and feelings in response to a goal-relevant event.
The third presentation discusses the development of the Geneva Emotional Competence (GECO) test that aims at assessing emotional competence in the work
setting. It combines a situational-judgment approach with emotion theory to
assess emotional competence in a practically relevant and theoretically sound
way. The last contribution focuses on emotion recognition ability, which is another key aspect of the emotional intelligence/competence construct. It presents
the construction and validation of the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT),
which works with multimodal expression information and is scored on a theoretical basis. It is furthermore demonstrated how emotion expression recognition
ability can be trained with the same type of stimulus material.
258
Is Emotional Intelligence a New Cognitive Ability?
Richard Roberts
Center for Innovative Assessment, USA
The well-known bifurcation of the measurement of emotional intelligence (EI)
has lead to two distinct camps. In this presentation, I begin by arguing that the typical emotional intelligence (sometimes called by its misnomer trait EI, or emotional self-efficacy) framework represents an important field, but likely represents a
search for further facets that might be incorporated into the Big Five Factor Model
rather than a distinct construct. This part of the field would also benefit from moving beyond self-assessed Likert-type instruments, to include methodologies such
as anchoring vignettes and forced-choice. In support of this assertion I present
some recent data collected in our laboratories with these new approaches. In the
second part of the presentation, I turn my focus to examine the evidence supporting the idea that maximum emotional intelligence represents a second-stratum
human cognitive ability, akin to other broad factors (e.g., fluid intelligence, broad
visualization) represented by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Model. A large data
set incorporating various maximum EI measures and broad cognitive factors support this assertion. But as for typical EI measures, new approaches appear requisite. I conclude with demonstrations of the Multimedia Emotional Management
Assessment and Empathic Agent Paradigm, and new data showing how these fit
within the nomological network of ability constructs.
259
Measuring EI as an ability: treasuring the past to build the new
generation of ability measures
Marina Fiori
The conceptualization of emotional intelligence as an ability (or competence) implies the measurement of the construct with performance measures. One of the
biggest challenges of this approach resides in providing a criterion of correctness
for perceiving, understanding, and managing emotions. In fact, individuals may
differ with respect to how they feel and manage emotions effectively. Furthermore, correctness of emotional reactions may depend on the frame of reference
for judging a response as correct; for example, anger suppression may be an effective way to manage emotions if the goal is to preserve interpersonal relationships.
However, it may not be the most effective strategy for reducing frustration (see
also Fiori et al., 2014). Several criteria have been proposed, including scoring as
correct the answer provided by the majority of people (‘consensus scoring’), scoring the answer according to a pool of experts (‘expert consensus’) or according
to theories of emotions and adaptation. Presenting data on two ability tests of
EI--the Mayer Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (or MSCEIT, Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002) and the Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (or STEU,
MacCann & Roberts, 2012)--I will provide an overview of the scoring methods, including the score distribution and the test information function, pointing out the
differences, and drawing the attention to the usefulness as well as the potential
limitations of each of them. Implications for investigating EI as an ability will be
discussed, in particular by relating the development of ability EI measures with
that of intelligence testing.
260
Assessing emotion understanding on the basis of the
componential emotion approach
Eva Sekwena12, Johnny Fontaine21
North West University - South Africa1, Ghent University2,
Emotion understanding is a central component of the Emotional Intelligence/
Competence construct. It is either measured on the basis of emotion terms or
of appraisals. However, it has not yet been measured in a construct representative way. On the basis of the componential emotion approach an emotion is
defined as a situationally elicited synchronization of the five emotion components of appraisal, action tendencies, bodily reactions, expressions, and feelings
in response to a goal-relevant event (e.g., Scherer, 2005). The development and
first validation of a new instrument that looks at whether and to which extent
people understand how the five emotion components are likely to synchronize
in goal-relevant events is presented. Based on extensive qualitative research, 10
emotion scenarios were constructed that typically elicit one of 10 emotions (guilt,
shame, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, joy, pride, love/friendship, and compassion).
For each scenario respondents had to rate 25 emotional reactions representing
the five emotion components and had to rate 5 emotion terms. The reactions
were theoretically selected to vary from very unlikely up to very likely for each
emotional situation. Participants were asked to rate the emotional reactions on
a five-point Likert scale ranging from (1) very unlikely to (5) very likely. In total 139
undergraduate students the North-West University in South-Africa took the new
emotion knowledge instrument as well as tests for cognitive abilities, self-reported emotional intelligence, personality, well-being, and psychopathology. Factor
analysis revealed a bipolar emotion understanding factor with the right reactions
loading positively and the wrong reactions loading negatively on it and a unipolar
acquiescence factor with all emotional reactions loading positively on it. The bipolar EI factor correlated positively with cognitive ability, self-reported emotional
intelligence, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, honestyhumility, emotionality, and well-being, and correlated negatively with some of the
psychopathology measures. The current research demonstrates that it is possible
to assess emotional intelligence in a construct representative way. Interindividual
differences in understanding can be represented by a single higher-order factor.
The nomological network further confirms the validity of this factor.
261
The Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECO):
A Situational Judgment Test to Measure Emotional
Intelligence in the Workplace
Marcello Mortillaro, Katja Schlegel, Irene Rotondi
University of Geneva, Northeastern University, Boston MA
Proponents of an ability model of Emotional Intelligence (EI) describe EI as a set of
multiple and partly independent cognitive abilities. Some of these scholars even
suggest dropping the term intelligence in favor of competence, to remark that
this is a dynamic ability that can vary between situations and over time. Despite
the increasing support for this view, most EI measures are self-report measures
that are in many respects confounded with personality questionnaires. Adopting
the ability EI model, conversely, implies that questionnaires should be designed as
performance-based tests in which the competence level of the person is assessed
by means of ability-specific tasks. This approach resulted in very few tests so far
(e.g., Situational Tests of Emotion Understanding and Emotion Management
- STEU, STEM), and only one considers several branches of EI, the Mayer Salovey
Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). This test has been widely adopted
and became the standard measure for ability EI. Nevertheless, several authors criticized the MSCEIT for its a-theoretical approach and for its scoring rubric based
only on group consensus.
In this contribution, we will present a newly developed performance–based test
of EI that is hard-wired in contemporary emotion theories and targets different
facets of EI: emotion understanding, emotion regulation, emotion recognition,
and emotion management. The Geneva Emotional Competence (GECO) test uses
a situational-judgment approach targeted at measuring EI in the context of work
activities. The items were built based on realistic emotional scenarios collected
through individual interviews with professionals. Scoring is based on a combination of theoretical assumptions (e.g., appraisal theory), consensus, and expert
scoring.
We will present the structure of the test, the item generation process, and the results of validation studies with different populations of respondents. In particular
we will discuss the results of the construct validation study in which 149 students
of the University of Geneva completed the GECO along with other questionnaires
relevant for the different facets of the test. Results showed that the four scales
have satisfactory internal consistency (alpha .60-.75) and are substantially correlated with other measures, confirming its construct validity. The test also has a
higher difficulty level than previous tests and therefore is better able to discriminate between individuals with higher levels of EI. The GECO is the first instrument
specifically dedicated to measure EI in the context of the work activities. Potential
applications for training and assessment will be discussed.
262
Assessment and training of emotion recognition ability
Katja Schlegel
Northeastern University, Boston MA
The ability to recognize other people’s emotions from their face, voice, and body
is crucial to successful functioning in private and professional life. Although research on ERA has had a long tradition in psychology, two aspects, namely assessment and training, have received somewhat less attention and will be addressed
in this contribution.
In the first part of the paper, we will review how ERA is typically measured and
will highlight the major limitations of existing standardized ERA tests. Such tests
suffer from restricted ecological validity because they mostly use emotional expressions from a single modality (usually the face) and include only few emotions.
In addition, little is known about their psychometric properties such as internal
consistency or dimensional structure. The recently developed Geneva Emotion
Recognition Test (GERT; Schlegel et al., 2014) attempts to overcome some of these
problems. In the GERT, participants see 83 multimodal emotion expressions (short
video clips with sound) in which 10 actors portray 14 different emotions. After
each clip, participants are asked to choose which of the 14 emotions the actor had
expressed. Here, we will present several studies supporting its good psychometric properties. Results showed that the GERT is positively correlated with tests
measuring various components of emotional and cognitive intelligence and negatively correlated with maladaptive affective traits like anxiety, anger, and alexithymia. Furthermore, GERT scores predict higher monetary gains and higher peer
ratings of cooperativeness in a dyadic negotiation task.
In the second part, we address the question whether ERA can be improved through
training. We present a new computer-administered training that was developed
based on the video clips used in the GERT. The training consists of 1) an instruction
part with information about how the 14 emotions are typically expressed in different modalities and example clips, and 2) a training part in which participants
watch clips, choose the expressed emotion, and get feedback on whether their
choice was correct or not. Results from a first study with students revealed significantly higher ERA scores in the training group in comparison to the untreated
control group. Next steps in the validation of this training will be outlined. This
line of research has important implications for future research and practice, for
example in the training of managers or healthcare professionals, and populations
with lower levels of ERA such as elderly people.
263
Symposium S4.4
What emotions can tell us about social life
Conveners
Ursula Hess, Shlomo Hareli
Humboldt-University, University of Haifa
In everyday life emotion expressions are used to infer the emotional state of
others. However, this process is often not an end in itself. Rather we use emotion
expressions to infer something about the person who reacts with the emotion or
about the situation in which the emotion was shown. Indeed research focusing of
the social signal value of emotions reveals the wealth of inferences that observers
extract from emotions expressed by others, among other things, inferences about
the social status of the expressers (Tiedens, 2001), their dominance and affiliation (Hareli, Shomrat, & Hess, 2009; Hess, Blairy, & Kleck, 2000; Knutson, 1996),
and their intentions during a negotiation (Van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2004).
A central factor informing these inferences are the appraisals associated with
specific emotions (Hareli & Hess, 2010). However, the context within which the
emotions are perceived also plays an important role in this process. The proposed
symposium samples some of the inferences that people draw from observed emotional reactions in different everyday life contexts while explicating the different
ways by which the context in which the emotions are expressed intervenes in the
inference-drawing process. Hareli will discuss how emotional counter-reactions
to one’s anger affect inferences of social power of the angry person. Such counter-reactions are considered alongside the gender of the expressers as well as the
context in which the anger is perceived. Elkabetz will present research suggesting
that people can infer the rules of a game and the quality of performance from
the spectators’ emotional reactions with specific emphasis on the signal value
of awe and the conditions under which inferences extracted from awe depend
on context. Kafetsios will discuss research on how cultural differences in emotion
norms, emotion perception, and normative tightness impact on the inferences
people draw regarding the appropriateness of behavior based on the emotional
reactions of onlookers. Finally, David will discuss how the social group membership of the expresser and the presence of other individuals affect the identification of emotions and inference extracted from them.
264
The role of emotional counter-reactions to anger
for inferences of social power
Shlomo Hareli, Shlomo David
University of Haifa
Expressions of anger, especially in men, are perceived as signals of high social
power (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008; Tiedens, 2001). Targets of such expressions may
respond by expressing emotions of their own (Hareli & Rafaeli, 2008; Van Kleef,
2009). Depending on the type of response, it can serve as a signal of confirmation
or disconfirmation of the claims to high power suggested by these expressions of
anger and determine the perceived social power of the responders. The current
presentation reports results from two studies that tested this idea, by presenting
participants with a sequence of two photos of same-sex and mixed-sex dyads.
The first photo presented an angry person and the second one presented another person responding by expressing, anger, neutrality, sadness or fear. Focusing
on the way in which the first person was perceived, Study 1 shows that counterreactions of neutrality decreased perceived social power, whereas counter-reactions of fear increased it. For same-sex dyads only, counter-reactions of anger had
the same effect as neutrality, while sadness had the same effect as fear. Furthermore, counter-emotions had a stronger effect on perceived social power when
the emotions were incongruent with gender-stereotypes. Whereas women’s stereotype-incongruent reactions made women appear more powerful, the stereotype-incongruent reactions of men made men seem less powerful. The second
study suggests that counter-emotions also affect the perceived social power of
the responders; this may also explain the effect it has on the perception of the
first expresser. This research underscores the importance of social interaction as a
context for the social perception of emotions.
265
The role of context in social inferences drawn from emotions as a
function of the situative informativeness of the emotion
Shimon Elkabetz1, Shlomo Hareli1, Ursula Hess2
University of Haifa1, Humboldt-University2
How people react emotionally to an event can tell us much about the event itself
(Hareli & Hess, 2012; Van Kleef, 2010). However, emotions vary in their situative informativeness, that is, in how much information about the situation they provide.
We predicted that when emotions are shown which are low in situative informativeness participants rely more on context information, then when the emotions
shown are high in situative informativeness. At the same time, context may still
serve to provide information on the validity of the emotions. These hypotheses
were tested in two studies in which participants were asked to deduce the rules
of an unknown sports game and to evaluate the quality of a player’s performance
based on the emotional reactions of spectators to the game. Spectators reacted
either with awe (high in situative informativeness), or with happiness or neutrality
(low in situative informativeness). Participants also received context information.
The findings supported the predictions and illustrate how emotions and context
interact to inform us about events.
266
A cross-cultural study on emotion expression and the learning
of social norms
Konstantinos Kafetsios, Shlomo Hareli, Ursula Hess
University of Crete, University of Haifa, Humboldt-University
When we do not know how to correctly behave in a new context, the emotions
that people familiar with the context show in response to the behaviors of others,
can help us understand what to do or not to do. The present study examined crosscultural differences in how group emotional expression (anger, sadness, neutral)
can inform norm violation in four cultures (Germany, Israel, Greece and the US)
that differ in terms of decoding rules for negative emotions. As expected, in all
four countries, anger was a stronger norm violation signal than sadness or neutral
expressions. However, angry and sad expressions were perceived as more intense
and the relevant norm was learned better in Germany and Israel than in Greece
and the US. Participants in Greece were relatively better at using sadness as a sign
of a likely norm violation. The results demonstrate both cultural universality and
cultural differences in the use of group emotion expressions in norm learning. In
terms of cultural differences they underscore that the social signal value of emotional expressions may vary with culture as a function of cultural differences, both
in emotion perception, and as a function of a differential use of emotions.
267
The influence of social and situational context
on emotion perception
Shlomo David1, Shimon Elkabetz1, Shlomo Hareli1,
Konstantinos Kafetsios2, Ursula Hess3
University of Haifa1, University of Crete2, Humboldt-University3
Two studies were conducted to investigate the effect of two types of context information: the social group membership of the expresser and the presence of other
individuals. Participants first saw images from a fictitious ball game and then
rated the supporters’ or opponents’ purported emotional reactions to the player
shown. The different types of context led to different effects. Whereas situational
information about social group membership invited perspective taking and led to
complex assessments of the expresser’s likely emotional state, the mere presence
of surrounding others of the same group led to a more basic effect on perceptual
processes. In sum, not all contexts are alike and hence research on context effects
should carefully assess what specific information a given context provides and
how this information can influence perception and inferences regarding the emotions of others.
268
Symposium S4.5
New conceptualisations of an old emotion:
The feeling of being moved
Convener
Beate Seibt
University of Oslo
Western cultures have developed many practices for the purpose of evoking the emotion
of being moved. Examples are drama like Romeo and Juliette, religious exercise like the
contemplation of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, wedding ceremonies which culminate in a
public kiss, or tear-jerking youtube-videos which get shared millions of times. But Western
cultures are not the only ones harnessing this emotion. All the major world religions perform rituals that move the devotees, and thereby increase their sense of community with
the other believers and their devotion to the deity.
In this symposium, we explore the emotion of being moved from various theoretical and
disciplinary angles.
We start by looking closely at physiological symptoms accompanying being moved, in particular chills and goosebumps. The first talk investigates responses to music and collected
objective data on goosebumps by filming the skin. The study found a pattern of physiological responses marked by piloerection, increased skin conductance, and a decrease in
respiration rate together with an increase in respiration depth, which was accompanied by
reports of being moved. In a similar vein, the second talk reports that the more participants
felt moved by a video clip, the more likely they were to experience chills. When comparing
being moved, sadness, and joy as predictors, being moved proved to be the best predictor for chills. The talk also elucidates the “bittersweet” nature of moving situations: The
sadness evoked by moving scenes is transformed into pleasure, which is mediated by the
feeling of being moved.
The following two presentations focus on developing theoretical conceptualisations of
being moved. In the third talk, being moved is characterized as a pleasant and warm feeling often accompanied by tears that is triggered by the manifestation of positive core
values. Five experiments are reported which confirm that being moved by autobiographical
memories or by short video sequences leads to prosocial action tendencies. This conceptualization entails that elevation, another recently theorized social emotion, is a special
case of being moved. The fourth talk advances the notion that it is the intensification of
communal sharing relations which triggers being moved. In four studies, this notion is explored through diary studies, judgments of video sequences and cross-correlations of time
series of closeness and being moved. The anthropological evidence reviewed lends further
support to this model.
The final talk explores the interplay of music and video, investigating the downstream
consequences of being moved. Three studies found that videos transport the spectators
more, make them feel less manipulated and more compelled to comply with the message
of the video when they are shown with moving music as opposed to non-moving music.
Thus, being moved seems not only to increase prosocial behaviour directly, but also to
change the way narratives are processed.
In conjunction, the five talks shed a fascinating light on the emotion of being moved, surveying physiological correlates, psychological causes, and cognitive and social outcomes.
The symposium unites insights from a large number of studies with many participants,
using a wide array of methods based on a diversity of approaches. From these, it appears
that the emotion is frequently and universally experienced, that it goes along with a unique
physiological pattern and that it is evoked by a small set of appraisals. In consequence,
individuals act more pro-socially. Notably, the theoretical perspectives laid out in the talks
show both convergence and divergence, emphasizing the need for more theoretical and
empirical effort to unify the perspectives. We hope that this symposium contributes to
a renewed interest in this emotion and its significance for individual, interpersonal, and
cultural processes.
269
Hair being moved: Longing for sadness
Christian Kaernbach, Mathias Benedek
University of Kiel, University of Graz
Piloerection is the condition where the hair stands on ends. Piloerection is known
as an indicator of strong emotional experiences. It has been suggested that piloerection marks peaks in emotional arousal (Rickard, 2004). An alternative view is
proposed by Panksepp (1995). He suggests that piloerection is linked to certain
sad emotions and is originally a response to the perception of social loss (separation call hypothesis). We recorded piloerection, heart rate, respiration, and skin
conductance in response to music and the sound tracks of movies for fifty participants. We found an increase in heart rate, skin conductance, and respiration
depth together with a slight decrease in respiration rate shortly after the onset
of piloerection. The overall pattern of the physiological response fits better to
Panksepp’s separation call hypothesis than to the peak arousal hypothesis. The
decrease in respiration rate together with the increase in respiration depth could
also be interpreted as a mild form of a gasp. Following to Huron (2006) this could
indicate the feeling of awe which results from the perception of a sustained danger (such as a social loss). This fits nicely with the rating results of our participants,
with higher ratings of being moved when a stimulus elicited piloerection than
when it did not.
270
Art-elicited chills indicate states of being moved
Eugen Wassiliwizky1, Valentin Wagner1, Thomas Jacobsen2,
Winfried Menninghaus1
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics1,
Helmut Schmidt Universität Hamburg2
Most research investigating the phenomenon of “art-elicited chills” (for a review
see Maruskin et al., 2012) typically circumnavigates a thorough definition of the
emotional state that may underlie them by using vague terms such as heightened emotion or peak emotional experience. The present work advocates the hypothesis that being moved is the emotion that may generally underlie art-elicited
chills (which has already been suggested but not tested empirically by Benedek
and Kaernbach, 2011). We focused on two prototypical variants of being moved:
one involving sadness as a key component and the other joy. In our experimental
setting, 30 participants watched 25 moving film excerpts of either the sadly or the
joyfully moving type (e.g., farewell scenarios and reunion scenarios, respectively).
They rated how sad, how joyful, and how moved they felt after each film clip, as
well as their pleasure. They also reported whether they experienced chills.
The results of a logistic regression revealed that the higher participants felt moved by a clip, the more likely they were to experience chills. Additionally, being
moved proved to be the best predictor for chills, compared to sadness and joy. We
further investigated the interrelations between these emotions and pleasure. As
expected from literature on sad films (Hanich et al., 2014), we found a positive
correlation between sadness and enjoyment, known as the “sad film paradox”.
Multi-level mediation analyses showed, however, that this relation was fully mediated by being moved, whereas no such mediation effect was found for the relation between joy and pleasure. Only if sadness is experienced along with states of
being moved the overall emotional experience becomes a source of pleasure. In
this sense, the “sad film paradox” is resolved, since it should rather be called the
“moving film paradox”, which eventually is a contradiction in terms.
271
Is elevation a way of being moved?
Florian Cova
Recently, moral psychologists have postulated the existence of new emotion category: “elevation”. Elevation is supposed to be elicited by the spectacle of virtuous
actions, is characterized by warm feelings in the chest and a lump in the throat,
and has been shown to lead to more prosocial behaviour. Here, we argue that
there was no need to coin a new term for this emotion, for “elevation” is just a
particular instance of the wider emotional category of “being moved”, that is triggered by a wider range of situations than sole virtuous actions. In support of this
hypothesis, we present the results of five experiments. Experiments 1 and 2, in
which participants were asked to remember occasions in which they were moved
or witnessed people act virtuously, show that the physiological responses and actions tendencies purported to be characteristic of elevation are also characteristic of “being moved”, and that «being moved» can be characterized as a pleasant
and warm feeling often accompanied by tears that is triggered by the manifestation of positive core values. Experiments 3, 4 and 5 lend additional support to our
hypothesis by showing that the physiological responses and actions tendencies
supposed to characterize elevations can also be elicited by emotional videoclips
in which no one acts virtuously. Additionally, results of experiments 4 also illustrate the power of the feeling of being moved to motivate prosocial behaviour. In
conclusion, we argue that the nascent research on the feeling of being moved and
the more developed literature on the emotion of elevation should be considered
as investigating one and the same phenomenon.
272
Kama Muta: A social emotion emerging from the sudden
intensification of a communal sharing relation
Beate Seibt1, Thomas Schubert1, Janis Zickfeld1, Alan Fiske2
University of Oslo1, University of California Los Angeles2
To explain the feeling of being moved and integrate the literature, we postulate a
new construct, the emotion kama muta (Sanskrit for “moved by love”). We conceptualize it as a social-relational emotion that is elicited by experiencing sudden
intensification of communal sharing relationships (Fiske, 1992). In four studies,
participants kept a diary of moving experiences; watched video clips and reported
feelings, judgments, and symptoms after each clip; or watched clips and reported continuously while watching. We found that participants reported frequent
and strong feelings of being moved. Indicators of increased communal sharing
(expressions of love and affection, increased closeness) predicted being moved.
Weeping and goose bumps were related to both being moved and communal
sharing. Ethnographic and historical sources show that kama muta is culturally
informed, often scripted or ritualized, sometimes an ultimate value, and crucial to
the constitution of communal sharing among humans — and between humans
and deities in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Our theory
and evidence provide a new framework to understand feelings typically labelled
as “being moved” and the many manifestations and functions of kama muta in
various cultures and contexts.
273
Moving music in advertisements increases narrative
transportation and persuasion
Madelijn Strick, Hanka de Bruin, Linde de Ruiter, Wouter Jonkers
Utrecht University
Transportation refers to the sensation of being “lost” in a book or movie, and is associated with enhanced emotional involvement and changes in story-consistent
beliefs (Green & Brock, 2000). Research on transportation has typically used written stories. However, based on its profound effects on emotion and physiological
responses (Blood & Zatorre, 2001) and its heavy use in political propaganda, Hollywood films, and advertising (Costabile & Terman, 2013), we hypothesized that
music plays an important role in narrative transportation and persuasion. This
hypothesis was tested in three experiments among university students (N = 372).
Two audiovisual ads were used as a basis, and for each ad one version with moving
music and one version with non-moving music was created. In both versions, the
music fitted the timing of the visual events, and was appropriate and supportive
of the visuals.
Participants viewed one ad (either the moving or the non-moving version), and
then filled out questions relating to transportation and persuasion. In Experiment 1, moving music increased transportation and intentions to donate money
to the promoted cause. Experiment 2 replicated these effects, and also showed
that moving music decreases inferences of manipulative intent by the advertiser.
Experiment 3 explored boundary effects, and showed that moving music in advertisements backfires when the salience of manipulative intent of the advertiser is
extremely high or extremely low.
The results supported the overall idea that the effect of moving music in narrative advertisements is based on transportation, which then decreases inferences
of manipulative intent, which then increases behavioral intentions to support
the promoted cause. These findings corroborate and extend earlier findings on
transportation in written stories. Moreover, they show that, without changing the
content of a story, music increases the experience of “being moved”, which profoundly increases the physiological and behavioral impact of a story.
274
Symposium S4.6
Emotions, Dangers and Crises in the Metropolis
Convener
Ann Brooks
University of Bournemouth
This Symposium takes Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the social production of space’, as its point
of departure (Lefebvre, 1991). The papers demonstrate how his theory may be reapplied creatively to the metropolitan experience by considering the crucial role of individual and collective
human emotions in the reproduction and representation of urban life. Contributions include a
discussion of relevant theoretical approaches (Brooks), and three case studies relating to early
modern London, one by a scholar of William Shakespeare’s plays (Gray), and two by historians of
the eighteenth century (Lemmings and Tarantino). In these the metropolis is conceived as a site
for the social appropriation of space by the management of human passions: the city reproduces
itself as people, classes and communities struggle to inhabit and imagine the streets in conformity with their hopes and fears.
Brooks considers critically Lefebvre’s work alongside contemporary theorists of the city such as
Zukin, Harvey and Castells and shows how Lefebvre’s work foregrounds the operation of emotions in the politics of the city. She considers Lefebvre’s concept of space in terms of a micro and
macro analysis of urban crises. She shows how both a micro and macro spatial analysis can generate individual and collective emotions that produce feelings of intimacy or alienation around
particular urban spaces. The paper also draws attention to ideas about a ‘crisis of authenticity’,
when groups feel outraged by what they see as a locality’s loss of appropriate social practices.
By contrast with Lefebvre’s optimism about the possibility of socialist space, Gray argues that
Shakespeare’s dramatizations of urban strife in Coriolanus and Henry IV part 3 represent the
metropolitan plebeian crowd as dominated by self-destructive passions. For Shakespeare, the
struggle between the passions and interests of patricians and plebeians on the streets of the
metropolis is not imagined as productive of utopian space; rather, if one or the other class becomes dominant the dismal prospect is a spatial regime of tyranny or alternatively of chaos. In
his plays, according to Gray, the city space is revealed as the primary venue for a clash between
aristocratic and plebeian emotions; and aristocratic ‘honour’ usually overcomes plebeian disorder through the cynical politics of populism.
Lemmings discusses the dramatic representation of mid eighteenth-century London in the journalism and other writings of the magistrate Henry Fielding. Fielding imagined the metropolis as
a site of violent struggle between plebeians addicted to crime and vice and respectable people
characterized by honesty and industry. The paper shows that as a government propagandist he
was attempting to construct a narrative of authority that represented the magistrates and police
as the heroes of an epic story about war between the forces of law and disorder. His journalism
also included elements of humour, compassion and prurience, however, and thereby constructed
mixed messages that potentially undermined the official campaign to manage the emotions
of the reading public. Indeed, Lemmings demonstrates that ‘mediatisation’ of the public sphere
typical of the modern urban environment privileges the performance of emotions (Thrift, 2004:
66); and thereby produces an urban politics that is both complex and ultimately unstable.
Finally, Tarantino discusses the London Gordon Riots (1780) as an emotion-driven spatial confrontation between Protestants and Catholics inhabiting the same metropolitan environment. The
clash of emotional regimes can be seen in several places here: the confessional patriotism of
Lord George Gordon’s Protestant Association sought to appropriate the streets in an orderly demonstration that simply represented the Catholic minority as un-English. But their carefully orchestrated street performance degenerated into a week of rioting whereby ‘the mob’ expressed
its rage and resentment by attacking sites of Catholic worship and community, as well as symbols of authority such as the Bank of England and the Fleet prison. Ultimately the rioting provoked an emotional reaction on the part of the authorities, best expressed by the savage theatre
of public prosecution and punishment. In the meantime, as Tarantino shows, some observers
recommended an alternative emotional regime by which the Catholics would be corrected and
more subtly integrated into metropolitan life: that of exemplary Christian fraternal love.
275
Crises in the Metropolis: Emotions, and the Politics
of the Urban Imaginary
Ann Brooks
University of Bournemouth
Cities are often positioned as key nodal actors whose efforts, either individually or
collectively can best implement initiatives that will help address or mitigate specific risks or crises facing them. These could include crises imposed on a global scale
such as terrorism or disease or more localised crises, failure or threats emerging
from political failure (e.g. Arab-Spring), inequities in the distribution of resources
(Occupy Movement) or urban growth, gentrification and the marginalisation of
the poor and ethnic minorities, resulting in a loss of social and aesthetic diversity and a ‘crisis of authenticity’ (Zukin, 2009). Criticisms of undesirable changes
in urban life are not new and emerge during periods of significant urban growth
and waves of migration. Such criticism is reflected in the mid-nineteenth century
novels of Balzac, the travel journals of Henry James and in the writings of Henri
Lefebvre, whose work is explored in this paper. Emotions can be seen to operate
on a micro and macro level theoretically. On a micro level Lefebvre (1991) drew
attention to the city as lived experience and established the intersection of intimacy and urban space. Zukin defines authenticity, ‘as a proxy for Lefebvre’s espace
vecu – as both a real set of social practices anchored to existing buildings and
land, and a metaphorical framework to establish a vulnerable population’s right
to make an urban place’ (Zukin, 2009: 544). At a more macro level urban struggles
are motivated by feelings of outrage and indignation that may or may not coalesce into larger social agitations and result in protest movements. This paper
considers the way in which emotions operate in the context of the city at a micro
and macro level and examines the theoretical underpinnings of these debates as
well as empirical examples. As Thrift (2004: 57) in his analysis of the intersections
of emotions and space points out: ‘Cities may be seen as roiling maelstroms of
affect’. Thus to fully understand urban space we need to appreciate the role of
emotions especially since the ‘politics of affect’ is ‘not just incidental but central
to the life of cities’ (Thrift 2004: 57).
276
Shakespeare, Unruly Emotions, and the Right to the City
Patrick Gray
University of Durham
This paper builds upon Ian Munro’s engagement with influential Marxist urban
theorist Henri Lefebvre (Munro, 2005); as well as articles on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Shrank, 2004; Kuzner, 2007). Lefebvre claims that inhabitants of urban
space have a “right to the city” which supersedes the rights of property owners,
and advocates “re-appropriation” of the city, resulting in “collective ownership
and management of space.” This transformation requires “activation and mobilization of inhabitants,” spurred on by a vision of an “urgent utopia.” In his depiction of the Roman Conflict of the Orders, Shakespeare presents what amounts
to point-for-point opposition to this proposed restructuring of urban governance.
For instance, in Julius Caesar, Antony tells the crowd that Caesar has bequeathed
them “all his walks, / His private arbours and new-planted orchards” as “common
pleasures.” The result is not “utopia,” however, but a frightening riot, culminating
in the on-stage murder of an innocent bystander. In Coriolanus, the plebeians
banish an aristocratic war-hero and for a time enjoy a peaceful commonwealth.
Under threat of war, however, they realize they are not self-sufficient; their ability
to live in peace requires the protection of patricians. Shakespeare’s representation
of the Jack Cade Rebellion in 3 Henry IV connects this critique of ancient Roman
populism to England. Here, too, visions of an “urgent utopia” lead to horrifying civil
strife. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s opposition to communism is not simply class
prejudice. As in Plato’s Republic, the plebeians in his Roman plays are fickle and riotous. But the patricians are arrogant and selfish; they represent thumos, the desire
for honour, rather than any higher principle such as classical reason or Christian
benevolence. Communists such as Lefevbre are relatively optimistic about human
nature. Shakespeare by contrast is more Augustinian. Human beings, whether
capitalists or workers, are unruly, self-interested, and prey to self-destructive passions. The best possible outcome of urban class conflict is not a Marxist utopia,
but instead a balance of power: fear of violent reprisal and the breakdown of civic
order allows each class to restrain the potential excesses of the other.
277
Henry Fielding and the Metropolitan Mind: Panic, Authority and
Emotion in English Crime and Justice Reportage, 1748-52
David Lemmings
University of Adelaide
Henry Fielding was not only a novelist and comic dramatist. He was also a barrister, and he acted as a stipendiary magistrate at Bow Street, in Westminster, from
1748 to 1754. This paper discusses Henry Fielding’s complex representations of
crime and justice in London during the years of his Bow Street magistracy. Against
the background of recent studies that suggest eighteenth-century newspaper
reportage constructed ideas about street crime that would have engendered fear
and pessimism among readers (King, 2007; Snell, 2005, 2007), analysis of news
stories derived from Fielding’s activities suggests that he was representing himself and the Bow Street Runners as the heroes of an epic counter-narrative about
authority triumphing over disorder. At the same time, his Charge to the Grand Jury
of Westminster (1749) and Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequency of Robbers
(1751) recommended vigorous government action to deal with a ‘crisis’ of morality
and disorder among the common people: here he approximated to a ‘moral entrepreneur’, labelling and combating deviance from community norms. Accounts
of Fielding’s magisterial work in his own Covent Garden Journal (Jan-Dec 1752)
invested offenders with strong elements of humour, compassion and prurient
interest, however, as well as more orthodox ‘law and order’ representations, and it
is suggested that these personalized accounts of London crime, disorder and vice
appealed to a deep ambivalence and even hypocrisy in contemporary attitudes
towards transgressive acts. The paper concludes that as a publicist Fielding was
doing ‘emotional work’ on behalf of the government by attempting to re-possess
the metropolitan imaginary; indeed he was involved in a struggle for the production of (virtual) space (Lefebvre, 1991). But it also suggests that his literary and
commercial instincts inspired unstable polyvocal representations of passion and
compassion that undermined the authorized message of law and justice.
278
Centrality and Segregation Behind the Gordon Riots:
Digging Out Some Emotional Roots of British Anti-Catholicism
Giovanni Tarantino
University of Melbourne
According to the Neo-Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre, citizenship should not be
bound up with the notion of belonging to a nation-state but with inhabitance. The
Gordon Riots in 1780 represented an emblematic emotionally charged struggle for
centrality between groups with different religious and social identities who were
sharing the same urban space. On one side was the anxious Catholic minority,
faced by the prospect of their civil rights and therefore their urban visibility being
extended, but against their will, by a parliamentary act of 1778 designed to swell
the ranks of British troops engaged on various fronts—against the American rebels, France, Spain and the Dutch Republic. On the other, the Protestant popular
orders, reacting violently to the prospect of Catholic Relief, demanded a hearing
in Parliament: further impoverished by the on-going conflict, they directed their
frustrations against their “foreign” Catholic neighbours. An extraordinary witness
of the riots was Ignatius Sancho, born a slave in 1729. Amazed by the furious violence displayed in the riots, Sancho, himself a former Catholic turned Anglican,
wrote: “Let us convert by our example, and conquer by our meekness and brotherly love!” A policy of intolerance towards Catholics, carefully orchestrated from
the top down, played on the deep-rooted fears and inherent xenophobia of the
English “mobs”, moulding, nurturing, and feeding their anger and resentment,
so much so that when Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, the resulting
protests gave rise to the most violent urban riots in British history. Significantly,
the perturbation caused by the Gordon Riots among the elite largely broke down
resistance to the idea of setting up a professional police force in Britain, and those
who had previously had radical sympathies saw the potential horrors of the “mob”.
279
O2.1 Oxytocin increases attention to the face of fearful
protagonists and selectively enhances affective empathy for fear
Kelly Hubble, Katie Daughters, Antony Manstead, Aled Rees,
Anita Thapar, Stephanie van Goozen
Cardiff Univeristy, UK
Oxytocin (OXT) is increasingly recognised as a neuropeptide with therapeutic
potential in the treatment of a range of mental health disorders. There has been
relatively little research on the effect of OXT on empathic ability and the results
are inconsistent (e.g. Hurlemann et al., 2010; Bartz et al., 2010). Furthermore, these
studies did not examine the mechanisms through which OXT may improve empathy, or whether OXT may selectively facilitate empathy for specific emotions. This
latter question is important for the emotion of fear. If OXT has fear dampening
effects on the amygdala, this should facilitate approach and prosocial behaviour
(Kirsch et al., 2005). However, one study found that a dampened amygdala response was associated with reduced affective empathy (Cox et al., 2012). It is therefore important to examine whether OXT has differential effects on empathy for
different emotions. In the present study we used eye-tracking to assess attention
to socially relevant information whilst participants viewed dynamic, empathy inducing film clips, in which protagonists expressed sadness, happiness, pain and
fear. In a double-blind, within-subjects randomised control trial 40 healthy male
participants received 24 IU intranasal OXT and placebo in two identical experimental sessions separated by a 2-week interval. OXT selectively enhanced participants’ affective empathy for fear, but it did not affect cognitive or affective empathy for other emotions. OXT also led to more fixations on the face of the fearful
protagonist specifically. This result shows that OXT increases attention to socially
relevant stimuli, specifically fearful ones. This study provides the first demonstration that OXT increases attention to fearful face stimuli and selectively enhances
affective empathy for fear. The results suggest that OXT may have important therapeutic implications for those who suffer from disorders that are characterised
by abnormal fear processing.
280
O2.1 Intensity Bias in Intergroup Emotion Perception
Pum Kommattam, Kai Jonas, Agneta Fischer
Interactions of different ethnic groups are often characterized by a lack of intergroup empathy, referred to as the ‘empathy gap’. The current research focuses
on one potential factor of this empathy gap by examining whether we perceive
facial expressions of emotions of ethnic out-groups as less intense compared to
the intensity of in-group expressions (i.e., intensity bias). We conducted 13 studies
including white Dutch, U.S., and U.K. citizens (N total = 2692) judging the intensity of different emotions. A random effects model meta-analysis suggests that
individuals perceive less intense emotions in ethnic out-group members than in
ethnic in-group members in the population (d = .26, r = .13). This bias is especially
prominent in ambiguous emotions (embarrassment, pride, surprise, fear) and in
contexts without clear emotional cues that provided no further moderating factors. The intensity bias in emotion perception complements theories on intergroup empathy and contributes to intergroup conflicts because in-group members perceive out-group members to feel less than themselves.
281
O2.1 Tuning in to Self and Others: Synchrony Differentially Affects
Self- and Other-Focused Emotions
Gabriela Pavarini, Simone Schnall
University of Cambridge
Individuals often oscillate between two different ways of being. On the one hand,
individuals act upon the pursuit of self-interest and react emotionally to their
own success or failure. At the same time however, people often focus on broader,
collective goals. We present three studies testing whether behavioural synchrony
facilitates a transition from an individual to a collective state. In particular, we
expected synchrony to amplify moral elevation, a positive other-focused feeling
triggered by seeing others acting prosocially. In contrast, we expected synchrony
to suppress pride following accomplishment, a self-focused state arising from
downward comparisons.
In Study 1, pairs of participants either moved cups in time while music played at
a common tempo (synchrony) or music played at different tempo (asynchrony).
After the manipulation, participants individually watched a morally-elevating
videoclip. Synchrony amplified feelings of moral elevation in reaction to the movie, in particular for participants high in sociability. To confirm that the effect of
synchrony on elevation was not due to general positive emotionality but rather
to an increase in other-focused affect, we ran a second study in which the same
synchrony (and control) manipulation was followed by a pride induction—namely
positive feedback on participants’ individual performance on a dot-counting task.
Synchrony did not affect self-reported pride.
Study 3 tested whether outperforming synchronous others would elicit less pride
than outperforming asynchronous others. Participants were paired up with a
confederate, and they either walked in time with music played at a common tempo (synchrony) or music played at different tempo (asynchrony). After walking,
participants completed a timed word search task which they always finished at a
faster rate than the confederate. Participants who walked in step reported lower
feelings of pride after outperforming the confederate than those who walked out
of step, but this result only reached significance for participants high in affiliation
goals.
Although anthropologists and sociologists have speculated that synchrony induces positive feelings and a sense of ‘collective effervescence’, psychological
studies had failed to find an effect of synchrony on positive affect. Our results
suggest that synchrony does influence positive emotions, but the effect depends
on whether the feeling focuses on the self or on others. In particular, synchrony
amplifies the other-focused feeling of elevation and, under specific circumstances,
suppresses the self-focused feeling of pride. These results support the idea that
synchronized action supports affiliative relationships and the attainment of collective goals, tuning one’s emotional states accordingly.
282
O2.2 The role of the prefrontal cortex in automatic and voluntary
affective modulation – an effective connectivity study
Tomasz S Ligeza, Miroslaw Wyczesany
Psychophysiology Laboratory, Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University
Emotion regulation describes the ability to modulate the intensity and quality
of responses to emotional stimuli (Gross and Thompson, 2007). As yet, neurocognitive science has focused mainly on its’ volitional forms, however, growing
evidences show that affective responses may be modified automatically. Thus, to
fully understand emotional functioning we need to take into account both forms
of emotional control, especially as they are known to occur simultaneously (Gyurak et al., 2011).
What is known so far is that the prefrontal activations associated with both volitional and automatic control processes inhibit the activity of the emotion-related
brain areas (Delgado et al., 2008). Yet little is known how these control instances
affect other cortical regions, related to the early stages of affective perceptual processing.
The aim of this study was to find patterns of effective connectivity distinguishing
both emotional control processes and explore the way they modulate the perceptual and attentional systems. Depending on experimental conditions, participants
were asked either to positively reinterpret (reappraisal) or to passively watch emotionally arousing film clips. Using the effective connectivity EEG method (Directed
Transfer Function, DTF; (Blinowska et al., 2004) we examined communication patterns between different cortical regions.
We found that the dorsolateral prefrontal control center can be characterized
with apparent lateral specialization. While the left hemisphere turned out to be
more associated with automatic form of emotion regulation, the right one was
related to volitional form of emotion control. These effects were mainly associated
with top-down control exercised over perceptual and attentional cortical areas.
These findings bring a deeper insight of the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex not only in the overall cognitive control but also in the generalized emotional
control. Specifically, results point to separate neurocognitive mechanism involved
in automatic and volitional control of emotions.
283
O2.2 To see or not to see: Dynamic attentional interference by
non-consciously perceived relevant stimuli
Audric Mazzietti, Virginie Sellem, Olivier Koenig
Laboratoire EMC, University of Lyon
The Component Process Model (CPM, Scherer, 2001) posits that attention is an appraisal-driven mechanism guided by the relevance of a stimulus toward the goals
and needs of an individual (Sander, Grandjean & Scherer, 2005). The CPM also
suggests that the appraisal of relevance is a multilevel and dynamic mechanism
that implies low-level and automatic processes (van Reekum & Scherer, 1997). In
that perspective, the main goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis
that attention can be modulated by a stimulus appraised as relevant, even if that
stimulus is not consciously perceived. We also aimed to test the hypothesis that
such a mechanism is dynamic by manipulating the relevance of a stimulus within
the same group of individuals. To do so, twenty-four participants (twelve women)
performed a non-conscious relevance manipulation procedure. First, participants
performed 120 trials of a non-conscious detection task in which they had to indicate as quickly as possible when a square appeared at the center of a distractor.
The distractor was presented in a non-conscious way, using the Continuous Flash
Suppression (CFS) paradigm (Carmel et al., 2010), so that even if the square and
the distractor appeared at the same location, participants consciously perceived
the square only. The distractor could be a picture of hands washing or a picture of
hands holding a cup, both randomly chosen in a set of twenty pictures. Then, participants saw disgusting pictures, in order to induce the goal to be clean in them.
The aim of this induction was to make washing-hands pictures become relevant
to the participants’ goal to be clean (Vogt, Lozo, Koster & de Houwer, 2011). Immediately after the induction, participants performed the non-conscious detection
task a second time. While washing-hands pictures were expected to be non-relevant to the participants’s goal to be clean and not to produce any attentional
interference in the task before the induction, they were expected to be relevant
and to produce an interference in the second task, i.e., after the induction. Results
revealed that it was indeed the case, which suggests that the appraisal of relevance involves low-level processes and modulates attention even if the relevant
stimulus is not consciously perceived. Moreover, since the relevance of the same
stimulus was manipulated in the same group of individuals, this appraisal-driven
mechanism seems to be dynamic.
284
O2.2 Attention capture by relevant stimuli after non-conscious
goal activation
Virginie Sellem, Audric Mazzietti, Olivier Koenig
Laboratoire EMC, University of Lyon
The Component Process Model (CPM, Scherer, 2001) posits that attention is an
appraisal-driven mechanism guided by the relevance of a stimulus toward the
goals and needs of an individual (Sander, Grandjean & Scherer, 2005). The CPM
also suggests that the appraisal of relevance is a multilevel and dynamic process that implies low-level and automatic mechanisms (van Reekum & Scherer,
1997). The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that attention
can be modulated by a stimulus appraised as relevant toward a goal that is not
consciously activated. In Experiment 1, we induced the goal to be clean in half of
our participants by presenting them with disgusting pictures (the other half saw
neutral pictures). Then, all participants performed a dot-probe task in which they
were presented with pictures depicting hands washing and hands holding a cup.
Washing-hands pictures only were expected to be relevant to the goal to be clean
(see Vogt, Lozo, Koster & de Houwer, 2011). As expected, washing-hands pictures
did provoke an attention capture, only when they were appraised as relevant, i.e.,
in the disgust group. These data confirm that attention can be modulated by the
appraisal of relevance. In Experiment 2, we tested the hypothesis that such a mechanism operates even if the goal is not consciously activated in participants. To
do so, we induced the goal to be clean in a non-conscious way, using a Continuous
Flash Suppression (CFS) procedure (Carmel, Arcaro, Kastner & Hasson, 2010), so
that even if participants were presented with the same pictures as in Experiment 1
during the induction phase, they did not perceive consciously any of them (indeed,
no participant reported having seen any picture at the end of the experiment). The
results replicated those of Experiment 1 (i.e., washing-hands pictures captured attention only when appraised as relevant), even if participants were not conscious
that the goal to be clean had been activated in them. Our data therefore confirm
that attention is a relevance-driven mechanism and suggest that the appraisal
of relevance involves low-level processes, since relevance can be induced, and can
modulate attention, even in the absence of conscious perception of the goal that
is activated.
285
O2.2 The impact of reward on learnt fear responses
Deborah Talmi, Robert Hoskin
We know that people must often relinquish a short-term objective in order to
promote a long-term goal, however the emotion regulation mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. A series of experiments were therefore
conducted to assess how the promise of delayed reward affects the response to
stimuli that are associated with immediate aversive outcomes. Participants performed a two-stage classical conditioning task. In the first, conditioning stage,
participants viewed a succession of images that either did (CS+) or did not (CS-)
predict the delivery of a painful electric shock. Participants were required to perform a simple classification task in response to the CS images that was unrelated
to the delivery of the shocks. At the start of the second, counterconditioning stage,
participants were instructed that one of the CS+ stimuli would bring a monetary
reward when it was followed by a shock, whereas the other CS+ stimuli would not.
The second stage then proceeded similar to the first, apart from the delivery of
monetary rewards as per the instructions. Participants provided affective ratings
of each of the CS stimuli at the end of each stage. Skin conductance response
was measured throughout the experiment. A conditioning effect was successfully achieved during the first stage of the experiments. Participants were slower
and less accurate in the classifying the CS+ stimuli and displayed elevated skin
conductance responses to them (vs CS- stimuli). Participants also rated the CS+
stimuli as more threatening and less likeable than the CS- stimuli. Data from the
counterconditioning stage revealed that the introduction of reward induced the
participants to rate the CS+ images more positively, but had a limited effect on
their behavioural and physiological responses. This suggests that delayed monetary reward has a limited ability to attenuate learnt fear responses. We are currently investigating whether the neural response to learnt fear is affected by the
introduction of monetary reward.
286
O2.3 Narrative approaches to emotion: anthropological
perspectives and scientific gains
Andrew Beatty
Brunel University London
Emotions have an indeterminate place in anthropology. A tension between objective, empirical reporting and the insider-perspective offered by memoirs and
narratives goes back to the beginnning. Malinowski made a distinction between
the ‘firm skeleton of tribal constitution’ – captured in tables and charts – and the
‘imponderabilia of everyday life’, which could only be grasped by the deep engagement of participant-observation. Ever since, emotions have mostly been consigned to the imponderabilia: the stuff of anecdote and impression rather than
systematic observation - either that or oversimplified as stereotyped ‘sentiments’.
The assumption was that narrative detail was counter to science. In mid-century
anthropology, emotions were schematically represented in structural models, obscuring the situational diversity of emotion episodes and the variety of emotion
concepts and regimes. More recently, constructionists have focussed on linguistic
formulations (definitions, ‘discourse’) rather than naturally occurring emotions,
analysing emotion terms as pragmatic tools (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). In different ways, all these approaches have undereported emotions and underestimated their complexity and function.
One way in which social scientists can more profitably explore emotions in the
field is through narrative – a mode of apprehending and writing about sociality
shared with other disciplines, notably history (Author 2010). Historians have questioned whether narrative imposes or recognizes a structure in the flow of events;
whether it is teleological; and whether narrative shape is variably present in social life. These arguments have concerned historiography, not emotion. But how
might such questions relate to the description of living emotions? And how can
they illuminate the reporting of emotions in other cultures?
This talk will assess the scientific merits of a narrative approach to emotions.
Among problems to be discussed:
- What advantages does narrative have over the narrower timescales of experimental approaches?
- Can narrative enhance verisimilitude or is it susceptible to the distortions of fiction?
- What are the methodological and epistemological challenges?
- What can historians, philosophers and ethnographers of emotion learn from one
another on this common terrain?
287
O2.3 Funeralscapes: the emotional journey of re-experiencing
pre-Christian, early Christian and Viking funeral rites
Carlos Galan-Díaz, Frances Wilkins, Shane McLeod
University of Aberdeen, Elphinstone Institute - University of Aberdeen, Division of
History and Politics - University of Stirling
Funeralscapes is an exploratory project which used action research involving residents of the Isle of Eigg (Scotland, UK) to re-enact the music of three funeral
rites, pre- Christian, early- Christian and Viking. The re-enactments took place at
Kildonan to the south-east of the island, a location for burial sites from pre-Christian times to the present day, overshadowed by the “An Sgurr” (the UK’s largest
exposed piece of pitchstone - a volcanic glass) and with rich folklore attached.
These re-enactments had the objective of understanding how residents of the
island were emotionally affected by re-enacting the burial rites (including music,
chanting and a procession). Funerals have always been accompanied by music
– from pre-Christian times to the present day; there are many references to the
moving, and emotional effects of music performed on these occasions(1).
We approach emotion as a social construction(2,3) and take the premise that the
relationship between a person and the environment is an emotional one(4). Do
the totality of music, landscape, sounds, chants, and procession, invite people to
feel joyous, solemn, sad? How do participants, who do not share the same social,
spatial and time dimensions for whom these funerary rites were intended, interpret an ancient burial rite? Participants completed questionnaires that explored
their emotional responses to the music, funeral rites and landscape. This was
complemented by data from short interviews (pre and post performances) and
analyses of the audio and visual recordings of the performances.
We conclude the paper by describing and discussing how the re-enactment of
ancient funerary rites, with the absence of precise socio-temporal details, do elicit
similar emotional experiences as those described in medieval sources in modern
day participants.
288
O2.3 Between hope and fear: determining the dynamics of perceived suspense in literary classics
Annekathrin Schacht, Mareike Bayer, Andrea Hildebrandt, Gerhard Lauer,
Katrin Riese
University of Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany
The reception of narrative fiction is a highly emotional process (e.g., Green, Brock,
& Kaufman, 2004; Mar, Oatley, Djikic, & Mullin, 2011). Plot suspense is assumed
to be one of the most important components of narrative fiction that motivate
recipients to follow fictional characters through their worlds (e.g., Gerrig, 1996;
Knobloch, 2003; Mellmann, 2007; Zillmann, 2003). In a multi-methodological approach, we aimed at investigating (i) the dynamic development of narrative suspense in excerpts of literary classics from the 19th century and (ii) the interrelation
between perceived suspense and a variety of other emotional and cognitive dimensions and readers’ dispositions presumably constituting literature reception.
First, for two texts, differing in suspense as judged by a large independent sample
(N=176), we collected (a) data from questionnaires, indicating different affective and cognitive dimensions of receptive engagement, (b) continuous ratings
of suspense during text reception from both experts and lay recipients, and (c)
registration of pupil diameter as a physiological indicator of changes in emotional
arousal and attention during reception over time. Data analyses confirmed differences between the two texts at different dimensions of receptive engagement.
Further, the present results show that suspense can be described as a dynamic
aspect during the reception of literary texts. Most importantly, we could demonstrate that these dynamics are reflected not only in suspense ratings, but also in
pupillary responses, resulting in positive correlations between pupil diameter and
ratings obtained from two independent samples. Furthermore, we found differences in the appraisal of literary excerpts at the level of continuous suspense
ratings during the reception process and subsequent judgments using questionnaires. Therefore, our findings suggest that changes of the pupil diameter provide
a reliable physiological indicator of suspense, which drives recipients’ attention
and modulates their emotional engagement.
Second, based on structural equation modeling on questionnaire data, we will
describe the interrelationship between different dimensions (latent factors) of
literature reception, including suspense, emotional engagement, identification,
reading pleasure, as well as cognitive dimensions like attention and cognitive
effort, and its potential modulations by specific readers’ attitudes such as individual reading habits and empathy. Together, we hope that our study will be a step
towards opening new avenues for research investigating receptive engagement
in literary as well as non-fictional texts.
289
O2.3 Contempt and Literature
Julien Zanetta
CISA, University of Geneva
Contempt is considered by contemporary philosophers (Mason 2003, Abramson
2010) as a moral emotion based on the response to violations of the social order,
but it also plays an important role in aesthetics. I will examine the links between
literary expressions of contempt, on the one hand, and existing psychological and
philosophical theories of contempt on the other. I will analyze, in particular, the
nuances between contempt, scorn and despising attitudes, and their interplay
with opposites traits such as esteem, admiration, and respect. Following the analysis of Bell (2013) on “apt” and “inapt” contempt, I wish to characterize more specifically the nature of a supposedly “cold emotion” that can have loud outbursts
and unsuspected outcomes. Considering contempt through a literary perspective,
I will focus on authors such as Baudelaire and Stendhal for whom contempt had
not only a social appraising function but was a precisely codified doctrine, stating
ones own dissent with society. I shall concentrate more precisely on the figure of
the dandy that embodies a unique feature of self-contempt mixed with a sincere
belief of his own superiority. The contemporary developments of such a figure,
and its enduring form in the uses of contempt, should encourage us in our investigations. In that respect, I aim to shed a fresh light on theories of laughter and
irony, that are the “contempter’s” favorite weapons.
290
O2.4 The neural correlates of emotional idiom comprehension
Francesca Citron, Cristina Cacciari, Arthur Jacobs
Lancaster University - UK, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia - Italy,
Free University Berlin - Germany
Neuroscientific research on language has shown that the emotional content of
verbal material affects language comprehension (e.g., Kissler et al., 2006). However, this research mostly focused on literal language, despite the pervasiveness of
figurative expressions in everyday communication. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between affect and figurative language, by focusing on very
frequent and conventional expressions, namely idioms (e.g., she spilled the beans).
In an event-related design, functional magnetic resonance imaging was recorded
while participants silently read sentences for comprehension, and occasionally
responded to yes/no questions. Ninety idioms and 90 literal sentences (LS; both
divided in 30 positively valenced, 30 negatively valenced and 30 neutral ones) were
randomly presented, in 3 runs. Idioms and LS had different meanings but were
matched on length, familiarity, concreteness, emotional valence and arousal. This
study was exploratory with respect to a possible relationship between affect and
idioms; however, we expected emotional idioms to activate affect-related brain
regions more strongly than neutral idioms. Furthermore, in line with a recent
study showing that taste metaphors are more emotionally engaging than their
literal counterparts (Citron & Goldberg, 2014), we may expect idioms to engage
emotional brain regions more strongly than LS. Finally, in line with neuroscientific
research on idioms (cf. Cacciari & Papagno, 2012), we expected stronger activation
of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) bilaterally in response to idioms than LS.
Results showed enhanced activation of the IFG bilaterally, the right pre-central gyrus and the left amygdala in response to idioms > LS. These results are in line with
previous research showing that idioms require more processing resources to be
understood than LS; at the same time, idioms seem to be more emotionally engaging than LS, interestingly corroborating and generalising a recent similar finding
on metaphors (C&G, 2014). Furthermore, enhanced activation of the left pre- and
post-central gyri and the right superior temporal gyrus was found in response to
emotional > neutral idioms. Hence, the former do not seem to engage emotionrelated brain regions more strongly than than the latter, but rather sensory-motor cortices and areas associated with semantic processing. Finally, no significant
clusters were found for the same contrast within LS. Thus, idioms may be more
salient and therefore better differentiated at the neural level than LS. This study
was the first to explore the relationship between affect and idioms at the neural
level; the results and their implications will be further discussed.
291
O2.4 The role of grammar and culture in shaping emotion metaphors. A case study on two Australian languages
Maïa Ponsonnet
Dynamique du Langage (CNRS/Lyon 2) and Australian National University
Most languages in the world can represent emotions by means of analogies with
more concrete things – that is, they use emotion “metaphors” (Lakoff, 1987). English, for instance, depicts fear as an enemy (“fight one’s fears”), and anger as a
liquid (“overwhelming anger”) – among other comparisons (Kövecses, 2000). Metaphors normally rely historically on shared conceptual analogies – e.g. a comparison between fear and enemies culturally shared by English speakers. Therefore,
shared cultural representations of emotions contribute to determine which emotion metaphors are found in each language (Kövecses, 2005).
However, other factors may contribute to shape up metaphors: in some languages, some grammatical properties seem to block certain metaphors, so that
the language itself may influence the range of emotion metaphors available
(Whorf, 1956). For instance, the fear and anger metaphors above are possible because English has emotion nouns. By contrast, Dalabon, a severally endangered
language of northern Australia, has remarkably few emotion nouns. At the same
time, unlike most languages in the world, it never depicts emotions metaphorically as things or persons, but only as states (Ponsonnet, 2014). In Dalabon, one
can only say things comparable to “he loves”, never “he is in love”. Therefore, emotions can never be the subjects or objects of sentences, and this seems to block
many metaphors. Should we conclude that there is a cause-to-effect relationship
between the absence of nouns and the absence of certain metaphors?
Data from Barunga Kriol, the English-based creole that replaces Dalabon in the
post-colonial era, suggests that this cause-to-effect relationship is not strict.
Barunga Kriol has more emotion nouns than Dalabon, yet its range of emotion
metaphors presents comparable restrictions. Given that the two languages are
spoken by the same communities, hence in a similar cultural context, this restriction must result from cultural constraints.
Based on first-hand data collected between 2007 and 2014, this presentation
will analyze the emotion metaphors found in Dalabon and Barunga Kriol, so as
to highlight the respective impact of cultural and grammatical factors on these
metaphors.
292
O2.4 Language and Conceptual Knowledge:
how might the two interact to support emotion perception?
Emma Portch, Jelena Havelka, Charity Brown, Russell Hutter
University of Leeds, UK
Conceptual knowledge may provide a top-down constraint for the perception of
emotional expression in faces (Barrett, Lindquist & Gendron, 2007). Perhaps due
to their referential nature, language labels (e.g. ‘sad’) are both responsible for organising and re-activating relevant conceptual knowledge. As such, language manipulations can be used to explore the types of conceptual knowledge available
to perceivers and the way activated knowledge may influence perception. Several
competing accounts exist. Construction theorists suggest that access to meaningful, semantic information about emotion is important for perception (Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau & Russell, 2006 e.g. the previously experienced causes
and consequences of experiencing a particular emotional state). Here language
labels play an indirect role, recruiting useful semantic knowledge. In contrast, label theorists suggest that language itself explicitly directs attention towards the
perceptual, category-diagnostic features of an emotional face (e.g. smiles of happiness). Here language labels are viewed as inseparable from perceptual forms
of conceptual knowledge and therefore play a direct role in perception (Lupyan
& Thompson-Schill, 2012). We use a modified semantic satiation paradigm to explore these accounts (Lindquist et al., 2006). Participants were required to repeat
a word, out loud, either 3 or 30 times before deciding whether two faces matched
or mismatched in emotional expression. Across four experiments participants repeated either emotion words (e.g. ‘sad’), neutral words with no emotional connotations (e.g. ‘paper’), and/or non-words, with no semantic basis (e.g. ‘Borbi’). The
semantic satiation manipulation would only reduce access to meaningful emotional knowledge after massed repetition of an emotion label. In contrast, access
to emotion labels themselves might be reduced after massed repetition of any
word, as a result of verbal interference (Roberson & Davidoff, 2000). Two trends
emerge in the combined data, both supportive of a direct role of language (labelling account). Judgement accuracy was reduced after massed repetition of any
word, suggesting that the repetition manipulation instated verbal interference,
preventing access to decision-necessary labels. At both levels of repetition, participants also showed facilitated performance after repeating an emotion label
that matched both expressions at test. This may indicate that overtly repeated
labels direct attention towards category-diagnostic features, speeding decisions
when the face stimuli present a match. Although the present results support a
direct role of language, we discuss the possibility that language plays multiple
roles, dependent on the context in which emotion perception occurs.
293
O2.4 The Cultural Shaping of Emotion Talk among Chinese
Michelle Yik, Ceilia Z. Chen
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The cultural psychiatry literature suggests that somatization tends to occur among
people who are more acculturated to the Chinese culture. However, recent studies
on the relationship between acculturation to the Chinese culture and somatization reached inconsistent conclusions (see Mak & Zane, 2004; Tsai, Simeonova, &
Watanabe, 2004). For instance, Ryder et al. (2008) reported consistent psychologization among their Canadian patients but inconsistent somatization among
their Mainland Chinese patients. In the present study, we compared the word use
of the Chinese subjects who varied in their degree of acculturation when they
described their experience during a recent illness episode. Overall, the Chinese
subjects used more emotion words (43%) than somatic words (20%). In contrast
to prior findings, the more acculturated Mainland Chinese (N = 70) used significantly more emotion words than did the less acculturated Hong Kong Chinese (N
= 82). The latter used more somatic-emotion words (e.g., uncomfortable, suffered,
lacking energy). No significant group difference was noted in the somatic words
category. The present results suggest that future research should be conducted
to explore factors in addition to acculturation in understanding Chinese somatization.
294
O2.5 Colour choices and colour representation as a function of
expressed emotion
Nele Dael1, Perseguers Marie-Noelle2, Cynthia Marchand2
Jean-Philippe Antonietti2, Christine Mohr1
University of Lausanne1, Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne2
Stable colour-emotion associations are postulated to influence numerous aspects
of colour cognition. Folklore assumptions in popular media as well as in scientific
studies often state specific hues as colour properties related to specific emotions
(e.g., red and anger). Colour, as well as emotion, can however be understood in
terms of multiple components, and mappings along different continua have been
suggested to contribute to colour-emotion associations. For example, a strong
association has been found between the brightness component of colour and
affective valence (e.g., Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994), supposedly driving behavior
responses congruent with the affective meaning associated to the colour.
In two studies we investigated the effect of emotionally salient information on
colour cognition. In the first study, we examined whether a colour’s appropriateness depends on the target’s affective properties. 28 participants selected colours varying in hue, brightness and saturation to go best with bodily expressions
of elated joy and panic fear. Results showed that expressed emotion influenced
judged colour appropriateness congruent with the depicted emotional content:
colour chosen for the joy expressions were brighter and more saturated than
those for the fear expressions. In addition, colours along the red-yellow hue spectrum were deemed more appropriate for joy expressions and cyan-bluish hues for
fear expressions. These results support the role of emotion in colour choices along
all colour properties, confirming that a valence-brightness association is present
in such ecological settings as bodily emotion expression, but that saturation and
hue are also but to a lesser extent related to valence. In the second study we investigated whether such bodily expressions of emotion also affected brightness
reproduction. Participants mind-matched the brightness level of previously seen
upper-body clothing of actors expressing four emotions. The estimation of brightness was higher for positive and high arousal (elated joy) emotional expressions
than for negative (hot anger, sadness) and low arousal (relief, sadness) emotional
expressions. This study shows that emotional expression biased colour reproduction in line with the valence-brightness association.
The current findings from both studies indicate that emotionally salient information affects both higher and lower colour cognition, beyond mere perception.
These further support the existence of colour-emotion associations along basic
components, such as affective valence and colour brightness, beyond one-to-one
mapping and highlighting large variabilities especially regarding hue.
295
O2.5 Effects of color on emotion: Evidence from self-report ratings
and physiological measures
Daniel Oberfeld, Lisa Wilms
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Previous studies of emotional effects of color often failed to control all of the three
dimensions of color (hue, brightness, and saturation) (cf. Kaiser, 1984). In addition,
studies often asked to rate the emotional meaning of color stimuli (e.g., Wright
& Rainwater, 1962), rather than assessing the actual emotional state of the subject while being exposed to a specific color. To address these shortcomings, we
created a three dimensional space of chromatic colors by varying the hue (blue,
green, red), brightness, and saturation in a factorial design. The 27 chromatic colors, plus three brightness-matched achromatic colors, were presented with a relatively large visual angle (18° × 18°). Participants (N = 65) viewed each color for 30
s, and then rated their current emotional state on the SAM scales for valence and
arousal. Skin conductance and the heart rate were measured continuously. The
emotion ratings showed that saturated and bright colors result in higher arousal.
The hue also had a significant effect on arousal, which increased from gray over
blue and green to red. The saturation had a stronger effect on arousal than the
hue, compatible with previous finding (Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994). The ratings
of valence were highest for saturated and bright colors, and also depended on
the hue. Interaction effects of the three color dimensions were observed for both
arousal and valence. For instance, the valence ratings were higher for blue than
for the remaining hues, but only for highly saturated colors. The saturation had a
significant effect on the skin conductance response (SCR), with saturated colors
causing a stronger SCR. The SCR amplitude also increased from blue over green to
red, but this effect did not reach significance. The correlation between the arousal
ratings and SCR was significant but weak. For the chromatic colors, the three color
dimensions had no significant effects on the heart rate, but the heart rate was
significantly slower while viewing achromatic rather than chromatic colors. Taken
together, the results confirm that color causes emotional responses. The effect of
color on emotion is not only determined by the hue, as is often assumed, but by all
of the three color dimensions as well as their interactions.
296
O2.5 Choosing the negative: Introducing a novel paradigm to
measure curiosity for negative images
Suzanne Oosterwijk
To date, traditional models of emotion have largely overlooked the phenomenon
that people are often curious of negative information. In this talk I present a series of four studies that utilized a novel choice paradigm to examine this phenomenon. This paradigm operationalized curiosity for negative stimuli as an active
choice to approach and explore negative images. Subjects were presented with
pairs of small images displayed shortly on the screen that combined neutral or
positive images with highly arousing, negative images. The negative images held
negative scenes with social (e.g., war scenes), physical harm (e.g., mutilation) or
natural threat (e.g., attacking shark) content. In each trial, subjects were asked
which image in the pair they wanted to view and explore in full screen format.
In addition to the choice task, subjects rated the images on several dimensions,
including interest, arousal, negativity and complexity.
Across all studies, the choice for negative images was significantly correlated with
interest ratings. In terms of behavior, social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, subjects preferred social negative images over neutral images. When paired with positive social
images, negative social images were chosen on average in about 50% of the trials.
Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral
images, but were chosen in about 50% of the trials. These results were replicated
across different studies, including a study that presented short descriptions of
images, instead of small visual cues.
These findings counter assumptions of rigid relationships between negative stimuli and avoidance behaviors. People do not consistently avoid negative information, but deliberately subject themselves to this kind of content, in particular when images display negative social situations. Since the stimuli used in the
present studies were taken from stimulus sets often used in emotion research,
these findings may have important methodological implications. Furthermore,
these studies forward a new paradigm that can measure a phenomenon that has
high real-life relevance, but has so far been neglected as a topic of investigation
in affective science.
297
O2.5 Does Interest Makes You Miss the Forest for the Trees?
Billy Sung, Jennifer Yih
University of Queensland, Vanderbilt University
Recent research suggests that interest is an emotion that motivates the learning
and exploration of new, unfamiliar things (Silvia, 2008). According to the novelty
categorization theory (Förster, Marguc, & Gillebaart, 2010), broadened attentional
scope and a global processing style facilitate the understanding of novel information. Thus, interest should broaden attentional scope, which is consistent with the
idea that positive emotions serve the general purpose of broadening attention
and cognition (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). However, research suggests that interest is not necessarily a pleasant emotion, and that it focuses attention towards
novelty (Turner & Silvia, 2006). Across three studies, we showed that interest and
the predisposition to experience interest are associated with narrowed attentional focus.
In Study 1, we used a directed imagery to induce either interest or a neutral state,
and subsequently, participants completed the 16-item global-local visual processing task (Kimchi & Palmer, 1982). When compared to the Neutral condition, the
Interest condition evoked significantly higher interest (p = .003), surprise (p < .001),
awe (p < .001), and amusement (p < .001). Despite the elicitation of these positive
emotions, the Interest condition showed a significantly narrowed attentional bias
compared to the Neutral condition (p = .028).
In Study 2a and 2b, we explored whether traits associated with interest predispose
individuals to narrowed attention. The visual processing task was administrated
before participants completed the 12-item boredom proneness scale (Vodanovich
et al., 2005) and the 10-item trait curiosity scale (Litman, 2008), respectively. The
need for external stimulation subscale for boredom proneness was significantly
related to narrowed attention (p = .032). Furthermore, trait curiosity and its interest subscale were associated with narrowed attention (p = .023 and p = .008,
respectively).
Both interest and awe can have pleasant affective tone and involve an appraisal
of challenge to current mental structure (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Silvia, 2006). We
therefore used a writing task in Study 3 to elicit these emotions and investigated their effects on attention. When compared to awe, interest resulted in significantly more narrowed attention (p = .043). Taken together, our findings contradict
contemporary theories by demonstrating that both state and trait interest are
associated with narrowed attention instead of broadened attention.
298
O2.6 Romantic Resonance in a Restless World
Aaron Ben-Ze’ev
University of Haifa
There are conflicting theoretical considerations and empirical findings regarding
the possibility of long-term love. Some propose that romantic love can only be of
limited duration as the frequency with which a couple has sex declines significantly over time, in part because of the crucial role of change in emotions (Spinoza, Ethics, 1677; Baumeister & Bratslavsky, “Passion, Intimacy, and Time,” 1999). Love
is a trade-off, the prevailing wisdom goes: We can either soar briefly to the highest
heights or we can achieve long-term contentment (Berscheid, “Love in the Fourth
Dimension,” 2010). There are, however, other studies that espouse the enduring
nature of love (O’Leary et al., “Is Long-Term Love a Rare Phenomenon?” 2010; Acevedo et al., “Neural Correlates of Marital Satisfaction,” 2012).
This dilemma is examined by proposing a conceptual framework describing essential differences between short-term and long-term love: (a) romantic intensity
and profundity, (b) emotional resonance and resonance activity, (c) hedone (feeling good) and eudaimonia (flourishing), and (d) instrumental and intrinsic activities. In the features underlying long-term relationships— romantic profundity,
eudaimonic flourishing, intrinsic activities, and resonance activity—time-consuming activities are essential. My discussion focuses on (a) and (b).
The intensity-profundity distinction expresses two aspects of romantic experiences: a momentary peak of passionate desire, and ongoing shared emotional
experiences and activities essential to romantic and personal flourishing. Time
is constitutive in romantic profundity and destructive for romantic intensity.
Whereas change is essential for romantic intensity, development and growth are
crucial for romantic profundity. Romantic resonance is the tendency of a romantic connection to amplify its profundity through mutual interactions. Emotional
resonance, based mainly on attractiveness, is central in initiating love; resonance
activity is developed through the process of joint activities. Resonance is both a
condition and an achievement of love and deep-seated types of resonance can be
cultivated (Krebs, «Wie ein Bogenstrich», 2009).
The need for time-consuming activities in romantic relationships is contrary to
the prevailing attitude in our current high-speed and restless society (Rosa, Social
Acceleration, 2013) where timing is more significant than time. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that spouses’ investment of time in their marriage has decreased over time. The lack of such an investment impedes romantic and personal
flourishing. This failure prevails more in lower socio-economic levels (Finkel et al.,
“Suffocation of Marriage,” 2014). Long-term love is possible when you give time a
chance, and romantic profundity, resonance activity, eudaimonic flourishing, and
intrinsic activities are present.
299
O2.6 Love and the Law
Elizabeth Brake
Arizona State University
The free love tradition sees state recognition of marriage as in tension with the
spontaneity of love. Marriage abolitionists have more recently argued that the
state should not legitimate relationships, both on grounds of non-discrimination and on free love grounds of burdening the free choice to love (Card, 1996).
While accepting that the state should not discriminate among relationship types
(especially on the basis of heterosexual marriage), Brake (2012) has argued that
caring relationships are politically significant goods and that their legal support
is required as a matter of justice. Accordingly, Brake (2012) argues for a right to
marriage-like legal structures protecting relationships in certain contexts (such
as immigration).
Here, I examine whether the state can support caring relationships without compromising love or attitudinal care, and, if so, what social and legal institutions are
required to support caring relationships. I consider and reject the objections that
legal supports for caring relationships wrongly burden the choice to love, that they
inappropriately contractualize altruistic relationships, or that they must psychologically threaten the spontaneous emotional content of such relationships. Next,
I note that marriage-like legal structures and family law are important means for
supporting caring relationships. However, I argue that providing access to caring
relationships for elderly and invalid citizens is equally a matter of justice and one
requiring different social and legal supports than those provided by marriage-like
law. How can the state support love and care relationships for citizens isolated in
their homes?
300
O2.6 Jealousy in Horace’s Odes
Ruth Rothaus Caston
There are many examples of jealousy in Western literature that center on its telltale signs: the lover’s suspicious nature, an obsession with a beloved’s fidelity, and
the need to find clues and evidence to substantiate the mistrust. The same is true
of some examples from ancient literature as well, in particular Roman love elegy.
But there is also a series of Odes by Horace that seems clearly to be about jealousy and yet does not exhibit any of the features listed above. David Konstan
even thinks that one of these Odes offers the earliest clear example of jealousy
in ancient literature. What, then, is the basis for identifying these Odes as being
about jealousy? While the scenario in these poems does satisfy some of the core
criteria for jealousy (see Caston 2012, Intro.), it is also quite different from other
treatments in ancient literature. In other literature, jealousy is described as part
of an unfolding story whose veracity the reader cannot easily assess. In Horace,
by contrast, jealousy is told retrospectively, with a certain amount of distance and
mature perspective on the emotional upheavals of the narrator’s youth. Unlike
the speaker in elegy, the Horatian narrator adopts an assured and confident tone
that comes from no longer being in the grip of the passion. At the same time,
he also evokes his past feelings, both in connection with what he regards as the
mistreatment by women and with jealousy’s relationship to anger and its role in
Rome’s history. He thus suggests that jealousy is not simply something personal
or relevant to his own past experiences, but something salient to Rome’s history
more generally.
301
O2.6 Contempt in Colonial Literature: the Mysterious Case of the
Eastern Woman
Isabelle Pitteloud
Contempt is of particular importance when looking at how colonial literature
represents and defines the indigenous people so-called inferiority. In 19th French
literature, cultural and biological racism tends to legitimate the European domination in the East. Writers fascination for Eastern culture as a vestige of ancient
Egyptian and Greek cultures concurrently express a special mixture of contempt
and admiration. As all travels to the East in 19th century highlight the experience
of prostitution as a way to “really” meet indigenous people, one interesting case
of such a mixture is given by the beginning of what can be called sexual tourism.
Using the literary technique of close reading, I will first consider Gustave Flaubert’s relationship with Kuchuk Hanem – a famous Egyptian dancer and prostitute – as described in the travel report of his tour in Near East and North Africa. I
will then contrast that report with Gerard de Nerval’s experience with Zeynab – a
javanese slave he bought in Egypt (or so he says in his travelogue) and whom he
tried to teach French. I will especially point out the struggle between love and
contempt when it comes to sexual intercourse with Oriental women. I will also
show the role of such narratives for Romantic writers trying to escape Western
prejudice against other cultures and to reverse it against their own culture.
302
Emotions and Values in Sentimentalist Thought
Professor Justin D’ Arms
Ohio State University, Columbus USA
Philosophical sentimentalists since David Hume have hoped to explain values by
appeal to emotional responses. They say that what it is for something to be good,
right or beautiful, is for it to elicit (or, perhaps, to make appropriate) some relevant emotional response in people. Some sentimentalists suggest that the central function of evaluative thought is to regulate conduct indirectly, through the
regulation of emotion. This talk explores connections between this philosophical
approach and the empirical study of the nature of emotions. I demonstrate that
the most plausible forms of sentimentalism are committed to some controversial but perhaps true claims about the nature of emotional reactions. And I try
to articulate an empirical hypothesis about emotion regulation on which certain
arguments for sentimentalism seem to depend.
305
Symposium in honor of Nico Frijda - 10.7.2015
What emotions really are: The legacy of Nico Frijda
Prof Klaus Scherer, Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva
Prof Batja Mesquita, Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven
Prof Antony Manstead, School of Psychology, Cardiff University
Prof Keith Oatley, Dept of Human Development & Applied Psychology, University of
Toronto
Prof Ed Tan, Dept of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam
Prof Kathleen Higgins, Dept of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
Organised by: Prof Agneta Fischer, University of Amsterdam
& Dr Carien van Reekum, University of Reading.
The question of what emotions really are has occupied philosophers and scientists since ancient Greece. The publication in 1986 of Nico Frijda’s seminal book,
simply entitled «The Emotions», came at the start of an explosion in the study
of emotion in psychological sciences. Nico’s enduring contributions to emotion
research include among other the notion of action readiness as a core outcome of
appraisal, control precedence, his formulation of the Laws of Emotion (1988, 2007)
and, more recently, ur-emotions (2011, with Jerry Parrott). Throughout his career,
Nico inspired and strongly supported junior researchers to develop and voice their
views on emotion. In this symposium, former students and close friends present
their theoretical explorations of emotion, many of which resulted directly from
their collaborations with Nico.
Talks:
Klaus Scherer: Defining emotion: Concerns, action readiness, and control precedence
Batja Mesquita: Emotions: Culture or Nature?
Antony Manstead: The place of appraisal in emotion
Keith Oatley (through video): Emotions and the free will
Ed Tan: Sentiment and the reality of fiction film
Kathleen Higgins: Aesthetic Emotions in Commemoration
307
Symposium S5.1
Executive Functions and Emotions
Conveners
Madeline Pe, Peter Kuppens
KU Leuven
Since early appraisal theories of emotions, it has been widely recognized that cognition plays a critical role in human emotion. In recent years, the essential function of cognition in emotion has also been reflected in the integral role of executive functions in the experience and regulation of emotions. Executive functions is
a term for several basic general cognitive processes that are responsible for the regulation of thought and behavior. However, in understanding executive functions,
it is crucial to take into account the cognitive architecture in which they work.
Working memory is characterized as a limited-capacity system, and executive
functions play the key role of controlling the contents of working memory. Given
that there are various internal and external information competing for access into
working memory, executive functions help determine which information would
be actively maintained in working memory and therefore become the focus of
attention. What is at the focus of one’s attention partly determines the emotions
that are currently experienced. However, for a long time, most studies investigating executive functions do not consider that the information being manipulated
in working memory may have emotional content. This is a critical drawback especially if the goal is to understand executive functions and its relation to emotional
experience. Indeed, most situations are appraised as having either a positive or
a negative meaning, which then determines the valence of the emotions experienced—whether they are more positive or negative. From this perspective, we
argue that executive functions operating on emotional information are critical in
elucidating the relation between executive functions and emotional functioning,
and this relation has significant implications to well-being.
In this symposium, we will present five areas of study that aim to acquaint the
audience about the current state of research on executive control and emotion.
We start the symposium with evidence that emotional content cannot be ignored
in the study of executive control and working memory. The first speaker will present a meta-analysis on the effect of emotional information on working memory performance. This will then be followed by a series of empirical studies that
examine the differential effects of emotional information on working memory
among healthy participants and those suffering from PTSD and depression. The
meta-analysis also shows that there has been an explosion of interest in affective executive control and working memory, with researchers using different tasks
to measure the various executive functions. Despite this advancement, the psychometric properties of the measures used to study affective executive control
are still unknown. The second presenter will address this shortcoming in her talk.
From a series of studies that utilized various research methodologies (trait questionnaires, experience sampling, and experimental studies), the third speaker will
demonstrate that affective executive control is a component that is involved in
emotional functioning. If executive functions is a critical component of emotional functioning, then enhancing executive control is one route towards improving emotional health. The fourth speaker will discuss this possibility by sharing
results on an executive control training, and its effects on rumination and depression. Finally, to understand the underlying mechanisms involved in cognitive processing and emotional functioning, the last speaker will demonstrate that the
observed positivity effect in attention and memory among older adults can be
linked to activations in specific brain regions.
308
Working memory: Is it affected by affective contexts?
Susanne Schweizer, Tim Dalgleish
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
AIM: Working memory (WM) has long been understood to be fundamental to
many types of higher cognitive functions. Yet, despite the fact that our everyday
environments frequently require these cognitive functions to be performed in affective contexts – much of the goal-relevant as well as distracting information we
process has affective characteristics — the “conative, emotional and motivational control of WM” though “crucial”, as Baddeley (2003) noted —has mostly been
ignored. The past decade, however, has seen an exponential increase in studies
investigating WM in affective contexts. Our aim is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-science in affective WM followed by an overview of a series of studies
we have conducted to extend these findings.
METHODS PART I: We will present findings from our meta-analytic review of the
effects of affective memoranda and distractors on WM performance and the role
of potential moderating factors including valence and psychopathological status are discussed. The findings from the behavioural meta-analysis are complemented by a second meta-analysis of the neuroimaging data investigating the
neural substrates of affective WM.
RESULTS PART I: The meta-analyses revealed that there is an effect of emotion
on WM performance (both accuracy and reaction time). However, the effects are
complex with a moderating effect of valence. At a neural level affective compared
to neutral WM is associated with increased activation of the salience network and
reduced activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
METHODS PART II: In a series of experiments we aimed to extend the findings
from this meta-analysis using valenced complex span tasks in both healthy
controls and individuals suffering from affective psychopathology (i.e., depression
and posttraumatic stress disorder – PTSD).
RESULTS PART II: Our results show that a valenced version of the classical reading
span (Engle et al., 1992) task produced mixed results across healthy participants
and those suffering from PTSD and depression. That is, healthy controls showed
an emotion enhancement effect of WM performance, which was absent in those
with a history of depression and PTSD. In contrast, a different complex span task
requiring the performance of a distractor task (i.e., visuospatial search task) and
a target task (i.e., storage of words) in the presence of either neutral or affective
distractors showed a significantly impairing effect of negative distractors on WM
performance in both healthy individuals and those with a history of PTSD.
CONCLUSIONS: We discuss the implications of these findings for both affective
neuroscience and clinical science.
309
Executive functions and the processing of neutral and
emotional stimuli: A psychometric approach
Annette Brose1, Madeline Pe2, Peter Kuppens2
Humboldt University1, KU Leuven2
Emotion regulation requires executive control (EC) and various literatures have
established links between EC and (deficient) emotion regulation. For example,
individuals who suffer from depression have inhibitory deficits, and depleting EC
resources in experiments has consequences in the emotional domain. Despite
much convincing research in this field, there seem to be two shortcomings. First,
the number of EC tasks that are being used in this field is quite vast and the task
vary in content (e.g., whether the stimuli are emotional or neutral). Second, the
psychometric properties of those tasks are often unknown. Therefore the two
aims of this study are (1) to select tasks in line with theoretical considerations and
in accordance with distinguishable aspects of EC (updating, switching, and inhibition), and (2) to investigate the psychometric properties of those tasks. Results
from a first study that focused on the updating component of EC are very promising. In this study, 200 students (average age = 18.32) participated in a threewave longitudinal study. In each wave the students worked on an updating task (4
blocks) with positive and negative stimuli. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed
good psychometric properties of this task. Fit indices indicated an excellent fit at
each wave (RMSEAs < .01, SRMRs < .01, CFQs > .99). A model that included all three
waves revealed strict measurement invariance across waves (RMSEA = .04, SRMR
= .04, CFQ = .98). That is, updating emotional material was measured reliably in
this study and longitudinally across waves, which justifies the use of this task in
substantive research very well. Additional analyses will distinguish between the
stimuli’s valence. The other aspects of EF will be examined in future studies with
the goal to provide a battery of tasks for research on EC and emotional functioning.
310
Emotional updating ability is associated with better
emotional functioning
Madeline Pe, Peter Kuppens
KU Leuven
Previous research has emphasized the critical role of cognitive content in emotional experience. For example, negative cognitions are strongly related to higher
levels of negative emotions. Here, we argue that in addition to cognitive content,
the processes that function to change emotional content in working memory also
has an essential part in emotional experience. We suggest updating of emotional
information in working memory (WM) is one such process. We provide evidence
for this hypothesis in a series of studies that examined the relationship of emotional updating ability and emotional functioning. In Study 1, our findings demonstrated that individuals with high emotional updating ability experienced lower
levels of negative emotions and higher levels of positive emotions in their daily
lives. Using trait questionnaires (Study 2), a 7-day experience sampling design
(Study 3), and an experimental study (Study 4), we found consistent evidence that
individuals with high emotional updating ability showed greater emotional recovery regardless of the emotion regulatory strategies they used. Finally, in a longitudinal study (Study 5), we found that under high levels of stress, the depressive
symptoms of individuals with high emotional updating ability did not increase
four months and one year later. These results demonstrated that emotional updating ability plays a critical role in emotions.
311
Gaining control of your emotions – The influence of cognitive
control training on stress reactivity and rumination
Kristof Hoorelbeke, Ernst Koster, Marie-Anne Vanderhasselt,
Siebren Callewaert, Ineke Demeyer
Ghent University
Cognitive control impairments have been identified as an underlying mechanism
for rumination, a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy that has been linked
to sustained negative affect and forms a key predictor of depression. Literature
suggests that cognitive control training (CCT) targeting working memory functioning can increase effectiveness of existing antidepressant treatments to reduce
rumination. However, it remains unclear whether CCT can also be implemented
as a preventive intervention for depression, increasing resilience. For this purpose,
at-risk undergraduate students (high trait ruminators) were divided into a CCT
or active control condition, consisting of 10 online training sessions. Working memory functioning was assessed preceding and following the training and emotional reactivity to a lab stressor was assessed directly following training. Finally,
at four weeks follow-up, brooding – the maladaptive form of rumination – was
re-assessed in response to a naturalistic stressor (examination period). Although
we did not find direct transfer effects of CCT on working memory functioning,
increase in working memory functioning following CCT was related to post-training brooding levels while controlling for baseline levels of brooding (β = -.23, p <
.05). Participants receiving CCT demonstrated lower stress reactivity in the lab as
assessed by a behavioral measure of rumination (positive thoughts: p < .05, η² =
.11; negative thoughts: p < .05, η² = .09) and self-reported levels of negative affect
(p < .01, η² = .16). Moreover, participants receiving CCT reported a decrease in brooding following a naturalistic stressor at follow-up (p < .05, η² = .11), indicating temporal stability of our findings. These findings suggest that CCT can be considered
a promising preventive intervention to reduce stress reactivity and rumination.
312
Mechanisms of older adults’ positivity effect in
attention and memory
Mara Mather
University of Southern California
Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past
choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition,
when shown positive and negative stimuli, older adults are more likely to favor
the positive over negative stimuli in attention and memory than younger adults
do. These age-related positivity effects may be due to an increased focus on emotion regulation as people get older and feel that time left in life is more limited. In
a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we found that amygdala functional connectivity with medial prefrontal regions at rest predicted the subsequent
positivity effect in older adults, suggesting that individual differences in prefrontal interactions with the amygdala at rest are associated with how older adults
process emotional stimuli. In addition, in a behavioral study, we found that the
positivity effect in memory is amplified when people focus on having limited time
left in life, consistent with the notion that older adults’ sense of having less time
left in life is an important factor in their increased focus on positive rather than
negative stimuli.
313
Symposium S5.2
Connecting Identity and Emotion as Affective Experiences
Conveners
Andreas Schneider, Tobias Schröder
Texas Tech University, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences
This symposium introduces work on emotions within the symbolic interactionist framework of Affect
Control Theory (ACT) and its measurement model of affective responses. Osgood identified Evaluation,
Potency, and Activity (EPA) as culturally universal dimensions of affective response. This measurement
model translates the qualitative face of ACT into a quantitative model that is operationalized to the
extent that it allows computer simulation.
Explaining ACT with the words of the founder (David Heise. 2007. Expressive Order: Confirming Sentiments in Social Actions. New York: Springer pp. 3-4): “here’s the essence of affect control theory.
- You (and every individual) create events to confirm the sentiments that you have about the identities
of yourself and others in the current situation.
- Your emotions reflect your sentiment about yourself and the kinds of validations or invalidations that
you are experiencing at the moment.
- If your actions don’t work to maintain your sentiments, then you re-conceptualize the identities of
others or yourself.
- Confirming sentiments about your current identity actualizes your sense of self, or else produces
inauthenticity that you resolve by enacting compensating identities.
- In the process of building events to confirm your sentiments, you perform social roles that operate
the basic institutions of society”[bullets in original]
The symposium will feature the following contributions:
Kathryn Lively addresses a classic and central theme in the sociology of emotions: emotion norms. Emotion norms are a result of social action in which people try to confirm their identities. She addresses
the central contribution of symbolic interactionism: investigating the social component of emotion
caused by actors being interdependent with others in their production and maintenance of emotions.
At minimum, the social situation entails an actor emitting a behavior towards an object person. This
(ABO) event is the smallest unit of symbolic interactionist analysis. ACT extends this model unit by
including emotions that are experienced and mutually seen by actors and objects of the interaction.
Lively employs the program INTERACT, a mathematical operationalization of ACT, to demonstrate that
identities in social action generate characteristic emotions that correspond to emotion norms identified in qualitative research.
Andreas Schneider based his work on the same ACT paradigm: emotions are social products of identities in interaction. However, by looking at people who seek acts of submission, he assumes that people
congregate in order to achieve a specific esthetic experience. Matching people by the EPA pattern of
their self-attitudes, he compares the esthetic representation of submission in photographic images.
Like Schneider, Linda Francis looks at individuals in situations that people generally avoid. While
Schneider investigates how people actively create such situations to confirm their self-attitudes, Francis studies people that find themselves in unpleasant situations against their will. Francis hereby
addresses dissonance, a classic problem in psychology, with the ACT concept of deflection. In her research she uses data of 50 semi-structured interviews with bereaved cancer caregivers to investigate
how grief can be seen as a result of identities in social interaction.
Rohan Lulham and Daniel Shank brighten things up when they turn the topic from emotional experiences resulting from the loss of power to the empowerment people can achieve by using gadgets.
While Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory only worked for negative states, the ACT principle of
deflection allows the investigation of positive affective gain identities receive when they interact with
fancy gadgets. The most important extension of ACT, and symbolic interactionism in general, is that
Lulham and Shank present in their research is the treatment of material objects as interactants.
Kimberly Rogers, Tobias Schröder and Jesse Hoey provide a much vaster extension of ACT. Using Bayesian probability theory, they generalize ACT into their modification as BayesACT that goes beyond a
language-based investigation prevalent in symbolic interactionism. They demonstrate how this new
Bayesian approach can show how emotions serve as signals in the communication of identity. Their
contribution leads us back to the beginning where we extended the minimum event of the symbolic
interactionist perspective (ABO) with the emotions experienced and communicated by the identities
of actors and objects of an action. This extension is crucial for investigating social components of emotions.
314
Characteristic Emotions: An ACT explanation of the origin
of emotion norms
Kathryn Liveley
Dartmouth College
Over the last three decades scholarship documenting the existence of emotion
norms – rules that govern both our experience and expression of emotion - has
flourished. Qualitative scholars have argued that emotion norms differ according
to settings (such as law firms), to social roles (such as attorney), as well as to social
characteristics (such as gender) (Pierce 1995; also see Cottingham 2014, Harlow
2003, Hochschild 1983, Wingfield 2010, among others). One question that has plagued many of these studies, however, is where do emotion norms originate (also
see Ridgeway 2006)? A recent extenstion of affect control theory (Heise 2007; Lively & Heise 2014), suggests that the static emotion norms that qualitative scholars often cite – such as feeling sad at a funeral or happy at a wedding – may very
well be a function of characteristic emotions. Characteristic emotions are those
feelings actors are likely to feel when their social identities – in these cases, mourner and bride, respectively – are perfectly confirmed, something that rarely occurs
during the course of embedded interactions. The goal of this study is to test the
degree to which the characteristic emotions generated by INTERACT compare
with observed emotion norms documented in existing qualitative data. This work
contributes to affect control theory by developing the theoretical importance of
characteristic emotions and to the sociology of emotion more generally, by addressing the origins of emotion norms.
315
Esthetic Experiences of Submission
Andreas Schneider
Texas Tech University
Esthetic experiences integrate subjective realities and objectively shared imagery.
In the tradition of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, esthetics are seen as shared rules of interpretation that establish contexts and elicit affective experiences.
The esthetic experience hereby entails both, a repository of significance or value,
and a sensory experience appreciated by the individual. This synthesis in esthetics
is summarized in Hegel’s theory of art as “the sensuous embodiment of the idea.”
Empirical measures of affective experiences in subjective realities provide quantifications of experiences that are matched with objective photographic images.
Merging both assessments of experience, I provide a holistic assessment of the
esthetic experience.
Measuring affective responses subjects were asked to list core attributes describing themselves in a submissive context. They used the Twenty Statement Test
(TST) of Kuhn and MacPartland (1954) to identify relevant self-attitudes. These
attitudes were then quantitatively assessed with Charles Osgood’s (1962) semantic ratings of affective responses: evaluation (E), describing the goodness versus
badness, and on the potency (P) and activity (A) dimensions.
The shared imagery is represented in photography of subjects in the same submissive context. Developing a new methodology of visual sociology the mechanics of gestures are analyzed and matched with quantified subjective experience
of the subjects.
Data and images were collected in the context of religious submission. I suggest
that further tests should investigate if submission is experienced in the same
way in extremely different contexts. In a systematic comparison of the imagery
of religious and sexual submission I will demonstrate this possible expansion of
my research.
As a highly quantified symbolic interactionist theory, Affect Control Theory (ACT)
(Heise 1987, MacKinnon and Heise 2010, Smith-Lovin and Heise 1988) investigates
the dynamics of affective experiences in interaction. If new tools of visual sociology can link subjective experience as EPA profiles with imagery we can analyze
the dynamics of images in ACT.
316
Grief Adaptation as Deflection Resolution
Linda Francis
Cleveland State University
A key sociological concern about grief is the context in which the individual tries
to make sense of their loss (Charmaz and Milligan, 2006). Whether the emphasis is on relationships (Carr & Boerner, 2009), reactions of others (Clark, 1997), or
labels given to the emotion (Horwitz & Wakefield, 2007), grief is embedded in
interactions which give it meaning. Building on this contextual view, this qualitative exploration of caregiver narratives of bereavement uses the Evaluation,
Potency and Activity dimensions of Affect Control Theory (ACT) (Heise, 2012) to
show how individuals make sense of bereavement. The data for this study are
comprised of 50 semi-structured interviews with bereaved cancer caregivers, 1224 months after the death. Interviews were 1-3 hours long, recorded and transcribed, then coded using both in vivo and protocol coding (Miles et al., 2014). Results
showed that participants treated the death of a loved one as a deflection from
the expected sentiments about the deceased, and redefined the act of dying to
resolve those deflections. Common resolutions included attributing power over
the time of dying, power of the caregiver to release the deceased from suffering,
and weakness of others in allowing the untimely death. These results add to the
literature on grief in highlighting the agency of actors in managing their grief by
cognitively manipulating situational definitions to convert the event of dying into
a validation of their identities and relationships.
317
Products as affective modifiers of social identities:
Managers and retirees with iPads and mustangs
Rohan Lulham, Daniel Shank
University of Technology Sydney, University of Melbourne
Do salesclerks seem better, more powerful and lively when they have iPhones?
Previous research has considered what affective qualities encourage people to
buy products (Reed et al, 2012), and how to design products with these qualities
(Desmet and Hekkert, 2007), but little research asks about how products change
the perception of individuals. Using an affect control theory framework of how
traits and emotions alter affective impressions of social identities (Averett and
Heise, 1987), we explore whether a select number of products modify people’s
impressions of business identities. We seek to first determine if affective impressions of business identities are modified when they are associated with products,
and then examine whether affect control theory’s trait modifier equations are
predictive of the product amalgamated identities.
Through Amazon Mechanical Turk, we collected usable data from 249 US participants (4 unusable) who each rated a subset of fifty concepts on evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). We selected six business identities – Manager, Unemployed
Person, Salesclerk, Retiree, Entrepreneur, and Scrooge. Products selected included
four mobile phones, four personal computers, and four types of cars. Lastly, we
measured 72 amalgamated concepts created by combining each business identity
with each product (e.g., Manager with a Mobile Phone).
We found that products systematically modified business identities. The influence
of products on business identities were greater on the potency and activity dimensions, than on the evaluation dimension. We also found support for the utility of the current affect control theory trait modifier equations in predicting our
observed product modified identities. Trait equation predictions were very similar
on the evaluation dimension, and quite similar on the potency and activity dimensions.
The findings from this initial study are supportive of additional research examining a greater range of identity and product concepts across the EPA space. This
line of research could form a basis for incorporating product-identity modification
into the affect control theory framework. More broadly, the research may provide sociologists, designers, and marketers with a way of exploring how products
influence the way we are perceived, behave, and feel in social situations.
318
Modeling Dynamic Identities and Uncertainty in Social
Interactions: Bayesian Affect Control Theory
Kimberly Rogers, Tobias Schröder, Jesse Hoey
Dartmouth College, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences,
University of Waterloo
Drawing on Bayesian probability theory, we propose a generalization of affect
control theory (BayesACT) that better accounts for the dynamic fluctuation of emotions and identity meanings for self and other during social interaction, explains
how interactants learn and adjust meanings through social experience, and shows
how stable patterns of social interaction can emerge from individuals’ uncertain
social perceptions. Using simulations, we illustrate how this generalization offers
a resolution to several issues of theoretical significance within sociology and social
psychology by balancing cultural consensus with individual deviations from shared meanings, balancing meaning verification with the subtle learning processes
that reflect change, and accounting for noise in communicating identity. We show
how emotions serve as a signal in the dynamic communication of identity, and
how multimodal emotional displays help navigate multiple identity enactments.
We also show how the model speaks to debates about core features of the self,
which can be understood as stable and yet malleable, coherent and yet comprised
of multiple identities that may carry competing meanings. Implications are discussed for the theoretical grounding of computational models of social behavior
and emotion, along with potential applications in artificial intelligence.
319
Symposium S5.3
Exploring the motivational diversity of envy: Destructive and
constructive emotional reactions toward the better-off
Conveners
Jens Lange, Jan Crusius
University of Cologne
Life is full of opportunities for upward comparisons. Not only might the neighbors have
better skills in gardening, their kids might also go to better schools and their car might
be much nicer. Such situations in which someone lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession can elicit the most joyless of all deadly sins—envy. Recent research,
however, casts doubts upon the uniformly negative and hostile nature previously ascribed
to envious reactions. In contrast, it shows that this emotion serves as a powerful motivator
of various intra- and interpersonal actions directed at changing one’s inferior position in
multifaceted ways. This can be achieved either by destructive action aimed at harming the
position of the envied person or group or by constructive action aimed at improving the
envier’s own standing on the respective comparison domain. Such a functional perspective has been pivotal to much recent research about envy. Nevertheless, the motivational
underpinnings that drive envy’s various reactions are still far from being fully understood.
Furthermore, parallel to the scientific debate about the nature of envy, there is much societal disagreement about when and how envy influences behavior toward the better-off.
The aim of the symposium is to share recent advancements in the research on envy and to
engage in discourse about the conflicting views in the field. The contributors to this symposium will present evidence for the multifaceted nature of emotional reactions toward
the better-off and will discuss envy’s conceptualization as a unitary or two-type construct.
First, Richard Smith will present research about the complex relationship of political ideology and emotional reactions toward economic inequality and the political debate of whether envy or justice concerns drive opinions in these domains. Conservatives attribute protest against Wall Street to envy, whereas liberals stress the importance of unfairness as
motivating the protest. Additional data shows how the actual emotional reactions conform
to and diverge from these perceptions. Then, Jérémy Celse will present data incompatible
with the uniformly hostile picture of envy that depicts enviers as people who irrationally
lash out in anger. In a series of dice-under-cup games envy impeded lying behavior when
it would have benefitted the opponent. This underlines that envy can also spur strategic
action. Afterwards, Jan Crusius will present evidence that envy has multifaceted motivational consequences which are also reflected in two distinct personality dimensions. This
research shows that people differ in how prone they are to react in benign or malicious
ways to upward comparison standards. Using a newly developed dispositional envy scale,
he shows how motivational inclinations of fear of failure and hope for success relate to the
different kinds of envious reactions and how this relates to real world performance data.
Subsequently, Jens Lange will present research about how a situational factor, the pride display of the superior person, shapes envious responding, investigating envy’s interpersonal
core. Pride attributed to talent—hubristic pride—fosters destructive consequences. Pride
attributed to effort—authentic pride—fosters constructive consequences. Finally, Yochi Cohen-Charash and Elliott Larson will present evidence for a functional interaction of person
and situation characteristics to predict destructive and constructive consequences of envy.
Particularly, the changeability of the situation predicts both motivational consequences,
yet, contingent on high self-esteem, enviers react to the situation differently. Furthermore,
physical proximity fosters destructive consequences of envy especially for individuals with
high trait envy.
In sum, these findings confirm the importance of examining envy’s vital role in shaping
intrapersonal processes, interpersonal relationships, and collective action. By investigating
perceptions of envy-based motivation, actual envious intentions, and envy-driven behavior
at the state and trait level as well as their interaction, this symposium contributes to the
understanding of the multifaceted motivational nature of envy. Furthermore it will allow
fruitful discussions about whether envy is a unitary construct with opposing consequences
or can be conceptualized in two different forms.
320
Liberal and Conservative Reactions to the Excesses of
Capitalism: Fairness or Envy?
Richard Smith, Charles E. Hoogland, Alexandra R. Martin
University of Kentucky
Political debates about issues such as the appropriate tax rates for the wealthy
and the morality of extreme forms of capitalism often center on the emotionrelated motives that appear to drive opinions. Are liberals who criticize the huge
profits gained by private equity firms simply envious, for example? If so, does
appeasing the “envious” harm general economic welfare more than the creative
destruction inherent in capitalism? Two studies examined the possible role of
political ideology in envy-based motivations, both in terms of how liberals and
conservatives are perceived and well as their self-reported motivations. In Study
1 participants screened for their liberal or conservative views later read accounts
of individuals protesting Wall Street excesses. Conservatives, compared to liberals,
indeed tended to perceive such protests as motivated by envy. By contrast, liberals, compared to conservatives, tended to perceive the protests as motivated by
concerns over justice and attributed the excesses to greed. Study 2 examined liberal or conservative participants’ actual reactions to wealthy entrepreneurs who
either did or did not harm workers in the process of attaining their wealth. Overall,
compared to conservatives, liberals were slightly more envious of wealthy entrepreneurs. Compared to liberals, conservatives saw even those actions that harmed
workers as fairer than liberals. However, both political groups viewed harm-doing
actions as much less fair than action causing no harm. Whether harm was done or
not, liberals perceived more unfairness than conservatives. This perceived unfairness was correlated with greater envy in liberals. The findings of these two studies
have a number of implications for an understanding of the role of envy in politics.
First, in terms of perceptions, consistent with common observations, conservatives
will tend to view protests against the excesses of capitalism as motivated by envy.
However, liberals will tend to view these protests as motivated by justice. There
is only slight evidence for liberals actually feeling more envy than conservatives
in terms of their reported reactions. Furthermore, concerns over justice appear to
have especially close links with how liberals react to the excesses of capitalism.
Although the interplay of envy and concerns over justice is highly complex, sorting
out these reactions will go a long way to understanding motivations linked to
political ideology.
321
The bright side of a dark emotion:
Envy can refrain people from lying
Jérémy Celse
Burgundy School of Business, Laboratoire d’Expérimentation en Sciences Sociales et
Analyse des Comportements
Research of lying prevention traditionally focuses on the factors of moral norms,
self-awareness, supervision and the relative importance of these factors on lying
behavior. Different from prior studies, the current research suggested that, based
on the theories of emotions, envy could refrain people from lying. Experiments
were designed to examine the influence of envy on lying behavior, via a series
of dice-under-cup games in the laboratory. Three conditions were manipulated
to induce the payoffs (benefits) of lying, including: baseline condition (control
group), symmetric condition (players A and B received the same benefits of lying),
and asymmetric condition (player A received half benefits of lying than player
B). Findings showed that players had propensity to lie when lying brought them
benefits. However, due to the effect of envy, players had refrained such propensity
when lying brought more benefits to other players. Implication of the findings are
discussed.
322
The Janus face of dispositional envy: Disentangling benign and
malicious forms of the envious personality
Jan Crusius
People differ in their propensity to react with envy toward other people who surpass them with regard to important achievements, characteristics, or possessions.
Previous research has conceptualized differences in the inclination towards envy
along a single dimension focusing on hostility and resentment as central components (Smith, Parrott, Diener, Hoyle, & Kim, 1999). At the state level, however,
recent research (Crusius & Lange, 2014; Van de Ven, Zeelenberg, & Pieters, 2009)
has revealed that envy exists in two qualitatively distinct forms: benign and malicious envy. Even though both forms of envy are negative emotions marked by
high levels of frustration, they differ in their motivational consequences: Benign
envy motivates people to attain the superior fortune, but is not characterized by
the hostility of its malicious counterpart. In contrast, the goal of malicious envy
is to level the other person down. Across several studies employing the newly
developed Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BeMaS, Lange & Crusius, in press),
we show that dispositional envy also exists in two distinct forms—benign and
malicious envy—and provide evidence for their distinct motivational profiles. In
particular, dispositional benign envy is linked to hope for success and predicts the
superior performance of marathon runners mediated by higher goal setting. In
contrast, malicious envy is linked to fear of failure and predicts goal avoidance.
These results underline the value of conceptualizing dispositional envy in two
dimensions. We discuss how this distinction can be used to unravel the diverse
motivational and behavioral outcomes of envy and its relationship to other personality characteristics such as narcissism.
323
It takes two sins to tango: The social-functional relation
of envy and pride
Jens Lange
Envy is a social phenomenon and entails at least two individuals—the envier
and the envied person. Previous research on the elicitation of envy, however, has
focused strongly on intrapersonal processes, thereby neglecting envy’s interpersonal core. In five studies, we show that the envy of the inferior person and the
pride of the superior person are inherently intertwined in a social functional relationship. Specifically, our evidence reveals that envy and pride often co-occur and
pride displays increase envy. Authentic pride (success is attributed to effort) is
perceived as likeable and conveys prestige which fosters envy directed at improving personal achievement (benign envy). Hubristic pride (success is attributed
to talent) is perceived as less likable and conveys dominance which fosters envy
directed at harming the envied person’s position. These effects occur only when
pride is displayed by the superior person and not when knowledge about success attributions is simply available in the environment. Our findings converged
in methodological diverse ways in the lab and online, using recall tasks, vignettes,
as well as by eliciting envy in situ, and measuring behavioral intentions and envydriven behavior. Taken together, this research highlights the value of taking envy’s
social nature into account and open up numerous avenues for studying envy at
the intergroup level or in the realm of interpersonal emotion regulation.
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When Do Reactions To Envy Turn Constructive Or Destructive?
Yochi Cohen-Charash, Elliott Larson
Baruch College
Contrary to common beliefs that envy only leads to destructive reactions, research
has found that envy can also motivate constructive behaviors (Cohen-Charash,
2009; Schaubroeck & Lam, 2004). This is in line with social-comparison theory,
according to which the goal of the envious person is to equate his or her lot with
that of the other. This can be achieved either by bringing the better off other
down to the level of the envious person, or improving the envious person up to
the level of the envied one (Heider, 1958).
We experimentally examined the changeability of the situation (the level by which
the situation permits the envious to improve his or her inferior position, CohenCharash & Larson, 2011), and psychological distance (Larson, 2013), as situational
determinants of reactions to envy. We also examined trait self-esteem (CohenCharash & Larson, 2011) and trait envy (Larson, 2013) as dispositional moderators
of the relationships between situations and reactions to envy. We found that regardless of the changeability of the situation, envy leads to both destructive (e.g.,
harming the envied other by hiding information) and constructive reactions (e.g.,
attempting to improve one’s situation by practicing for a test instead of playing
computer games). However, trait self-esteem moderates this relationship, such
that high self-esteem individuals that are envious self-handicap in order to preserve their sense of self from additional blows. Furthermore, high physical proximity (but not high distance) leads to destructive reactions to envy. Specifically,
envious participants do not persist on a difficult task, and individuals high in trait
envy share less information with the envied (Larson, 2013).
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Symposium S5.4
Emotions, values and energy technology acceptance:
Bringing together psychological and philosophical perspectives
Conveners
Nicole Huijts
Delft University of Technology
Public discussions about energy technologies easily culminate in heated debates,
as different values seem to be in conflict. The traditional approach is to say that
we should not ‘get emotional’; instead we should be rational and talk about facts.
In this symposium, however, we argue that emotions towards energy technologies should be taken seriously and we sketch new insights into how such emotions can be better understood, predicted, and addressed in decision-making.
In the literature, it seems that the role of emotions is characterized in different,
seemingly opposing ways. In some situations, feelings are considered to be ´aberrations’ or ‘disturbances’ to the properly, rationally weighing of costs, risks and
benefits of a technology. In other situations, feelings are seen as valuable and even
indispensable ingredients in human decision making. Literature reflecting the first
viewpoint seems to use the word affect more often, while literature reflecting the
second viewpoint seems to use the word ‘emotion’ more often. The antecedents of
affect or emotions also seem under debate. Are they based on unreflected intuitions, or are they based on things that people hold dear to themselves – called
values? In this symposium we focus on the role of affect/emotions and values in
forming opinions about and responding to energy technologies. We include viewpoints from both psychology and philosophy and search for differences and common grounds. We aim to make our viewpoints on affect/emotions more explicit
and figure out in what decision situations feelings are helpful and useful and in
what situations they would be biased and unhelpful.
Perlaviciute, Steg and Hoekstra, working in the field of psychology, look into the
workings of the affect heuristic and the possible roots of this phenomenon. The
affect heuristic implies that a general feeling towards an energy technology can
color evaluations of costs and benefits of that technology. But where does this general feeling come from? The researchers argue and provide initial evidence that
people’s general values in life play an important role here.
Sütterlin and Siegrist, working in the field of psychology, postulate that affect
mediates the effect of symbolic meaning of certain energy-related behaviors and
technologies on people’s judgments and evaluations of those behaviors and technologies. In line with the affect-as-heuristic theory, they find that people rely their
judgments and evaluations mainly on the evoked affect which may mislead energy consumption judgments and result in biased risk perception and acceptance
of energy technologies.
Huijts and Roeser, performing psychological and philosophical research respectively, argue that emotions, including trust in those responsible for a technology,
are indispensable guides in forming an overall opinion about the technology.
Based on affect-as-heuristic theories one could expect that emotions play a weaker role in attitude formation when one has more knowledge. However, based on
data about the acceptability of hydrogen fuel stations they show that emotions
influence overall opinions also very strongly, or even more strongly, among more
knowledgeable citizens.
326
Public emotions and values in sustainable energy transitions
Goda Perlaviciute, Linda Steg, Elisabeth Hoekstra
University of Groningen
Various energy alternatives are promoted as (relatively) sustainable (e.g. renewable resources, nuclear energy, natural gas), but they are often met with fierce
public opposition, fuelled by negative emotions. When emotions are involved,
people may evaluate energy alternatives negatively on many aspects and neglect
their potential benefits, a phenomenon known as affect heuristic (Slovic, 2000).
The affect heuristic implies that people have a “general feeling” towards energy
alternatives, which colours their evaluations. But where does this feeling come
from? We propose that people’s values (e.g. equality, protecting the environment,
wealth) play an important role in this process.
We argue that people have positive feeling and hence evaluate positively energy
alternatives that support their important values, whereas they have negative feeling and evaluate negatively energy alternatives that threaten their important values. We tested this reasoning in three representative studies in the Netherlands
on nuclear energy, renewable resources, and natural gas, respectively. Nuclear and
renewable energy have been much debated and triggered emotional responses
from the public. As expected, we found that that the stronger their egoistic values (i.e. focus on personal resources), the more people favoured nuclear energy
and the less they favoured renewable energy, whereas the opposite was true for
people with strong biospheric values (i.e. focus on nature and the environment).
Next, values indeed coloured people’s evaluations of these energy alternatives on
many aspects. Natural gas, on the other hand, had mostly been taken for granted
and hardly debated in the Netherlands until recently. As expected, we found that
particularly hedonic values (i.e. focus on comfort) enhance acceptability of gas.
Values were less likely to colour evaluations of gas, in comparison to nuclear and
renewable energy. This might change, however, since the current developments
in the Dutch gas sector (gas-related earthquakes, controversial gas production
methods such as shale gas, development of gas-based sustainable solutions) may
motivate people to think about the implications of gas in the light of values, triggering emotions.
This research integrates theory on affect heuristic and value theory, and enhances
these theories in important ways. Next, it has important practical implications
for developing sustainable energy transitions that are not only economically and
environmentally viable, but also societally acceptable.
327
Affect as a mediator of the misleading effect of symbolically
significant information on energy-related judgments
Bernadette Sütterlin, Michael Siegrist
Consumer Behavior, Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED), ETH Zürich
When judging outcomes or consequences, people rely on informational attributes
of high symbolic significance while ignoring other information, which may result
in biased decisions (Sütterlin & Siegrist, 2014). This is also true for energy-related judgments. However, there is a need to clarify the underlying mechanisms.
According to previous research, risk judgments are often based on evoked affect
(Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2007). Since symbolically significant attributes hold stronger affective meaning than other information, we can assume
that evoked affect mediates the misleading effect of symbolically significant information. In Experiment 1 (N = 188), the participants viewed two car driver descriptions. One entailed a positive symbolically significant attribute (i.e., Prius) and
a negative symbolically neutral attribute (i.e., covering 28,700 km); for the other
one, the reverse was true (i.e., SUV; covering 11,400 km). The participants received
detailed information about the cars’ fuel consumption (i.e., 3.9 l/100 km, 8.4 l/100
km, respectively). Therefore, it was obvious that the Prius driver consumed more
energy. However, the participants wrongly judged the energy consumption of the
driver showing the positive symbolically significant behavior to be lower. The effect of the valence of the symbolically significant behavior on the judgments was
fully mediated by the affect associated with the symbolically significant information. Moreover, energy production technologies are attributed a positive (e.g.,
solar) or negative (e.g., nuclear) symbolic meaning, evoking a positive or negative
affect, respectively. This influences the interpretation of risk information, evoking
a specific affect that influences subsequent evaluations. In Experiment 2 (N =
302), we formulated two scenarios involving the risk assessment of power generation based on life-cycle analyses (i.e., two fatalities). They were identical except
in terms of the type of power-generating technology—solar vs. nuclear. However,
in the solar power condition, the participants assessed the risk of two fatalities
as more acceptable. Our results suggest that the affect evoked by the information has an impact on the evaluation of a technology, but also that the affective
tagging of a technology influences the interpretation of new information. This
research shows how the symbolic significance fallacy via evoked affect impedes
the interpretation and adoption of adequate energy-friendly behavior and results
in biased decisions when evaluating energy systems.
328
The role of trust and emotions in the opinion formation about
hydrogen fuel stations
Nicole Huijts, Sabine Roeser
Studies in the field of technology acceptance and risk perception have suggested
that when citizens have little opportunity (e.g. little time or knowledge) to deliberate about a technology, they base their opinion about the technology more
strongly on affect or emotions (Alhakami and Slovic 1994). Similarly, trust has
been found to influence only the acceptance of technologies that people rate
themselves to have little knowledge of (Siegrist and Cvetkovich 2000). Emotions
and trust have thus been suggested to come in lieu of the rational weighing of
risks and benefits in these circumstances. Following this line of thought, the hypothesis can be formulated that the provision of information or the availability of
a higher knowledge level reduces the reliance of opinions about a technology on
emotions and trust. We empirically tested this for the case of hydrogen fuel station acceptability by citizens. The findings show that two trust and two emotion
measurements influenced the attitude towards the technology independent of
information or knowledge level, or influenced the attitude towards the technology
significantly more strongly in case of more information or higher knowledge level
as compared to less information/lower knowledge level. We thus do not find support for the proposed hypothesis. Therefore, we suggest an alternative account for
the role of trust and emotions. We suggest emotions and trust to be important,
even ‘rational’ ingredients in decision making in general, and about risky technologies specifically (see also Damasio 1994; Kahan 2010; Roeser 2012). Trust and
emotions can influence overall opinions independent of one’s knowledge level or,
going even further, it can be argued that information and knowledge helps people
to understand how the safety of the technology depends on those managing it
and how the technology affects what is important to people and thus may even
increase the influence of trust and emotions.
329
Emotions, values and frames: Multiple determinants of
individual energy consumption in an experimental decision task
Tobias Brosch
Several disciplines of the behavioral sciences have advanced theoretical frameworks aiming at the explanation of individual energy consumption. Microeconomic approaches focus on the maximization of self-interest in the context of
financial gains and losses, while perspectives based in sociology and social psychology emphasize the importance of internal attributes of the decider such as
belief structures and core values (Wilson & Dowlatabadi, 2007). More recently, the
impact of affective processes and emotions has become a topic of investigation in
the energy domain (Brosch, Patel, & Sander, 2014). In this study, we were interested
in evaluating how factors put forward by these different approaches (availability
of resources, framing in terms of gains and losses, environmental core values, experienced environmental emotions) interact to predict individual energy-relevant
decisions. We used a social dilemma task, an economic decision game reflecting
a situation in which individuals share access to a common resource, and must
choose between acting in their own short-term interest (i.e. claiming a lot of the
resource for themselves) or in the long-term interest of the group (i.e. constraining
their individual resource consumption). We observed a reduction in participants’
consumption when resources became scarcer. This reduction was found both in
the gain frame and in the loss frame, but was more pronounced in the former. We
furthermore observed an effect of individual core values, in that participants with
more pronounced self-transcendence values showed lower overall consumption
across both framing conditions. Finally, we observed – to our knowledge for the
first time – an effect of environmental emotions on individual decisions: Participants who more frequently experienced emotions in environmental contexts
showed a larger reduction of their consumption when resources became scarce.
This effect was sensitive to the framing, as it was observed in the gain frame only.
Our results highlight the importance of integrating theories and concepts from
several disciplines of the behavioral sciences such as economics, social psychology and affective science when trying to understand the factors underlying individual energy consumption. Economic framing, perceptions of resource scarcity,
core values and emotions all may interact to influence individual energy-related
decisions and may be potential levers for interventions supporting a successful
energy transition.
330
Moral emotions, values and energy technologies
Sabine Roeser
Emotions are generally seen to be a disturbing factor in debates about risky technologies such as energy technologies, as they are taken to be irrational and immune to factual information. In my presentation I will offer an alternative account
which sees emotions as a source of practical rationality. I build on cognitive theories of emotions as developed in psychology and philosophy. I will argue that moral emotions are judgments of value that can provide us with moral knowledge.
In the context of energy technology acceptance, emotions can highlight important moral aspects of energy technologies that get overlooked in conventional,
technocratic approaches to risk. Sympathy, compassion, indignation, and feelings
of responsibility help to grasp morally salient features concerning the risks and
benefits of energy technologies, such as autonomy, fairness, justice and equity.
Furthermore, emotions also have a motivational component that can contribute
to needed changes in behaviour concerning our energy consumption in order to
lead a more sustainable lifestyle. Hence, emotions should be taken seriously in decision making about risky technologies. This will lead to a more balanced debate
in which all parties are taken seriously, which increases the chances to be willing
to listen to each other and give and take. This is needed in order to come to wellgrounded policies on how to deal with potentially risky energy technologies.
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Symposium S5.5
The Epistemic Value of Emotions
Convener
Fabrice Teroni
University of Bern, University of Geneva
Emotions are reactions to matters of apparent significance – or so almost all philosophers and psychologists think. This means that nearly everyone accepts that there are intentional relations between
emotions and ways in which things are significant – namely, values. So fear is about danger, anger
about offensiveness, and so on. Philosophers and psychologists of all stripes also tend to agree that
emotions can inform us about or can represent values: this is central to cognitive theories of emotion
in philosophy, and appraisal theories of emotion in psychology.
It is therefore surprising that there has been relatively little work done, in either discipline, on the epistemology of emotion: roughly, the view that emotions can contribute in positive ways to our beliefs
about or knowledge of value. This lack is, however, now being addressed, with increased attention to
the ways in which emotions influence beliefs in psychology (see, for instance, Emotions and Beliefs
(2000), ed. Frijda, Manstead, & Ben, Cambridge University Press) as well as in interdisciplinary collections that present both psychological and philosophical perspectives (see, for instance, Epistemology
and Emotions (2008), ed. Brun, Doguoglu, and Kuenzle, Ashgate Publishing.)
But perhaps the greatest contribution to thinking about the epistemology of emotion has been the
development of the Perceptual Theory. This view holds that emotions mirror perceptual experiences
(e.g. visual experiences) in their epistemic role: the occurrence of each kind of experience constitutes
a defeasible reason for the corresponding judgement or belief. Thus, just as my having a visual experience of a red apple is a defeasible reason for me to judge that there is a red apple on my desk, so too
my experiencing guilt is a defeasible reason for me to judge that I have done something morally wrong.
Moreover, just as visual experience is necessary in order for me to possess certain colour concepts – I
won’t know what redness is without visually experiencing it – so some emotional experience is necessary in order to me to have knowledge of some values.
The present symposium proposal sets itself the aim of bringing together some of the most prominent
supporters, and critics, of the perceptual theory. It aims to facilitate further discussion between philosophers and psychologists about this new and very significant development in our thinking about
emotion and knowledge.
Michael Brady is one of the major critics of the perceptual theory. In his recent book he argues that the
perceptual theory is inadequate as an epistemological account, and proposed his own, positive epistemological view as a replacement. His contribution seeks to further undermine the perceptual theory
by arguing that there is no difference in content between emotional and non-emotional evaluative
appraisals.
Patrizia Lombardo has devoted much of her research to the representation of emotions in the arts
– with a distinctive focus on literature and film – and its impact on the nature and extent of our
knowledge of value. In her contribution, which draws upon her previous research on Stendhal and
Musil, she argues that Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir constitutes an ideal ground to discuss recent
approaches regarding the relations between emotions and values and their epistemic consequences.
Christine Tappolet is one of the first philosophers to have advocated a perceptual approach to the emotions. In her contribution to the symposium, she wishes to investigate a key issue faced by accounts
that try to assimilate the epistemological role of emotions to that of perceptual experiences. This is
the issue of whether it is reasonable to maintain that emotions are prima facie reasons for making
evaluative judgments given that they are notoriously subject to a variety of biases.
Fabrice Teroni has worked extensively on affective phenomena and has recently developed an original
account of them as evaluative attitudes. His approach to the emotions shares some important insights
of perceptual approaches to them, yet he denies one of their fundamental commitments: the claim
that emotions represent evaluative properties. This denial has important epistemological repercussions, which he proposes to explore in his contribution to the workshop.
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Does affect tell us about value? The case of pain and suffering
Michael Brady
University of Glasgow
What is the content of an emotional experience? Many philosophers think that
this content is evaluative: emotions, that is, inform us about various different kinds
of value, at least in normal or idealized conditions. So – to use some commonplace
examples – fear gives us information about danger, jealousy about infidelity, grief
about loss, guilt about moral fault. Now a subset of these philosophers maintain
that the kind of evaluative information that emotion provides is different from
the kind of information contained in a non-emotional appraisal or assessment
of certain objects and events. As some might say, the representational content of
emotional or affective experience is different from the content of non-emotional or non-affective experience. Thus, my fear gives me information about a dangerous situation that goes beyond a non-emotional assessment of my situation
as dangerous. These philosophers include Sabine Döring, Peter Goldie, and Mark
Johnston. In this paper I want to argue against the views of these philosophers.
The argument rests upon the fact that the central difference between affective
and non-affective representation is – quite obviously – the element of feeling or
affect present in the former, and absent in the latter. But affect itself, I propose,
has no information or representational content. I make this case by considering
the kind of negative affect that is central to experiences of pain and other forms
of physical suffering, and arguing that these experiences do not represent forms
of disvalue.
The paper will build upon my own research – most recently, in Emotional Insight
(OUP 2013) – and the work of Döring (‘Seeing What to Do: Affective Perception and
Rational Motivation’, in Dialectica 61, 2007), Goldie (The Emotions, OUP, 2000), and
Johnston (‘The Authority of Affect’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
63, 2001). It will advance the current debate by bringing in findings from the philosophy of pain literature about the informational content (or lack thereof) of painful experiences. In this way the paper will show how work in the philosophy and
psychology of pain has a central role to play in furthering research in philosophy
of emotion.
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Literature, emotions and values
Patrizia Lombardo
Literature offers thought experiments developing a great variety of accounts of
the relationships between values and emotions. Novels and drama typically present characters’ emotions and dispositions; fictional characters take decisions
and act more or less wisely or foolishly; they are sometimes torn between their
inclinations and a non-cognitive attitude of acceptance towards norms and rules;
sometimes they are concerned with the appropriateness or non-appropriateness of their emotions; more interestingly the narrator can magnify the difference between the character’s self-deception and the discrepancy between their
emotions appropriateness and non-appropriateness, rationality and irrationality
(Stendhal and Musil). Characters might then exemplify an emotivist approach to
values; other times they illustrate cognitive standpoints corresponding to the dispositional account or various types of realist accounts (Mulligan 1998). In these
cases, cognitively oriented novels present accurate analysis of motivations and
justifications carried on by characters themselves. Characters will then dwell retrospectively on the analysis or evaluation of their emotions, often based on memories and beliefs of various order, realizing that their emotions are not always
emotional responses to their system of values, that perceptual and propositional
elements are not separated. I will focus on two examples taken from Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le Noir in order to show that this novel, which obviously implies a
temporal dimension, represents a rich account of the role of emotions in acquiring
knowledge of values and of the awareness that values are not norms. Stendhal’s
novel represents a useful ground to discuss some recent approaches on the topics
of the knowledge value of emotions.
334
Emotions and biases
Christine Tappolet
University of Montreal
According to a plausible account, which is based on a theory of emotions that
underlines the analogies with sensory perceptions, emotions constitute epistemic touchstones of a sort. The emotions we feel constitute defeasible reasons
that confer prima facie justification to evaluative beliefs. For example, the fear
we feel would constitute defeasible reasons to believe that what we are afraid
of is fearsome, so that the belief that what we are afraid of is fearsome will be
prima facie justified. The belief will be justified sans phrase on condition that we
have no reason to believe that defeaters interfere with your emotions. However,
emotions are also liable to bias our beliefs. Subjects feeling disgust at their surrounding are liable to make harsher moral judgments. Your attachment to a close
friend will induce you to evaluate her and her actions more positively than might
be warranted. Out of jealousy, Iago falsely believes Desdemona to be unfaithful.
The question I want to discuss is whether such cases can be accounted for within
a perceptual theory of emotions.
335
Emotions, reasons and understanding
Fabrice Teroni
The epistemological role of emotions is intricate. On the one hand, we readily
distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable emotions and the contrast
we have in mind differs from that between appropriate and inappropriate emotions. Anger at a person may be appropriate because she has been offensive, yet
unreasonable if it is based on the testimony of a famously unreliable witness.
Alternatively, an episode of sorrow may be reasonable in light of a well-founded
but inappropriate conviction that a close friend has died. In this regard, emotions
resemble beliefs: both (should) respond to one’s reasons for or against specific
value interpretations of given situations. On the other hand, emotions seem to
play a more substantial role in relation to value knowledge than that of a belief
as to the presence of antecedent reasons for or against certain value interpretations. For instance, someone systematically failing to react emotionally in the way
situations merit is akin to a blind person. Both appear to lack something essential
to the epistemological position we occupy vis-à-vis the relevant domain of properties – values or colours. Observations along these lines have been forcefully
put forward within perceptual approaches to the emotions – it fosters the conclusion that emotions’ role in relation to value knowledge is similar to that played by
perceptual experiences in relation to perceptual knowledge. Both kinds of experiences would provide (defeasible) reasons for the relevant judgements. Yet, this
appears difficult to reconcile with the idea that emotions resemble beliefs in responding to reasons.
In my contribution, I explore these issues by arguing for a middle ground position
between perceptual approaches to the emotions and recent criticisms of them.
Against perceptual approaches, I explain why the fact that emotions resemble
beliefs in responding to reasons means that they do not provide reasons for value
judgements. Yet, I deny that this supports the conclusion that emotions are deprived of any substantial epistemological role. After having explained why emotions should not be pictured as depending on a prior and non-emotional awareness of value, I explore two ways in which emotions prove epistemologically
indispensible. The first relates to the manner in which they modulate the subject’s attention, the second to their contribution to her understanding of the value
concepts she deploys.
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Symposium S5.6
Semantic analysis of emotion words using the GRID paradigm:
Validation and application of a brief version of the instrument
Convener
Klaus R. Scherer
Much of emotion research is focused on words – words describing experiences, concepts,
mechanisms, neurophysiological processes, motor expressions or even constructs of our
imagination. Given that they take center stage, the emotion words themselves, and particularly their meaning, have all too rarely been studied in a systematic way. This is particularly regrettable if one adopts a sedimentation hypothesis which assumes that the essence
of recurrent experiences is reflected in language as the prototypical meaning of the emotion words used to label those experiences (contrary to the belief that words are labels
that can be fairly arbitrarily assigned to various psychological constructions). Recently, a
domain-specific semantic profile approach has been developed to assess the meaning of
emotion words -- the GRID paradigm (Scherer, 2005). The assessment instrument used
consists of feature profiles covering all components of emotion. These profiles record the
consensually judged probabilities of the presence of the respective features in an emotion
episode prototypically labelled with a particular word. The results of a large scale study of
24 emotion words in 27 countries covering 24 languages from all over the world (published
in book form; Fontaine, Scherer, & Soriano, 2013) show overall equivalence between the
terms across languages, confirm the relevance of all components for the differentiation in
meaning of the emotion words, and suggest that four dimensions (valence, power, arousal
and novelty) are required to satisfactorily map the emotion space.
The proposed GRID symposium will present a number of major new studies involving applications and recent developments for the paradigm. A new short form of the instrument,
the CoreGRID, was designed to capture the same dimensionality as the full instrument
with a fraction of the features, while still allowing to clearly differentiate the meaning profiles of major emotion terms. The talk “The meaning structure of the emotion domain” will
present a validation of the instrument in two languages (French and Indonesian) using
80 instead of the original 24 emotion words. The results confirm the four dimensions previously found and raise a number of important issues concerning prototypicality and the
structure of emotion families.
The CoreGRID has also been used to explore emotion concepts in specific contexts. Two
adaptations were made to tap into the emotions pertinent to achievement situations and
to aesthetic experiences, respectively. The question is whether the meaning of emotion
words changes in different contexts and if so, in which way. Results from these two interdisciplinary studies will be presented. The talk “The adaption of the GRID instrument for
aesthetic emotions” illustrates the utility of the GRID paradigm in the study of aesthetic
and epistemic emotions by literary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists. In turn, the
talk “Components of Achievement Emotions – A GRID-Based Investigation” presents results
from a collaboration between emotion, personality and educational psychologists using
the GRID approach in the study of achievement emotions.
Finally, the GRID approach has also been used to explore near-synonyms in the same emotion family. To that end, a new instrument was designed to capture specific differences
between various types of anger. The talk “The meaning of ‘frustration’ across languages”
presents empirical evidence of such differences in the conceptualization of “frustration”,
which is found to be markedly different in English compared to Spanish, Russian, French,
and German. Converging evidence is also presented from other types of linguistic analysis.
The symposium will conclude with an open discussion among the speakers and audience,
led by Prof. Phoebe Ellsworth as discussant. In the session we will evaluate the results of
these studies, reflect on open questions, and propose new avenues for further development and applications of the GRID paradigm in the affective sciences.
337
The meaning structure of the emotion domain:
Further confirmation of the four-dimensional
structure in Switzerland and Indonesia
Johnny Fontaine1, Christelle Gillioz2, Efrata Kristina1,
Cristina Soriano3, Klaus R. Scherer3
Ghent University1, University of California - San Diego2, University of Geneva3
In an extensive cross-cultural research project, called the GRID study, the meaning
of 24 emotion terms was investigated on the basis of the componential emotion
approach (Fontaine, Scherer, & Soriano, 2013). Thirty-four samples of participants
from 27 countries and 24 languages had to rate the meaning of these 24 emotion words on 142 features that represented each of the five emotion components
(appraisals, action tendencies, bodily reactions, expressions, and feelings). A highly
stable four-dimensional structure emerged across cultural and linguistic groups:
These 24 emotion terms could be represented along the dimensions of valence,
power, arousal, and novelty in that order of importance. A central issue, however,
is whether and to which extent the meaning structure, and its cultural and linguistic stability, has to be attributed to the 24 emotion terms that were specifically selected for the GRID study. In the present research project it is investigated
whether the same four-dimensional meaning structure emerges with a much
larger and much more representative set of emotion terms in two very different
cultural and linguistic groups. Two studies were executed both in Switzerland (in
French) and in Indonesia (in Bahasa Indonesia). First, a comprehensive set of 80
emotion terms was identified in each cultural group separately on the basis of
an emotion categorisation task, a prototypicality rating task, and a collocational
profile analysis of the word emotion (the latter only in Switzerland). Secondly, 156
French-speaking Swiss respondents and 196 Bahasa Indonesia-speaking Indonesian respondents each rated 10 emotion words from their own list on 68 emotion
features (CoreGRID instrument). Both in the Swiss and in the Indonesian sample
the expected four-dimensional structure emerged accounting for 86% and 80%
of the total variance respectively. The current study corroborates the results of the
GRID study in two very important ways. First, valence, power, arousal, and novelty
do indeed structure meaning in the emotion domain, and not just the meaning of
the 24 emotion terms selected for the GRID study. Second, this structure cannot
be attributed to a Western bias, as the structure also emerges in a typically nonWestern cultural group with emotion terms that were locally selected.
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The adaption of the GRID instrument for Aesthetic Emotions
Ursula Beermann1, Georg Hosoya2, Ines Schindler2, Valentin Wagner3,
Winfried Menninghaus3, Michael Eid2, Klaus R. Scherer1
University of Geneva1, Freie University Berlin2,
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics3
The Component Process Model [1] proposes that emotion processes comprise activity in five components (appraisal, bodily reactions, action tendencies, expression,
and feelings). The GRID paradigm [2] aims at testing the applicability of those components to the semantic field of emotion words. Scherer and colleagues (e.g., [3])
suggested the distinction between three types of emotion: utilitarian (involving
evaluations important for survival), epistemic (e.g., interest, involving evaluations
of information content), and aesthetic (e.g., awe, involving evaluations of intrinsic
qualities). The current study adapts the CoreGRID instrument to investigate the
semantic profiles of aesthetic and epistemic emotions in German. The «emotion
words» were the 75 initial items of the newly developed AESTHEMOS scale [4],
constructed to assess affective states elicited by different aesthetic events (e.g.,
musical pieces). The items were short phrases such as «I was enchanted», «Was
unsettling to me», or «Irritated me». 157 students participated in the online study
(38 males, age: 17 to 55), 75 of which were active in an artistic domain (such as
singing, writing, or theatre). Inter-rater reliabilities ranged from Cronbach Alpha
= .72 («Made me long for»), .75 («Made me feel nostalgic») to .96 («Found it pleasant», «made me content»), suggesting that the meaning of terms like longing,
nostalgia of sentimentality (potentially referring to something else, not present)
were more difficult to grasp and less clear than the meaning of terms referring
to something more concrete and to something present, such as pleasantness or
content. Further analyses focus on the salience of the different components in
the area of aesthetic emotions (e.g., predominance of cognitive elements over
physiological and expression responses). Findings shed light on the utility of the
differentiation between subclasses of emotions, such as utilitarian, epistemic and
aesthetic emotions.
339
Components of Achievement Emotions –
A GRID-Based Investigation
Kristina Loderer1, Kornelia Gentsch2, Reinhard Pekrun1, Klaus R. Scherer2
University of Munich1, University of Geneva2
The componential approach to emotion is the common ground of the control-value theory (CVT, Pekrun, 2006) and the component process model (CPM, Scherer,
1984, 2009). Previous GRID studies have never specified a particular context in
which the emotion occurred. This study employs a modified CoreGRID instrument
to investigate the semantic profiles of 16 emotions words embedded in achievement contexts (i.e., situations involving success or failure).
In the present study, we aim to investigate two research questions. (1) We investigate the semantic component profiles of emotions that typically occur in achievement contexts. Specifically, we test predictions of the CVT for three emotion components, including appraisal, action tendency, and affect (i.e., valence/arousal).
(2) We explore to what extent the achievement context modifies the meaning of
emotion words compared with an unspecified general context. We modified the
CoreGRID instrument to present the emotion words in an achievement context.
Participants rated the likelihood (nine-point scale: 1 = extremely unlikely, 9 = extremely likely) of 84 features for 16 emotion terms. The terms were selected based on
the CVT and describe emotions typically experienced in relation to success or failure. Further, we added 13 new items to the CoreGRID to capture relevant features
as predicted by the CVT.
Twenty-nine German university students (26 women, all native speakers; Mage =
21.07 years; SD = 3.68) participated in a controlled web study. Participants’ agreement on the meaning profile of each emotion word was excellent (Cronbach`s
Alpha: .94-.98). Averaged meaning profiles of each emotion term were computed across all participants that at least moderately agreed on the meaning (i.e.,
with corrected-item-total correlations >.20). Descriptive results largely support
the predictions of the CVT. For example, emotions were classified as positive vs.
negative and activating vs. deactivating widely in accordance with CVT, and negative deactivating emotions (disappointment, hopelessness, boredom) were associated with behavioral disengagement. To explore research question (2), the data
from a previous GRID study were matched with the present data set. The results
indicate that context specification differentially amplified the feature ratings of
the appraisal, action tendency, expression, bodily reaction, and subjective feeling
components.
Taken together, the results highlight the utility of a modified CoreGRID instrument to test the meaning of emotion words in achievement contexts as predicted
by the CVT. The findings demonstrate that the GRID instrument allows investigating the impact of specified contexts on component profiles of emotions and
perceived semantic structures of contextualized emotion words.
340
The meaning of “frustration” across languages
Cristina Soriano, Anna Ogarkova
Languages can differ considerably in their emotion words, making it difficult to
translate an emotion term into other languages. However, translation equivalence seems fairly straightforward in the case of cognate terms (i.e. words with
the same etymological origin, such as English ‘joy’ and French ‘joie’). Given their
resemblance in form, one may assume that their meaning is the same. However, translation equivalence is always a matter of degree and cognates may hide
important differences in meaning. The results of this study suggest that such is
the case of the English word ‘frustration’ and its cognate terms in Spanish (‘frustración’), French (‘frustration’), and German (‘Frustration’). Deriving from an earlier study suggesting that English ‘frustration’ may refer to a fairly culture-specific
emotion (Panayiotou, 2004), typical in English (Fehr and Russell, 1984; Russell and
Fehr, 1994), but not necessarily in other languages and cultures (Pavlenko, 2008),
the semantic profiles of English ‘frustration’ and its cognates in three European
languages are investigated using the GRID approach. Native speakers of American English (N = 135), Spanish (N = 206), French (N = 186), and German (N = 158)
filled in the ELIN questionnaire, an adaptation of the GRID instrument designed
to tap into the differences of near-synonyms in the anger family (among other
conflict-related emotions) (Soriano et al., 2013). HCA, MDS, profile correlations and
analyses of variance reveal that English ‘frustration’ is closer to the prototypical
anger concept (i.e. an expressive and powerful type of anger) than its cognate
terms in other European languages. Congruent evidence is presented from other
types of linguistic analysis: a labelling task, an analysis of word frequency, and an
analysis of the metaphorical language associated to these terms.
341
P3.1 Higher gamma power over bilateral scalp marks the
predominance of negative over the positive stimuli
during binocular rivalry
Navdeep Ahuja, Ratna Sharma
University New Delhi
Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon of alternating percepts when two different stimuli are presented simultaneously to different eyes (Blake, 2001). Although the
predominance of emotional stimuli over neutral stimuli during binocular rivalry
has been reported in literature (Alpers et al., 2006), the binocular rivalry of negative and positive stimuli has not been reported to the best of our knowledge.
Present study aimed to examine perceptual reversals in rivalry of negative and
positive stimuli. International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures (Lang et al.,
2008) classified according to their valence ratings were presented according to
intermittent paradigm (Britz et al., 2011) of binocular rivalry and their perceptual
rivalry was achieved with the help of a mirror stereoscope. Experiments were done
in twenty healthy male subjects aged between 18-35 years. EEG was recorded with
128 channels and wavelet analysis was done with continuous wavelet transform
using ‘Morlet’ wavelet. Statistical analysis revealed higher dominance durations of
negative stimuli compared to that of positive stimuli. Wavelet analysis showed a
significantly higher gamma power over bilateral areas of scalp during perceptual
reversals compared to stable perception in time intervals of 100 ms before the
stimulus onset as well as during 600 ms after stimulus presentation. The higher
gamma power indicates binding and negativity bias during rivalry between negative and positive stimuli.
342
P3.2 Attentional and emotional bias for the rear
auditory perceptual space
Erkin Asutay, Daniel Västfjäll
Linköping University
Sounds provide information about the objects and events around us. They can
also carry biologically significant emotional information (such as unseen dangers
and conspecific vocalizations) [1]. Thus, the ability to detect and localize sounds
in an environment is critical, which is a computational challenge for the human
brain since the auditory cortex lacks a topographical space representation [2].
Nevertheless, it was shown that attention and task demands can modulate the
processing of auditory spatial information [3]. Previous research also found that
emotional salience of objects can enhance sensory processing and provide cues
for the allocation of attention and mental resources [4]. Here, we investigated
whether auditory spatial information can influence emotional reactions and
auditory attention. We measured auditory-induced emotion by ecological sounds
occurring in the frontal or rear perceptual fields, and employed a rapid localization
task. It was found that both localization speed and accuracy were higher, and that
stronger negative emotions were induced when sound sources were behind the
participants. The results provide clear behavioral evidence that the auditory attention can be influenced by sound-source location. Importantly, we also show that
the effect of spatial location on attention is mediated by emotion, which is in line
with the argument that emotional information is prioritized in processing. In sum,
the results point to an auditory bias for the rear perceptual space in emotional
and attentional levels. The auditory system functions as an alarm system and is
in charge of detecting possible salient events, and alarming for an attention shift
[5]. Further, spatial processing in the auditory dorsal pathway has a function of
guiding the visual system to a particular location of interest [6]. Thus, an auditory
bias toward the space outside the visual field can be useful, so that visual attention could be quickly shifted in case of emotionally significant information.
343
P3.3 Emotion perception in autism spectrum
disorders – where lies the deficit?
Tanja Bänziger, Linda Omberg, Anders Flykt
Mid Sweden University
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are diagnosed on the basis of impairments
in social interaction and communication. In recent years, inconsistent findings
have been reported with respect to the association between this diagnosis and
nonverbal emotion recognition ability. While emotion recognition deficits have
been reported for individuals with ASD in some studies, other studies have failed
to replicate this finding. Methodological shortcomings might account for such
inconsistencies. More specifically, the fact that different assessment instruments,
which measure partially different skills or have unequal difficulty levels, have been
used in different studies. In the results reported here, a classical instrument, the
Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Affect (DANVA), and a new multimodal emotion
recognition test, the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Instrument (MERI, based
on the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals), were administered to thirteen
participants qualifying for autism spectrum disorder (scored with the reduced
Ritvo Autism and Asperger Diagnostic Scale, RAADs-14, Eriksson, Andersen, & Bejerot, 2013) and thirteen matched (age, gender, & education level) participants. One
MANOVA with group as independent variable for each emotion perception test
showed that the scores on DANVA only tended to differentiate between the two
groups, while the scores on MERI clearly differentiated between the two groups.
For both instruments, the univariate F-tests showed that the larger difference was
observed for facial emotion recognition. A regression model with two dimensions
of RAADs-14 (mentalization difficulties & sensory reactivity) and group as predictor variables was tested for the total scores of the MERI. The results showed a
high sensory reactivity predicts better emotion perception performance on the
MERI. Excluding group from the regression model gave a contribution of mentalization difficulties, in the way that a higher score on performance predicts higher
performance scores. This was due to the group differences in mentalization difficulties. Confusion matrices between portrayed and attributed emotions showed
that the attribution errors in the autism spectrum disorder group are not evenly
distributed across emotions. More research in this direction is warranted in order
to disentangle the complex processes involved in emotion recognition and the
deficits associated with ASD.
344
P3.4 The effect of a Mindfulness-Based intervention program
on the multicomponent process of
empathic responding: a comparison to oth
Marie Bayot1, Rebecca Shankland2
Moïra Mikolajczak1, Nicolas Vermeulen1
Université catholique de Louvain1, Grenoble 2 University 2
Mindfulness (MF) is a state of being characterized by an intentional orientation of
attention toward all experiences in the present, as they arise moment by moment,
in a non-judgemental and benevolent attitude. In its occidental and scientific use,
MF has been conceived as a measurable trait (e.g., FFMQ) or a trainable competence through meditative practices (e.g., MBCT) and showed multiple benefits on
health, cognitive abilities as well as intrapersonal emotional competencies (e.g.,
emotion differentiation). Although intersubjectivity and compassion lie at the
core of MF in its Buddhist cradle, few investigations have been led on its effects
in the interpersonal domain, such as the phenomenon of empathy. The capacity
to respond empathically in a functional way relies on commonly acknowledged
components, such as an affective response (e.g., emotion contagion), perspective
taking and emotion regulation (comprising self-agency). In addition to these processes, compassion or empathic concern seems to be a significant factor for the
engagement in empathy. Interestingly, many authors, conceptually or empirically suggest that mindfulness impacts the way we respond empathically to witnessed others’ emotional experiences. Importantly however, a clear lack of experimental investigations of empathy and understanding of underlying processes
springs from the MF literature. This study (N=125) aimed at further testing the link
between MF and empathy, by using self-reported (e.g., IRI, VDQ, PEC), explicit and
implicit cognitive-behavioural measures of empathy and its subcomponents (e.g.,
empathic accuracy paradigms, pro-sociality paradigm, compassion and emotion
regulation paradigm) and comparing a MF training program to two active control
groups (other types of well-being intervention programs based on positive psychology or cognitive-behavioural therapy) and one passive group. The data collected one month before (double-blind procedure) and after the 8-week programs
show how mindfulness training fosters perceived emotional well-being but also
shapes reactions toward other’s affective states. The specific impact of MF, in
comparison to other psychological intervention programs, on emotion regulation
and perspective taking, as core dimensions of empathy, will be discussed and new
methodological perspectives will be presented.
345
P3.5 Emergence of low-level aggressive responses in a
reactive goal-directed robotic system
Marwen Belkaid, Nicolas Cuperlier, Philippe Gaussier
Université de Cergy-Pontoise
Following a constructivist approach, we aim to study the emergence of aggressive behavior in a robotic system. The agent motivational and emotional states
are built on an opposition between an appetitive and an aversive pathway. In this
work, we emulate functions hypothalamus (physiological perception, feeding
drive) and ventral tegmental area (pleasure triggering) versus superior colliculus
(multisensory integration, safety drive) and periaqueductal gray (pain triggering).
Two-by-two lateral competitions simulate interactions between dopaminergic
and serotonergic pathways, inhibiting either appetitive or aversive behaviors. The
obtained pleasantness states and drive levels allow us to determine the robot
emotional valence and arousal. The latter modulate the robot perception of its
peripersonal space (PPS) [1][2]. Our hypothesis is that emotional modulation occurs at two levels: the perception of raw sensory input and their utilization after
integration. We represent the robot PPS as a fusion of modulated reachable space
and comfort zone. We consider the case where the architecture is implemented
in two agents competing for a unique resource. We show that the approach/avoidance competition allows for a fighting behavior. Also, collisions produce affective
defense, as opposed to predatory attack [3]. More related to anger, these aggressive responses (triggered by elements of threat) are caracterized by negatively valenced states and high sympathetic arousal [4]. However, we observe a proactive
behavior as well. We cannot speak of predatory attacks per se, since no instrumental learning is performed. Yet, a goal-directed form of aggression emerges from
the dynamics of the system.
346
P3.6 Felt power, and not manipulated power, is associated
with positive affects
Dario Bombari1, Marianne Schmid Mast1, Manuel Bachmann2
University of Lausanne1, University of Applied Sciences, Bern2
Researchers have put forward different hypotheses about the affective states associated with power. Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson (2003) suggest that high
power individuals should feel more positive affects and low power people more
negative affects. However, clear empirical evidence is still missing. Berdahl and
Martorana (2006) found that high power individuals felt more positive emotions
than low power individuals, but they found no difference in terms of negative emotions. Galinsky, Gruenfeld, and Magee (2003) found no difference in felt emotions
between high and low power-primed individuals, whereas Schmid Mast, Jonas,
and Hall (2009) found that high power people felt more positive emotions than
low power people. In the present research, we suggest that the reason of these
inconsistent findings might be the fact that manipulating power, which was used
in previous studies, is not the optimal operationalization to study the influence of
power on affective states. We propose instead felt power as a more reliable measure because it is more linked to situational aspects. We conducted 4 studies, in
which we investigated this hypothesis. In Study 1 (N=160), we asked participants
to imagine being in a situation in which they either had power or somebody had
power over them and report their feelings. In Study 2 (N=79), participants were
put in the role of a superior or a subordinate and had to provide a feedback to a
virtual human who interacted with the participants through a computer screen.
In Study 3 (N=83), we used immersive virtual environment technology and put
participants either in a high or low power role while receiving a feedback from a
virtual human. In Study 4 (N=96) we used a similar setting as Study 3, except that
participants actively provided a feedback. We meta-analytically combined the results from the 4 studies and analyzed the relationship between felt power and felt
emotions and the relationship between manipulated power and felt emotions.
We found that felt power was positively associated with positive emotions and
negatively associated with negative emotions. Manipulated power instead was
not associated with any affect. These results provide clear support to Keltner et
al.’s (2003) model and underline the importance of felt power as a reliable measure for researchers working on affective states.
347
P3.7 Primate Emotion
Maria Botero
Sam Houston State University
In this paper I will argue that it is possible to find one common characteristic
among all primates -the mother- and that this commonality will help us understand emotions in primates. For this task I have chosen as a theoretical framework
the basic emotions approach (Ekman 1999; Izard, 2011; Panksepp, 1998). One of the
main criticisms of the basic emotion model focuses on the variability of emotions
denying the existence of biological or behavioral essences underlying basic emotions (for a review see Barret, et al., 2007). I agree that it is impossible to deny the
evidence on variability that has been collected over the years but I will adopt a
basic biological commonality to explain this variability: the mother-infant interaction measured as touch. I will show how this mode of interaction is common
among different species of primates and across human cultures. I will also show
how this form of interaction has a direct physiological and behavioral effect on
human and non-human primate infants and is directly related to their emotional
states. Finally, inspired by Bruner (1990), I will show how this kind of interaction is
influenced by culture. I will illustrate the main thesis with the example that motivated this paper, the anxiety-related behavior of orphan chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) at Gombe National Park, Tanzania (Botero, MacDonald &
Miller, 2013; Botero et al., in preparation). Even though this case is only about two
chimpanzees in one community of one species, it is helpful to illustrate a more
general point: emotions will only be developed successfully if, through the mother-infant interaction, the infant is capable of experiencing emotions that can be
understood in their culture.
348
P3.8 Cognitive roots of racial discrimination : infrahumanization or
threat perception? A visual search approach
Amélie Bret, Brice Beffara, Martial Mermillod
University of Grenoble
In these studies we investigated the influence of beliefs on visual and attentional processes. More precisely, our aim was to determine how racist beliefs could
influence automatic perception and behaviour. We particularly focused on the difference of an in-group and an out-group face implicit detection. We wanted to understand if out-group members were automatically considered as a threat (Quillian, 1995) or as something less human (infrahumanization hypothesis, Leyens,
2000). The infrahumanization is the fact to consider out-group members as less
human than members who do belong to our group (Leyens, 2000). It is possible
to measure this mechanism with the attribution of primary emotions (commonly
shared by the in and out group) and secondary emotions (only attributed to the
in-group). In order to provide an implicit measure of infra-humanization, we used
the pop-out effect in a visual search task (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). Faces from
different ethnic groups have been worn : Caucasian and North African (ADFES database, Van der Schalk, Hawk, Fischer, & Doosje, 2011). A screen composed of neutral pictures (8x8) was displayed to the participants and we asked them to detect
as fast as they could if a face was present on the screen. We did not mention that
there were different ethnic faces. We identified a difference of faces perception
depending on the ethnicity of the face. Participants were faster to respond when
it was a North-African face compare to the condition of the Caucasian face. The
threat perception of out-group members could explain these results. It offers to
us some ideas to develop a tool to regulate racial discrimination, and may be discrimination in a more general way.
349
P3.9 Emotional Ambivalence and the Representation of Cultural
Diversity Among Italian Youths
Flavia Cangia1, Camilla Pagani2
University of Neuchatel Switzerland1, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and
Technologies, National Research Council, Italy2
Emotional ambivalence is a psychological constituent of most human relationships, especially when in these relationships particularly complex aspects of reality are involved. Across the social sciences, this concept has long been studied with
regard to its psychological implications, and its relation with social and political
strategic action. The specific relationship between emotional ambivalence and individuals’ conceptualization of cultural diversity has not been, to our knowledge,
sufficiently investigated. The paper aims to examine this relationship from an
interdisciplinary perspective. We draw on qualitative research on youths’ conceptualizations about “multiculturalism” in Italy, in particular, on the analysis of anonymous open-ended essays written by Italian youths (aged 14-18) in some state
high schools in Central Italy, and of some group interviews conducted in their
schools. We present some extracts in which Italian youths express ambivalent
feelings about immigration in Italy, feelings that are inextricably linked to various
conflicting evaluations both about “Italians” and “immigrants”. Our suggestion is
that emotional ambivalence can represent a compromise strategy through which
these youths not only try to express personal feelings, but also try to make sense
of different social categories, and to conform to mostly shared and favorable values of the larger society. Findings demonstrate that different levels of subjective
integration and regulation of ambivalent emotions can lead to different, and at
times more elaborated, representations of cultural diversity. This research contributes to understanding the interplay between affective, cognitive, and social processes in migration contexts. Moreover, the construct of “emotional ambivalence”
can contribute to enriching the various conceptualizations regarding “complex
thinking” and complexity theory in general in the social sciences, in particular in
the study of humans’ relationship with diversity.
350
P3.10 Addiction of being powerful vs. popular:
The characteristics of communal narcissism
Min-gi Chung, Min-Hee Kim, Kyung Hwan Min
University of California, Korea Counseling Graduate University,
Seoul National University
The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of communal narcissism and the difference between agentic narcissism and communal narcissism
in emotions, motives and interpersonal problems. Gebauer, Sedikides, Verplanken,
and Maio(2012) proposed the new and broad model of narcissism, agency-communion model of narcissism. According to them, both communal and agentic
narcissism share core self-motives of narcissism (i.e., grandiosity, esteem, entitlement, power), however, communal narcissists satisfy their self-motives through
communal means that contain communion values such as empathy and interpersonal warmth while agentic narcissists gratify their motives through rather selfdirected agentic means. Total of 228 undergraduate students from Seoul National University with the mean age of 21.5(SD=3.25) participated in study 1, where
empathy (perspective taking, empathic concern), anger (state anger, trait anger,
anger control, anger expression), aggression, motives and interpersonal problems
variables were used to compare the difference between agentic narcissism and
communal narcissism. The more communal narcissistic the person is the lower
anger, aggression, power motive and interpersonal problem experiences in control
dimension they possessed compared with agentic narcissistic people. There were
no significant correlation differences in empathy despite of significant positive
correlation only with CNI. Correlation of .399(p<.01) was found between agentic
narcissism and communal narcissism. Based on the result of study 1 and previous
studies that communal narcissisists and agentic narcissisists can have different
reactions in negative emotions and social situations and that narcissists tend
to be more aggressive in ego-threatening situations(e.g., Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Bushman , Bonacci, van Dijk, & Baumeister, 2003; Donnellan et al., 2005;
Stucke & Sporer, 2002; Twnege & Campbell, 203), two types of ego-threatening
scenarios were tested with 204 undergraduate subjects in study 2. The participants completed four agency-threatening situations and four communion-threatening situation scenarios with hypothetical negative emotions, self-esteem, and
life satisfaction in each case. Three different groups depending on their level of
agentic narcissism and communal narcissism including one of control group were
selected and analysis of variance was used for the analysis. Unlike the hypothesis
that anger would be salient in each corresponding situations, irritation in agency-threatening situations and shame in communion-threatening situations were
significantly observed. Moreover, anger, irritation, and shame were also found in
some of the cases when investigated into each scenario. There were significant
group differences both in self-esteem and life satisfaction in all cases. Lastly, suggestions and implications for the future investigations are discussed.
351
P3.11 Viewing the job-related and organisational antecedents of
employee engagement through an emotional lens
Nuno Da Camara, Victor Dulewicz, Malcolm Higgs
University of Southampton
There is currently a lack of research on the impact of job-related and organisational-level factors on employee engagement (Fisher, 2010). In particular, although
theorists have described the critical role of emotional cognitions of the workplace
environment as antecedents to employee engagement (Alderfer, 1987; Hackman &
Oldham, 1980; Kahn, 1990), empirical research on the impact of emotional cognitions on employee engagement is limited (Da Camara, 2013; Da Camara, Dulewicz
& Higgs, 2015, in print). Moreover, the link between emotional cognitions of the
workplace environment and workplace attitudes such as job satisfaction and organisational commitment is strongly supported by empirical research (Parker et
al., 2003). Using an emotional lens, this study investigates the impact of emotional cognitions of job, role, leader and organisation domains of the work environment – as represented by measures of psychological climate and organisational
emotional intelligence (OEI) - on employee engagement. The research is based on
a quantitative cross-sectional survey of employees in a UK charity organisation
(n=174). The research instruments applied include the psychological climate scale
(Brown & Leigh, 1996), the organisational emotional intelligence questionnaire
(OEIQ) (Da Camara, 2013; Da Camara, Dulewicz & Higgs, 2015, in print) and the
Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) (Schaufeli, Bakker & Salanova, 2006). The
data were analysed using hierarchical regression and partial least squares (PLS)
analytical techniques (Ringle et al., 2005). The results of the study show that both
psychological climate and OEI, which represent emotional cognitions of job, role,
leader and organisation domains in the workplace are significant drivers of employee engagement. In particular, the study found that across all work domains
emotional cognitions of Contribution and Challenge were the strongest drivers of
employee engagement. The study discusses the importance of using emotionally
relevant approaches in furthering our understanding of workplace engagement.
352
P3.12 Sex and loving moments as emotion regulation:
A daily diary study of young parents
Anik Debrot, Dominik Schoebi
University of Fribourg
People who are happy with their sexual lives are also happy with their lives more
generally (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004). While little research has investigated
associations of sexuality and affect in daily life, one study suggested that sexual
encounters are associated with enhanced mood (Burleson et al., 2007). It remains
unclear, however, which aspects of intimate interactions involving sexuality contribute to the modulation of emotions. Based on the assumption that the sexual
and affectionate drives are distinct, yet associated systems (Diamond, 2003), and
presumably more closely interrelated in women (Impett et al., 2014), we tested
reports on sexual intercourse, and on affectionate and loving exchanges, as predictors of fluctuations in daily affect. Using electronic momentary assessment,
109 dual-earner couples with young children reported on their momentary affective experience and on their sexual as well as their loving exchanges with their
partner several times a day over ten consecutive days. Dyadic multilevel analyses
suggested that sexual intercourse and loving moments with the partner, when
tested separately, were both predictive of increases in men’s and women’s positive
affect. When tested in the same model, sexual experiences remained a significant predictor of increases in positive affect, but surprisingly, only men’s effects
of loving interactions remained a significant predictor for men’s positive affect,
whereas in women, the loving interactions with the partner did not predict daily
affect fluctuations beyond sexual intercourse. The implication of these results for
interpersonal emotion regulation in close relationships and gender differences in
sexuality are discussed.
353
P3.13 Tuned In Teens: a music based emotion regulation
intervention for adolescents
Genevieve Dingle, Joseph Hodges, Ashleigh Kunde
Adolescence is the lifetime peak age of onset for mental health problems and
poor emotional awareness and regulation constitute trans-diagnostic risk factors
for mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, self-harm and substance
misuse. There is a need for early intervention programs that teach adolescents
emotional skills in order to prevent the onset of these mental health problems.
This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of Tuned In, a brief group intervention
in which participants listen to their preferred music as a way of evoking and learning to regulate strong emotional states. The Tuned In program is underpinned by
music psychology theories about music and emotion and a two dimensional (valence and arousal) model of emotion. There were two samples: N = 58 adolescents
attending a 10 week program educational program for at-risk adolescents; and N
= 215 adolescents attending years 8 and 9 of a mainstream school for girls. The
at-risk sample received Tuned In over 8 sessions, in groups of around eight participants with two psychologist facilitators. The mainstream school sample received
Tuned In as a half day workshop with their whole school year in one auditorium
and five facilitators (all psychologists and one was also a teacher at the school).
Results of the first sample showed pre- to post-program improvements of around
10 percentiles on subscales of the Behavioural Assessment Scales for Children
2 (Adolescent Self Report of Personality) such as school problems, internalising,
hyperactivity, and self-esteem. In the second sample, highly significant improvements were found from pre- to post-program on measures of emotional skills and
self-efficacy for regulating anger, sadness, happiness and anxiety. Participants also
rated Tuned In as an engaging program in both samples. The findings are encouraging and the authors aim to conduct a randomised controlled trial of Tuned In
to further evaluate its use with a range of school and clinic-referred adolescents.
354
P3.14 Recognition of action readiness in natural facial expression
Damien Dupré, Anna Tcherkassof
Univ. Grenoble Alpes
Previous studies suggested that different kind of information could be derive from
the observation of others’ faces (Yik & Russell, 1999; Scherer & Grandjean, 2008).
Thus, posed and static emotional facial expression (EFE) can be interpreted according to basic emotions or as reflecting cognitive appraisals or social messages,
for instance. Some also highlighted that relevant contextual information could be
conveyed by the face and recognized for contextual adaptations. Thus, as stated
by Frijda (1986, 2007), EFE can also reflect the subject’s relational activity, or state
of action readiness. It has been evidenced when showing posed and static EFE to
observers. However, no study has tested the recognition of states of action readiness expressed by spontaneous and dynamic facial expressions. To test this assumption, 12 excerpts (10s long) of natural facial expressions were taken from the
DynEmo database (Tcherkassof, Dupré, Meillon, Mandran, Dubois & Adam, 2013).
These excerpts display adults’ spontaneous facial expressions of happiness, fright,
disgust, boredom, interest and astonishment. (Preliminary experiments were
conduct to ensure their emotional meaning.) Participants were asked to assess
those excerpts on 14 action readiness items chosen to be significantly related to
those emotions (Frijda, Kuipers & TerShure, 1989). Results show that participants
successfully associate the expected modes of action readiness with the corresponding natural facial expressions. This study establishes that relational information is thus conveyed by natural faces and that action readiness modes can
be considered as a relevant kind of information capturing the meaning of facial
expressions.
355
P3.15 Freely Produced Labels for Action Tendencies
Conveyed by Facial Expressions
Anne-Marie Faltacas, Pierre Gosselin, David Horic-Asselin
According to Frijda’s theory (1986, 2010), facial expressions communicate information regarding people’s action tendencies. While several studies have provided
support for the idea that people are likely to behave in certain ways when experiencing a given emotion, little attention has been paid to the second part of the
communication process: people’s ability to perceive action tendencies from facial
expressions. To our knowledge, only three studies have examined this issue and
provided some support for the theory. In one study, participants were asked to
perform a rating task (Tcherkassof, 1999) and in two studies they had to perform
choice-from-an-array tasks (Scherer & Grandjean, 2008; Faltacas, Gosselin, & Horic-Asselin, 2014). In this study, we examine people’s ability to infer action tendencies from facial expressions by asking participants to perform a free-labeling task.
Fifty-two undergraduate students were shown one facial expression at a time and
asked to write down what the stimulus-person was likely to do next. The facial
expressions were selected from the Pictures of Facial Affect (Ekman & Friesen,
1976). Participants’ responses were coded by independent judges (mean kappa
was .92) to determine whether they corresponded to the theory’s predictions or
not. The results yielded some support for Frijda’s theory. Happiness, fear, anger,
and sadness expressions were associated more often with the predicted action
tendencies than with any other unpredicted action tendencies. Results provided
less support for the theory in the cases of surprise and disgust expressions, as participants associated these expressions with not only the predicted action tendencies but also with other (unpredicted) action tendencies. For instance, surprise
expressions were often associated with action tendencies theoretically related to
happiness, and disgust expressions with those theoretically related to anger.
356
P3.16 Angry, very angry or ...really very angry? Intensifiers and the
role of discourse in emotion research
Nina-Maria Fronhofer
University of Augsburg
Linguistic intensification has received much attention in emotion research
(Lewandowska-Tomasczyk/ Wilson 2010; Mathieu/Fellbaum 2014). However, few
studies focus on external intensification, i.e. the upgrading or downgrading of
emotion lexemes by adverbial adjuncts such as very or slightly (Quirk et al. 1985).
Nevertheless, external intensification is an integral part of emotions displayed
in discourse: (1) e_f_016_1 I was annoyed by this because [...] (2) e_f_033_1I’m so
annoyed right now […] (3) e_f_027_1 At first I am just really upset that I didn’t
do well. In (2) the booster so increases the degree of the emotion displayed in
contrast to (1). In (3), a case of double intensification (DI) can be found. The two
types of intensifiers have to be explicitly analysed, since leaving them out would
definitely result in a differential emotion display. In order to pin down the functions of DI in (3) – just has the status of a contextualization here – even the wider
context plays a major role (Fronhofer forthcoming). As cross-linguistic differences
in emotion concepts, more specifically intensification, have been detected in
various languages (Wierzbicka 2009; Cislaru 2014; Constantinou 2014), I expect
to find some with respect to English and German. Current (contrastive) linguistic analyses should therefore seriously address the recent call for more discursive
approaches in order to overcome the “methodological flaw of decontextualization
in emotion research” (Constantinou 2014: 159). The present paper set therefore
out to investigate from a cognitive corpus linguistic (Kövecses 2000; Lakoff 1987;
Langacker 1987, 1991; Lewandowska-Tomascyk/ Dziwirek 2009) and a pragmatic
and interactional sociolinguistics perspective (Gumperz 1982, 1992ab; Ariel 2008)
intensification and related emergent and salient discourse patterns with respect
to the emotion concept ANGER/AERGER in English and German. The both qualitative and quantitative analyses are based on a comparable, gender-balanced and
topic-balanced corpus of elicited personal narratives (n= 248) written by British
(n=62, 34 females) and German (n=68, 34 females) university students. The results
corroborate the fact that context plays a major role in emotion analysis (1) and
give insights into cross-linguistic differences in the emotion concept of ANGER/
AERGER (2). Intensifiers, especially in cases of DI, are crucial for foregrounding or
backgrounding (Gumperz 1982, 1992ab) certain emotions in a cluster of related
emotion concepts. Moreover, a differential distribution of upgraders and downgraders was found in the corpus. The English upgrade significantly more (97,5%)
and downgrade significantly less (12,5%) than the Germans (67,7% and 32,3%). The
outcome of this paper will be beneficial for a wide range of applications, e.g. teaching. In follow-up studies, further emotion concepts (e.g. SURPRISE) as well as
discourse patterns (co-occurrences with cognitive verbs like I think; Fetzer 2014)
will be under scrutinity.
357
P3.17 Mental representations of emotion during reading are
based on emotion components
Christelle Gillioz1, Pascal Gygax 2
University of California1, University of Fribourg2
The specificity of the emotion included in the readers’ mental representation of
the text has been questioned by Gygax et al. (2003, 2004), who showed that readers do not differentiate between similar emotions during reading. One possible
explanation for this non-specificity may be that readers did not have sufficient
information to infer a specific emotion, not in terms of quantity but in terms of
quality. In this study, we investigated whether the quality of the content of the
narratives, in terms of emotion components, could prompt readers to infer specific
emotions. Twenty-four emotional narratives were constructed based on the features contained in the GRID instrument (Fontaine et al., 2013; Scherer, 2005), that
assesses which feature of each emotion component is the most likely to be inferred when an emotion term is used in one’s language. We manipulated the degree
of congruency of the emotional narratives by varying the number of emotion
components in the narratives. In the optimal version, the narratives included all
components qualified by their most typical feature. In the moderate version, two
components were omitted. All narratives ended with a target sentence containing
the intended emotion. Thirty-six participants had to read the narratives and to
decide as fast as possible whether the target sentence was a sensible continuation of the preceding narrative. The proportions of target sentences evaluated as
sensible continuations of the preceding context were very high in both conditions
(moderate: 93.4%, optimal: 96.3%), which shows that all target sentences matched readers’ mental representations. Crucially, participants were 77 milliseconds
faster to say that the target sentences were sensible continuations of the preceding context in the optimal than in the moderate condition. These results support
our hypothesis that enhancing the emotion context, in terms of emotion components provided in narratives helps readers to infer specific emotions.
358
P3.18 Facial patterns produced in an affect imagery task
Pierre Gosselin, Anne-Marie Faltacas
Although human beings have a fairly good control of their facial activity and can
feign emotions with their face, it is not clear whether they can produce the prototypical facial expressions theoretically associated with basic emotions. In this
study, we examined the facial patterns produced by 20 young adults who were
instructed to portray happiness, anger, and disgust convincingly by remembering
past emotional episodes. The participants’ facial behavior was analyzed with the
Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen, 1992) and self-reports were used
to assess the extent to which participants succeeded in feeling and portraying
the target emotions. The results indicate that participants activated most of the
action units theoretically associated with the target emotions. More importantly,
they often produced the prototypical facial expressions associated with happiness
and disgust. Most of their happiness expressions involved the co-activation of the
cheek raiser and lip corner puller, and most of their disgust expressions involved
the activation of the nose wrinkler or the upper lip raiser. However, prototypical
facial expressions of anger were virtually never observed. The participants succeeded in co-activating some action units associated with anger but not enough
to produce the expected prototypical expressions. Remembering past emotional
episodes appears to be an efficient technique for feigning happiness and disgust,
but not anger.
359
P3.19 Interoceptive sensitivity shapes empathy
Delphine Grynberg1, Olga Pollatos2
Universite Catholique de Louvain1, University of Ulm2
Empathy is a basic human ability with affective and cognitive facets and high
interindividual variability. Of importance, recent neural findings suggest that
there may be an interdependence between accurately detecting one’s internal
body signals (interoceptive sensitivity; IS) and empathy, specifically empathy for
pain, such that individuals activate their own body representations of pain when
observing someone in pain, leading to stronger empathic responses. Although
the hypothesis about the role of IS in empathy is theoretically and empirically
driven, the empirical evidence remains indirect, and so far scant direct evidence
is available to suggest that empathizing for someone depends on the level of
interoceptive sensitivity in the empathizer. This study thus investigated whether
IS (i.e., heartbeat perception task) shape affective and cognitive empathy. To this
aim, 93 participants were asked to report the valence of their feelings, as well as
the degree of compassion, arousal, and distress they felt in response to pictures
depicting other people in pain or in non-pain situations. Participants also had to
estimate how painful the situation was. Main results showed that greater interoceptive sensitivity enhanced the estimated degree of pain (cognitive empathy),
as well as arousal and feelings of compassion (affective empathy), in response to
painful pictures. In conclusion, the accurate perception of bodily states and their
representation us to feel more compassion for another person and to evaluate the
pain that they experience as being more intense. We thus confirmed that interoception may modulate affective and cognitive empathy in response to people
experiencing pain .
360
P3.20 Factors influencing emotional responses to upward
comparisons: The good, the bad, and the mixed
Nicole E. Henniger, Christine R. Harris
University of California
The superiority of another person can elicit emotions ranging from admiration and
inspiration to envy and resentment. What makes someone feel bad or good about
a better person? Factors like perceived control, deservingness, and relationship closeness have been hypothesized to influence both general valance and the specific emotions that occur in response to another’s success (e.g. Smith 2000; Tesser,
1988). These specific upward comparison emotions may also be differentiated by
their focus on self versus other. We tested the hypothesized associations among
perceived situational factors, specific emotions, and feelings towards the superior
person and the self. Participants (n=237) recalled details about two experiences: a
time when they felt bad and a time when they felt good in response to someone
who had something that they wanted (e.g. object, accomplishment, trait). Good
experiences were characterized by only slightly greater perceived control, attainability of success, deservingness, fairness, and relationship closeness. Reports of
these factors varied widely, as did reports of the specific emotions experienced.
This variation provided a rich and nuanced picture of relationships among factors
and emotional responses. For example, perceived control and attainability were
most strongly associated with participants’ self-directed feelings and motivation,
while fairness and deservingness were most strongly associated with participants’ other-directed emotional responses. Interestingly, relationship closeness
only influenced pride, not any other upward comparison emotion. These findings
suggest that emotional responses to upward comparisons are often mixed, including multiple specific emotions and both positive and negative valance. By considering these co-occurring emotions, researchers may be able to develop a more
accurate model of how situational factors and attributions in upward comparisons produce different emotional responses towards the self and other.
361
P3.21 Dual processes in cognitive and emotional domains shapes
ambiguous task performance
Kamil Imbir, Anna Antosz
University of Warsaw
This poster present new conceptualization of emotion cognition interactions in
case of ambiguous task processing. This proposition is based on duality of mind
approach to mental processes. This group of theories distinguish automatic vs.
controlled cognitive processes due to two separate mental systems. We may apply
duality of mind distinction between automatic and controlled processes for emotions understanding (Jarymowicz & Imbir, 2014). This leads us to distinguishing
so called automatic and reflective emotion operationalized as heart vs. mind origin dichotomy (Imbir, 2014). Taking into account both sides of emotion - cognition
relationship (treated as function of mental system due to their formation) we
have to manage with four different situations. First two, when automatic emotion influence heuristic cognition and reflective emotion influence systematic
cognition, operate inside the same mental system (Experiential or Rational) for
both emotion and cognition. Last two, when automatic emotion influence systematic cognition and reflective emotion influence heuristic cognition, operate
between different mental systems. Since now all of them has been described as
emotion - cognition relationships. We decided to check if priming of mindset and
emotional quality materials would result in ambiguous task processing. Mindset
was primed by instruction suggesting that acting fast or slow is connected with
intelligence and wisdom. Additionally task showing benefits of such thinking
was provided. Emotional quality of materials used in ambiguous task was based
on emotional meaning of words. The task was to choose one of two symbols hexagrams deriving from Chinese symbol language - which better expressed previously presented word. We found that both manipulations influenced reaction
times in ambiguous task. Firstly, reaction times were shorter in case of heuristic or
fast thinking priming in comparison with systematic or slow and neutral processing. Secondly, reaction times were longer when ambiguous task involved reflective originated words than in case of automatic and neutral words. This effect was
especially significant in neutral mindset condition. We did not find any valence
effects. These results suggest that both manipulations could promote heuristic or
fast and systematic or slow processing of ambiguous task, thus emotion duality
model can be treated as one of duality of mind representations.
362
P3.22 Using a wide angle to explore colour preferences: An investigation of individual liking and disliking in various choice settings
Domicele Jonauskaite, Nele Dael, Christine Mohr
Current approaches of assessing colour preferences often target the positive end
of the spectrum (liking). Relatively little is known about negative preferences (disliking) and mechanisms would underlie presumed stable evaluative judgments.
In addition, findings are based on relatively limited choice settings compared to
realistic situations that offer a wide range of colours for specific objects. Recent
theories have been proposed about what drives colour preferences. For example,
the ecological valence theory (EVT, Palmer & Schloss, 2010) hypothesizes that
peoples’ preferences for colours result from their combined affective reactions to
correspondingly coloured objects. In one study (Strauss, Schloss & Palmer, 2013),
positive evaluations of coloured objects increased liking of the corresponding colour, but this effect was absent for negative experiences with objects. In addition,
showing pre-defined colour samples poses a risk of neglecting particularly liked or
disliked colours. To obtain a refined assessment of both liked and disliked colours,
we asked individuals to select the colours they liked most and least for three scenarios (in general, for a t-shirt, for room walls) using a newly devised incremental
colour picker. We further assessed whether the chosen colour was associated to
a valenced object or concept. Results show a varied selection both between individuals and between the three choice scenarios and reasons for choice. Saturated colours are most preferred in general, supporting previous reports. However,
darker and less saturated colours are preferred for a t-shirt and lighter colours
for room walls. Compared to liked colours, disliked colours are less often linked to
valenced objects or concepts. Also, the observed high individual variability in this
and previous reports suggests that colour preferences, at least for hues, are determined by non-general subjective experiences. The current results thus indicate
that colour choices are complex and that previously learned associations such
as posited by the EVT may not be as prone to change for negative preferences
(dislikes) than for positive ones (likes). Further, object specific preferences did not
follow the same pattern as general preferences, indicating that ecological choices
are multi-determined. Results will be further discussed drawing on motivational
tendencies and in relation to other frameworks of esthetic judgment.
363
P3.23 Which characteristics of disliked people inhibit
helping behavior?
Kazuaki Kawano1, Takashi Hanari2, Kimio Ito1
Tokai-Gakuen University1, Sugiyama Jogakuen University2
Social emotions of humans contribute to maintaining reciprocal altruism, and
emotions of fondness or dislike in particular are considered to adjust the helping
behavior between individuals and to underlie the maintenance or collapse of a
reciprocal relationship (Trivers, 1971). However, the details of how the emotion
of disliking people affects the reciprocal relationship have not been clarified yet.
Objective: This study used a questionnaire to examine which characteristics of
disliked people inhibit the helping behavior of those who dislike such people.
Method: Previous studies have pointed out some characteristics of disliked people.
Respondents of the questionnaire were asked to choose and think about a person
whom the respondents disliked the most and another person toward whom the
respondents had neutral emotions (hereinafter referred to as “neutral person”)
among the people whom the respondents saw face-to-face, and the respondents
were further asked what emotions they had toward such persons and their characteristics, as well as how much the respondents wanted to help them and how
much they wanted to avoid being disliked by them. Result: Dislike and helping
behavior were found to be in a negative relationship; it was shown that “dislike induced by differences from the respondents” and “dislike induced by selfishness of
the disliked person” particularly inhibited helping behavior while dislike induced
by “envy toward the disliked person” promoted helping behavior. Analysis of the
emotions of the respondents toward the neutral persons and their avoidance of
being disliked by the neutral persons revealed that “respect” and “inclination toward avoidance of being disliked by others” promote helping behavior while “dislike” inhibits helping behavior. The result has been interpreted to suggest that we
refrain from helping those whom we dislike, but we are likely to maintain help for
persons if they are considered to have many resources, and we promote helping
behavior when we do not want to be disliked. The functional meaning of dislike of
others was discussed.
364
P3.24 What is The Role of Positive Emotion Experience to Promote
Adolescents’ Skills: A Longitudinal Study of Organized Activities
Aiko Komoto
Tokyo University
Participating in organized activities, such as sports and arts, are known to promote adolescents’ positive development (Larson, 2000). Results of relationship
between activity participation and psychological adjustment have been mixed,
however (Feldman & Matjasko, 2012). Further investigation into adolescents’ activity experiences is needed to explain why these activities promote adolescents’
development. Among possible experiences to foster adolescents’ development,
the function of positive emotion experience has been ignored. According to Fredrickson (2001), positive emotions can broaden and build personal resources.
The current study, therefore, examined unique contribution of positive emotion
experience toward promotion of individual nonacademic skills. In addition, since
several study had suggested adolescents at risk are likely to benefit from organized activities (e.g. Fredricks & Eccles, 2006), less skilled individuals prior to the
activity might benefit more by experiencing positive emotion than more skilled
individuals. This study, thus, also examined the moderating effect of prior individual skills on the association between positive emotion experience and individual
skills. The sample consisted of 955 high school students. Students were asked to
rate the extent to which they felt positive emotions while participating in the
activity. Also, individual non-academic skills were assessed both before and after
the activity. Using hierarchical regression analyses, main effects of positive emotion experience on individual skills were found. Interactions with students’ prior
skills in the intensity of positive emotion experience and individual skills were also
found to be significant. Follow-up analyses for these interaction effects revealed
that only more skilled students had positive association of intensity of positive
emotion experience with individual skills. These findings revealed that the experience of positive emotion in youth activity promotes individual skills. Positive
emotion experience was only positively associated with the individual skills for
skilled individuals, however. More investigations may be needed to examine what
kind of experience can promote development for less skilled individuals.
365
P3.25 Emotion congruity effect at different stages of the perception
of emotional facial expressions
Yulia Kozhukhova, Dmitry Lyusin
Russian Academy of Sciences
The emotion congruity effect in emotion perception consists in the better perception of emotions that are congruent with a perceiver’s state or trait emotion (Rusting, 1998; Niedenthal et al., 2000; Schmid & Schmid Mast, 2010). The emotion
incongruity effect, being an extension of the congruity effect, consists in hampering the perception of emotions incongruent with a perceiver’s emotion. Our
study aimed at exploring emotion congruity and emotion incongruity effects at
the earlier and later stages of the perception of emotional facial expressions. Participants (N=33) filled out questionnaires that measured their actual mood, trait
happiness, and trait sadness. Then they performed emotion recognition tasks in
the frame of two different experimental paradigms. In the first paradigm, emotional faces were presented for 200 ms. Participants were asked to assess emotions
with the use of two response formats, open responses or multiple choice. In the
second paradigm, they evaluated emotional facial expression with no fixed time
frame for the stimuli presentation.State and trait sadness impaired recognition of
happy faces at the earlier stage of emotion perception (partial incongruity effect),
whereas trait happiness facilitated perception of happiness at the later stage of
emotion perception (partial congruity effect). These results do not fit thoroughly
the predictions of the theories commonly used for the explanation of the mood
congruity and mood incongruity effects (Bower, 1981; Schwarz & Clore, 1983).
However, the results can be more easily explained by Schwarz and Clore’s moodas-information theory.
366
P3.26 Understanding the strategies for emotion regulation
in primary school children
Kirsty Lowe-Brown
University of Buckingham
Emotion regulation refers to the deliberative attempt to alter some aspect of the
emotion process such as intensity or duration. Understanding of the strategies
that can be used for regulating emotional experiences develops during childhood.
In developmental research, studies have typically investigated developmental
changes in understanding regulation by distinguishing between behavioural and
mental strategies (Pons, Harris and De Rosnay; 2004). Other literature has suggested that strategies of emotion regulation may be distinguished by further
sub-categorisation; such as whether regulation is self (intrapersonal) or other (interpersonal) initiated (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006). Therefore further distinctions may also be useful in creating a developmental framework of understanding
of emotion regulation. The present study investigated 128 children (58M 70F) aged
4-11 years’ (range 4 years 10 months to 11 years 5 months) understanding of strategies for emotion regulation. Children were presented with hypothetical everyday
scenarios in which they might be expected to experience a negative emotion. A
test re-test method was used to assess understanding at two time points (average 4.2 month’s duration between test points). Children were asked to give verbal
responses to what they could use to alleviate negative emotional feelings in the
given contexts. This methodology was selected as an alternative to forced choice
response commonly used in research within the field in order to identify the range
of strategies employed. Expressive vocabulary was measured as a covariate using
the EVT-2. Results are discussed in terms of developmental changes in the types of
strategies suggested for interpersonal and intrapersonal regulation and ability to
explain such mechanisms. Differences in strategy suggestions between emotions
and scenarios are also explored as well as the within subject consistency between
the two test points. The study adds insight into existing research on children’s
understanding of emotion regulation and how explicit strategies for regulating
emotions emerge developmentally. The verbal free response method allowed for
investigation as to whether the traditional forced choice method, by it’s over simplicity risks missing the breadth of strategies children employ.
367
P3.27 An Intentional Object Approach to Emotion
Susanna Melkonian
Dusseldorf University
The goal of this paper is to synthesize the perceptual-feeling theory of emotion
(e.g., James 1884) with the cognitivist theory (e.g., Gordon 1987). Crucial to my
account is the idea that emotions have content, where ‘content’ refers to what
is evident in the presentation of the object to the mind (Crane 2001). The advantage of my account over other synthesizing accounts (e.g., Zinck and Newen 2008)
is that it directly addresses issues pertinent to the philosophy of the emotions.
According to De Sousa (2003): “We need a taxonomy of the different sorts of
possible emotional objects. We might then distinguish different types of emotions, not on the basis of their qualitative feel, but—at least in part—according
to the different complex structures of their object relations.” I argue that the kind
of content involved in an emotion depends on the ontological kind of object involved. While ‘basic emotions’ typically involve a physical object that can either be
conceptually or directly perceived, ‘cognitive emotions’ typically involve a non-directly perceivable social object that is accessed by a propositional attitude. I argue
that if a physical object is directly perceivable, then an emotion in question does
not need to involve cognitive content. But if the object in question cannot be directly perceived, then because it is a social object, cognitive content is necessary
for accessing it. Zinck and Newen’s account fails to meet De Sousa’s criteria since
it distinguishes different sorts of emotions by characterizing a wide range of their
characteristic features. Incorporating insights from developmental psychology
and neuroscience, Zinck and Newen integrate several emotional features such as
physiological, expressive and cognitive into a single account. The problem with
such a multi-factorial account is that it posits different sorts of mental states in
order to distinguish between ‘basic emotions’, ‘primary cognitive emotions’ and
‘secondary cognitive emotions’ (authors’ terminology).
368
P3.28 Does dysphoria modulate alpha asymmetry
during emotional imagery?
Rocco Mennella, Simone Messerotti Benvenuti,
Giulia Buodo, Daniela Palomba
University of Padova
Left and right cerebral hemispheres are differently involved in emotional processing. Asymmetry of the electroencephalographic alpha band (an inverse index of
cortical activation) provides information on emotion-related cortical lateralization, as well as on mood changes and disturbances 1. Indeed, relatively less leftthan right-sided cortical activity at anterior scalp sites, and the opposite pattern
at posterior scalp sites is often displayed in depressed individuals, at rest 2. However, respectively, these differences are more likely to emerge during emotional and
visuospatial tasks, than in resting conditions 3,4. The emotional imagery task is a
useful tool to study the influence of emotion on both anterior and posterior alpha
asymmetry in dysphoric individuals. Indeed, although it is well-established that
posterior cortical activity plays a key role in emotional processing, the influence of
dysphoria on posterior, other than anterior, alpha asymmetry during an emotional
task has not been fully investigated. In the present study, dysphoric (n = 23) and
non-dysphoric (n = 24) individuals performed an emotional imagery task including
pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant narratives. At anterior sites, reduced left relative
to right cortical activity (i.e. more left than right alpha power), was found in the
group with dysphoria, compared to the group without dysphoria, irrespective of
emotional condition. Conversely, lower right relative to left parietal activity during
unpleasant than pleasant and neutral imagery was found specifically in dysphoric
individuals. Results at anterior scalp sites are in line with previous findings reporting reduced left hemisphere activity in dysphoric individuals, possibly indicating
reduced approach motivation. Right- relative to left-sided parietal hypo-activation
observed in dysphoric individuals in response to unpleasant imagery may reflect
verbal ruminative rather than visuospatial processing of the unpleasant content.
369
P3.29 Getting angry when playing tennis: Gender differences and
the effect of gender stereotype
Maria Grazia Monaci, Francesca Veronesi, Luca Scacchi
University of Valle d’Aosta
In sport anger has not only been a neglected emotion, but has also often been mistaken for aggressiveness (Isberg, 2000). Sportspeople develop some meta-beliefs
on the emotions associated with the best performances (Lane et al., 2012; Jones,
2012) and these beliefs play a crucial role in emotion regulation (Gross & Barrett,
2011). In addition, and consistent with the social rules of emotion display and with
gender stereotypes, it can be assumed that women, more than men, implement
strategies aimed at regulating anger and its expression (Brody, 1997). The present
study investigates the issue of anger felt while playing tennis, a “high status” and
highly emotionally controlled sport in which women’s participation has been traditionally tolerated, by focusing on gender differences and the effect of adherence
to the masculinity and femininity stereotypes. Through a questionnaire, 180 amateur tennis players (88F) reported the frequency, duration and quality of anger
they felt during tennis matches. Regulation strategies, expressions and perceived
effects on performance were also measured. Results show that people often feel
anger during a match. No gender differences emerge on the subjective experience
of anger, but they are relevant on its expression and regulation strategies: more
often than female players, male players tend to report externalizing modalities,
both self-directed and verbally aggressive toward others. Also, female players with
low levels of femininity tend to be more verbally externalizing than those with
high levels of femininity. Finally, a good part of the variability unexplained by gender differences finds a reason in the players’ level of expertise: players with higher
levels of expertise report getting angry more frequently.
370
P3.30 Intracranial evidence of the modulation of the emotion
network by musical structure
Diana Omigie, Severine Samson, Marcus Pearce
Lille University, Queen Mary
Social science research has demonstrated that music is widely exploited as a tool
to evoke emotions and manage mood and arousal. However, while a growing
body of neuroscience research has begun to provide neural correlates of so called
musical emotions, still unclear is the nature of the dynamics of communication
between the implicated brain areas and the specific roles each of these areas play.
Furthermore, the extent to which a musical stimulus’s structure alone, in the absence of perceivable or explicit emotion, can be shown to modulate the emotional
network remains an important topic for new research. The current study aimed to
examine the extent to which musical structure modulates areas of the brain commonly associated with emotions in music. To this end, we took advantage of the
excellent spatial and temporal resolution of intracranial electroencephalography
(iEEG) recordings, which can be collected from epileptic patients implanted with
depth electrodes for presurgical evaluation. Participants were presented with short
melodies, whose individual notes had been characterized in terms of Information
Content (IC) - a measure of stimulus probability. iEEG responses to these notes
were then examined with event-related-potential, time frequency and functional
connectivity analysis to determine the extent to which IC predicted activity in and
between the different brain structures recorded from. Results showed sensitivity
to IC in various medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures, drawing an important link
between music as an ambiguous stimulus situation and the hypothesized role
of some of these MTL structures in modulating moment-to-moment vigilance
in such situations. In addition, and as expected, modulation of activity was also
found in areas associated with processing musical syntax such as the superior
temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. Findings contribute to recent iEEG and
functional magnetic response imaging (fMRI) studies that have begun to elaborate on the dynamics, causes, and neural specificity of musical emotions.
371
P3.31 Feelings Associated With Romaphobia
Lisa Pagotto, Anna Maria Meneghini
The Roma are a stigmatized group of people who have suffered discrimination
throughout Europe for centuries. However, the recent massive migrations of
Roma from Romania to Western Europe have exacerbated the so called Romaphobia and Antiziganism (Piasere 2012) in host countries. Empirical data (Ljujic et al.,
2012) support the notion of Romaphobia as a qualitatively distinct type of prejudice. As part of an articulated investigation involving five EU countries (“MigRom:
“The immigration of Romanian Roma to Western Europe: Causes, effects, and
future engagement strategies”), this study aims to map Italian citizens’ feelings
towards Romanian Roma (RR) and analyse how these emotions are associated
with:1) Perceived threats in terms of physical safety, public health, private property,
the job market and economic resources; 2) attitudes towards RR; 3) stereotypes
that the participants attribute to RR with reference to the warmth-competence
model (Fiske et al., 2002). An on-line questionnaire was administered to 221 Italian residents. It included a list of 16 emotions, measures of attitudes, stereotypes
and perceived threats. Participants reported a more negative attitude towards
RR as compared to other groups of immigrants. They expressed more negative
than positive feelings, with contempt and irritation being strongly associated
with negative attitudes, while interest and sympathy were moderately correlated
with positive attitudes. The stereotypes that were most frequently attributed to
RR were sly, dirty, criminal, and poor and the only positive adjective was musical.
Similarly, the most intense emotions elicited by RR were suspicion, anxiety and
fear which was highly correlated with physical threat and danger. However, the
emotions that showed the highest correlations with perceived threats and negative adjectives were anger and disgust. Interestingly, the participants were also
curious about the RR. To date, few studies have investigated the emotions elicited
by Roma people and the specific threats associated with them. Knowledge about
the feelings that shape attitudes towards RR could help policy makers to address
the social problems associated with multi-cultural coexistence and to choose the
best acculturation strategies for both migrants and hosting communities.
372
P3.32 Revisiting the role of both ability and trait emotional
intelligence as predictors of well-being and health
Juan Carlos Perez-Gonzalez1, Javier Cejudo2, Debora Rodrigo-Ruiz1,
Jose M. Mestre3, Rocio Guil3
UNED, Madrid1, Faculty of Education, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha,
Ciudad Real2, Universidad de Cadiz3
A distinction between ability EI and trait EI has been established along the last
years (e.g., Matthews et al., 2012; Pérez-González & Sanchez-Ruiz, 2014). According
to the meta-analysis by Martins et al. (2010), the positive association between EI
and health has already reached sufficiency and stability, specially for the case of
trait EI which was more strongly associated with health than ability EI. Likewise,
Martins et al. (2010) found the TEIQue had the strongest association with mental health. Nevertheless, in the meta-analysis by Martins et al. (2010) the only
included measures of ability EI were the MSCEIT and the MEIS. But recently a
couple of tests of ability EI based on theories of emotion (i.e., STEU and STEM)
have been developed (MacCann & Roberts, 2008; MacCann, 2010). Both tests have
been unevenly associated with indicators of health and well-being (e.g., MacCann
& Roberts, 2008). We present the results of two studies exploring the relationship
between ability EI (measured by the STEU & the STEM) and trait EI (measured
by the TEIQue) with health (MH-5) and well-being (SWLS). In the first study the
sample was composed by 196 adults and we used the short forms of the STEU
and the STEM, together the short form of the TEIQue as predictors. In the second
study the sample consists of 225 adolescents and we used the short adolescent
forms of the STEU, the STEM and the TEIQue. The findings indicate that trait EI is
a consistent predictor of health and well-being in both adults and adolescents
samples. The associations between ability EI (STEU & STEM) and both health and
well-being were also consistent but negligible. Implications for the construct validity of both constructs of ability EI and trait EI are discussed.
373
P3.33 The Expression Of Fear In Russian And Italian:
The Role Of Metonymy Over Time
Erica Pinelli
University of Pavia
The notion of embodiement (Rohrer 2007) is basic in Cognitive Linguistics and
implies that our conceptualization of reality is mediated by our experience and
perception of the world, by our senses and our body. Emotions are one of the most
typical embodied concepts, because they usually have strong physiological impact
on our body and our mind. Consequently, they are often understood metonymically. Metonymy is defined as a cognitive process that relates two entities belonging
to the same conceptual domain, for example, cause-effect or container-content
(Kövecses 2004, 2010). The concept of fear is very often expressed linguistically by
referring to its uncontrollable effects on our bodies such as trembling, pallor and
loss of consciousness. The body reaction can be combined with direct reference
to the emotion, for example ‘trembling with fear’ or, in some specific contexts, it
can stand alone for the emotion without any further references as in (1). 1.U menja
drožali koleni. My knees were trembling. In phraseologism and specific metonymical expressions the reference to fear is direct also without any specific context as
the Italian rabbrividire ‘shudder’ in (2). 2.Quella vista lo fece rabbrividire. That sight
made him shudder. Moreover, metonymy is a process that can lead to lexicalization. The etymological analysis of the most prototypical noun and verb expressing
fear, the Russian strach ‘fear’ and bojat’sja ‘to fear’ and the Italian paura ‘fear’ and
temere ‘to fear’, shows that those words are themselves a result of metonymical
processes. For example, the word strach it was originally related to words whose
meaning was “become torpid, turn into ice”. This paper wants to show how the
same metonymies can play a relevant role at different degrees of lexicalization.
Moreover, the comparison between Italian and Russian data shows that in these
two languages the embodied concept of fear can be expressed by similar metonymies but, at the same time, there are culture specific features that can interfere in
the emotion conceptualization.
374
P3.34 Relations between Emotion Regulation and
Co-Rumination in Youths’ Friendships
Natalee Price, Kara Braunstein, Naomi Parr,
Kat Fleckenstein, Janice Zeman
College of William & Mary, Virginia
Emotional competencies play an integral role in peer relations (von Salisch, 2001),
through a variety of theorized mechanisms, most of which have not yet been
tested. The current study evaluates one such mechanism, co-rumination that refers to excessive problem talk within friendships, characterized by mutual encouragement of problem talk, problem rehashing, speculation about future effects of
the problem, and dwelling on negative affect (Rose, 2002). We examined the relations between co-rumination and two facets of emotion competence—expressive reluctance and poor awareness of emotional experience. It was hypothesized
that increased emotion expression and awareness would predict increased corumination among adolescent friendships and that these relations would differ
by gender. Participants were 174 middle school youth (55.2% girls; 74% EuropeanAmerican, ages 10-15; M = 12.67). Youth participated with a reciprocated same-sex
best friend. They each completed the Emotion Expression Scale for Children (EESC;
Penza-Clyve & Zeman, 2002), the Friendship Quality Questionnaire (FQQ; Parker &
Asher, 1994), and the Co-rumination Questionnaire (Co-R; Rose, 2002). In a 15-minute discussion task, the best friend dyads each discussed a problem while being
videotaped. The videos were coded for co-ruminating behaviors. Actor-Partner
Interdependence Modeling (APIM; Cook & Kenny, 2005) was used to account for
mutual influence in dyadic data. Actor refers to the participant who brought in
their best friend, the partner. Expressive reluctance was correlated with friendship
quality (r = -0.19, p = 0.005). In all analyses, gender and positive friendship quality
were entered into the model as covariates. There were no significant main effects
for poor emotional awareness. Expressive reluctance had a significant main (partner) effect (b = -.18, p = 0.005) such that partner’s expressive reluctance predicted lower actor co-rumination during the discussion task. There was a significant
gender x partner interaction (b = -.45, p = 0.01). Analyses were then conducted for
each gender to interpret this effect. When predicting total Co-R, the partner effect
remained significant for boys (b = -.21, p = 0.02) and girls (b = -.17, p = 0.04). When
predicting specific Co-R behaviors, a significant gender x partner interaction was
found for rehashing (b = -.29, p = 0.08). Expressive reluctance significantly predicted rehashing among girls (b = -.24, p = 0.02), but not boys (b = -.13, p = 0.12). These
results suggest that emotional expression and co-ruminating behaviors may have
bidirectional effects within adolescent friendships. Reluctance to express emotion
may lessen a best friend’s tendency to engage in problem talk (particularly rehashing of the problem). Alternatively, one’s minimal co-ruminating may lead to
less expressed emotion by a friend.
375
P3.35 Ephemeral emotions and unforgettable words - fMRI study
of associative long-term memory
Monika Riegel, Malgorzata Wierzba, Katarzyna Jednoróg,
Anna Grabowska, Artur Marchewka
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Varsovie
Emotional events have a privileged status in human memory. Emotion-memory
interactions are present at various stages of information processing, from the initial encoding to their long-term retrieval [1]. However, little is known about the influence of specific emotional dimensions [2] and basic emotions [3] on the storage
of emotionally-charged verbal stimuli. Goals: Our goal was to study the influence
of emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and basic emotions (happiness,
sadness, fear, anger, disgust) on the long-term memory (LTM) of words, with a focus on the brain activation patterns revealed by functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) during encoding and associative memory test. Methods: During
scanning in the encoding phase, participants were presented with word pairs
consisting of one neutral word and a second word with the manipulated emotional content. After 10 seconds, the word pairs were tested in a probe phase. In the
second scanning session, long-term memory was tested in a single item LTM task,
and associative LTM task of word pairs. Results: As expected [4,5,6], our preliminary results show that negative affect impaired associative long-term memory, as
reflected in lower accuracy for the recognition of word pairs. The observed effects
were reflected by specific patterns of brain activation. Conclusions: Our study provides additional evidence that processes during encoding and retrieval, as well
as affective content (characterized by emotional dimensions and basic emotions)
might modulate the effects of emotion on relational memory, which is reflected
in the brain activation patterns.
376
P3.36 Passionate Emotions
Ira Roseman, Patricia Gordon, Alex Flitter
Rutgers University
Passion has often been investigated in relation to romantic love (e.g., Hatfield,
Bensman, & Rapson, 2012). But people report being passionate about other activities, such as vocations and avocations, politics, religion, and causes (see, e.g.,
Ho, Wong, & Lee, 2011). Vallerand et al. (2003) define passion broadly, as strong
inclination toward any activity that people like, find important, and invest time
and energy. So is passion an emotion--a type of love? joy in activity? hope for
an outcome? The relationship between feelings of passion and particular emotions is an understudied topic. We investigated two varieties of passion: toward
a relationship partner and one’s work. Undergraduates (n=152, 67% female) filled
out questionnaires about a current romantic relationship, and a current job. They
completed the Passionate Love Scale (Hatfield & Sprecher, 2011) and an analogous
job-related scale; a single item measure of passion applicable to relationships and
jobs; items from the Passion Scale (Vallerand et al., 2003); measures of individual
positive and negative emotions (such as joy, hope, affection, pride, fear, and anger);
and questions measuring positive and negative emotion actually and potentially
obtained from, or reduced by, the relationship or job. Passion was associated with
increased positive emotion and decreased negative emotion. Hope was the emotion most highly correlated with scores on the PLS, and was also rated highly on
the job-related scale (interest was non-significantly higher in relation to jobs). Joy
was rated higher on the single item measure. Results argue against arousal +
cognition, general positive affect, and love-oriented models. They suggest that
passion corresponds to a particular emotion or set of emotions and/or motivations that can be experienced toward a variety of activities and people.
377
P3.37 How emotional coloring of stimuli influences
working memory: an fMRI study
Renata Rozovskaya, Regina Machinskaya, Valentin Sinitsin,
Ekaterina Pechenkova
University of Moscow
The interaction between emotion and cognition remains one of the most exciting
and complicated research areas in both psychology and neuroscience. Is it collaboration or competition? One facet of this question is how emotional valence of
information modulates memory. While there is a substantial body of research on
the long-term memory for emotional stimuli, studies that consider the interplay
between emotion and working memory are not numerous, and only few of them
address the neural correlates of working memory for emotionally colored material (Gray, Braver, & Raichle, 2002). Our event-related functional MRI (fMRI) study
aimed to clarify whether maintenance of pleasant, unpleasant and emotionally
neutral visual material in the working memory recruits distinct neural substrates.
Forty five healthy subjects (18 females, 27 males) aged 20-60 years (mean = 30, SD
= 6.2) performed change detection task in the scanner while being showed the
photographs (40 pleasant, 40 unpleasant and 40 neutral) from IAPS (Bradley &
Lang, 2007) and GAPED (Dan-Glauser & Scherer, 2011) databases. Initial stimulus
was presented for 4 s, a test stimulus was displayed for 3 s and contained a change
to an original image on half of the trials. Participants had to indicate with a button press whether they had noticed any change between the initial and the test
photograph. Presentation of the test stimulus was delayed by an interval of 9.5-11
s (the retention period). Change detection is widely used in studies of working
memory because accurate performance of this task requires that the participant
maintains information in the working memory for the retention period. In order
to reveal neural correlates of memory per se rather than perception of emotional
stimuli, our data analysis was also focused on the retention period. Functional
MR images were collected on 1.5 T Siemens Avanto scanner at the rate of 2 s per
volume. The behavioral results show a significant difference between emotional
and neutral conditions in percent of correct responses and reaction time respectively. Functional MRI data also show the different topography of activated brain
areas during first 4 seconds of the retention period of working memory. The most
significant differences were found for the negatively colored and neutral stimuli.
Taken together, behavioral and fMRI data suggest that processing of negative
information results in different (as compared to neutral) brain basis for working
memory and such basis seems to be less optimal for this type of cognitive task.
378
P3.38 Memory for emotional faces and voices vary as a
function of expressed emotion
Diana Sanchez Cortes, Christina Lindahl, Petri Laukka, Håkan Fischer
Stockholm University
Socioemotional memory plays a key role in daily interactions, for example because
people often need to remember whether they have met a person before or not.
Previous research has been inconclusive regarding the effect of emotional expressions on memory function, and this type of socioemotional memory has barely
been examined in expression modalities other than faces. The aim of the current
study was to investigate whether certain emotions are recalled more accurately
than others and if this depends on the sensory modality. At study, the incidental
memory task was to recognize the expressed emotion in photographs of facial expressions, followed by vocalizations (e.g., cries, laughter), and finally audio-visual
stimuli (combinations of photographs and vocalizations) in a forced-choice task.
All modalities included expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and
neutral expressions. During recognition participants were presented with the old
items together with new items for each presentation modality in a Remember/
Know task. Results from 600 participants showed that memory (hits minus false
alarm) for emotional faces and/or voices varied as a function of expressed emotions and sensory modality. Regardless of sensory modality, neutral expressions
were remembered most accurately, but for other expressions memory varied
across modalities. For the visual and audio-visual modalities, fearful expressions
were best remembered, whereas happiness expressions were best remembered
in the auditory modality. This suggests that neither visual nor vocal emotional expressions facilitate memory accuracy in person perception, possibly due to differentiated processes underlying memory for facial/vocal identity and memory for
facial/vocal expressions. To summarize, our results show that emotional expressions do not necessarily enhance memory, and that faces and voices expressing
different emotions are not equally easy to remember. The psychological mechanisms and neural substrates underlying these cross-modal effects deserve more
attention.
379
P3.39 The role of relevance to sexual concerns of individuals in
wanting underlying variations in sexual desire
Vanessa Sennwald, Eva Pool, Tobias Brosch,
Sylvain Delplanque, David Sander
Recently, a model developed in affective neuroscience (Berridge & Robinson, 2003)
has posited that reward processing involves two components: (a) wanting, the
effort individuals are willing to mobilize to obtain a reward and (b) liking, the hedonic pleasure felt during the consumption of a reward. Studies have shown that
intensity of wanting (Balleine, 1994) and involuntary attentional orienting (Brosch,
Sander, Pourtois & Scherer, 2008) depends on the relevance of the stimulus for
the concerns, goals and values of individuals. Accordingly, if sexual desire can be
considered a specific case of reward processing (Toates, 2009), relevance should
be crucial in wanting and attention orienting during sexual stimuli processing. In
the present study, we aimed at investigating whether relevance can trigger wanting for sexual stimuli and involuntary attentional stimuli toward sexual stimuli.
More precisely, sexual relevance was manipulated by choosing heterosexual and
homosexual male participants and using sexual stimuli representing erotic men
or women. We hypothesized that stimuli associated with sexual reward would
trigger wanting and attract attention depending on the participants’ sexual
orientation. The selection of the reward was based on reported liking of various
erotic images, then the amount of effort they were willing to mobilize to obtain
a stimulus associated with the reward was measured through the number of
presses during a Pavlovian Instrumental Transfer task and finally to test attention
orientation, they performed a dot probe task. Preliminary results for heterosexual
participants have been promising. Particularly, heterosexual participants had a
tendency to be faster during the dot probe task and to mobilize more effort by
pressing on a handgrip more times when the cue associated with the image of
the erotic woman was displayed compared to the cues associated with a neutral
image and an image of an erotic man. These findings would add to the model of
reward processing. Specifically, highlighting relevance as a crucial psychological
mechanism in wanting and attention orienting.
380
P3.40 Impact of mood on decision-making routines
Yury Shevchenko
Mannheim University, Germany
We investigate the role of mood in the process of alteration of decision-making
strategies. There are two theories explaining impact of positive and negative
mood on the strategy selection process. The first one, “attention-broadening theory”, argues that a positive mood should broaden attention, and, therefore, lead to
compensatory strategy that includes more information in decision-making process (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005). Sad mood, on the contrary, narrows attention,
and results in non-compensatory strategy that concentrates on less amount of
information. The second, “dominant response theory”, is based on the interaction
between a mood and previously established strategy: people in a positive mood
should rely on the routine, because a positive mood signals that situation is safe
and benign. People in a sad mood, on the contrary, should change their strategy,
as far as sad mood serves as a signal of problematic situation (Bless et al., 1996).
We argue that the presence of environmental cues pointing to the possibilities
of changes impacts which of the two mechanisms will come in sight. To test the
hypothesis, we conducted the experimental study where we manipulated the
mood and the decision-strategy routines of participants. The participants were
randomly assigned to either positive or negative mood condition and had to
make 105 decisions in multi-attribute decision task. We manipulated participants’
mood state by showing them short movie clips (Schaefer, Nils, Sanchez, & Philippot, 2010), and measured choices, decision time, and information acquisition
behavior to infer decision-making strategies. The results of preliminary analysis
did not support the first hypothesis that people in a positive mood should broaden their attention and, therefore, incorporate more information in their decision.
The difference between our study and the studies which found that happy mood
leads to more information acquisition (Scheibehenne & von Helversen, 2014), that
in our case the participants followed decision-making routines, whereas previous
study induced happy mood before people started with a decision task. However,
the second hypothesis that people in a sad mood should less rely on a dominant
response if there is a cue about potential changes was partially approved for the
users of compensatory strategy. The results will be presented and discussed more
thoroughly in the poster.
381
P3.41 Examining the Roles of Emotion and Language in Theory of
Mind
Stephen Smith1, Michelle Di Nella2
University of Winnipeg1 (Canada), University of Manitoba2
Background: Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the capacity to recognize and make
judgments about the mental states of other individuals, including their beliefs,
desires, intentions, knowledge, and emotions. However, many of the measures
used to assess ToM are highly dependent upon linguistic abilities, thus making it
difficult to separate difficulties in understanding others’ thoughts and emotions
(i.e., ToM) from language-based impairments. In the current study, we developed
a non-verbal test of ToM, the Affective Visual Theory of Mind Task (AVToM), and
compared it to existing ToM-assessment tools. Methods: Seventy-four healthy
undergraduate participants (37 female) completed the AVToM, an image-based
test of ToM; on each experimental trial, participants were asked to identify which
of five photographs contained a correct match between the protagonist’s facial
expression and the social context. Participants also completed five existing measures of ToM: the Faux Pas Recognition Task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999), the Reading
the Mind in the Eyes task (Baron-Cohen et al.,2001), the Reading the Mind in Films
Task (Rutherford et al., 2002), the Reading the Mind in the Voice Task (Golan et
al.,2006), and the “Yoni Task”, in which participants interpret the mental states of
a cartoon-like character (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2007). They also completed tests
of linguistic abilities: the North American Adult Reading Test (Nelson, 1982) and
six components of the Woodcock-Johnson Achievement Tests III (Woodcock et al.,
2004). Results: Accuracy levels on the AVToM task ranged from 70% (sadness) to
86% (happiness). Interestingly, performance on the AVToM task only correlated
with performance on one other measure: the Yoni task. The other measures of
ToM were all weakly positively correlated (r = 0.23 – r = 0.38). When linguistic abilities were factored out, the only remaining significant correlations were between
the Yoni task and the AVToM and Reading the Mind in the Voice tasks. Discussion: The results suggest that ToM is not a single ability but is instead a number
of interrelated abilities including emotional perception and linguistic skills. They
also suggest that many of the existing measures of ToM are reliant on language,
thus making it more difficult to assess individuals’ ability to understand others’
thoughts and emotions.
382
P3.42 Learning to fear depends on emotion and gaze interaction:
The role of self-relevance in fear learning
Yoann Stussi, Tobias Brosch, David Sander
Emotional learning is a crucial adaptive function enabling an organism to predict
and detect aversive and appetitive stimuli with high importance in the environment, and therefore to prepare an appropriate response to these stimuli. However, psychological determinants of emotional learning remain unclear. According
to preparedness (Seligman, 1970, 1971) and fear module (Öhman & Mineka, 2001)
theories, threatening stimuli encountered by the species during its evolution
would benefit from enhanced learning relative to threatening stimuli from ontogenetic origin or non-threatening stimuli. Here we offer a different view by proposing a new theoretical framework based on appraisal theories of emotion, which
holds that emotional learning is modulated by a process of relevance detection.
Testing the model, we predicted faster, larger acquisition and greater resistance
to extinction of the conditioned response to highly self-relevant stimuli relative to
stimuli with less relevance. We manipulated self-relevance through emotion and
gaze direction of synthetic dynamic facial expressions during differential aversive conditioning. Results provided mixed evidence for our hypotheses. Critically,
we revealed faster acquisition of the conditioned response to angry faces when
they were higher in self-relevance (i.e., with direct gaze as compared with averted
gaze) and greater resistance to extinction to fearful faces when they were higher
in self-relevance (i.e., with averted gaze relative to direct gaze). We conclude that
the relevance detection hypothesis offers an appropriate theoretical framework
allowing to (re)interpret existing evidence, incorporate our results, and propose a
new research perspective in the study of emotional learning.
383
P3.43 A small-world network model of facial emotion recognition
Takuma Takehara, Fumio Ochiai, Naoto Suzuki
Doshisha University
Facial emotion recognition has generally been discussed in terms of two models.
In the categorical model, many facial emotions, including computer-generated
morphs, could be effectively categorized into six basic emotion categories. In the
dimensional model, valence and intensity are defined as the two fundamental
dimensions that locate facially expressed emotions in emotion space. However,
both models have not explored collective behaviors relating to each facial emotion as part of the comprehensive cognitive system. If it is possible to apply a
small-world network model, such as is famous for the “six degrees of separation”
(Watts & Strogatz, 1998), that has both close connectivity and extremely short distance between any two nodes, one may capture the collective behaviors of facial
emotion recognition, as well as the efficient processing of facial emotions. This
study shows that facial emotion recognition can be characterized in terms of a
small-world network. We specified fifteen possible continua between pairs of the
six basic facial emotions, and generated five morphs for each continuum under
an equal transformation ratio. In total, 81 images were prepared. We asked participants to use a 4-point Likert-type scale with anchors of 0 (not similar at all) to
3 (very similar) to rate degrees of similarity of all 3,240 pairs of faces at their own
pace. We averaged rating scores for each face pair across participants. If means
were less than the median value of 1.5, face pairs were disconnected due to dissimilarity, whereas if means were greater than the median, face pairs were linked
due to similarity. We made these judgments for all face pairs and then constructed the network. Consequently, the average distance and clustering coefficient of
the network were 1.78 and 0.78, indicating that the distance between any two
facial emotions was extremely short and the network was hyper-clustered. Additionally, nodes that were crucial to the maintenance of the network were morphs,
not prototypes. Results indicate that facial emotion network clearly forms a smallworld network, suggesting the existence of collective behaviors in facial emotion
recognition. This describes why we can efficiently recognize facial emotions, in
terms of enhancement of signal-propagation and spreading activation speed, and
indicates the importance of morphs. Moreover, these results are new to the literature of cognition and emotion, showing that the framework of the small-world
network is effective in this application.
384
P3.44 How children’s emotional experience and expression in
classroom affect their classroom adjustment
Akiko Tonegawa
The University of Tokyo
Goals: Recently, significance of emotion in classroom has been suggested. For instance, emotional expressions and the sharing of emotions in the classroom were
related to high master goals at a class level (Turner et al., 2002), and higher quality
of one-on-one discourse (Zembylas, 2004), as well as higher quality of classroom
level interactions (Meyer & Turner, 2007). However, individual differences in children’s emotional experiences/expressions and the uniqueness of the classroom
context have been overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine how children experience and express their emotions in the classroom context, and how they
are related to children’s engagement in learning and the interpersonal relationships in classroom. Method: Participants were 4th to 6th grade Japanese elementary school children. Used questionnaires were as follows; Emotional Experience/
Expression in Classroom Scale (joy, interest, sadness, fear, and anger; Sakagami,
1996), Relationships with Teacher Scale and Peer Relation Scale, and Children’s Engagement in Learning in Class Scale (Okubo & Aoyagi, 2004). Result Children’s emotional experience between during and outside class were compared, and results
of the t-test showed that children experienced more joy (t (74)=-4.897, p=.000,
r=.50) and anger (t (73)=-2.704, p=.009, r=.30) outside class. Partial correlation
analysis showed that children’s experience of interest during class was positively
related to all variables, namely, relationships with teacher and peers, engagement
in learning. Furthermore, experiences of anger (r=-.360,p=.003) and sadness (r=.304, p=.013) were negatively related to relationships with teacher. On the other
hand, expressions of anger (r=-.388, p=.006) and sadness (r=-.367, p=.008) were
negatively related to peer relation. Discussion: Low frequency of emotional experiences during class may be the reflection of the uniqueness of the context, where
cognitive aspect is regarded more important than emotional aspect (Mayall,
2006). Results: implied that experience of interest has a possibility of promoting
both positive relationships and engagement in learning. Also, negative emotional
experiences and expressions were related to different dimensions of relationships
in classroom. Further research on interaction between individual differences and
classroom climate is needed.
385
P3.45 Aggressive anger management and friendship involvement
among adolescents- a cross-lagged panel study
on selection and socializat
Maria von Salisch, Janice Zeman
Leuphana University Lueneburg, College of William and Mary
Managing anger at a friend within the context of a close friendship places youth
in a bind. On the one hand they may feel obliged to tell their friend about their
angry feelings but on the other hand, such disclosures can result in the deterioration and ultimately in the dissolution of the friendship. Thus, adolescents who
regularly engage in aggressive forms of anger management likely have fewer reciprocal friendships over time. This is the selection perspective. The socialization
perspective predicts that within the context of close friendships, friends teach
each other how to use socially acceptable ways of managing angry feelings that
do not include aggressive management strategies. Thus, adolescents with more
reciprocal friendships should engage less often in aggressive forms of anger management. It is possible that both perspectives operate in friendships. In order to
solve this question on the direction of effects, 287 German adolescents completed
the SAR-A, a questionnaire on strategies of anger regulation for adolescents in the
beginning and end of grade 7 (T1 and T2) and in grade 9 (T3). At all times, adolescents completed an interview about their supportive peer network that provided
the number of reciprocal friends. Autoregressive cross-lagged panel models were
calculated in Mplus that used either peer ratings (Model 1) or teacher ratings (Model 2) of physically aggressive behavior and number of reciprocal friendships while
controlling for gender and peer acceptance. Model 3 used adolescents’ self-reports
of their aggressive anger management. Model 1 and 2 (with good fit characteristics) both resulted in large gender effects and non-significant socialization paths.
Selection paths were significant in both models: adolescents who were known to
be physically aggressive had fewer reciprocal friends at T3. Specifically, physically
aggressive adolescents had a difficult time maintaining friendships over longer
periods of time. Model 3 (with equally good fit indices) provided support for a
socialization perspective. Adolescents with more reciprocal friends reported using
aggressive forms of anger management less often at the next time point. Results
were marginally significant from T1 to T2 (i.e. in friendships in the first year after a
change into a new school), but more pronounced from T2 to T3 (i.e. in the 20-month period from early to middle adolescence when adolescent friends tend to know
each other better). Results will be discussed from the selection and socialization
perspectives as well as the influence of the reporter.
386
P3.46 Dynamic recognition of basic and complex emotions at
varying intensities in high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders
Tanja Wingenbach, Chris Ashwin, Mark Brosnan
University of Bath
Background : Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are defined by impairments in
social communication and interaction, including non-verbal communication such
as emotional expressions. However, not all behavioural studies comparing ASD to
controls on facial emotion recognition have shown group differences. This might
be attributed to the methodology applied, with many investigations including
only full-blown static displays of certain basic emotions, small numbers of trials
and stimuli. Subtler and complex emotion expressions are experienced on a daily
basis and important to correctly recognise for functioning social interactions. To
date, no published work exists on recognition of varying intensity expressions of
both basic and complex emotions based on dynamic videos in individuals with
ASD compared to controls. Objectives : To investigate facial emotion recognition in
ASD from videos including basic and complex emotions across three expression
intensities. It was expected those with ASD would show reduced accuracy especially at high expression intensity due to a diminished ability to use the additional
emotional information available for more intense expressions. Methods : Twelve
individuals with a current diagnosis of high-functioning ASD (9 male; M(age) =
16.92, SD = .29) and 12 age-matched controls (9 male; M(age) = 17.25, SD= .75) completed a facial emotion recognition task (360 trials) including six basic emotions
(anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and three complex emotions
(contempt, embarrassment, pride) at three intensities of the expressions (low,
intermediate, high). Unbiased hit rates (Hu) were the DV and entered in a linear
mixed model.Results : Both groups showed significantly higher accuracy for the
high than the intermediate intensity expressions, and for intermediate compared
to low. Controls significantly outperformed the ASD group in the higher intensities of anger, fear, and pride. Controls recognised low intensity anger significantly
better than the ASD group, suggesting the contained emotional information was
insufficient for the ASD group. The ASD group outperformed the controls at low
intensity surprise recognition; a clear representation of surprise expressions seemed to be present in ASD independent of expression intensity. Conclusions : Overall, both groups benefitted from the greater emotional information available in
the higher intensities compared to low intensity expressions. However, an emotion-specific facial emotion recognition deficit for anger, fear, and pride suggests
the control group displayed superior ability to utilise this greater emotional information for these emotions. These findings add to the literature on dynamic facial
emotion recognition across basic and complex emotions at varying expression
intensity in ASD.
387
P3.47 How emotion experience affects cardiovascular responses to
competitive stress?
Daisuke Yamaguchi, Naoto Suzuki
Doshisha University
Competitive stress is generally regarded as eliciting negative emotion. Thereby,
it is well known that a competition evokes increased cardiovascular response
(e.g., Shahidi, Henley, Willows & Furnham, 1991). However, competition sometimes
induces positive emotion because winning a competition means that we gain
benefits (e.g., promotion). Nevertheless, it is little known how emotion experience
during a competition affects physiological responses. To investigate how an experience of emotion during a competition affects physiological responses, the present study divided all participants into the win group or the lose group depending
on a task performance. 15 pairs (30 students) independently participated in this
study. Participants engaged in one-on-one competition using the computer-based
mirror drawing task. This task was consisted of three trials. Each participant was
required to compete for winning more trials than the other participant of pair. After a complete of each trial, outcome of each trial (Win or Lose) was fed back to participants. Physiological responses (Heart rate, Blood pressure, cardiac output, total
peripheral resistance) were continuously recorded during rest and task. On the
other hand, the General Affect Scales (Ogawa, Monchi, Kikuya and Suzuki, 2000)
was employed to assess emotion during a competition. Self-reports were assessed
at four points (pre task and after 1st trial, 2nd trial, 3rd trial ). Results showed that
through competition, negative emotion in both the win group and the lose group
was no difference, whereas positive emotion in the win group was higher than
that in the lose group. In physiological responses, the win group showed higher
cardiac output than the lose group, conversely, the lose group showed increased
total peripheral resistance than win group. These findings suggest one possibility
that an experience of positive emotion during competition induces a difference of
physiological responses to competitive stress.
388
P3.48 Video based continuous measurement and classification of
emotional facial expression
Axel Zinkernagel1, Rainer Alexandrowicz2, Manfred Schmitt1
University of Koblenz-Landau1, University of Klagenfurt2
Measurement of emotional facial expressions has so far been derived by FACS-Coding, deduction of muscle activation via EMG, or by commercially available facial
emotion expression recognition programs. The disadvantages of FACS are, (1) that
a continuous rating of a longer emotional sequence is very time-consuming, and
(2) it is a rating (no measurement) by trained observers. The disadvantage of facial EMG is that only a few muscles for a specific emotion can be measured. The
disadvantage of commercially available recognition programs is that the emotion
recognition model is unknown and therefore the results are not straight forward
to interpret.In the present two studies (N = 39, N = 72) we present an open source
software based procedure, which circumvents these disadvantages by adapting a
motion tracking technique for facial markers as used in the film industry, e.g., for
animating avatars in a life-like manner. The aim was to obtain uninterpreted raw
data of facial movements. Participants were provided with up to 60 facial-, and 12
head-movement markers and were instructed to (a) pose emotional faces to obtain a consciously elicited facial expression and (b) to view emotion eliciting films
to obtain an automatic facial expression, each for the basic emotions joy, fear, and
disgust. During these tasks participants were recorded on video for approximately
12 min each. Movements of facial markers were tracked, corrected for head movements, and standardized for individual head size in a three dimensional space.
Parameters for distinction between posed and automatic facial expression (Speed
and Timing of Phases, Duration, Distance and Amplitude, Symmetry) were presented and discussed.
389
Symposium S6.1
The rapid processing of motivationally relevant information:
Psychological, neurophysiological and endocrinological
mechanisms
Conveners
Janek Lobmaier, Tobias Brosch
Our environment constantly confronts us with large amounts of incoming stimulus information out of which we have to rapidly select the most important information in order to
prepare appropriate behavioural responses. Stimuli that are important for our motivational and affective concerns, such as stimuli indicating potential rewards or dangers, stimuli
relevant for our current or permanent goals, as well as social stimuli that facilitate social
interactions are prioritized in the processing stream and can thus more easily influence
our behaviour. Importantly, this selection process may vary considerably between and even
within individuals, as it depends on the individual’s learning history, motivational structure, and the contextual circumstances. In this symposium we bring together interdisciplinary work investigating how psychological, neurophysiological, and endocrinological
mechanisms can account for inter- and intra- individual differences in the rapid processing
of motivationally relevant information and its downstream impact on behaviour. Eva Pool
will present behavioural evidence showing that stimuli which have been associated with
reward capture attentional resources, independently of their low-level perceptual salience
and of voluntary processes. Dissociating the hedonic and motivational components that
comprise reward value, she will argue that motivational relevance, but not hedonic pleasure, determines the attentional bias toward the reward-associated stimulus. Matthias
Wieser will present electrophysiological research investigating whether faces that have
been associated with different types of aversive events lead to enhanced electrocortical
responses, and whether this depends on social features in faces (facial expressions and
gaze direction). He will argue that aversive learning mechanisms play an important role
in social perception, but that the role of cues such as facial expressions and gaze is less
prominent in transient experience-dependent cortical plasticity. Ryan Murray will present
fMRI evidence pointing out the amygdala as a detection system for motivational concern
relevance at the neural level. Participants with high intrinsic academic motivation showed
stronger amygdala activation during the detection of targets than participants with low
motivation when the task was described as predictive of academic success. He will argue
that these results suggest that the default functional profile of the amygdala is the detection of stimuli that are appraised as relevant given the motivational concerns of the
individual. Janek Lobmaier will present EMG evidence showing that women during their
luteal phase, when progesterone levels are high, show more and faster automatic mimicry
of emotional expressions than when they are near ovulation. Given that increased progesterone levels during the luteal phase underlie increased social monitoring, he will argue
that increases in progesterone may be linked functionally with automatic and fast social
mirroring. Bhismadev Chakrabarti will present data showing bidirectional links between
facial mimicry and reward, using eye gaze tracking studies. He will argue that both mimicking and being mimicked alter the reward value of social targets. These findings provide
promising prospects for research into conditions marked by deficits in social reward perception and spontaneous mimicry, such as for example autism. Take together, the research
presented in this symposium will illustrate how different types of motivational concerns
(reward, punishment, achievement motivation, affiliative motivation) can influence the
rapid processing of motivationally relevant information and will shed some light on the
underlying psychological, neurophysiological and endocrinological mechanisms. By combining various approaches and methods (fMRI, EEG, fEMG, eye tracking, and behavioural
paradigms), the contributions to this symposium will add to a better understanding of the
different factors that shape our perception of our (social) environment.
390
Attentional Bias For Sweet Reward: The Role of motivational
Salience and Hedonic Pleasure
Eva Pool, Tobias Brosch, Sylvain Delplanque, David Sander
Reward-associated stimuli orient attentional resources independently of their
low-level perceptual salience and of voluntary processes. Previous research has
demonstrated that the attentional bias toward reward-associated stimuli critically depends upon the reward value. However, the reward value is composed of hedonic and motivational components. Here, we aim at investigating which of these
two components determines the attentional bias reward-associated stimuli.
We selected 50 participants who loved chocolate that learned to associate an
arbitrary neutral perceptual stimulus with a sweet reward (i.e., a chocolate odor)
in a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. The attentional bias toward this chocolate
associated stimulus was assessed in a spatial cuing task. Moreover, we measured
the motivational relevance of chocolate was assessed using a Go/noGo association task and the sensory hedonic pleasure felt during the consumption of the
chocolate odor
Results revealed that after conditioning attentional resources were rapidly
oriented toward the stimulus that was previously associated with the sweet
reward. Interestingly, motivational relevance, but not hedonic pleasure, predicted
the magnitude of the attentional bias toward the stimulus associated with the
sweet reward.
These findings suggest that the attentional bias toward reward-associated stimuli depends upon the motivational, rather than the hedonic, component of the
reward.
391
Fear that face – Studies on the electrocortical facilitation
of faces in (social) conditioning
Matthias Wieser
University of Würzburg
Sensory facilitation of cues that predict harm is a useful mechanism for efficient
detection of threat in the environment. Recent studies employing steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) demonstrated that low-level visual cues previously paired with aversive events lead to enhanced sensory gain in early visual cortex. From a social affective neuroscience perspective, faces constitute a social cue
which may lead to different reactions and impressions due to simple associative
learning mechanisms. Therefore, in a series of studies we investigated whether
faces when paired with different aversive events lead to enhanced electrocortical
responses, and whether this depends on social features in faces (facial expressions and gaze direction). Amplitudes of the face-evoked ssVEP revealed larger
cortical mass activity in response to faces paired with negative social cues indicating successful affective learning and concomitant short-term plasticity in visual
cortex depending on the learning experience. This effect was replicated using verbal comments as US in low socially anxious participants, but high socially anxious
subjects did not differentiate cortically between the three types of CS faces. Gaze
cues seem to play a subordinate role in fear acquisition, but may lead to different
time courses in visuocortical learning, as single-trial analysis of ssVEP amplitudes
revealed. Together, these results point at the significance of learning mechanisms
in social contexts, but suggest that the role of cues such as facial expressions and
gaze is less prominent in transient experience-dependent cortical plasticity.
392
The appraising brain: The amygdala detects individual
concern-relevance
Ryan Murray, Tobias Brosch, Hana Kutlikova, David Sander
Neurocognitive appraisal theory of emotion claims that the amygdala is a detector of individual concern relevance. To test this hypothesis, participants with
varying levels of intrinsic academic achievement motivation performed several
target detection tasks using affectively neutral letter stimuli as targets. To endow
stimuli with concern-relevance, the tasks were described as “predictive of academic success”, “determining the payment for participation”, or “control task”, respectively. Congruent with our hypothesis, participants with high intrinsic academic motivation showed stronger amygdala activation during target detection
than participants with low motivation, but only in the task described as predictive of academic success. Our data are highly consistent with a perspective that
sees the computational profile of the amygdala not as restricted to one or several
basic emotions, nor to the mental representation of arousal, but characterizes it
as default detection of stimuli that are appraised as relevant given the concerns
of the individual.
393
Increased affiliation motivation during the luteal menstrual cycle
phase: evidence from a fEMG study
Janek Lobmaier, Vanda Lory, Fabian Probst
University of Bern
Facial mimicry describes the unintentional imitation of another person’s nonverbal displays. Facial mimicry assists in understanding how others feel and at
the same time it can signal empathy and compassion of an observer towards a
counterpart. We tested whether the female menstrual cycle affects the amount
and willingness to exhibit facial mimicry. The menstrual cycle has been shown to
affect many socially relevant behaviours. For example, women have been shown
to dress, dance and walk in more attractive ways during days of high compared
to low fertility. Conversely, evidence has accumulated that emotion recognition
performance is highest during the luteal phase, a phase during which women’s
bodies prepare themselves for possible pregnancy. Evolutionary informed scholars have explained such phase-specific behavioural changes as serving to maximize reproduction success. According to such ideas women should show less
risky behaviour and instead adopt a more affiliative attitude during the luteal
cycle phase. In accordance with these evolutionary claims we hypothesized that
women would mimic more during the non-fertile luteal phase than during the
late follicular phase. We measured zygomaticus activity in 50 naturally cycling
women while they viewed short video clips of 8 male and 8 female actors each
showing happy, angry, and neutral expressions. Each woman was tested twice,
once near ovulation and once during the luteal cycle phase. The order of testing
sessions was counterbalanced across participants and ovulation was determined
using ovulation test strips. We additionally measured salivary estradiol, progesterone and testosterone levels to ascertain whether hormone levels could predict
facial mimicry. We found that during the luteal phase (when progesterone levels
are high) women mimicked more than near ovulation. We suggest that increased
mimicry of (positive) emotions during the luteal phase may be part of an adaptive
biological mechanism to protect foetal development. Increased facial mimicry
may result from more affiliative motives during the luteal phase, which may be
linked with increased progesterone levels. Increased facial mimicry may in turn
explain why women are better at emotion processing during the luteal phase.
394
Reward on both sides of the mirror: Testing the rewarding
effects of mimicking and being mimicked using eye-gaze tracking
Bhismadev Chakrabarti, Janina Neufeld
Social psychological studies have shown that people like those who mimic them,
suggesting that mimicry may alter the reward value of social targets. To directly
test the reward value of mimicry, we investigated the impact of mimicking and
being mimicked on preferential looking, using 2 implicit conditioning experiments.
In study 1 conditioning phase, 30 adults made happy, sad, or neutral expressions:
crucially, <1s after they started making the expression, they saw a video of a person making the same expression (Mimicking face) or another person making a
different expression (AntiMimicking face). In the test phase, “Mimicking face” and
“AntiMimicking face” were presented side-by-side on a gaze-tracking monitor, and
participants showed longer gaze duration for Mimicking faces than AntiMimicking faces (controlling for baseline difference in gaze duration between faces)
(t=2.99, p=.005). In study 2 conditioning phase, a separate sample of 37 adults
mimicked expressions of certain faces (Mimicked faces) and performed the opposite expression when seeing other faces (NoMimicked faces). In the test phase,
Mimicked face and NoMimicked face were presented side-by-side, and people looked longer at Mimicked faces than NoMimicked faces (t=2.18, p=.018). This effect is
unlikely to be driven by greater response conflict associated with certain faces, as
no effect of spatial congruency on gaze duration was detected in a separate experiment. These findings provide direct evidence that both mimicking and being mimicked alter the reward value of social targets and provides avenues for research
into conditions such as autism, marked by deficits in social reward perception and
spontaneous mimicry.
395
Symposium S6.2
Emotions across Adulthood: The Role of Cognition,
Motivation, and Culture
Conveners
Alexandra M. Freund, Igor Grossmann
University of Zurich, University of Waterloo
Seniors are the fastest growing population worldwide. In countries such as Germany, Japan or South
Korea, the percentage of the population over 65 is predicted to represent ¼ of the total population
by the year 2025. For the first time in human history older adults will outnumber children. Despite
these forecasts, social scientists know relatively little about the emotional aspects of aging in different
cultures. How do emotional experiences unfold across adulthood? The currently symposium brings
together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from four countries – Canada, Germany, Switzerland,
and the U.S. – to systematically address this question across multiple levels of analysis. The common
theme surrounding each talk concerns the interplay between aging-related losses (e.g., biological
decline) and a wide range of (positive and negative) emotional experiences. Katharina Schnitzspahn
(University of Geneva, Switzerland) will start the symposium by exploring the basic neurocognitive
processes involved in emotional experiences among younger vs. older adults; stress and cognitive
control. Specifically, Schutzspahn’s research team explored age differences in acute stress effects on
cognitive control, comparing performance in a cognitive control task in 66 young (19-34 years) and 57
older adults (60-82 years) exposed either to an established psychosocial stress procedure or an active
control condition. Stress responses were measured on a fine-grained level across the entire procedure
using subjective and physiological stress markers. While cognitive control was reduced under stress in
the young adults, cognitive performance in the older adults was not influenced by acute stress. Moving
from basic cognitive processes to the domain of autobiographic memories, Ute Kunzmann & Margund
Rohr (University of Leipzig, Germany) presents research exploring whether aging-related processes
in recall of autobiographic memory unfold differently across specific negative emotions. Specifically,
Kunzmann & Rohr asked younger and older adults to relive and think aloud about two situations in
which they felt particularly sad or angry. Their results indicated that the signs of anger decreased
with age, whereas the signs of sadness remained stable or increased. In the next talk, Alexandra M.
Freund (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Andreas Keil (University of Florida, USA) will expand the
study of emotional experiences across adulthood to the study of motivated cognition (i.e., learning
from gains vs. losses). Using this perspective, Freund & Keil will report an experiment investigating
if older adults react more strongly to positive events (i.e., monetary gain for an actual donation) or
to negative ones (i.e., monetary loss for a donation). In their study, younger, middle-aged, and older
adults experienced repeated gains and losses that were paired with different (formerly neutral) visual
patterns, and reported valence and arousal ratings of respective (gain vs. loss-related) stimuli. Preliminary results from their research suggest that late middle-aged and older adults react more strongly
to stimuli associated with losses compared to gains. In the last talk, Igor Grossmann (University of
Waterloo, Canada) and his colleagues will utilize a cultural psychological perspective to understand
the interplay between culture and aging-related differences in emotional experiences. Grossmann and
colleagues collected random samples of adult Americans (a culture characterized by focus on positive
and distancing from negative experiences) and Japanese (a culture characterized by its endorsement
of dialectical experiences) to test whether aging-related differences in preference for maintaining positive experiences and distancing from negative experiences is more pronounced in Western cultures
that encourage linear approaches to well-being compared with Eastern cultures that encourage more
dialectic approaches to well-being. Results indicated that older Americans reported significantly less
negative emotions across a variety of trait-, and state-level-indicators, whereas aging-related effects
were absent in the Japanese respondents. Instead, older Japanese reported more positive emotions
in the unpleasant situations, whereas there were no corresponding aging-related differences among
the Americans. Finally, Angela Gutchess (Brandeis University, USA) will provide a discussion and integration of the presented findings into her perspective on emotional development across adulthood,
highlighting the role of basic cognition, motivation and culture for betting understanding of how
emotional experiences unfold across adulthood.
396
Acute stress impairs cognitive control in young,
but not in older adults
Katharina Schnitzspahn1, Franziska Plessow2, Clemens Kirschbaum2,
Matthias Kliegel1
University of Geneva1, Technische Universität Dresden2
While a wide variety of cognitive functions decline with age, emotional experience
and emotion regulation remain largely intact or even improve across adulthood.
Given these different developmental trajectories, there has been a growing interest in the interactions between cognition and emotion in aging. Studies suggest
that emotional task material can enhance cognitive performance in older adults
(Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). Furthermore, it seems as if older adults are better
able than young adults to deal with an affective state and a cognitive task at the
same time (Schnitzspahn et al., 2014). Thus, older adults may have an advantage
over young adults when it comes to emotion-cognition interplays. The goal of the
present study was to examine if this age advantage holds true for a specific affective state, namely stress and its effect on cognitive control. Given the omnipresence of stress in modern society and the importance of an intact cognitive functioning for the maintenance of independence, it is surprising that only very little
empirical research is available concerning possible age differences in acute stress
effects on cognition in general and cognitive control in particular. Accordingly, the
present study set out to test these effects in a controlled laboratory setting comparing performance in a cognitive control task in 66 young (19-34 years) and 57
older adults (60-82 years) exposed either to an established psychosocial stress
procedure or an active control condition. Stress responses were measured on a
fine-grained level across the entire procedure using subjective and physiological
stress markers. Results suggest that the stress induction was equally successful
in both age groups. Interestingly, while cognitive control was reduced under stress
in the young adults, cognitive performance in the older adults was not influenced
by acute stress. This missing stress effect in the older adults may be due to more
effective and cognitive less effortful emotion regulation (Scheibe & BlanchardFields, 2009) and age-related changes in the frontal lobes possibly reducing the
responsiveness to acute cortisol elevations (Wolf et al., 2001). Results will be discussed in the context of current neurocognitive models on emotion-cognition
interactions in aging.
397
Anger and Sadness in Autobiographical Memories
Ute Kunzmann, Margund Rohr
University of Leipzig
The successful modulation of negative affect has been regarded as an important facet of successful aging. Given that negative affect is a multidimensional
concept, however, questions regarding age differences in specific negative emotions remain. In individual sessions, we asked young (n = 85) and older (n = 79)
adults to relive and think aloud about two situations in which they felt particularly sad or angry. The intensity of anger and sadness was assessed on two levels:
subjective feelings during reliving phase and verbal expressions during the thinkaloud interview. Our analyses suggest that the signs of anger decrease with age,
whereas the signs of sadness remain stable or increase. We propose that these
multidirectional age differences in anger and sadness have important implications for our understanding of successful development during adulthood and old
age.
398
Emotional reactions to gains and losses across adulthood
Alexandra M. Freund, Andreas Keil
University of Zurich, University of Florida
The currently dominant view on emotional development across adulthood is that
older adults demonstrate a «positivity bias» such that they weigh positive emotional information and experiences more heavily than negative ones. At the same
time, the literature on psychology and aging suggests that negative events (i.e.,
losses) become more prevalent with increasing age. One of the consequences of
the increase in losses seems to be that older adults are more motivated to avoid
and counteract losses than younger adults, who are more motivated by potential
gains. The central question of the current study is if older adults react more strongly to positive events (i.e., a gain in a monetary game) or to negative ones (i.e.,
a loss in a monetary game). Younger, middle-aged, and older adults experienced
repeated gains and losses that were paired with different (formerly neutral) visual
patterns. After each trial, participants provided ratings of the valence (positive vs.
negative) and the arousal associated with the stimuli signaling gains and losses.
Moreover, throughout the experiment we assessed the heart-rate of participants.
First data analyses (data collection is still ongoing) suggest that late middle-aged
and older adults react more strongly to stimuli associated with losses compared
to gains. Data from the full study will be presented and discussed regarding their
implications for emotional development across adulthood.
399
A Cultural Perspective on Emotional Experiences
Across the Life Span
Igor Grossmann, Mayumi Karasawa, Shinobu Kitayama
University of Waterloo, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University,
Past research suggests that older adults place a greater priority on goals of
maintaining positive experiences and distancing from negative experiences. We
hypothesized that these aging-related differences in emotional experiences are
more pronounced in Western cultures that encourage linear approaches to wellbeing compared with Eastern cultures that encourage more dialectic approaches
to well-being. We compared reports of positive and negative emotional experiences from stratified random samples of Americans (a culture characterized by
focus on positive and distancing from negative experiences; samples collected in
the Midwest) and Japanese (a culture characterized by its endorsement of dialectical experiences; samples collected in the Tokyo Metropolitan area). In support of
our hypothesis, older Americans reported significantly less negative emotions in
unpleasant situations, relative to their younger counterparts. Furthermore, both
trait-level negativity (i.e., rumination) and interpersonal negativity (i.e., recall of
unpleasant relationships and intensity of an unpleasant interpersonal experience)
were lower among older compared with younger Americans. However, such
aging-related effects were absent in the Japanese respondents. Further, though
older and younger Japanese reported the same amount of negative emotions in
unpleasant situations, older Japanese also reported more positive emotions in the
same unpleasant situations. Yet, we did not observe corresponding aging-related
differences among the Americans. Together, these findings highlight the role of
culture for understanding how emotional experiences unfold across adulthood.
400
Adult Development and Aging - An Integrative Discussion
Angela Gutchess
Brandeis University
In this final talk, Angela Gutchess will provide a discussion and integration of the
presented findings into her perspective on emotional development across adulthood, highlighting the role of basic cognition, motivation and culture for betting
understanding of how emotional experiences unfold across adulthood.
401
Symposium S6.3
Emotion Reactivity and Regulation in Individuals with
Autism Spectrum Disorder
Conveners
Antonio Hardan
Stanford University School of Medicine
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that
is characterized by abnormalities in social and communication abilities, as well
as restricted interests, repetitive behavior, and sensory deficits. In addition, there
is growing awareness of severe emotional disturbances as well as maladaptive
behavior including irritability, poor anger control, temper tantrums, self-injurious
behavior, and aggression in individuals with ASD (Mazefsky et al., 2013; Rieffe et al.,
2014; Samson et al., 2014a). Recent studies suggest that more than 50% of children
and adolescents exhibit one or more of these symptoms (Samson et al., 2014b).
Therefore, there is a great need to increase our understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying aberrant emotional reactivity and emotion
dysregulation and related behaviors, since maladaptive emotional responses may
contribute to impaired functioning and could affect long-term outcome. The goal
of this symposium is to examine emotional reactivity and regulation in individuals
with ASD in comparison to typically developing controls, to assess their impact on
core features, and to discuss available therapeutic approaches for the treatment
of irritability and aggression.
First, a general overview will be given on emotional reactivity and regulation in
individuals with ASD, compared to typically developing (TD) controls. Using data
from a large multi-method study in children and adolescents with ASD, parentand self-reports on emotional reactivity and regulation will be presented and
its impact on problematic and maladaptive behavior will be examined. Another
focus will be on emotional reactivity in the social context, which will be systematically examined with eye-tracking pupillometry in a series of studies, as well as
the impact of anger in contrast to guilt as one moral emotion on externalizing
behaviors (i.e., bullying and aggression) in individuals with ASD. Another study
will present emotion regulation in 5 to 12 year old children using a multi-methods
approach. Behavioral codings from a frustration-eliciting situation, parent reports,
and physiological measures will be discussed. Finally, a review of the therapeuic
approaches to treat irritability, and aggression will be discussed with a focus on
pharmacological agents. Evidence from randomized controlled trials will be reviewed including data from a meta-analysis.
Taken together, emotional difficulties, including the difficulty to process emotions
in the social context, as well as the lower ability to regulate own emotions are prominent in individuals with ASD. Individuals with ASD seem to use more frequently
maladaptive and less frequently adaptive emotion regulation strategies, which
impacts functioning and adaptive behavior. Future research directions will be discussed to further document and understand emotional difficulties in individuals
with ASD to formulate directions for effective interventions targeting emotional
reactivity and regulation to increase long-term outcome.
402
Emotion Regulation Difficulties in Individuals with Autism
Spectrum Disorder and its Impact on Maladaptive Behavior
Andrea C. Samson12, Antonio Hardan1, Yael Enav1, James Gross1
Stanford University - CA - USA1, University of Geneva2
Background: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by social and communication deficits and repetitive behaviors, however, emotional difficulties are
common in individuals with ASD. Tantrum behaviors and general irritability are
key motivating factors for seeking treatment (Robb, 2010). Therefore, a better
understanding of the mechanisms that increase problematic behavior in ASD
is required to improve interventions and associated outcomes. As the questions
of whether and how different emotional components are related to maladaptive behavior in this disorder remain largely unanswered, the goal of the present study was to examine whether components of emotions, such as emotion
experience and emotion dysregulation, might serve as explanatory constructs for
maladaptive behaviors in ASD. More specifically, we wanted to better understand
whether patterns in positive and negative emotion experience as well as adaptive
and maladaptive emotion regulation function as a link between group (ASD vs.
typically developing participants, TD) and maladaptive behavior. As part of a large
multi-method study, thirty-one individuals with ASD and 28 TD participants and
their parents completed questionnaires assessing emotion experience (Positive
and Negative Affect Schedule), regulation (Emotion Regulation Questionnaire),
and maladaptive behavior (subscale of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, 2nd
Edition). The relationships among group, emotion experience, emotion regulation, and maladaptive behavior were examined via path analyses of 2- and 3-path
mediation designs. Four 2-path models were tested to examine whether group
membership was linked to maladaptive behaviors via positive emotion, negative emotion, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression. In addition, two
3-path models were tested to examine the sequence of effects as indicated from
the 2-path model results.
Results: The findings suggest that individuals with ASD use cognitive reappraisal less frequently, which is an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, resulting in
increased negative emotions, and in turn leading to elevated levels of maladaptive
behavior.
Conclusions: The current study in line with previous research (Samson et al., 2014)
suggests that interventions targeting the ability to use cognitive reappraisal may
improve emotion experience as well as decrease maladaptive behavior in individuals with ASD. Novel interventions that target emotional experience and regulation are crucial to decrease maladaptive behaviors and improve long-term outcome.
403
Emotional Reactivity in Autism Works Differently:
Insights from Studies using Eye-Tracking Pupillometry
Heather J. Nuske, Giacomo Vivanti, Kristelle Hudry,
Cheryl Dissanayake
La Trobe University
Background and Aims: Often people with autism have difficulty reading and responding to others’ emotions (Begeer, Koot, Rieffe, Meerumterwogt, & Stegge, 2008;
Nuske, Vivanti, & Dissanayake, 2013; Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2012). Much research in
autism has been conducted on the processing of emotion in others, however important questions remain: 1) Do people with autism respond more normatively to
emotion in familiar (vs. unfamiliar) people? 2) Do people with autism need more
time to process emotion in others? 3) Do emotional reactivity difficulties impact
on learning from others’ emotions? In a series of three studies we aimed to answer these research questions.
Methods: We showed video and photo emotion-inducing stimuli using eye-tracking technology to 27 children with autism and 21 matched typically developing
children and recorded their pupil dilations as an index of emotional reactivity.
Results: Pupil dilation results for the three studies were as follows: 1) Children
with autism had the same magnitude of pupillary response to emotion in familiar people, but a reduced response to emotion in unfamiliar people, relative to
comparison children. However, across familiarity conditions, children with autism
had a delayed pupillary response (approx. 800ms longer latency). 2) Children with
autism had greater pupil dilation to emotion shown for 2000ms vs. 30ms, but the
typically developing children had the same magnitude of pupil dilations across
the timing conditions. 3) Children with autism did not react to a previously-neutral object (a white box) more emotionally (greater pupil dilation) after seeing an
actor respond emotionally to its contents (occluded from the viewer), whereas the
typically developing children did.
Conclusions: Results indicated that preschoolers with autism react to emotions
in a different way relative to comparison children, which appears to require more
explicit attention, take more time (both in terms of exposure and response), depend on person familiarity (with less difficulty to emotions of familiar people) and
impact on their learning.
404
The Regulating Role of Moral Emotions in Children
with ASD and Controls
Carolien Rieffe1, Marieke de Bruine1, Marieke Bos1,
Mark de Rooij1, Lex Stockmann2
Leiden University1, Center for Autism - Leiden2
Moral emotion guide children into behaving as requested by their social environment, adapting to the norms and values of the different subcultures they belong
to. Feelings of guilt prevent one to cause harm to another person. Whereas more
anger can bring children to behave more aggressively towards others, the mediating role of guilt should prevent externalizing behaviors. Yet, children with ASD
fall behind their TD (typically developing) peers in the development of moral emotions, and the question is to what extent this also negatively affects their aggressive and other externalizing behaviors towards their social environment. To date,
however, cross-sectional data showed that more guilt and less anger were related
to fewer externalizing behavior (bullying) in TD and ASD children alike (Rieffe et
al., 2012).
The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between anger and guilt
with externalizing behaviors longitudinally in ASD and TD children separately, and
compare the changes over time. A total of 125 children participated in this study.
The sample included 67 high functioning boys with ASD at T1 (Mean age around
12 years old) and an age-matched control group consisting of 59 boys drawn from
primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands. All children had IQ>80 and no
known additional diagnosed developmental disorders. Children filled out self-reports on their levels of guilt, anger, and externalizing behaviors. Parents also filled
out parent reports on externalizing symptoms in their children. All questionnaires
were filled out 3 times, with 9-month intervals.
Regression analyses were computed using new statistical procedures like imputing and bootstrapping that enables to decrease bias and deal with longitudinal
data in smaller samples in a more appropriate way than the traditional ways of
analyzing data (Rieffe et al, 2014). Although we expected that guilt would increase
more strongly in TD children than in children with ASD, which would consequently
be related to a stronger decrease of externalizing behaviors (e.g. bullying and aggression), preliminary outcomes show a compatible increase in both the ASD and
TD group for guilt.
405
A Multimethod Assessment of Emotion Regulation in Children
with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Andreia Costa, Georges Steffgen
University of Luxembourg
Emotion regulation (ER) is an important aspect of emotional and social development. ER is particularly relevant for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
(ASD). Children with ASD have frequent emotional and conduct problems that are
believed to derive from difficulties with ER (Mazefsky & White, 2014). ER is a multicomponent process (Thompson, Lewis, & Calkins, 2008) that should be studied
as such. However, only a small proportion of studies have used more than one
method to assess ER in children with ASD (Weiss, Thomson, & Chan, 2014). The
main purpose of the present study was to, using a multimethod assessment, compare ER in children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children. Participants
were 29 children aged from 5 to 12 years old. 17 children were diagnosed with ASD
and 12 were TD children. ER was assessed by behavioural codings during a frustration-eliciting situation, parents’ reports of their child’s ER (Emotion Regulation
Checklist – ERC; Shields & Cicchetti, 1997), and through the assessment of heart
rate variability (HRV). Behavioural codings demonstrated that children with ASD
used significantly less active self-regulation (U=58, p<.05), and significantly more
disruptive behaviours (U=39.5, p<.01) as ER strategies than TD children. Parents
of children with ASD reported their children as having a lower score on the ERC
than parents of children with TD (U=22.5, p<.001). Finally, children with ASD had
a significantly lower HRV than TD children (U=40, p<.01). Although the present
study has a small sample, all three measures point towards more ER difficulties in
children with ASD compared to TD children. These results are in agreement with
the literature and point to a difficulty that is expressed at the behavioural and
physiological levels and that is reported by parents. The present results can be
relevant to developing interventions aiming at improving ER in children with ASD.
406
Evidence-Based Therapeutic Approaches for Treating Emotion
Dysregulation and Irritability in ASD
Antonio Y. Hardan, Lawrence K. Fung
Stanford University School of Medicine, CA, USA
Background: Children with ASD have core deficits in social communication and
reciprocity as well as restricted and repetitive behaviors. They often experience
irritability which underlie emotion dysregulation frequently associated with temper tantrums, and aggression toward others or to self, agitation, and self-injurious
behaviors (Matson et al., 2011). These symptoms cause significant distress to the
children themselves, and may be a burden on their families and others involved in
their care. Behavioral approaches have been used to target these behaviors with
variable success. A wide range of pharmacologic agents have also been used targeting various mechanisms of action, with many potential adverse events (Elbe &
Lalani, 2012).
Goals: The focus of this presentation is to review evidence-based data supporting
the use of medications in the treatment of irritability and associated behaviors.
Methods: Randomized controlled trials will be discussed and results from a metaanalysis will be reviewed.
Results: Risperidone and aripiprazole are, perhaps, the most commonly used medications for the treatment of irritability, agitation and aggression in individuals
with ASD. Other agents have been studies including N-acetylcysteine, clonidine,
methylphenidate, valproic acid, guanfacine, and tianeptine. Current literature
suggests that risperidone and aripiprazole have the strongest evidence for reducing irritability and associated symptoms in children and adolescents with ASD.
However, these compounds have potential adverse events including somnolence/
sedation, weight gain and extra-pyramidal symptoms. Methylphenidate may be
a useful agent when inattention, hyperactivity, and/or impulsivity are co-morbid
symptoms. Other medications such as N-acetylcysteine, clonidine, and tianeptine
may be potentially effective agents to reduce IAA with fewer adverse events, but
replication of these findings is warranted.
Conclusions: Findings will be discussed with the goal of providing clinicians and
researchers with a useful, individualized approach to assessing and treating emotion regulation and irritability in youth with ASD. It is hoped that guidelines will
emerge one day to help in the management of these individuals while integrating
medical and behavioral approaches in the assessment and treatment of the behavioral manifestation of these emotions to optimize long-term outcome.
407
Symposium S6.4
What do language patterns reveal about emotion concepts?
Conveners
Anna Ogarkova
University of Geneva, University of Heidelberg
The importance of language in emotion research can hardly be overestimated. Most emotion research
at least partially relies on language, either due to the use of linguistic labels to name emotion states in
a language, or because of the frequent recourse to speakers’ verbal accounts of emotional experience.
However, historically, psychology and linguistics have entertained little communication, mostly due to
a view of language and cognition where emotions and their linguistic symbolizations were considered
separate domains and no inference was drawn in either field about the findings in the other. The landscape has started to gradually change with the emergence of the cognitive view of meaning, where
language is seen as embodied, i.e. fundamentally grounded on physical and sensorial experience. At
the same time, since experiences are also inextricably cultural, language is also assumed to reflect
important concerns for a lingual/cultural group.
One of the most encompassing and prolific linguistic traditions endorsing the cognitive view of meaning is Cognitive Linguistics. In this tradition, meaning is assumed to extend beyond necessary and
sufficient feature‐based semantics to encompass all world knowledge, thus equating (or at least approximating) semantic and conceptual representation. One of the reasons why Cognitive Linguistics
is particularly attractive for the affective sciences is that it is embedded in cognitive science at large
and, thus, shares the methods and integrates the findings of other domains, like psychological studies
on categorization and conceptual representation. An additional advantage of Cognitive Linguistics is
that it facilitates research on linguistic phenomena as artifacts of human experience and of the salient
practices of a particular lingual group, building a bridge between linguistic and cultural studies.
This symposium brings together cutting-edge methodologies in corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics
research on emotion concepts. Two broad approaches will be presented. The first is illustrated by the
first two contributions to the symposium. They illustrate the ‘behavioral profile’ approach (e.g., [1]),
a corpus-based method in cognitive semantics in which the meaning of an emotion word (and the
concept behind that word) is established on the basis of ‘behavioral’ information about the term. This
is done through the manual coding and statistical treatment of semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic
features of a representative number of instances of the investigated lexeme in context. The second
tradition will be illustrated by the last two contributions. It can be referred to as the ‘metaphorical
profile’ approach (e.g., [2]), which stems from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and adopts a corpus-based
methodology to characterize an emotion concept on the basis of the metaphorical lexico-grammatical
constructions regularly entertained by the lexemes that name that emotion in a language (e.g. the
English nouns ‘anger’, ‘fury’ or ‘irritation’ for the emotion concept “ANGER”).
While differing in the type of linguistic patterns included in the analysis, all these studies share a number of methodological characteristics, namely:
(1) They are based on extensive and representative corpus data;
(2) They employ a statistical assessment of the distribution of linguistic uses;
(3) They adopt a cross-lingual comparative approach,
(4) They are interdisciplinarily oriented: explicit effort is made to relate the findings to relevant research in the affective sciences.
Additionally, they illustrate different orientations in temporal scope, adopting either a synchronic or a
diachronic approach in the study of emotion concepts.
A discussion session at the end of the symposium will summarize the results and insights of the four
talks. The specific aims will be:
(i) To discuss the similarities, limitations, and mutual complementarity of these methods for the description of emotion concepts;
(ii) To compare them with semantic profiling methodologies of a more psycho-linguistic nature, like
the GRID approach [3];
(iii) To showcase how the outcomes of the linguistic profiling can be related to findings in fields like
emotion or cross-cultural psychology;
(iv) To discuss the added value of profiling methods in Cognitive Linguistics for the affective sciences at
large, for example by illustrating how they can test claims made in emotion psychology, or, conversely,
how their findings can lead to hypothesis generation or construct formation in a different discipline.
408
Contextually sensitive evidence for conceptual structuring:
A corpus-driven study of ANGER in Czech,
English and Portuguese
Dylan Glynn, Juliana Zmetáková
University of Paris VIII, Palacký University
Arguably, situational, social, and cultural context plays an important role in structuring our emotional responses. However, most psychological research has focused on stimulus and response largely ignoring contextual factors, and linguistics has focused on how lexical categories structure emotion conceptualization. By
contrast, this study seeks to integrate contextual dimensions into the description
of emotions, using novel methods in corpus linguistics to that end. The study examines ANGER in Czech, English, and Portuguese. The primary hypothesis is that
we will observe significant contextual effects on the representation of the ANGER
eliciting stimulus (the cause) and subsequent response. The aim is to model quantitatively these contextually sensitive patterns.
The study involves three stages. The first is data collection. Personal diaries are used
in all languages to control for stylistic variation, and because diaries frequently include descriptions of emotional causes and responses. 600 occurrences of ANGER
events are extracted through keyword searches, using the most frequent lexemes
in each language to control for part-of-speech effects.
The second stage is sentiment analysis. This method, developed in Cognitive Linguistics [1, 2], has recently been adopted in computational linguistics [3]. Based on
the linguistic [4] and psychological [5] literature, an annotation schema is devised
to manually annotate the characteristics of the ANGER event in the full dataset (a
Kappa score of inter-rater reliability is also calculated). This produces a large set of
meta-data on the contextualised use of the lexemes designating ANGER.
The third stage is the quantitative investigation of the meta-data. Due to their
high dimensionality, exploratory multivariate analysis is used to identify usage
patterns. A combination of multiple correspondence analysis and k-medoid cluster analysis is used to identify correlations and underlying structures. Preliminary results indicate that type of cause, norm violation, and social engagement in
response are amongst the crucial factors structuring the emotion. Confirmatory
modelling, in the form of mixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, confirms
statistically significant contextual effects and permit some degree of predictive
modelling with regard to the three languages concerned.
409
Self-evaluative emotions across languages and cultures:
A multifactorial profile-based approach to SHAME
Karolina Krawczak
Adam Mickiewicz University
Object & goals: This study investigates the concept of SHAME from a cross-linguistic perspective. The concept is operationalized through four lexical categories:
‘shame’, ‘embarrassment’, ‘humiliation’ and ‘guilt’, analyzed in their most frequent
lexical instantiations in British English, American English and Polish. The study has
two goals, one descriptive, the other methodological. Firstly, it aims to identify the
conceptual structuring of the categories under analysis relative to their respective socio-cultural contexts. Secondly, it further advances a corpus-driven quantitative methodology for the description of intersubjectively-grounded abstract
concepts [1]. In this, it is complementary to approaches like the elicitation-based
GRID method [2].
Hypotheses: Two hypotheses are formulated: one on the lexical structuring of the
SHAME domain, the other on cross-cultural divergences. Firstly, it is expected that
a continuum will emerge from ‘embarrassment’, through ‘humiliation’ and ‘shame’,
to ‘guilt’ relative to the gravity of the cause and its temporal frame. Secondly, individualism and collectivism [3] are hypothesized to affect the conceptualization of
SHAME. Two descriptive dimensions, i.e., audience and emotion type, are predicted
to be particularly informative here.
Method, data & analysis: The study employs a usage-based methodology: usagefeature analysis [4]. This method permits the identification of frequency-based
usage-patterns of the investigated lexemes, affording indirect access to conceptual and cultural tendencies in emotion representation. Equal numbers of the
most frequent lexical instantiations per category/language were extracted from
online diaries. 1000 observations were manually analyzed for usage characteristics, including cause of the emotion, temporal scope of the cause, emotion type,
audience, emotion status, and intentionality. The data were then modelled with
exploratory (correspondence analysis) and confirmatory (logistic regression analysis) techniques.
Results: Among the revealed patterns of use is the approximation between Polish
‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ relative to the interactive situation, and of the British and American English ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ relative to morally-grounded causes.
Overall, the study demonstrates that the culturally-sensitive usage-tendencies of
lexemes designating emotion concepts can be identified through a multivariate
corpus-driven profiling methodology.
410
Metaphorical profiles of ANGER nouns in three languages:
Converging evidence with cross-cultural emotion psychology
Anna Ogarkova, Cristina Soriano
While studies on the metaphoric representation of emotion concepts continue to
proliferate in Cognitive Linguistics, the question of their broader impact and interdisciplinary value remains largely unaddressed. One of the problematic issues
here is that neither the more introspective (e.g. [1]), nor the more data-driven (e.g.
[2]) emotion metaphor research systematically relates the findings to those from
(cross-cultural) emotion psychology.
The present study aims to bridge this gap by investigating whether the outcomes
of one of the recent profiling methodologies, the metaphorical profile approach
(MPA) [3], cohere with the characteristics of anger reported in emotion psychology. The MPA is a corpus-based method in which a concept (e.g., ANGER) is characterized on the basis of the metaphorical patterns (regular lexico-grammatical
constructions) entertained by the lexemes naming that emotion (e.g., ‘anger’,
‘fury’). Variance across lexemes in the distribution of metaphorical patterns is
assumed to reflect differences across emotion types in the various emotional aspects captured by the metaphors.
The analysis unfolds in three steps. First, from 20’000 occurrences of anger lexemes in the British National Corpus, Corpus del Español, and the Russian National
Corpus we establish the metaphorical profiles of 20 anger lexemes in English,
Russian, and Spanish. Second, based on previous research in emotion psychology,
five hypotheses are formulated, some tapping into allegedly universal features in
the internal organization of the anger category, others predicting cross-cultural
differences in regulation, somatization, and the degree of prototypicality of seemingly equivalent anger concepts. Finally, these predictions are tested against
the metaphor data.
The results of several statistical analyses (distribution statistics, clustering, and
multidimensional scaling) support most of the formulated hypotheses and suggest a high degree of convergence between the findings in the two disciplines.
411
Emotions in motion. Towards a corpus-based methodology for
describing the evolution of emotion conceptualisation over time
Ulrike Oster
Universitat Jaume I
This paper proposes the semantic and pragmatic profiling of emotion concepts
combining fundamental notions from cognitive semantics, like conceptual metaphor and metonymy, with a corpus-based methodology employing key corpus-linguistic notions like semantic preference and semantic prosody [1]. The approach
provides quantitative data on figurative conceptualisations, as well as insight on
conceptual proximity (i.e. the relative position of the emotion word in the conceptual domain and with respect to other emotion concepts), syntagmatic relations
(with information on prototypical causes, consequences or experiencers of the
emotion) and the way the emotion is described and evaluated.
So far the studies within this approach have provided synchronic descriptions
of emotion concepts, but cognitive semantics recognises the intrinsic historicity
of language [2] and thus the evolution of grammatical structures and concept
configurations. This has been shown for metaphor and metonymy [3,4] and first
attempts have been made to analyse the evolution of emotion concepts over time
[5-7].
This paper aims to outline some of the challenges and possibilities of extending
our profiling approach to a diachronic view on emotions and their evolution; to
present first results achieved with existing freely accessible corpora, to propose
ways to overcome some of the shortcomings of these corpora for this purpose;
and to explore ways in which the quantitatively oriented corpus-based approach
can tie in with the qualitative methods of neighbouring fields such as the history
of concepts or the Discourse Historic Approach.
412
Symposium S6.5
In Defense of William James
Convener
Jenefer Robinson
University of Cincinnati
What is an emotion? Emotion is a ‘feeling of bodily changes’ writes William James in a now famous article in Mind (1884). ‘My theory is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting
fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.’
James’s theory has probably provoked more critical response than any other view in the history of psychology. Subsequent writers have criticized him for reducing the emotion to a physiological process,
thereby ignoring the crucial role of evaluative judgment and making the object of emotion disappear.
In the heyday of cognitivism, psychologists declared themselves outright anti-Jamesians; psychological textbooks referred to his theory as an outdated approach that had been refuted by the results of
experimental research.
Two decades ago however, things started to change considerably. Phoebe Ellsworth published her
influential essay defending James from those who intentionally or unintentionally misconstrued him
(Ellsworth 1994). The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio developed a Jamesian view of emotion and
feeling (e.g. in Damasio 1994). Neo-Jamesian philosophers, such as Jesse Prinz (2004) and Jenefer
Robinson (2005), defended updated versions of James’s view. More than a century after his death,
James’s theory seemed to be undergoing a revival.
But the controversy is not over yet; the revival has spurred a new wave of attacks, not only against the
neo-Jamesian view of emotion (see e.g. Jones 2006) but also against James himself, as he gets viewed
through the lens of neo-Jamesians. For example, in a recent paper John Deigh has argued that for
James emotions are not motives for action but merely states of bodily arousal. He concludes that the
prospects for reviving James’s theory are dim, and that the theory cannot be sustained (Deigh 2014;
see also Deonna & Scherer 2010, Deonna & Teroni 2012, Reisenzein & Stephan 2014). In short, James’s
view of emotions continues to be both hot and controversial.
In this panel we will join the new discussion, assess whether the neo-Jamesians are as Jamesian as
they claim, and whether the critiques of the neo-Jamesians carry over to James himself. In particular, we will examine the dynamics of the emotional process: what initiates an emotional episode in
James’s view – the “perception of the exciting fact” that starts an emotion - and how feelings of
bodily changes relate to behavior and action. We will defend James as still today more up to date and
stimulating than other classical theorists of emotion.
Speaker 1 will discuss both issues mentioned above. She will examine what James meant by «the
perception of the exciting fact» from which bodily changes follow, arguing that this phrase suggests
1) that James believed that cognitive processes were as important as physiological ones in emotion;
2) that the variety of emotions is as great as the variety of exciting facts. She also argues that James’s
view is compatible with the idea of emotion as a motivating force.
Speaker 2 will discuss some criticisms of Jesse Prinz’s Neo-Jamesian account and argue that James
himself does not hold the views that get criticized. She also proposes an interpretation of James’s
“perception of the exciting fact” as a perception of Gibsonian affordances. She suggests that if we
think of emotions in this way we have a better chance of explaining the connection between emotions and how they motivate actions.
Speaker 3 will elaborate on James’s remark that the body in emotion can be “acutely and obscurely
felt” to argue that in order for an emotion to involve bodily feelings, the body need not be an intentional object of awareness, but can also be that through which the world is experienced in a certain way.
She will introduce the related notions of background bodily feelings and pre-reflective bodily self-awareness, and reflect on how these notions relate to James’s account of the emotions.
Finally, Speaker 4 will examine the claim that there are actually not just one, but two theories to
be found in James’ writings on emotion (Averill 1992; e.g. Reisenzein & Stephan 2014) - an early physiological theory that sees emotions as arousals, and a later one that implies some agreement with
appraisal theory. She will defend the unity of James’s thought, and show how an interpretation of
Jamesian feelings in terms of experiences of ‘action readiness’ (Frijda 1986, 2007) will allow us to close
the gap between the two seemingly incompatible versions of James’s theory.
413
James’s Innumerable Gradations
Phoebe Ellsworth
What did James mean by «the perception of the exciting fact» from which bodily
changes follow? I will argue that this phrase suggests that 1) James believed that
cognitive processes were as important as physiological ones in emotion and 2)
that the variety of emotions is as great as the variety of exciting facts. Because
motives and behaviors are also probabilistic, without fixed boundaries, James’s
view of emotion is compatible with the idea of emotion as a motivating force. Just
as there are very few stimuli that invariably elicit the same emotion in all humans,
so there are very few emotional states that invariably elicit specific behaviors.
414
Emotions as Perceptions of Affordances
Jenefer Robinson
University of Cincinnati
The leading Neo-Jamesian, Jesse Prinz, has been accused of ignoring the “theoretical divide between initiation pathways and emotional response” (Salmela 2011),
of failing to “connect the evaluative property [e.g. dangerous or offensive] and
the perceived object” [the dangerous or offensive item] (Deonna and Teroni 2012),
and of wrongly claiming that cognition is never a part of emotion but only a causal factor (Jones 2006). I will argue that James himself does not hold the views
that get criticized, and that James in fact differs from Prinz in some important
respects. For James an emotion is a causal process beginning in the perception of
the exciting fact and typically ending in action. Like Speaker 1, I will discuss both
“the perception of the exciting fact” and the link between emotion and action, but
I have a different view of the perception that initiates an emotion episode. I suggest that we should take James literally when he says that a perception initiated
an emotion episode, but that the relevant type of perception is best construed as
a perception of Gibsonian affordances, the terrifying, the caressable and so on. I
argue that if we think of emotions in this way we may have a better chance of
explaining the connection between emotions and how they motivate actions.
415
Background bodily feelings in emotion experience
Giovanna Colombetti
University of Exeter
Critics of James sometimes remark that not all emotion experiences involve bodily feelings. Goldie (2000: 52) for instance noted that “it surely seems correct to
say that there are certain sorts of emotion which might have associated feelings,
but which do not have associated bodily feelings”. In my talk I shall not defend the
view that bodily feelings are necessary for emotion experience. Rather, I will argue
that for a feeling to be a bodily feeling, it need not be about the body (namely,
it need not take the body as an intentional object—as when one notices one’s
trembling legs or one’s tight shoulders); the body can also enter awareness as that
through which one experiences something else. If this is correct, it becomes possible to claim that even when an emotion experience is about the world, it is still
a bodily experience. Drawing on the phenomenological notion of pre-reflective
bodily self-awareness, I shall advance the notion of background bodily feelings to
refer to bodily feelings that are not in the foreground of awareness as feelings of
the body, but that nevertheless determine the quality of emotion experience. Finally I will reflect on how these background phenomena relate to James’s account
of emotions.
416
Did James defend two theories of emotion?
Heleen Pott
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Some theorists (e.g. Averill 1992) have suggested that James defends not one
but two theories of emotion: a ‘tough minded’ empiricist theory in his early
psychological writings and a more ‘tender minded’ cognitive one in his later work.
The first theory sees emotions as states of arousal and fits what James called
the ‘coarser’ responses; however, it fails to account for the object directedness,
the cognitive dimension, and the motivational role of most emotions (Solomon
2003; Deonna & Scherer 2010; Deonna & Teroni 2012; Deigh 2014). The second
theory can be interpreted as implying agreement with appraisal views of emotion. Obviously the two theories can’t both be right; therefore, James’s writings on
emotion are inconsistent. (Reisenzein & Stephan 2014)
Is there a way out for James? I argue that there is. If we interpret his psychological writings as anticipating the pragmatism of his later work, particularly
the view that consciousness is a practical tool for dealing with the world, we
may end up with an original account of Jamesian feelings as experiences of
‘action readiness’ (Frijda 1986, 2007), and a relational model of emotion that is
consistent with both the causal and the cognitive version of James’s theory.
417
Symposium S6.6
Gender Beyond Difference: Gender Constructs Emotion,
Emotion Constructs Gender
Conveners
Stephanie Shields, Heather MacArthur
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Emotion researchers increasingly emphasize the interpersonal nature of emotion (e.g., Van Kleef,
2009), the idea that emotion is not a self-contained, private experiential event, but emerges from interaction (or imagined interaction) with others. This perspective is useful for gender-emotion research in
that it helps to move the field beyond focus on cataloging differences/similarities to a consideration of
why gender matters at all in the experience, perception, or performance of emotion. Most of the work
on gender and emotion has been conducted as a search for differences and similarities in emotion
between women and men, which both limits the type of research questions about gender that are
asked, and influences how people think about gender (e.g., Shields, 2013).
The purpose of the proposed symposium is to examine when, why, and how gender matters in beliefs
about and perceptions of one’s own and others’ emotion.
The first paper, “Too Much Emotion: Gender, Group Membership and Perception of Emotional Appropriateness,” demonstrates that gender, as well as ingroup/outgroup status, matters in perceptions
of others’ emotional appropriateness. Results of an experimental study in which female and male
targets’ in-group/outgroup status was manipulated revealed that judgments of appropriate emotional display shift depending on whose emotion is being perceived. As predicted, emotion of outgroup
members was seen as less appropriate than that of ingroup members,’ and, furthermore, this effect
was exaggerated for female outgroup members.
The significance of group membership is developed further in “How Culture and Gender Affect the
Perception of Tears.” Across three experimental studies, the authors found that presence of tears on
photos of faces yielded higher ratings of perceived sadness for male targets than for female targets.
Importantly, the ethnicity of the target moderated the effects of gender, such that gender mattered
more for ingroup targets than outgroup targets. This work raises the question of how the intensity of
ingroup men’s emotion is interpreted.
Although “powerful” emotions are stereotypically associated with men, “Doing Emotion the “Manly”
Way: When Does Emotional Expressivity Signal Masculinity?” suggests that men’s masculine legitimacy can actually benefit from exhibiting “weak” emotion. Results of Study 1 indicated that targets
were downgraded for their emotion only when they represented a subordinate (e.g., feminized) form
of masculinity. Study 2 showed that a male protagonist described as feeling and expressing moral
emotion was viewed as more masculine than male protagonists who did not. Taken together, these
results suggest that supposedly counter-stereotypical displays of emotion can be indicative of masculinity in some contexts.
“Communicating and Sharing Emotions on Facebook: A Study with Adolescents” summarizes results
of a survey study of adolescent expression of emotion via social media (Facebook), focusing on how
emotional self-presentation is used in the performance of a gendered self. Results show that Facebook does not displace in-person interactions, but offers an alternate space for sharing emotions that
adolescents are more guarded about sharing in person. As with other aspects of adolescent social
development, Facebook is an arena for practicing significant aspects of the gendered social self. Further, it shows that the gendered emotion practice is nuanced and not representative of the overblown
stereotypes as characterized by the gender differences approach.
“Boying the Boy and Girling the Girl: Affective Interpellation and the Heterosexualisation of Emotion”
develops the theme of the gendered self through presenting a theoretical account of the how beliefs
about gender and beliefs about emotion mutually influence the experience and performance of each.
Drawing on contributions to the social media blog site, Genderfork, the author demonstrates how
gender is affectively re-interpreted and performed by individuals who see themselves as beyond the
conventional female-male gender binary. Unconfined to binaries, the blog reveals how gender is an
affective process that is constantly imagined, embodied, re-imagined and re-embodied.
Our symposium significantly contributes to the study of gender and emotion: it critiques the limits
of cataloguing difference and encourages innovative ways to frame meaningful research questions
concerned with when, how, and why emotion and gender are linked in evaluation of own and others’
emotion.
418
Too Much Emotion: Gender, Group Membership and Perception of
Emotional Appropriateness
Marianne LaFrance, Jacqueline Smith
Yale University, USA
Expressions of emotion are everyday occurrences but so too are judgments by
others about whether any particular emotional reaction is regarded as appropriate given who the target is and the nature of the context where the emotion
occurred (Ekman et al., 1987; Mayer, 2009). As to the target, whether he or she
is categorized as an in-group or out-group member profoundly influences how
that person is perceived and evaluated by others (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2010). For
example, people less accurately perceive the emotions of out-group compared to
in-group members (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) and believe that out-group members are less capable of expressing uniquely human emotions (Leyens, Demoulin,
Vaes, Gaunt, & Paladino, 2007).
In the present research, participants read scenarios in which male and female
members of minimal groups or existing political groups expressed high intensity
anger or happiness in a workplace context. The question concerned the degree to
which the reaction was judged to be appropriate. Results showed that emotional
reactions were perceived to be less appropriate if displayed by out-group compared to in-group members and especially if the out-group member was female.
The results extend existing research in three overlapping areas: gender-based stereotypes about emotionality, the role of emotion in intergroup contexts, and shifting judgments of appropriate emotional display.
419
How Culture and Gender Affect the Perception of Tears
Eric Vanman, Leah, Sharman, Jenna Scambler
University of Queensland Australia
We know that cultural norms influence the extent to which men and women display tears when crying, but do such norms also affect whether we perceive tears
differently by gender? Across three experiments participants viewed still photos
of crying men and women who displayed visible tears or not. In Experiment 1, participants viewed the photos and made ratings of genuineness and sadness. In Experiment 2, participants viewed the photos in a backwards masking task for either
50 or 100 msec and rated them again for sadness. In Experiment 3 we also examined the ethnicity (i.e., Caucasian or Asian) of both the participant and the target
to investigate the role of culture and group bias in perceived gender differences in
crying. Analyses revealed across all three experiments that the presence of tears
yielded greater effects on perceived sadness for male targets than for female targets, regardless of the participant’s gender and ethnicity. In addition, the ethnicity
of the target moderated the effects of gender, such that gender mattered more
for ingroup targets than outgroup targets. We will discuss how these findings can
be considered in the context of gender roles and emotion.
420
Doing Emotion the “Manly” Way: When Does Emotional
Expressivity Signal Masculinity?
Stephanie Shields, Heather MacArthur, Jonathan Gallegos
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
The study of masculinity has grown substantially in recent years and a core assumption of major theories of masculinity is that men must distance themselves
from all that is considered feminine to successfully assert a masculine image to
themselves and to others (e.g., Pleck, 1995). So-called weak emotions are seen as
particularly antithetical to masculinity (Wong & Rochlen, 2005).
In this paper we report the results of two studies that challenge the view that
caring or “weak” emotions are incompatible with masculinity, and propose that
such emotions can actually be consistent with masculinity when expressed in the
“right” (masculine) way and by the right (masculine) individual. In the first study
participants read scenarios that described either a woman or man in a femalemajority occupation (nursing) or male-majority occupation (firefighting) tear-up
in response to working with an injured child. The question concerned whether perceived masculinity of the occupation (and by extension, target) would influence
ratings of emotional appropriateness. In the second study participants read
scenarios that described a high status male experience and/or express a moral
emotion or neither express/experience in response to a community tragedy. The
question concerned how appropriate and how masculine he was perceived to be.
Results from Study 1 indicated that targets were downgraded for their emotion
only when they represented a subordinate (e.g., feminized) form of masculinity
(male nurses); firefighters were not viewed as less appropriate as a result of their
crying. Further, the second study showed that the protagonist described as feeling
and expressing moral emotion was viewed as the most masculine. Taken together,
these results suggest that supposedly counter-stereotypical displays of emotion
are not, in fact, inconsistent with masculinity, but rather depend on the identity of
the target and how the emotion is displayed.
Results have implications for (1) understanding how performance of emotion is
linked to perceptions of gender-appropriate behavior, (2) theories of masculinity,
and morality as a defining element of masculinity, and, (3) the study of moral emotions.
421
Communicating and sharing emotions on Facebook.
A study with adolescents
Vanda Zammuner, Alice Bandino
University of Padova
The study focused on adolescents’ use of Facebook (FB), especially with respect to
whether and how they communicate and share their emotions on FB. About 1350
adolescents (14 to 21 yrs), from Sardinia, Italy, took part in the study. Adolescents
answered a survey that included many specific questions on FB usage, as well as
judged 5 reak FB posts of people sharing an event and their thoughts and emotions on it. They also filled a loneliness scale that was employed as a well-being
criterion.
The main results are that adolescents generally speaking use FB on daily on average, but they see their friends too, and there is no relation between using FB and
loneliness level. In general, adolescents do not share much their emotions, especially not the negative ones, and believe that one must be careful with whom you
share things. In general the adolescents have not shared with anyone either an
emotionally positive or a negative event. Girls have somewhat fewer friends and
fewer FB accounts than boys, but report using FB more often than boys to express
their emotions, especially sadness, through sharing and commenting on them by
posting links that express them. The sample is generally ‘healthy’, with girls reporting less loneliness than boys (both socially and emotionally, and UCLA measure.
In sum, the study shows that the tested Italian adolescents use FB ‘cum grano
salis’. That is, they do not use FB because they lack friends, but - especially if feeling
lonely - do tend to use FB to express their emotions (joy especially), and be consoled when down (much as they use FB for many other purposes, such as keeping
updated on politics and sports, sharing videos and music, keeping in contact with
people who are away, etc.). Gender is an important variable in differentiating FB
usage in many respects, overall indicating that adolescents follow at least to some
extent emotionally gender-congruent implicit norms.
422
‘Boying’ the Boy and ‘Girling’ the Girl’: - Affective Interpellation and
The Heterosexualisation of Emotion
Lyndsey Moon
University of Warwick, University of Roehampton
I propose that in the ‘boying’ of the ‘boy’ and the ‘girling’ of the ‘girl’ (Butler 1990)
an affective subjectivity is implicated and conferred onto the body at the point of
naming gender. I suggest that the citation and re-citation of emotion words and
meanings assigned to sentient bodies is conducted in such a way that once interpellated as either ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ they are expected to convey, communicate, relate
and/or display named emotions that reflect socialisation as ‘gender normals’ (Garfinkel 1967). In an on-going reflexive process, emotions are configured through
thoughts (conversation, self-talk, imagination) aligning certain ‘feelings’ to heterosexualised gender meanings, while gender is represented by the interior and
exterior output of these configurations and emotions remain heterosexualised.
Attempts to resist or remove these citations expose how the materiality of gender
depends upon the constant hailing of certain emotions to ensure bodies remain
uncontestably cis-gendered and heterosexual. (Cisgender refers to individuals
whose assigned gender, personal identity, and bodies match.)This perspective
suggests that knowledge of gender and its relationship to emotion is understood
and made recognisable in order to explain the body, while the ‘being’ of gender
has been ontologized into the binary system presently taken for granted by using
epistemic logic that reflects hegemonic social and cultural meanings. In effect,
bodies are framed according to feeling based meanings and these meanings are
gendered according to social systems and cultural codes. Gender is embedded in
feeling led meanings, and if the meaning for feelings change, then meanings for
gender change.
Using quotes from those who are part of a non-binary gendered community over
a period of 6 months (2014) on the social media blog site, Genderfork, I analyse
the way gender is being re-interpreted and performed and how feeling-led interpretations form ‘liminal genders’ where there is the space to rearticulate bodies
and feelings and re-cite their shifting interiority. Unconfined to binaries, the blog
reveals how gender is an affective process that is constantly imagined, embodied,
re-imagined and re-embodied.
423
O3.1 When Emotion Changes: A Dynamic Approach to the Cultural
Differences in the Perception of Facial Expressions
Xia Fang, Gerben Van Kleef, Disa Sauter
A dynamic display of emotional change was adopted to investigate the cultural
differences in the perception of facial expressions. Since facial expressions in real
life are highly dynamic rather than static, our perception of others’ emotions is
always in a continuous display and inevitably influenced by the preceding emotions. This influence may distort perception of the target emotion contrasted to
the anchor emotion (contrast effects) or assimilated to the anchor emotion (assimilation effects). Which effects occur is determined by many factors, and one of
them is the similarity between target and anchor. We predicted that assimilation
effects occur in morphologically and perceptually similar emotional change (e.g.,
anger-disgust) while contrast effects occur in morphologically and perceptually
different emotional changes (e.g., anger-fear). The effects may also vary between
different cultures, since individuals from collectivistic cultures (e.g., Eastern Asia)
focus more on the contextual information than ones from individualistic cultures
(e.g., Western Europe) and Easterners experience more dialectical emotions than
Westerners, we predicted Easterners would perceive the target emotion more
mixed (assimilated to the anchor emotion) while Westerners would perceive the
target emotion more specific (contrasted to the anchor emotion). In Experiment
1, anger, disgust and fear were chosen as the emotional stimuli and six emotion
morphs were created. Participants were required to evaluate the intensity of the
last facial expression shown on the morph on three scales (anger, disgust and
fear). Consistent with our hypothesis, the target emotion was perceived assimilated to the anchor emotion in similar emotion morphs (i.e., anger-disgust) while
the target emotion was perceived contrasted to the anchor emotion in different
emotion morphs (i.e., anger-fear and disgust-fear), and Easterners perceived emotions more mixed while Westerners perceived emotions more specific. In order to
test the robustness of this result in different emotions, anger, fear and surprise
were used in Experiment 2, with fear-surprise as similar emotion morphs and
anger-fear and anger-surprise as different emotion morphs, and the same result
was also found. The current research extended previous research on emotional
changes between neutral to an emotional state (e.g., neutral-anger) to emotional
changes between two emotional states (e.g., anger-disgust), and implied whether
assimilation or contrast effects occur in perceiving dynamic emotions is modulated by anchor-target emotion similarity and cultural background of perceivers.
424
O3.1 Construal Level influences Emotional Face Recognition
Martina Kaufmann
University of Trier
Research shows that emotion recognition accuracy varies from individual to individual and even sometimes within the same individual. In an attempt to explain
such variability, this research investigated the role of categorisation processes
and mental construal level in accurate emotion recognition. Results of three studies show that the activation of high-level construals resulted in better performance on emotion recognition tasks than the activation of low-level construals.
Participants who generated superordinate categories in an ostensibly unrelated
task (high-level construal condition), compared with those who had to find subordinate exemplars for the same objects (low-level construal condition, based
on Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi, 2006), subsequently were better at recognising emotions from facial configurations even when presented with the part
around the eye region only (i.e. “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, Baron-Cohen,
Wheelwright, Hill, Raste & Plumb, 2001: Study 1), when no emotion words were
pre-given (i.e. Eyes-test with open response format: Study 2) and when emotion
words were not explicitly necessary for performing the task (i.e. reaction time
when primed with emotional face cues, based on Gendron, Lindquist, Barsalou,
& Barrett, 2012: Study 3). By showing a positive link between high-level construal
level and emotion recognition accuracy this research provides further evidence for
constructionist view of emotion.
425
O3.1 Effects of Intranasal Oxytocin on Facial Mimicry
Sebastian Korb1, Jennifer Malsert2, Didier Grandjean2, Lane Strathearn3,
Patrik Vuilleumier2, Paula Niedenthal4
International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA)1, University of Geneva2
Baylor College of Medicine3, University of Wisconsin4
There has been a recent surge in the study of the effects of oxytocin (OT) in the
brain in relation to social cognition. Among other things, intranasal administration
of OT was shown to improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions, and
to increase gazing to the eye regions. Of clinical relevance, individuals with autism
spectrum disorder (ASD) avoid eye contact, have impaired emotion recognition,
and are generally impaired in aspects of social cognition. Similarly, spontaneous
facial mimicry (FM), i.e. the automatic imitation of perceived facial expressions, is
also thought to underlie facial emotion recognition in healthy individuals, and to
be deficient in people with ASD. To test the hypothesis that relatively increased
levels of brain OT lead to greater FM, 60 healthy male participants were given in a
double-blind between-subjects design 24 international units (IUs) of nasal spray
containing either OT or placebo (PLA). FM and emotion judgments were recorded
in response to movie clips depicting changing facial expressions. As expected,
FM of angry faces was significantly increased in the OT group. No effects were
found for FM of happy face stimuli. The results provide further evidence of the
importance of OT for social cognition skills, and suggest that FM could mediate
the effects of OT on improved emotion recognition.
426
O3.1 The Importance of Low Spatial Frequency Information for
Emotional Processing
Martial Mermillod, Brice Beffara, Amélie Bret
Université de Grenoble
At a perceptual level, the magnocellular layers at the level of the lateral geniculate nucleus act as a high-pass temporal frequency filter and a low-pass spatial
frequency filter, whereas the parvocellular layers correspond to a low-pass temporal filter but process high spatial frequency information. The question at a functional level is to determine why the human cognitive system has a preferential
access to low (and not high) spatial frequencies. The response could lie at the
level of emotional processes. Across different behavioral (Mermillod, Droit-Volet,
Devaux, Schaefer, & Vermeulen, 2010), neurocomputational results (Mermillod,
Vuilleumier, Peyrin, Alleysson, & Marendaz, 2009; Mermillod, Bonin, Mondillon,
Alleysson, & Vermeulen, 2010) and psychopathological results (Mermillod et al.,
2013; Mermillod et al., 2014) we have shown that low spatial frequency information is (i) more useful for recognition of emotional facial expression at a computational level but also (ii) preferentially involved during fear conditioning compared
to high spatial frequency information.
427
O3.1 Angry Soldiers, Fearless Doctors: The Influence of Outfits on
the Perceived Emotion
Christian Mumenthaler, David Sander
The study of isolated emotional faces dominated emotion perception research
since the second half of the 20th century (Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron, 2011). In
recent decades, numerous lines of research have shown that congruent contextual information that is physically presented along with the face facilitates the
recognition of emotional facial expressions, while incongruent information interferes with it. Based on the premise that emotional facial expressions are seen as
indicators of the ongoing cognitive appraisal process (de Melo, Carnevale, Read &
Gratch, 2014), we hypothesize that face-context integration process relies on the
congruency between the appraisal outcomes supposed by the emotional facial
expression and the contextual information. Therefore, in this study, we investigated how contextual information reflecting a high ability to deal with a situation influences the recognition of emotional facial expressions that share similar
physical features but suppose different coping potential. Participants were asked
to judge facial expression blends of anger and disgust, and of fear and surprise.
These faces were combined with four body outfits, two representing a profession
with high coping potential (a grey swiss military uniform and a white doctor coat),
and two outfits that serve as control conditions (a grey and white t-shirt). Results
of Experiment 1 revealed that facial expression blends of fear and surprise were
perceived as expressing less fear (which suppose a low coping potential) when
they were combined with a military uniform or a doctor coat than with a grey
or white t-shirt. However, facial expression blends of anger and disgust were
only perceived as expressing more anger (which suppose a high coping potential) when they were combined with the military uniform. We replicated these
effects in Experiment 2, where facial expression blends of fear and surprise were
less often categorized as expressing fear when they were combined with the two
outfits representing a high coping potential. Moreover, facial expression blends of
anger and disgust were more often and more rapidly categorized as expressing
anger when they were combined with the military uniform than with the control
condition. Our findings suggest for the first time that the face-context integration process relies on the detection of appraisal dimensions.
428
O3.2 Local and distant amygdalo-orbitofrontal cortex
cross-frequency coupling during emotion perception
Andy Christen1, Avgusta Shestyuk2, Lucas Tamarit1, Margitta Seeck3
Robert T. Knight2, Didier Grandjean1
University of Geneva - Geneva1, University of California - Berkeley2
Hôpitaux Universitaires Genevois - Geneva3
The amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are strongly involved in the processing of motivationally significant signals conveying socially threatening information critical to flexible behavioral adjustment. To investigate the mechanisms of
information integration and functional interactions between the amygdala and
OFC, we recorded electrical signals from eight patients implanted with intracranial
subdural electrodes in the right and/or left amygdala and OFC regions, while they
were presented with angry and neutral facial or vocal expressions. We tested the
degree of functional coupling through a measure of low-frequency phase-locking
synchronization, physiologically well suited to account for distant neural inputs
and outputs exchanges. In addition, we used phase-amplitude coupling to assess
the extent to which amygdala and OFC high-frequency activities were organized
as a function of slower phase rhythms. We observed that low frequency phaselocking was enhanced between the amygdala and the medial OFC in response to
both facial and vocal anger as compared to neutral expressions. Furthermore, the
degree of phase coupling in response to angry facial expressions predicted faster
behavioral responses in the emotion categorization task. Moreover, local phaseamplitude coupling was enhanced in the medial OFC during explicit recognition
of angry facial expressions. The results show that cross-frequency coupling mechanisms within the amygdalo-medial OFC network supports distinct facets of
anger processing in humans.
429
O3.2 Gujarati-English bilinguals’ responses to aurally presented
emotional words
Tiina M. Eilola, Jelena Havelka
Queen Mary University of London, University of Leeds
Current evidence on the processing of emotional words in bilingual speakers’ first
(L1) and second (L2) language suggests that early bilinguals and highly proficient
speakers of L2 respond equally strongly to the emotional words in their L1 and
L2 (e.g., Ferré et al., 2010). However, this evidence is based on studies using written words as stimuli. Given that spoken words may lead to stronger emotional
responses that written words, the aim of the present study was to investigate
the processing of emotional words in early, highly proficient bilinguals using a
Stroop-like task where the words were presented aurally. The experiment was
conducted with Gujarati-English bilinguals how had started learning both of
their two languages early in life and reported speaking them with a high level of
proficiency. They were presented with L1 (Gujarati) and L2 (English) positive, negative and neutral words, which were spoken either in a male or a female voice. The
participants were instructed to identify whether the words were pronounced in a
male or female voice as quickly and accurately as possible while ignoring the meanings of the words. The responses were given manually by pressing one of two
keys. After the experiment participants were also asked to complete a language
history questionnaire and to rate the word stimuli in respect to their perceived
familiarity and personal relevance. The results showed significantly slower RTs in
response to positive and negative words when compared to neutral words in both
L1 and L2, but the interference effect to negative words was found to be reduced in
the bilinguals’ L1 (Gujarati) when compared to L2 (English). Furthermore, the word
ratings showed that the participants perceived L2 words overall as more familiar
and personally relevant than L1 words, but these differences were not specific to
negative words. The key novel contribution of the study was to provide evidence
of reduced emotional impact of early bilinguals’ L1 when the speakers live in the
L2 environment. The language history data and ratings of the stimuli suggest that
the effect observed was due to L2 dominance leading to stronger emotionality
effects in that language.
430
O3.2 The macro- and micro-neural network underlying
the decoding of affective voices
Sascha Fruehholz, Didier Grandjean
CISA, University of Geneva
Vocally expressed emotions are a rich source from which listeners can infer the
emotional state of the speaker. The human brain incorporates a distributed and
specialized network of cortical and subcortical regions to decode the emotional
information conveyed by the affective tone of a voice. Cortical regions mainly
comprise the superior temporal and the inferior frontal cortex serving auditory processing and categorization of emotional vocalizations, while subcortical
regions mainly involve limbic brain regions and the basal ganglia serving the
emotional and temporal decoding of affective vocalizations. Though some of the
functional roles of these brain region have been already described on a general
level, recent high-resolution (f)MRI scanning approaches revealed that besides a
macro-network of these cortical and subcortical regions, their seem to be intraregional micro-networks of subregions within each of these target regions. Rather
than a general functional role, these intra-regional subregions obviously serve
different and specific functional roles for the decoding of affective voices. In this
talk I will outline the intraregional architecture and functions of subregions in the
superior temporal cortex, the inferior frontal cortex, the amygdala and the basal
ganglia, which underlie the processing of vocal emotions. Furthermore, based on
the micro-structural architecture I will outline the macro-structural network of
these cortical and subcortical brain regions, which shows a critical dependency on
stimulus- and task-specific factors.
431
O3.2 Structural and Functional Connectivity of the Subthalamic
Nucleus During Vocal Emotion Decoding
Julie Péron, Sascha Frühholz, Leonardo Ceravolo, Didier Grandjean
Our understanding of the role played by the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in human
emotion has recently advanced with STN deep brain stimulation, a neurosurgical
treatment for Parkinson’s disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However,
the potential presence of several confounds related to pathological models raises
the question of how much they affect the relevance of observations regarding
the physiological function of the STN itself. This underscores the crucial importance of obtaining evidence from healthy participants. In this study, we tested
the structural and functional connectivity between the STN and other brain regions related to vocal emotion in a healthy population by combining diffusion
tensor imaging and psychophysiological interaction analysis from a high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging study. As expected, we showed that
the STN is functionally connected to the structures involved in emotional prosody
decoding, notably the orbitofrontal cortices (OFCs), inferior frontal gyri, auditory
cortices, pallidum, and amygdala. These functional results were corroborated by
probabilistic fiber tracking, which revealed that the left STN is structurally connected to the amygdala and the OFC. These results confirm, in healthy participants,
the role played by the STN in human emotion and its structural and functional
connectivity with the brain network involved in vocal emotions.
432
O3.2 Emotional vocalisations are recognised across cultures
regardless of distractor valence
Disa Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, Sophie Scott
University of Amsterdam, Radboud University, Paul Ekman Group
University College London
The question of whether emotional expressions have universal meanings - and if
so what these are - has been at the centre of heated debates for many decades. Recently the discussion has moved beyond facial expressions, with researchers also
addressing other types of signals, such as vocalisations. In an earlier study, the authors demonstrated that nonverbal vocalisations such as laughs and grunts, communicate emotional states across cultures. However, a recent paper questioned
whether this conclusion was valid, proposing instead that only broad affective dimensions such as valence, but not specific emotions, can be communicated across
cultures via vocalisations. We present a re-analysis of our data, which allows for a
direct test of whether nonverbal vocalisations communicate specific emotions or
only valence across cultures. Specifically, we re-analysed the data from the Himba
participants in our original study who had heard British vocalisations (n=29). All
trials were re-coded in terms of the valence relationship of the distractor to the
target (Same Valence or Different Valence). Participants’ performance was significantly above chance both when distractors were of the opposite valence to the
target and when distractors were of the same valence as the target. These results
confirm our original conclusion that nonverbal vocalisations communicate specific emotions across cultures, extending our previous results by showing that this
is the case also when distractor and target are of the same valence.
433
O3.3 The intentionality of bodily feelings
Tom Cochrane
University of Sheffield, UK
Bodily responses are often taken to be essential features of emotional states. Less
clear is the role played by the feeling of these bodily responses. I will argue that
while bodily feelings are not necessary for emotions, they do contribute distinctive intentional content to emotions when they occur.
The additional intentional content provided by emotional bodily feelings is a predictable consequence of the capacity for self-monitoring. Emotions involve a fairly
complex causal process, and it is typical for us to be able to attend to the different
aspects of our bodily processes, particularly as we learn more about how our bodies function. It also makes sense from an evolutionary point of view that we are
endowed with the ability to monitor our bodily responses (as opposed to sheer
bodily sensation). By giving us a sense of our bodily capacities or powers, such
monitoring contributes to planning.
For this reason we should not regard the intentional content provided by bodily
feelings as merely a pattern of sensations but as providing representational information that is relevant to the status of the subject. I articulate the nature of this
representation by appeal to a notion of ‘emotional space’ which is a sense of the
general affordances offered by one’s body towards interactions with the world.
434
O3.3 Emotions as Embodied Action-Oriented Representations
Rebekka Hufendiek
University of Basel
Current philosophical theories tend to criticize not only cognitivist approaches to
emotions but also theories that take emotions principally to be representations.
Mainly among embodied and enactive approaches, there is a growing anti-representationalist consensus (e.g., Hutto 2012, Colombetti 2014). Authors describe
emotions as “embodied attitudes” (Teroni, Deonna 2012) or as “enacting meaning”
(Colombetti 2014). Such embodied accounts are highly promising when it comes
to explaining how emotions feel, how they motivate for action, and how they have
evolved. Yet, in my talk I will argue that embodied accounts fail to acknowledge
the many arguments that speak in favor of emotions being representations.
Conceptualizing emotions as representations a) allows us to explain our talk of
emotions as being adequate or inadequate, b) it helps us to explain how emotions relate to other mental states and c) it also facilitates an explanation of how
emotions can be about complex states of affairs, such as, the violation of social
rules and norms. I will argue that no current embodied or enactive account that
denies the representational status of emotions can account for these features. On
the other hand, assuming that emotions are representations does not necessarily
imply an over-intellectualization of the emotions. I propose instead to conceive of
emotions as embodied action-oriented representations. Such representations are
simple non-conceptual representations, they are constituted by patterns of bodily
reactions and directly guide our behavior.
435
O3.3 A criterion for the fitting attitude analysis of affective values
Stephane Lemaire
Université de Rennes 1
According to fitting attitude analyses of values (see recently Scanlon, 1998), an
object is, say, admirable if and only if admiration fits the object. These analyses of
value face the wrong kind of reasons problem (Rabinowicz & Rønnow‐Rasmussen,
2004) insofar as one may have an overriding reason to admire an object (a demon
threatens to inflict us severe pain if we do not admire him) although the object
(the deamon) is not admirable. All existing attempts to overcome the problem
(except Kauppinen, 2014) have concluded from such cases that the relevant notion of fittingness must not encompass prudential and moral reasons (d’Arms &
Jacobson, 2000). I disagree (Author, 2012). However, in defending that this notion
must be understood in terms of prudential and moral reasons, I need to provide a
criterion that sets apart the prudential and moral reasons that explain the notion
of fittingness. My suggestion is that an emotion E fits an object O if and only if it
is prudentially and morally better from the point of view of an entire life, to have
a disposition to experience E in front of O.
In other words, the set of the right kind of reason is not a subset of the reasons
that are present in a given context but the larger set of reasons that may be relevant in all the encounters of O within a lifespan. However, this criterion is still
inadequate in the context of a tyrany insofar as it may be preferable to admire the
tyrant from a prudential or even moral point of view. To overcome this objection,
I argue that the context in which emotional dispositions are assessed must be
morally idealized and I explain how this should be done.
I finally argue that this criterion concurs both with our intuition about our true
sensibility as a sensibility unaffected by perverse contexts and with the regulating
ideal of a State or social context that would allow us to live the best moral lifes
possible.
436
O3.3 Are Sensory Pleasures Happiness-Constituting States?
Mauro Rossi
Universite du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
In The Pursuit of Unhappiness (2008), Daniel Haybron has defended an emotional state theory of happiness, according to which happiness consists in a broadly
positive balance of (primarily) emotions and moods. One interesting aspect of
Haybron’s theory is that it regards some pleasures – i.e. most notably, sensory
pleasures – to be too shallow and superficial to be happiness-constituting states.
In fact, according to Haybron, sensory pleasures can only be sources of happiness,
but never constituents of it.
The goal of my paper is to reconsider the role of sensory pleasures for happiness.
More specifically, I shall offer two arguments to think that sensory pleasures are
happiness-constituting states, alongside emotions and moods.
The first, and more direct, argument consists in showing that sensory pleasures
possess the relevant features for counting as constituents of happiness. According
to Haybron, the essential characteristic of happiness-constituting states is that
they dispose an individual to experience certain affects rather than others. In this
paper, I argue that this is precisely how the most plausible contemporary accounts
(including the conative account, e.g. Heathwood 2007; the psycho-functional account, e.g. Aydede 2014; and the perceptualist account, e.g. Bain 2013) characterise
sensory pleasures.
The second, more indirect, argument consists in showing that sensory pleasures
are sufficiently similar to emotions to be regarded as happiness-constituting
states in the same way as emotions. In order to defend this position, I shall consider the five criteria used in philosophy and psychology for thinking that an affective state counts as an emotion, identified by Deonna and Scherer (2010) and Cova
and Deonna (2014), and argue that sensory pleasures satisfy all these criteria.
437
O3.3 Emotional experience, affect and the representation of Value
Daniel Vanello
University of Warwick
In her paper “Evaluative Phenomenology” (2014), Michelle Montague argues for
an account of evaluative property ascription in emotional experience where selfawareness takes centre stage. Montague argues that in emotional experience we
are intentionally aware both of the phenomenal character of the experience and
of the object or state of affairs represented evaluatively. Montague then gives the
following account of evaluative property ascription: during the emotional experience of, for instance, sadness we are intentionally aware of both the disvalue
inherent in the affective phenomenology characteristic of sadness and of the disvalue experienced as inherent in the object or state of affairs. We then notice the
resemblance between the intentional contents of the two instances of awareness
as both instantiating the disvalue “sad” and we consequently conclude that the
close resemblance means that the object instantiates the disvalue “sadness”. In
this paper I argue that Montague’s account distorts the evaluative phenomenology of emotional experience due to its inability to account for one of its essential
experiential aspects: disclosure. Disclosure refers to the non-inferential ascription of an evaluative property to an intentional object (see Scheler 1973; Goldie
2007). Montague’s account, by contrast, entails an inferential conception of evaluative property ascription as the upshot of a comparison between the intentional contents of the two instances of intentional awareness. Crucially, I argue that
Montague is inevitably led to this impasse by her mistaken conception, adopted
by other theories of emotion, of self-awareness (see Slaby and Stephan 2008). The
sort of self-awareness in play in emotional experience should not be construed as
an intentional about-ness directed towards one’s ongoing experience but rather
as a non-reflective, phenomenal awareness of the intentional object (Sartre 2004).
Thus I suggest that any account of emotional experience that fails to distinguish
between these two sorts of self-awareness is phenomenologically deficient.
438
O3.4 The development of emotion recognition during childhood
Georgia Chronaki1, Julie Hadwin2, Matthew Garger2, Pierre Maurage3,
Edmund Sonuga-Barke2
University of Manchester1, University of Southampton2
Catholic University of Louvain3
Sensitivity to facial and vocal emotion is fundamental to children’s social competence. Previous research has focused on children’s facial emotion recognition, and
few studies have investigated non-linguistic vocal emotion processing in childhood. We compared facial and vocal emotion recognition and processing biases
in 4- to 11-year-olds and adults. Eighty-eight 4- to 11-year-olds and 21 adults participated. Participants viewed/listened to faces and voices (angry, happy, and sad)
at three intensity levels (50%, 75%, and 100%). Non-linguistic tones were used. For
each modality, participants completed an emotion identification task. Accuracy
and bias for each emotion and modality were compared
across 4- to 5-, 6- to 9- and 10- to 11-year-olds and adults. The results showed
that children’s emotion recognition improved with age; preschoolers were less
accurate than other groups. Facial emotion recognition reached adult levels by 11
years, whereas vocal emotion recognition continued to develop in late childhood.
Response bias decreased with age. For both modalities, sadness recognition was
delayed across development relative to anger and happiness. The results demonstrate that developmental trajectories of emotion processing differ as a function
of emotion type and stimulus modality. In addition, vocal emotion processing
showed a more protracted developmental trajectory,
compared to facial emotion processing. The results have important implications
for programmes aiming to improve children’s socio-emotional competence.
439
O3.4 Emotion socialization at nursery school: An evidence-based
research adopting a conversational approach
Ilaria Grazzani, Veronica Ornaghi, Alessia Agliati
Universita di Milano-Bicocca
The present study was carried out into the theoretical background of the emotional development and emotional socialization constructs (Denham, 1998). Recent
years have seen the implementation of a range of training programs aimed at improving children’s socio-emotional skills (e.g., Izard, Trentacosta, King & Mostow,
2004). Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted with toddlers at nursery
school. In this training study, we adopted observational and experimental paradigms to examine the efficacy of an intervention based on conversation about
emotions in small group, from shared book-reading of emotionally laden brief stories. The conversational approach (Siegal, 1999) gives children the opportunity to
discuss, reflect on and reason about the themes introduced by the adult, helping
them to develop verbal abilities and to access the viewpoints of others.The twomonth innovative intervention for young children was designed to promote toddlers’ emotional talk, emotion understanding (EU) and prosocial behaviour. This
study consisted of three phases: pre-test, intervention, and post-test for both the
training and the control group.
Participants were 110 children (68 girls; overall mean age at pre-test: 29 months),
divided into two groups as a function of age, from seven nurseries located in a
northern region of Italy. Before and after the intervention phase, on one hand parents were asked to fill three instruments related to their children’s verbal and empathic competences, on the other hand toddlers were individually administered
four tasks of emotion understanding and were videotaped during spontaneous
interactions. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) for repeated measures
was run. Results showed that the training group significantly outperformed the
control group on measures of knowledge and use of emotional-state language,
EU competence and prosocial behaviour towards peers. There was also a significant group x age interaction, with the older training group participants displaying
greater gains in EU than the younger ones. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings in terms of emotion socialization activities in
educational contexts.
440
O3.4 Who and What are Envied and Does it Change with Age?
Christine Harris, Nicole Henniger
University of California, San Diego
Envy has bred enough psychological pain to be listed among the “seven deadly
sins” yet empirical exploration of envy has been relatively limited. Who do people
envy, and about what? One hypothesis is that similar, close others who are superior in self-relevant domains elicit the most envy (e.g. Smith & Kim, 2007; Tesser, 1988), although other researchers have argued for envy being the product of
comparisons with distant outgroup members (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick 2007). Studies
exploring these factors have generally been limited to college student samples
or have not assessed different domains of envy. In the present studies, we investigate experiences of envy in two large diverse adult samples (primarily from the
US) exploring both the perspective of the envier and the perspective of the person envied. Study 1 (n = 987) examined reported experiences of feeling envy while
Study 2 (n = 843) focused on situations in which participants had been (in their
judgment) the target of someone else’s envy. Both views of envy confirmed that
across the lifespan, people predominantly reported envying and being envied by
same-gender and similarly-aged others, supporting the hypothesis that people
envy those who are like them. We asked whether the preponderance of samegender and age envy was likely due to people spending more time among others
of the same gender and age, rather than directly due to similarity per se. The envy
similarity effect seems only partially explained by greater exposure to similar
others. Both studies found that the likelihood of envying certain domains shifted
across the lifespan. Scholastic success, social success, looks, and romantic success
were less envied with age; money was more envied with age; envy of occupation
and family peaked in the 40s; while an overall better life, talents, health were fairly
consistently envied across age groups. Generally, the genders reported envying
similar things, although there were some notable differences (e.g., looks). Both
evolutionary and social cognitive theories of envy have strong implications for the
envy-targeting issues illuminated by our data; these connections will be explored
in our talk.
441
O3.4 Quantifying visual information use for facial expression
recognition during development
Helen Rodger, Roberto Caldara
University of Fribourg
Behavioral studies of facial expression recognition during development have applied various methods to establish by which age expressions can be recognized.
Most commonly these methods employ static images either showing expressions
at their highest intensity (apex) or morphed expressions of reduced intensity.
Consistently, unique recognition trajectories have been found for the basic emotional expressions. However, the diverse methods used to index expression recognition have reported differences in these trajectories and only one study (Rodger,
Vizioli, Ouyang & Caldara, in press) has investigated the continuous development
of all 6 basic emotional expressions together under the same paradigm up to
adulthood. In this previous study we identified a fined grained mapping of the
continued development of facial expression recognition for all six basic emotions
and a neutral expression by manipulating the signal alone (Rodger et al., in press).
Here, our aim was to quantify visual information use for recognition of the 6 basic
emotional expressions using two distinct measures in a unified framework: from
early childhood (5 years) up to adulthood (8 age groups of 16 participants each).
We thus isolated both (1) the quantity of signal necessary to recognize an emotional expression at the apex normalized for contrast and luminance, and (2) the
expression intensity (using neutral-expression image morphs) necessary for each
observer to recognize the 6 basic emotions while maintaining accuracy at 75% correct. Both measures revealed that fear and happiness were the most difficult and
easiest expressions to recognize across age groups. During early childhood both
measures significantly correlated for all expressions except surprise. Interestingly, this correspondence between measures broke down at the ages of 11-12 years,
while recognition thresholds for both signal and intensity continued to improve
with age. Early adolescence thus marks a crucial developmental transition, where
visual information use for facial expressions becomes more discriminative and develops into dedicated processing systems: one coding for signal and the other for
intensity. Our results also show that data obtained with morphed or expressions
at the apex cannot be straightforwardly compared, offering novel insights and
tools for the investigation of the development of the affective system.
442
O3.4 The Development of Infant Responding to Discrete Emotions:
Differential responses in 16- and 24-month-old infants
Eric Walle1, Peter Reschke1, Joseph Campos2, Linda Camras3
University of California, Merced1, University of California, Berkeley2
DePaul University3
Research to date has investigated infant discrimination of discrete displays of
emotion (e.g., Flom & Bahrick, 2007), approach and avoidant behaviors to positive
and negative emotions (e.g., Walden & Ogan, 1988), and the presence of distinct
emotion categories in early childhood (Widen & Russell, 2008). However, a distinct gap in the literature exists in identifying at what age infants demonstrate
differential behavioral responding to discrete emotions (Walle & Campos, 2013).
The present study explored the development of infants’ responding to discrete
emotions.
Sixteen- and 24-month-old infants (observations = 120 and 156, respectively)
observed an experimenter express one of five emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear,
and disgust) through the face, voice and posture toward a stimulus. Infants were
allowed to freely respond to the emotional context. Researchers coded specific infant behavioral responses to identify patterns of behavioral variables constituting
a coordinated response (all kappas >.70). Latent-class analysis (LCA) identified four
distinct classes of coordinated functional behaviors (3-class BIC=3492.30; 4-class
BIC=3484.80; 5-class BIC=3502.96), characterized as: Security Seeking, Prosocial,
Exploring, and Relaxed. A fifth group was also identified to describe infants who
displayed no instrumental behaviors and only engaged in social referencing.
Subsequent analyses compared the frequency of infant response patterns in each
emotion condition. A number of interesting differences emerged from the data,
some of which are highlighted here. Age-related differences indicate that older
infants were more likely to seek security (Χ2=5.14, p=.02) than younger infants,
particularly in response to Anger. Older infants also trended toward responding
prosocially more than younger infants (Χ2=2.19, p=.14), particularly in the Sadness
condition. Younger infants, on the other hand, were more often relaxed than older
infants (Χ2=16.10, p>.00), particularly in response to Joy. Specific to 24-month-old
infants, Security Seeking was more likely to occur in Anger than in Joy (Χ2=17.68,
p<.00) or Sadness (Χ2=5.43, p=.02). Also, Prosocial responding trended toward
being more likely in Sadness than in Joy (Χ2=2.49, p=.11), Fear (Χ2=2.49, p=.11), or
Anger (Χ2=3.47, p=.06). Additional differences across emotion conditions, both within and between age groups, will be elaborated upon in the presentation.
To our knowledge, this is the first study to identify functional behavioral response
patterns to discrete emotions in infancy and examine their development. Furthermore, the inclusion of multiple discrete negative emotions makes clear that infants do not merely approach or avoid stimuli based on the valence of emotional
communication, but rather demonstrate more nuanced patterns of responding
specific to discrete emotions.
443
O3.5 Examining the robustness of Mixed Emotions:
A Meta-Analysis
Raul Berrios, Peter Totterdell, Steve Kellett
University of Sheffield
The idea that people can experience two oppositely valenced emotions simultaneously has been controversial ever since early attempts to investigate the
construct of mixed emotions. Over time, research interest has grown but controversies in the field survive. Thus, most of the research has been dedicated to demonstrate that mixed emotions would not be product of demand effects, lay theories
of mixed emotions, vacillation or measurement problems. However, the extant
research investigating mixed emotions has not addressed appropriately whether
the variety of designs, models of affect, and methods used consistently support
the experience of mixed emotions. In other words, the accrued evidence investigating mixed emotions has not been systematised. In the present meta-analysis we
examined the robustness with which mixed emotions have been elicited experimentally. A systematic literature search identified 63 experimental studies that
have sought to instigate the experience of mixed emotions. These studies were
distinguished according to the structure of the underlying affect model – dimensional or discrete – as well as according to the type of mixed emotions studied
(e.g., happy-sad, fearful-happy, positive-negative). Meta-analysis using a randomeffects model revealed a moderate to high effect size for the elicitation of mixed
emotions (dIG+ = .77), which remained consistent regardless of the structure of
the affect model, and across different types of mixed emotions. Several methodological and design moderators were tested. Studies using the minimum index
(i.e., the minimum value between a pair of opposite valenced affects) resulted in
smaller effect sizes, whereas subjective measures of mixed emotions increased
the effect sizes. The presence of more women in the samples was also associated
with larger effect sizes. The current evidence indicates that mixed emotions are a
robust measurable and non-artifactual experience. Implications of these findings
point to the understanding of affect as a versatile and flexible system which permit multiple activation patterns, ranging from bipolar affect reactions to different
blends of mixed emotions.
444
O3.5 Emotion profiles in anger- and shame-eliciting situations:
Using latent class analysis to examine emotion differentiation
Tanja Lischetzke1, Michael Eid2, Martin Wertenbruch2
Birgitt Roettger-Roessler2, Haci-Halil Uslucan3
Universität Koblenz-Landau1, Freie Universität Berlin2
Universitat Duisburg-Essen3
The ability to differentiate between discrete emotions with precision has been
termed emotion differentiation or emotional granularity and is assumed to facilitate affect regulation. “High differentiators” distinguish between emotions such
as anger, sadness, or shame when describing their emotional experience whereas
“low differentiators” describe their feelings along a broad pleasant-unpleasant
continuum. To assess individual differences in emotion differentiation, emotional
experience is typically measured repeatedly (e.g., via experience sampling), and a
within-persons intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) is calculated that captures
the degree to which individuals rate emotion terms consistently across situations.
A drawback of the ICC is that it does not inform us about the specific profiles
of emotions that individuals experience in different situations. Knowledge about
emotion profiles might shed more light on qualitative differences between individuals with respect to the specificity of emotional experience and their relation
to regulation behavior and well-being. Therefore, our aim was to use latent class
analysis as a novel way to examine individual differences in emotion differentiation. To control for the situations that individuals encounter, we chose a scenario-based method and focused on anger- and shame-inducing situations. We
hypothesized that at least two classes (types) of individuals could be differentiated based on their profiles of emotional experience (high vs. low differentiators)
and that these classes of individuals report different levels of behavioral reactions
(e.g., rumination, aggressive behavior) and well-being. Eighty-one German adolescents completed a scenario task, in which they rated their anger, shame, and pride
experience and their behavioral reactions to four hypothetical situations (two anger-inducing and two shame-inducing situations). A latent class model with three
latent classes fit the data best. One class had high probabilities to experience high
levels of both anger and shame across situations, but not pride (“low negative
differentiation”), whereas a second class reported less intense and more specific
emotion experience (congruent with the situation). The smallest class had high
probabilities to experience both anger and shame, but also pride, in anger and
shame situations (“low general differentiation”). In a subsequent analysis testing
for hypothesized differences between classes in covariates, the “low general differentiation” class reported higher rumination responses and lower dispositional
well-being (self- and parent-reported) than the other two classes. Taken together,
the results show that latent class analysis can be a useful tool to examine emotion differentiation and that the focus on specific emotion profiles might possibly
lead to a refined emotion differentiation concept.
445
O3.5 On Implicit Affect and Trying Harder: New insights
Guido Gendolla
Recently published research on the implicit-affect-primes-effort (IAPE) model
(Gendolla, 2012) has revealed ample evidence for the systematic impact of implicitly processed affective cues on resource mobilization during cognitive tasks (e.g.,
Freydefont, Gendolla, & Silvestrini, 2012; Gendolla & Silvestrini, 2012; Lasauskaite,
Gendolla, & Silvestrini, 2013). Extending the already available evidence, I report a
series of new yet unpublished studies on the systematic influence of implicitly
processed affective cues on effort mobilization—the intensity aspect of motivation. Those studies contrasted the effects of implicitly and explicitly presented
and processed affect primes (facial expressions) and the impact of different types
of negative affect—sadness, anger, and fear—on effort-related cardiac response
during the performance of cognitive tasks. In further support of the IAPE model,
those studies revealed that implicit fear, anger, and sadness have different systematic effects on effort mobilization: Implicit fear and sadness cues that are
processed online during performance render tasks subjectively more difficult,
resulting in relatively high effort as long as success is possible and justified. By
contrast, anger cues’ effect is facilitating, resembling that of happiness. Moreover
it was found that the effects of explicitly presented affective stimuli have opposite effects on resource mobilization than implicitly processed affective cues (Lasauskaite, Gendolla, & Silvestrini, 2014). Implications of these findings for theories
about self-regulation, implicit affect, and implicit motivation are discussed.
446
O3.5 The emergence of valence under active inference
Mateus Joffily, Giorgio Coricelli
Groupe d’Analyse et de Theorie Economique, CNRS
University of Southern California
We will present an innovative perspective on emotion that rests on mathematical
formalism and biological plausibility (Joffily and Coricelli, 2013). The approach pursued stands on the free energy principle, which is a Bayesian formulation about
how adaptive agents, such as living organisms, resist a natural tendency to disorder (Friston, 2010). Active inference refers to the selective sampling of observations/sensations that maximizes the evidence for the agent’s generative model
of the causes of their sensations. This speaks directly to the brain mechanisms
underlying perception, learning and action (Clark, 2013). Our formulation of valence (i.e., the positive and the negative character of emotions and feelings) from
purely information-theoretic quantities also offers a computational explanation
of how emotion and learning interacts during decision-making. We will suggest
that valence can be formally defined as the negative rate of change of free energy
(or surprise) over time. When free energy is increasing (decreasing) over time, negative (positive) emotions are elicited. Moreover, when higher-order dynamics of
free energy are also taken into account (e.g., the second time-derivative), a family
of discrete emotions can be accounted, such as happiness, unhappiness, hope,
fear, disappointment and relief (Reisenzein, 2009). According to this perspective,
an important function of valence turns out to regulate the uncertainty about the
causes of sensations. When sensations increasingly violate the agent’s expectations, valence is negative and increases the uncertainty of beliefs about their hidden causes. Conversely, when sensations increasingly fulfill the agent’s expectations, valence is positive and decreases the uncertainty of beliefs. Such changes in
uncertainty are directly related to the weighting of past and recent information
during learning, that is the leaning rate. The dynamic interaction between valence, uncertainty and learning rate highlights the crucial role played by emotions
in biological agents’ adaptation to unexpected changes in their world.
447
O3.6 Self-deception as Affective Coping - An Emotional Approach
Federico Lauria1,2, Delphine Preissmann2,3, Fabrice Clement2
University of Geneva1, University of Neuchâtel2, University of Lausanne3
People usually believe that they are good drivers, professors typically believe that
they are well above average and seriously ill patients often believe that they will
recover. As reality is less flattering, it appears that we deceive ourselves. How is
this possible?
In the philosophical literature, the main issues concern the paradoxes of the state
one is in when self-deceived and of the very process leading to it. Do self-deceived
subjects entertain contradictory beliefs [1]? Do they only form the self-deceived
belief [2]? Is self-deception intentional [1] or can we explain it without intentions
[2]?
Despite these controversies, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. Yet, suprisingly, few accounts take this idea and its affective
dimension seriously. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a mechanism of affective
coping.
First, we show how affect is implicitly part of all philosophical accounts. Second,
we present a model which recruits three appraisals of the distressful evidence:
appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain [3], low coping potential and
negative anticipation of one’s affective state along the same lines as Damasio’s
somatic marker hypothesis [4, 5, 6]. At the same time, the desire motivating selfdeception impacts the treatment of the flattering evidence via dopamine, as dopamine increases the anticipation of reward [7]. Our main proposal is that self deception involves emotional mechanisms similar to the ones described for decision
making by provoking a preference for immediate reward. In conclusion, we use
this model to disentangle the philosophical paradoxes with the help of emotions.
448
O3.6 Emotional future-oriented thoughts in daily life
Catherine Barsics1, Martial Van der Linden1, Arnaud D’Argembeau2
University of Geneva, University of Liège
Important progress has recently been made in understanding the representations
and processes underlying our ability to mentally explore possible futures [Schacter
et al., 2012, Neuron, 76(4), 677-694]. While many thoughts and mental images that
we form about our personal future refer to emotionally significant events, either
positive situations that we strive to achieve or negative situations that we would
rather avoid [D’Argembeau et al., 2011, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(1), 96103], little is known about the frequency and nature of emotional future-oriented
thoughts (EFTs) that occur in natural settings. Hence, the main goal of the present
study was to examine thoroughly the conditions of occurrence, characteristics,
and perceived functions of EFTs arising in daily life. In the first part of the study,
participants recorded the number of EFTs that they experienced during three typical days of their lives. In the second part of the study, they recorded 10 EFTs as
they occurred during their daily activities, and rated their characteristics, context
of occurrence, associated emotional states, and perceived functions. Results show
that EFTs are frequent in daily life, occur in various contexts, and take on different
representational formats. Investigating the affective dimension of EFTs, two emotional components of EFTs were distinguished: anticipatory emotions, which refer
to the emotions experienced in the present in response to the prospect of future
events, and anticipated emotions, which refer to the emotions that are expected
to be experienced in the future, if and when imagined events occur [Baumgartner
et al., 2008, European Journal of Social Psychology, 38(4), 68-696]. A positivity bias
in the frequency of reported EFTs was found to be restricted to anticipated emotions. The representational format and perceived functions of EFTs varied according to the valence of both anticipatory and anticipated emotions, whose intensities were influenced by the personal importance and amount of visual imagery of
EFTs. Furthermore, anticipatory and anticipated emotions impacted significantly
on post-EFT mood states. Finally, EFTs were perceived as serving a range of important functions related to goal pursuit (i.e., planning, intention formation, and decision making) and emotion regulation. In sum, these results shed further light on
the emotional properties of EFTs that are experienced in daily life.
449
O3.6 An Exploratory Analysis of Dynamic Emotional Communication Between Parents and Adolescents During Conflict Discussions
Alexandra Main, Rick Dale, Alexandra Paxton
University of California, Merced
Adolescence is a developmental period when parent-child relationships undergo
transformations that can increase conflict and negative emotion during parentchild interactions (Smetana, 2011), often resulting in poor adolescent adjustment
(Moed et al., 2014). However, research on parent-adolescent conflict has largely
ignored the role of positive emotions in the outcomes of such interactions and
has relied on global measures of behavior at the expense of examining momentto-moment fluctuations in emotion between parents and adolescents. The present investigation explored the dynamic coordination of parents’ and adolescents’
emotions during conflict discussions across level of reported satisfaction with the
outcome of the discussions.
In a sample of 50 parent-adolescent dyads (M adolescent age=14.84 years), the
Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF; Coan & Gottman, 2007) was used to code
parent and adolescent emotions in real time during a 10-minute conflict discussion. Codes were divided into negative (e.g., contempt, anger, sadness) and positive emotion (affection, humor, validation, and interest). Parents’ and adolescents’
emotions were coded separately resulting in two synchronized streams of data.
Data were analyzed using cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA; Coco &
Dale, 2014), a method for comparing two time series’ evolution over time to uncover patterns of influence. Parents and adolescents separately rated their satisfaction with the discussion after the conclusion of the interaction.
Dyads were split into two groups: low and high satisfaction with the discussion.
High-satisfaction dyads had lower incidence and distinctly absent synchrony in
negative emotion. Conversely, low-satisfaction dyads showed higher levels and
stronger synchrony in their negativity. The interaction between time lag and satisfaction was significant (t=-2.4, p=.016). For positive emotions, high-satisfaction
dyads showed higher levels of synchrony, but this did not reach significance; both
groups show some synchrony in positivity.
Perhaps most interesting is that low- and high-satisfaction dyads show different
dynamics in their patterns of validation (i.e., conveying an understanding of the
others’ point of view). Low-satisfaction dyads showed lower validation, but this
was in a distinct direction: when parents displayed validation, adolescents were
less likely to reciprocate compared with high-satisfaction dyads. On the other
hand, high-satisfaction dyads showed strong turn-taking dynamics (t=2.92,
p=.003).
Results are consistent with a view that timing in parent-child emotional communication is important (Harrist et al., 2006). However, much past work has highlighted strongly synchronous patterns of interaction, whereas our exploratory
analysis suggests that subtle differences in interactional timing, such as in turntaking patterns, may be more diagnostic of positive interactions during adolescence.
450
O3.6 The impact of customer relationship quality, perceived
injustice and betrayal on consumer revenge
Wilco van Dijk
Leiden University
Is it a thin line between love and hate?
The impact of customer relationship quality, perceived injustice and betrayal on
consumer revenge.
In the literature on consumer revenge there is still a debate on how the quality
of the relationship between a customer and a company affects the customer’s
vindictive behavior after a service failure of the company. Some studies support
a “love is blind” hypothesis—loyal customers are less likely to retaliate against a
firm after a service failure (Hess, Ganesan, & Klein, 2003)—,whereas others support a “love becomes hate” hypothesis—loyal customers are more likely to retaliate (Gregoire & Fisher, 2006, 2008). With the present research we aim to contribute to this debate by examining the impact of customer relationship quality,
perceived injustice and betrayal on consumer revenge and thereby advancing a
better understanding of consumer revenge.
A total of 166 respondents from different European countries took part in an online study and were asked to recall an event that led them to display vengeful behavior towards a company. Subsequently, they answered questions that assessed:
(1) relationship quality with the company, (2) appraised injustice of the event, (3)
feelings of betrayal, (4) direct revenge behaviors (market place aggression, vindictive complaining), and (5) indirect revenge behaviors (negative word-of-mouth,
third-party complaining, patronage reduction).
Overall, results supported a “loves becomes hate” hypothesis. More specifically,
results showed that customers with a better relationship with the company were
more likely to take revenge after a service failure, especially when the service failure was appraised as very unfair. Moreover, results indicated that these effects
were—at least in part—mediated by feelings of betrayal. That is, loyal customers
felt more betrayed by the company and these feelings, in turn, motivated their revenge behaviors. These findings add importantly to our understanding of consumer revenge and underline the importance of relationship quality in customers’
reactions to a service failure.
451
Author index
A
Abisheva Adiya, 50, 89, 155
Adamos Maria, 199
Adams Olivia, 218
Adina Chis Romana Vulturar, 180
af Klinteberg Britt, 216
Agliati Alessia, 440
Ahuja Navdeep, 342
Alexandrowicz Rainer, 389
Antico Lia, 226
Antonesei Alexandra, 51
Antonietti Jean-Philippe, 295
Antosz Anna, 362
Arnaud Sarah, 159
Arndt Charlotte, 134
Ashkanasy Neal M., 110, 113
Ashwin Chris, 387
Asselin David, 200
Asutay Erkin, 343
Audrin Catherine, 62
Avry Sunny, 52
Ay Büsra, 48
Ayoko Oluremi B., 113
B
Babayan Anahit, 235
Bachmann Manuel, 342
Baciu Monica, 57, 180
Baldini Amélie, 203
Balsters Martijn J. H., 46
Baltazar Margarida, 201
Bandes Susan, 40
Bandino Alice, 422
Bänziger Tanja, 136, 344
Barsics Catherine, 449
Bartsch Anne, 123
Basedow Christina A., 53
Bavelier Daphne, 226
Bayer Mareike, 202, 289
Bayot Marie, 345
Beatty Andrew, 4, 287
Beaudoin Luc, 54
Bediou Benoit, 143
453
Beermann Ursula, 5, 339
Beffara Brice, 203, 349, 427
Beijer Ulla, 216
Belkaid Marwen, 346
Benedek Mathias, 270
Ben-Ze’ev Aaron, 299
Berardi Daniele, 227
Berens Ann, 162
Berrios Raul, 444
Betrancourt Mireille, 52, 213
Blaison Christophe, 204
Böckler Anne, 102, 104
Boeren Andrea, 49
Boiger Michael, 105, 106
Bombari Dario, 347
Bonet Maxime, 61
Bonfiglioli Luisa, 55
Boone R. Thomas, 115
Booth Rob, 82, 205
Boros Smaranda, 114
Borowski Sarah, 246
Bos Marieke, 405
Botero Maria, 348
Bower Jo, 56
Brady Michael, 333
Brake Elizabeth, 300
Brancatisano Olivia, 29
Brase Julia, 206
Braunstein Kara, 375
Bret Amélie, 203, 349, 427
Broersma Mirjam, 67
Brooks Ann, 275, 276
Brosch Tobias, 5, 330, 380, 383, 390, 391, 393
Brose Annette, 310
Brosnan Mark, 387
Brown Charity, 293
Buck Ross, 17, 115
Buodo Giulia, 369
Burke Peter, 25
Burkitt Ian, 131
C
Cacciari Cristina, 291
454
Cacioppo Stephanie, 35
Caclin Anne, 142
Caldara Roberto, 442
Callewaert Siebren, 312
Campagne Aurélie, 57
Campos Joseph, 443
Camras Linda, 443
Canadas Elena, 5, 207
Cangia’ Flavia, 350
Canini Frederic, 182
Canli Turhan, 160
Carbognin Cristina, 58
Carman Mary, 208
Carnuta Mihai, 180
Carrus Giuseppe, 227
Castaman Valentina, 228
Caston Ruth Rothaus, 301
Cejudo Javier, 78, 373
Celiz-Yap Heather, 210
Celle Agnes, 5, 161
Celse Jérémy, 322
Ceravolo Leonardo, 5, 432
Cerven Chrissy, 25
Ceulemans Eva, 19, 108
Chakrabarti Bhismadev, 395
Chambers Chris, 79
Chanel Guillaume, 5, 52, 213, 222
Chatzakou Despoina, 158
Chen Ceilia Z., 294
Christakou Anastasia, 56
Christen Andy, 429
Chronaki Georgia, 439
Chung Min-gi, 351
Citron Francesca, 291
Claes Laurence, 162
Clay-Warner Jody, 26
Clement Fabrice, 4, 448
Cochrane Tom, 434
Cohen-Charash Yochi, 325
Coll Sélim, 59
Colombetti Giovanna, 416
Constantinescu Alexandra Caterina, 209
Conway Neil, 112
455
Coricelli Giorgio, 4, 447
Corneille Olivier, 98
Cortes Diana S., 136, 379
Costa Andreia, 406
Cousin Emilie, 99
Coutinho Eduardo, 144
Cova Florian, 5, 272
Crayen Claudia, 134
Crivelli Carlos, 167, 169
Crusius Jan, 320, 323
Cunningham William, 183, 185
Cuperlier Nicolas, 346
D
Da Camara Nuno, 352
Dael Nele, 295, 363
Dale Rick, 450
Dalgleish Tim, 309
Dallaire Danielle, 246
Danuser Brigitta, 215, 230
D’Argembeau Arnaud, 449
Daughters Katie, 60, 280
David Shlomo, 265, 268
Davidson Denise, 69, 210
de Bruin Hanka, 274
de Bruine Marieke, 405
de Groot Timon, 189
De Leersnyder Jozefien, 105, 108, 177
de Rooij Mark, 405
De Roover Kim, 108
de Ruiter Linde, 274
de Smet Pieter, 20
de Wit Sanne, 147
Debrot Anik, 353
Delmas Hugues, 61
Delplanque Sylvain, 5, 380, 391
Delvaux Ellen, 176
Demarchi Samuel, 61
Demeyer Ineke, 312
Desmidt Thomas, 161
Devillers Laurence, 154
Di Nella Michelle, 382
DiGirolamo Marissa, 168
456
Dingle Genevieve, 96, 354
Dissanayake Cheryl, 404
Droit-Volet Sylvie, 118
Droulers Olivier, 224
Dub Richard, 5, 249
Dukes Daniel, 62
Dulewicz Victor, 352
Dunsmore Julie, 211
Dupré Damien, 355
E
Eid Michael, 134, 339, 445
Eilola Tiina M., 430
Eisenkraft Noah, 114
Eisner Frank, 433
Ekman Paul, 433
El-Deredy Wael, 218
Elfenbein Hillary Anger, 114, 173
Elkabetz Shimon, 266, 268
Ellis Andrew, 233
Ellsworth Phoebe C, 148, 414
Enav Yael, 403
Endo Hiroko, 63, 65
Engert Veronika, 103
Eoh Yookyung, 212
Erbas Yasemin, 19
Erbey Miray, 235
Eyben Florian, 144
F
Faltacas Anne-Marie, 200, 356, 359
Famelart Nawelle, 64
Fancourt Amy, 29
Fang Xia, 424
Fayolle Sophie, 118
Feldman Barrett Lisa, 109
Fernández-Dols José Miguel, 170
Ferrarini Roberto, 58
Fessler Eli, 156
Fingerhut Joerg, 140
Fiorentini Chiara, 90
Fiori Marina, 260
Fischer Håkan, 136, 379
457
Fischer Agneta, 18, 175, 281, 307
Fiske Alan, 273
Fleckenstein Kat, 375
Flitter Alex, 377
Flom Ross, 234
Flower Lisa, 42
Flykt Anders, 344
Fokkinga Steven, 20
Fontaine Johnny, 258, 261,338
Forlani Elisa, 55
Fradcourt Benoit, 57
Francis Linda, 317
Freund Alexandra M., 396, 399
Fritz Mattia A., 213
Frommer Joerg, 223
Fronhofer Nina-Maria, 357
Fruehholz Sascha, 5, 66, 431
Fuji Kei, 63, 65
Fukushima Shintaro, 107
Fung Lawrence K., 407
G
Gaebler Michael, 235
Galan-Díaz Carlos, 288
Gallegos Jonathan, 421
Garcia David, 50, 89, 155
Garger Matthew, 439
Gari Perez Roser, 214
Gaussier Philippe, 348
Gendolla Guido, 446
Gendron Maria, 109
Gentaz Edouard, 5, 242
Gentsch Kornelia, 5, 144, 340
Gil Sandrine, 118
Gillioz Christelle, 338, 358
Giordano Michael, 210
Giovannelli Ilaria, 227
Giuliani Valentina, 227
Glowinski Donald, 66
Glynn Dylan, 409
Gomez Patrick, 215, 230
Gonzalez Philippe, 130
Gordon Patricia, 377
458
Gosselin Pierre, 200, 356, 359
Goudbeek Martijn, 67
Grabowska Anna, 376
Gracanin Asmir, 45, 49
Grandjean Didier, 4, 31, 59, 66, 426, 429, 431, 432
Granskaya Juliana, 216
Grass Annika, 202
Gratch Jon, 17, 156
Grau Christopher, 36
Gray Patrick, 277
Grazzani Ilaria, 440
Greenaway Katharine, 72
Griffioen Amber, 127
Gross James, 403
Grossmann Igor, 396, 400
Grynberg Delphine, 73, 360
Guidetti Michèle, 64
Guil Rocio, 78, 373
Gundogdu Nurdan, 82
Gutchess Angela, 401
Gygax Pascal, 358
H
Haase Matthias, 223
Hadwin Julie, 439
Haendler Philipp, 223
Hagman William, 68
Hall Alexandra, 149
Halperin Eran, 254
Hanari Takashi, 364
Hardan Antonio Y., 402, 403, 407
Hareli Shlomo, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268
Harm Jonathan, 181, 217
Harris Christine R., 361, 441
Havelka Jelena, 430, 293
Henniger Nicole E., 361, 441
Hess Ursula, 157, 204, 264, 266, 267, 268
Higgs Malcolm, 352
Hildebrandt Andrea, 289
Hilvert Elizabeth, 69, 210
Hird Emily, 218
Hodges Joseph, 354
Hoekstra Elisabeth, 327
459
Hoey Jesse, 319
Hommel Bernhard, 147
Hoogland Charles E., 321
Hoorelbeke Kristof, 312
Hoorn Johan F., 240
Horic-Asselin David, 356
Hoskin Robert, 286
Hosoya Georg, 339
Hot Pascal, 99, 178
Houben Marlies, 162
Hubble Kelly, 60, 280
Hudry Kristelle, 404
Hufendiek Rebekka, 435
Huijts Nicole, 326, 329
Hutter Russell, 293
I
Imbir Kamil, 362
Isaacowitz Derek, 30
Ito Kimio, 364
J
Jack Rachael, 171
Jacobs Arthur, 291
Jacobsen Thomas, 271
Jäger Christoph, 122, 125
Jarillo Sergio, 169
Jasielska Aleksandra, 70
Jasini Alba, 177
Jednoróg Katarzyna, 376
Jehn Karen A., 113
Jetten Jolanda, 96
Jiménez Rodríguez Berenice, 71
Joe Eun Young, 219
Joffily Mateus, 447
Johar Omesh, 135
Jonas Kai, 281
Jonauskaite Domicele, 363
Jonkers Wouter, 274
K
Kaernbach Christian, 270
Kafetsios Konstantinos, 158, 267, 268
460
Kalokerinos Elise, 72
Kanai Masato, 220
Kanske Philipp, 100, 104
Kappas Arvid, 17, 53, 155, 241
Karasawa Mayumi, 400
Karpinski, Franziska Anna, 190
Kaufmann Laurence, 130
Kaufmann Martina, 425
Kawano Kazuaki, 364
Keil Andreas, 399
Kellett Steve, 444
Kever Anne, 73
Khaled Fazia, 221
Kiefer Tina, 112
Kim Min-Hee, 351
Kim Heejung, 108
Kirchner Alexander, 106
Kirschbaum Clemens, 397
Kitayama Shinobu, 400
Kleinert Jens, 97
Klein-Koerkamp Yanica, 99
Kliegel Matthias, 397
Klimecki Olga, 5, 253, 257
Knight Robert T., 429
Koban Leonie, 143
Kobylinska Dorota, 76
Koenig Olivier, 284, 285
Kok Bethany, 101, 103
Kommattam Pum, 281
Komoto Aiko, 365
Komrsková Zuzana, 74
Konijn Elly A., 240
Korb Sebastian, 426
Koster Ernst, 312
Kostoulas Theodoros, 222
Kozhukhova Yulia, 366
Kozlova Maria, 75
Krautz Gerrit, 223
Krawczak Karolina, 410
Krebs Angelika, 141
Krippl Martin, 223
Kristina Efrata, 338
Królewiak Klara, 245
461
Krüger Julia, 223
Krueger Joel, 198
Kuester Dennis, 241
Kunde Ashleigh, 354
Kunzmann Ute, 398
Kuppens Peter, 19, 162, 308, 310, 311
Kutlikova Hana, 393
L
LaBar Kevin, 119
Lacewing Michael, 124
Lacoste-Badie Sophie, 224
LaFrance Marianne, 419
Lajante Mathieu, 224
Lake Jessica, 119
Landmann Helen, 150
Lange Jens, 320, 324
Lansari Laure, 161
Larson Elliott, 325
Lauer Gerhard, 289
Laukka Petri, 114, 136,379
Lauria Federico, 5, 448
Lawrence Andrew, 79
Lawrence Natalia, 79
Lee Steven, 30
Lee Eun-ji, 225
Lei Man, 27
Lejeune Fleur, 242
Lelieveld Gert-Jan, 256
Lemaire Stephane, 436
Lemmings David, 278
Leveque Yohana, 142
Lewczuk Karol, 76
Ligeza Tomasz S, 283
Lima César, 29
Lindahl Christina, 136, 379
Lischetzke Tanja, 134, 445
Lively Kathryn, 315
Lobmaier Janek, 390, 394
Loderer Kristina, 340
Lombardo Patrizia, 4, 222, 334
Lory Vanda, 394
Lowe-Brown Kirsty, 367
462
Lucas Gale, 156
Lulham Rohan, 318
Luminet Olivier, 22, 98, 188
Lyusin Dmitry, 77, 366
M
MacArthur Heather, 418, 421
Machinskaya Regina, 378
Mackintosh Bundy, 205
MacPherson Sarah E., 209
Main Alexandra, 450
Mäki Uskali, 197
Malandrakis Nikolaos, 156
Malsert Jennifer, 242, 426
Mani Nivedita, 206
Manstead Antony, 4, 60, 88, 280, 307
Marchand Cynthia, 295
Marchewka Artur, 376
Maricchiolo Fridanna, 227
Martin Alexandra R., 321
Martins Bruna, 145
Mast Fred, 233
Mastandrea Stefano, 227
Mather Mara, 145, 313
Maurage Pierre, 439
Mazy Mathieu, 244
Mazzietti Audric, 284, 285
McCabe Ciara, 51
McLeod Shane, 288
Meck Warren, 119
Meeussen Loes, 176
Mehu Marc, 143
Melkonian Susanna, 368
Memillod Martial, 203
Mendonca Dina, 126
Meneghini Anna Maria, 228
Mennella Rocco, 369
Menninghaus Winfried, 271, 339
Mermillod Martial, 427, 349
Mesquita Batja, 106, 108, 172, 176, 177, 307
Messerotti Benvenuti Simone, 369
Mestre Jose M., 373, 378
Meuleman Ben, 90, 183, 187
463
Meyer Marcel, 79
Mikolajczak Moïra, 179, 345
Miller Rachel, 211
Min Kyung Hwan, 351
Minner Frédéric, 128, 133
Misiunaite Ieva, 69
Missoni Ivan, 229
Miu Andrei, 180
Mo Di, 120
Mohr Christine, 295, 363
Molinari Gaëlle, 52, 213
Monaci Maria Grazia, 370
Montagrin Alison, 145
Montes Sanchez Alba, 151
Moon Lyndsey, 423
Moors Agnes, 17, 187, 247, 252
Mortillaro Marcello, 4, 62, 262
Mumenthaler Christian, 428
Murayama Kou, 51
Murray Ryan, 393
Muszynski Michal, 222
Muto Sera, 146
N
Naar Hichem, 34, 38
Nakamura Makoto, 80
Nelson Nicole, 168
Neufeld Janina, 395
Niedenthal Paula, 426
Nielsen Carole, 230
Niznikiewicz Margaret, 33
Norasakkunkit Vinai, 106
Nuske Heather J., 404
Nys Laura, 191
O
Oberfeld Daniel, 296
Ochiai Fumio, 384
Ogarkova Anna, 341, 408, 411
Ogihara Yuji, 107
Omberg Linda, 344
Omigie Diana, 371
Oosterwijk Suzanne, 297
464
Ornaghi Veronica, 440
Oster Ulrike, 412
P
Pagani Camilla, 350
Pagotto Lisa, 372
Palomba Daniela, 369
Park Eun-joo, 231
Park Soo Hyun, 212, 219, 225
Parkinson Brian, 174, 251
Parr Naomi, 375
Parrott W. Gerrod, 137
Pavarini Gabriela, 282
Paxton Alexandra, 450
Pe Madeline, 308, 310, 311
Pearce Marcus, 371
Pechenkova Ekaterina, 278
Pegwal Nishi, 81
Peker Mujde, 82
Pekrun Reinhard, 340
Pell Marc D., 32
Penney Trevor, 116, 120
Perak Benedikt, 232
Pérez Pérez Alejandra Elizabeth, 71
Perez-Gonzalez Juan Carlos, 373
Perlaviciute Goda, 326
Péron Julie, 432
Perseguers Marie-Noelle, 295
Petratou Irene, 83
Peyrin Carole, 57
Pichat Cédric, 57, 99
Pichon Swann, 226
Pinelli Erica, 374
Pinheiro Ana, 28, 33
Pismenny Arina, 37
Pitteloud Isabelle, 302
Plessow Franziska, 397
Pliskin Ruthie, 254
Pollatos Olga, 360
Ponsonnet Maïa, 292
Pool Eva, 380, 390
Portch Emma, 293
Pott Heleen, 417
465
Prade Claire, 84
Preissmann Delphine, 448
Preuss Nora, 233
Price Natalee, 375
Probst Fabian, 394
Pryakhina Tatiana, 85
Pun Thierry, 4, 52, 213, 222
R
Rafaeli Anat, 110
Rappaz Marc-André, 66
Rees Aled, 60, 280
Renaud Olivier, 187
Reschke Peter, 234, 443
Ricci Bitti Pio Enrico, 55
Richardson Daniel, 138
Rieffe Carolien, 404
Riegel Monika, 376
Riese Katrin, 289
Riley Bryce, 211
Roberts Richard, 259
Robinson Jenefer, 413, 415
Robinson Dawn, 26
Rodger Helen, 442
Rodrigo-Ruiz Debora, 373
Rodriguez Alejandra, 86, 181
Rodriguez-Cordon Jose, 78
Roebbig Josefin, 235
Roeser Sabine, 329, 331
Roettger-Roessler Birgitt, 445
Rogers Kimberly, 319
Rohr Margund, 398
Roseman Ira, 377
Rosenblum Hily, 87
Rossi Mauro, 437
Rotondi Irene, 262
Rotteveel Mark, 236
Rozovskaya Renata, 378
Russell James A., 21, 167, 168, 252
Rychlowska Magdalena, 88
S
466
Saarikallio Suvi, 201
Sahi Razia, 237
Sakai Nobuyuki, 80
Salmela Mikko, 194, 197
Samson Andrea C., 5, 402
Samson Severine, 371
Sánchez Aragón Rozzana, 71
Sanchez Cortes Diana, 379
Sander David, 4, 145, 257, 380, 383, 391, 393, 428
Saroglou Vassilis, 84
Sartori Riccardo, 58
Sauter Disa, 18, 424, 433
Scacchi Luca, 370
Scambler Jenna, 420
Scarantino Andrea, 17, 250
Schacht Annekathrin, 202, 289
Scheffel Birath Christina, 216
Schei Thea, 152
Scherer Klaus R., 90, 136, 144, 184, 187, 307, 337, 338, 339, 340
Schindler Ines, 339
Schirmer Annett, 30, 116, 120
Schlegel Katja, 143, 262, 263
Schmid Mast Marianne, 4, 207, 347
Schmidt Susanna, 90
Schmitt Manfred, 389
Schnädelbach Sandra, 41
Schnall Simone, 152, 282
Schneider Andreas, 314, 316
Schnitzspahn Katharina, 396
Schoebi Dominik, 353
Schröder Tobias, 314, 319
Schubert Thomas, 273
Schuller Bjorn, 144
Schweighofer Simon, 89
Schweitzer Frank, 50, 89, 155
Schweizer Susanne, 309
Scott Sophie, 433
Seeck Margitta, 429
Seibt Beate, 269, 273
Sekwena Eva, 261
Sellem Virginie, 284, 285
Sels Laura, 19
Sen Antarika, 30
467
Sennwald Vanessa, 380
Sergi Ilaria, 90
Shank Daniel, 318
Shanker Katie, 238
Shankland Rebecca, 345
Sharma Dinkar, 205
Sharma Ratna, 81, 342
Sharman Leah, 420
Shestyuk Avgusta, 429
Shevchenko Yury, 381
Shields Stephanie, 418, 421
Shirai Mariko, 91
Shore Danielle, 174
Shuman Vera, 143
Siegrist Michael, 328
Simonova Olga, 75
Simons Leslie, 27
Simons Ronald, 27
Sinaceur Marwan, 255
Singer Tania, 101, 102, 103, 104, 165, 226
Sinitsin Valentin, 378
Skolnick Alexander, 239
Sleuwaegen Ellen, 162
Smith Richard, 321
Smith Stephen, 382
Smith Jacqueline, 419
Smith-Lovin Lynn, 26
Sonuga-Barke Edmund, 439
Soriano Cristina, 4, 338, 341, 411
Sotgiu Igor, 92
Soury Mariette, 154
Spekman Marloes L.C., 240
Spijkerman Rose, 188, 192
Steel Craig, 56
Steffgen Georges, 406
Steg Linda, 326
Steiler Dominique, 182
Stephan Achim, 248
Stets Jan, 4, 23, 24
Stewart Lauren, 29
Stockmann Lex, 405
Stodulka Thomas, 132
Strathearn Lane, 426
468
Strick Madelijn, 274
Studer Regina, 230
Stussi Yoann, 383
Sütterlin Bernadette, 328
Sullivan Gavin Brent, 93, 195
Sung Billy, 298
Suzuki Naoto, 91, 231, 384, 388
Swiderska Aleksandra, 241
Szablowski Evan, 156
Szanto Thomas, 198
Szentagotai-Tatar Aurora, 180
T
Takehara Takuma, 384
Talmi Deborah, 286
Tamarit Lucas, 429
Tappolet Christine, 335
Tarantino Giovanni, 279
Tay Peter KC, 94
Tcherkassof Anna, 355
Teroni Fabrice, 332, 336
Thapar Anita, 60, 280
Theurel Anne, 242
Thingujam Nutankumar S., 114
Tijus Charles, 61
Tillmann Barbara, 142
Tipples Jason, 116
Todd Cain, 139
Tonegawa Akiko, 385
Totterdell Peter, 444
Tran Veronique, 95
Trautwein Fynn-Mathis, 104
Trettevik Ryan, 24
Trost Wiebke, 121
Trousselard Marion, 182
Tsvetkova Larisa, 216
Tusche Anita, 102
U
Uchida Yukiko, 106, 107
Urdapilleta Isabel, 61
Uslucan Haci-Halil, 445
469
V
Vakali Athena, 158
Valentin Sophie, 61
Van der Linden Martial, 449
van der Schalk Job, 88
van Dijk Wilco, 451
Van Dijk Hans, 176
van Dillen Lotte, 153
van Goozen Stephanie, 60, 280
Van Kleef Gerben, 424
Van Osselaer Tine, 193
Van Peer Jacobien, 143
van Steenbergen Henk, 147
van Stekelenburg Jacqueline, 196
van Troost Dunya, 196
Vandekerckhove Joachim, 243
Vanderhasselt Marie-Anne, 312
Vanderveen Gabry, 153
Vanegas Sandra, 69
Vanello Daniel, 438
Vanman Eric, 149, 420
Vansteelandt Kristof, 162
Vasiljevic Dimitri, 255
Vasilyev Pavel, 43
Västfjäll Daniel, 343
Vermeulen Nicolas, 73, 203, 244, 345
Veronesi Francesca, 370
Vidor Gian Marco, 39, 44
Vieillard Sandrine, 86, 181, 217
Villringer Arno, 235
Vingerhoets Ad J. J. M., 48, 49
Vivanti Giacomo, 404
von Gunten Armin, 215
von Salisch Maria, 386
von Scheve Christian, 128, 129, 194
Vuilleumier Patrik, 4, 257, 426
W
Wagner Valentin, 271, 339
Wai Yuen Heng, 30
Walle Eric, 234, 443
Walsh Elena, 186
Walter Zoe, 96
470
Wassiliwizky Eugen, 271
Watson Poppy, 147
Wegener Martin, 223
Weisgerber Anne, 244
Wertenbruch Martin, 445
Wiers Reinout, 147
Wierzba Malgorzata, 376
Wieser Matthias, 397
Wilkins Frances, 288
Wilms Lisa, 296
Wingenbach Tanja, 387
Wolf Svenja Anna, 97
Wolters Maria, 209
Wondra Joshua D, 148
Wróbel Monika, 245
Wyczesany Miroslaw, 283
Y
Yamaguchi Daisuke, 388
Yang Hwajin, 94
Yih Jennifer, 298
Yik Michelle, 294
Yukawa Shintaro, 220
Z
Zahavi Dan, 151
Zamariola Giorgia, 98
Zammuner Vanda, 422
Zanetta Julien, 290
Zeman Janice, 246, 375, 386
Zickfeld Janis, 273
Zinkernagel Axel, 389
Zloteanu Mircea, 138
Zmetáková Juliana, 409
Zsoldos Isabella, 99
471

Emotion knowledge in design

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