ABSTRACTPeople high in negative affect tend to think negative events are more likely than positive events. Studies have found that weak attentional control exaggerates another...

ABSTRACTThe olfactory system provides us with rich information about the world, but the odours around us are not always detectable. Previous research has shown that disgust enhances olfactory sensi...

Anticipated nostalgia is a new construct that has received limited empirical attention. It concerns the anticipation of having nostalgic feelings for one’s present and future experiences. In three...

The aim of the present study was to examine whether offspring at high and low familial risk for depression differ in the immediate and more lasting behavioural and physiological effects of hedonica...

This study explored whether conditions that promote flexibility in task processing enhance the detrimental impact of irrelevant negative stimulation on performance. We approached this flexibility f...

ABSTRACTPresenting information in a coherent fashion has been shown to increase processing fluency, which in turn influences affective responses. The pattern of responses have been explained by two...

The appearance of the body signals socially relevant states and traits, but the how these cues are perceived is not well understood. Here we examined judgments of emotion and sex from the body’s ap...

ABSTRACTThe visual system has been found to prioritise emotional stimuli so robustly that their presence can temporarily “blind” people to non-emotional targets in their direct line of vision. This...

We proposed and tested the notion of a bidirectional influence of emotion expressions and context. In two studies, we found that the expressions shown by supporters and opponents...

ABSTRACTThreat detection is crucial to survival. Studies using unnatural visual scene settings have shown that humans and primates are able to identify snakes more quickl...

Attentional control has grown in importance within theoretical and predictive models of psychopathology over past decades. The Attentional Style Questionnaire is a novel measure of internal a...

ABSTRACTBesides physiological, behavioural, and affective effects, romantic love also has cognitive effects. In this study, we tested whether individual differences in infatuation and/or attachment level predict impaired interference control even in the absence of a love booster procedure, and whether individual differences in attachment level predict reduced adaptive cognitive control as measured by conflict adaptation and post-error slowing. Eighty-three young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a Stroop-like task, which yielded reliable indices of interference control and adaptive cognitive (...) control. We did not observe the predicted negative association between infatuation or attachment level and interference control. It might be that reduced interference control with love only happens when people are actively thinking about their beloved. In addition, we observed only weak evidence for the prediction t... (shrink)

Inhibition-induced forgetting refers to impaired memory for the stimuli to which responses were inhibited. The present study aimed to examine if it would be modulated by the processing of threateni...

Illness anxiety disorder, formerly known as hypochondria, has been conceptualised in the psychological literature as an anxiety disorder, and its dimensional correlate is usually referred to as hea...

Facial blushing involves a reddening of the face elicited in situations involving unwanted social attention. Such situations include being caught committing a social transgression, which is typical...

Previous research has proposed the exploratory hypotheses that hostility could differ from anger in the sense that it involves higher possibility for inflicting physical harm while anger could invo...

In this paper, we explore whether masked emotional faces can elicit changes in physiology without awareness. We also explore whether emotional miss-discrimination involves the physiological correla...

We used a retrospective survey to model the patterns of appraisal, motivation, and coping that uniquely correspond with 12 positive emotions (affection/love, amusement, awe, challenge/det...

ABSTRACTMuch research has explored behaviours that are linked with disgust sensitivity. Few studies, however, have been devoted to understanding how fixed or variable disgust sensitivity is. We the...

In the present study, we explored the effects of high arousal on cognitive performance when facing a situation of risk. We also investigated how these effects are moderated by either positive or ne...

Emotional reactivity has been implicated in the development and maintenance of anxiety. The metacognitive model suggests that maladaptive metacognitive beliefs may inc...

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation is a topic of great interest due to its relevance to navigating everyday life, as well as its relevance to psychopathology. Recent research indicates that beliefs about t...

ABSTRACTRecent research has shown that observing others in pain leads to a general facilitation of reaction times. The current study sheds further light on the relationship between pain observation...

While modern theories of emotion emphasize the role of higher-order cognitive processes such as semantics in human emotion, much research into emotional learning has ignored the potential contribut...

Contextual learning pervades our perception and cognition and plays a critical role in adjusting to aversive and stressful events. Our ability to memorise spatial context has been studied extensive...

ABSTRACTFacial mimicry has long been considered a main mechanism underlying emotional contagion. A closer look at the empirical evidence, however, rev...

Low emotional clarity has been a target for psychological interventions due to its association with increased internalising symptoms. However, theory suggests that very high emotional clarity may a...

Theories that view emotions as being related in some way to moral judgments suggest that condemning moral emotions should, at a minimum, be understood by laypeople to coincide with judgments of mor...

The ability to recognise others’ emotions from nonverbal cues is measured with performance-based tests and has many positive correlates. Although researchers have...

ABSTRACTThere is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting theoretical and anecdotal claims regarding the spontaneous production of prototypic facial expressions used in numerous emotion re...

Rumination is an involuntary cognitive process theorized to prolong arousal and inhibit proper emotion regulation. Most available research has examined individual differences in cognitive dispositi...

Although attentional bias is considered a key characteristic of anxiety problems, the psychometric properties of most AB measures are either problematic or unknown. We conducted two experiment...

A growing body of research indicates that attentional biases toward emotional stimuli are not automatic, but may depend on the relevance of emotion to the top-down search goals of the observer. To...

Individuals who are more easily disgusted tend to be more politically conservative. Individuals who have a preference for order also tend to be more politically conservative. In the present researc...

Emotion regulation choices are known to be profoundly consequential across affective, cognitive, and social domains. Prior studies have identified two important external factors of emotion regulati...

ABSTRACTPrevious research has outlined high anxiety in connection with gamma modulation, identifying that gamma-band activity correlates with processing of threat perception, attention...

ABSTRACTPrior research and theory has suggested that rumination plays a role in nonsuicidal self-injury, and rumination increases recall of negative autobiographical information in dysphoric...

ABSTRACTAlthough item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is often impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We te...

ABSTRACTDespite advances in the conceptualisation of facial mimicry, its role in the processing of social information is a matter of debate. In the present study, we investigated the relationship b...

ABSTRACTEmpathy involves a mapping between the emotions observed in others and those experienced in one’s self. However, effective social functioning also requires an ability to differentiate one’s...

ABSTRACTAwe is described as an a “epistemic emotion” because it is hypothesised to make gaps in one’s knowledge salient. However, no empirical evidence for this yet exists. Awe is also hypothesised...

ABSTRACTTo extend our understanding of the proximal etiology of personality pathology, this study examined the dynamic, in-the-moment relations between mindfulness and negative affectivity (NA; emo...

ABSTRACTSharing experiences with others, even without communication, can amplify those experiences. We investigated whether shared stressful experiences amplify. Participants completed the Cold Pre...

ABSTRACTPrevious research has examined emotion regulation and trauma in the context of psychopathology, yet little research has examined ER in posttraumatic growth, the experience of pos...

ABSTRACTDistraction can reduce adults’ memory for emotion-eliciting information, whereas reappraisal can preserve or enhance it. Yet, when given instructions to use specific emotion regulation...

ABSTRACTCrying is a common response to emotional distress that elicits support from the environment. People may regulate another’s crying in several ways, such as by providing socio-affective suppo...

ABSTRACTHow do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice percept...

ABSTRACTWhat three words come to your mind in response to “happiness”? Using a free-association task [cf. Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Dennis, S.. What is free association and what does i...

ABSTRACTExperiences that contradict one's core concepts elicit intense emotions. Such schema incongruence can elicit awe, wherein experiences that are too vast...

ABSTRACTEmotion knowledge, the ability to accurately perceive and label emotions, predicts higher quality peer relations, higher social competence, higher academic achievement, and fewer behaviour...

ABSTRACTFacial expressions play a central role in diverse areas of psychology. However, facial stimuli are often only validated by adults, and there are no face databases validated by school-aged c...

ABSTRACTAlthough attention bias toward threat has been associated with Social Anxiety Disorder, concerns regarding the ability of current measures to detect change in AB following treatm...

ABSTRACTIn four studies, we examined the moderating impact of Interoceptive Accuracy and Interoceptive Sensibility (IS, ass...

ABSTRACTThe present study examined the effects of emotions on eye movements, head motion, and iPad motion during reading. Thirty-one participants read neutral, emotionally negative texts and emotio...

ABSTRACTIn our everyday life, we frequently switch between different tasks, a faculty that changes with age. However, it is still not understood how emotion impacts on age-related changes in task s...

ABSTRACTPrevious research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own fe...

ABSTRACTPeople sometimes report both pleasant and unpleasant feelings when presented with affective stimuli. However, what is reported as “mixed emotions” might reflect semantic knowledge about the...

ABSTRACTApproach-avoidance training has been shown to be effective in both clinical and laboratory research. However, some studies have failed to show the effects of AAT. Therefore, finding m...

ABSTRACTAvoidance towards innocuous cues is a key diagnostic criterion across anxiety-related disorders. Importantly, the most effective intervention for anxiety-related disorders, exposure therapy with response prevention, sometimes does not prevent the relapse of anxiety's symptomatology. We tested whether extinction effects, the experimental proxy of exposure, are enhanced by increasing the discrepancy between the prediction of an unpleasant event happening, and the actual event. Forty-eight individuals first saw pictures of three stimuli. Two pictures were followed by a shock and one was not. (...) Next, participants learned to avoid the US by pressing a computer key. An extinction and response prevention procedure followed. In the first part of it, participants saw unreinforced presentations of all CSs. In the second part, the single group saw unreinforced presentations of the CSA and CS-. The compound group encountered compound unreinforced prese... (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople can be moved and overwhelmed, a phenomenon typically accompanied by goose-bumps and tears. We argue that these feelings of being moved are not limited to situations that are appraise...

ABSTRACTThe attentional blink is the impaired ability to detect a second target when it follows shortly after the first among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation...

ABSTRACTDespite emotional clarity and attention to emotion being dynamic in nature, research has largely focused on their trait forms. We examined the association between state and trait forms of t...

ABSTRACTIn daily life, people make plenty of decisions, either intuitively or based on analysis. So far, research has examined when decision-making leads to correct or biased outcomes. In the prese...

ABSTRACTUsing faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants to make emotion, gender, (...) or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime f... (shrink)

ABSTRACTPopular culture has many examples of evil characters having vertically pupilled eyes. Humans have a long evolutionary history of rivalry with snakes and their visual systems were evolved to rapidly detect snakes and snake-related cues. Considering such evolutionary background, we hypothesised that humans would perceive vertical pupils, which are characteristics of ambush predators including some of the snakes, as threatening. In seven studies conducted on samples from American and Turkish samples, we found that vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening (...) on both explicit and implicit level and they are associated with physical, rather than social, threat. Findings provided partial support regarding our hypothesis about the relevance of snake detection processes: Snake phobia, and not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening, however an experimental manipulation of saliency of snakes re... (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccumulating evidence suggests that emotional information is often recognised faster than neutral information. Several studies examined the effects of valence and arousal on word recognition, but yielded partially diverging results. Here, we used two alternative versions of a constructive recognition paradigm in which a target word is hidden by a visual mask that gradually disappears, to investigate whether the emotional properties of words influence their speed of recognition. Participants were instructed either to classify the incrementally appearing word as emotional or (...) non-emotional or to decide whether the appearing letter string is an existing word or not. Results from both tasks revealed faster recognition times for high- compared to low-arousing words, and for positive compared to negative or neutral words. These findings indicate a recognition advantage for emotionally positive and highly arousing stimuli that persists even when visua... (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe investigated whether moral violations involving harm selectively elicit anger, whereas purity violations selectively elicit disgust, as predicted by the Moral Foundations Theory. We analysed participants’ spontaneous facial expressions as they listened to scenarios depicting moral violations of harm and purity. As predicted by MFT, anger reactions were elicited more frequently by harmful than by impure actions. However, violations of purity elicited more smiling reactions and expressions of anger than of disgust. This effect was found both in a classic set (...) of scenarios and in a new set in which the different kinds of violations were matched on weirdness. Overall, these findings are at odds with predictions derived from MFT and provide support for “monist” accounts that posit harm at the basis of all moral violations. However, we found that smiles were differentially linked to purity violations, which leaves open the possibility of distinct moral modules. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSocial attentional biases are a core component of social anxiety disorder, but research has not yet determined their direction due to methodological limitations. Here we present preliminary findings from a novel, dynamic eye-tracking paradigm allowing spatial–temporal measurement of attention and gaze-following, a mechanism previously unexplored in social anxiety. 105 participants took part, with those high and low in social anxiety traits entered into the analyses. Participants watched a video of an emotionally-neutral social scene, where two actors periodically shifted their gaze (...) towards the periphery. HSA participants looked more at the actors’ faces during the initial 2s than the LSA group but there were no group differences in proportion of first fixations to the face or latency to first fixate the face, although HSA individuals’ first fixations to the face were shorter. No further differences in eye movements were found, nor in gaze-following beha... (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople hiss and swear when they make errors, frown and swear again when they encounter conflicting information. Such error- and conflict-related signs of negative affect are found even when there is no time pressure or external reward and the task itself is very simple. Previous studies, however, provide inconsistent evidence regarding the affective consequences of resolved conflicts, that is, conflicts that resulted in correct responses. We tested whether response accuracy in the Eriksen flanker task will moderate the effect of trial (...) incongruence using affective priming to measure positive and negative affect. We found that responses to incongruent trials elicit positive affect irrespective of their accuracy. Errors, in turn, result in negative affect irrespective of trial congruence. The effects of conflicts and errors do not interact and affect different dimensions of affective priming. Conflicts change the speed of evaluative categorisation while errors are reflected in categorisation accuracy... (shrink)

Norm theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) described a tendency for people to associate stronger regret with a negative outcome when it is a result of an exception (abnormal behavior) compared to when it is a result of routine (normal behavior). In two pre-registered studies, we conducted a replication and extension of three classic experiments on past behavior exception/routine contrasts (N = 684). We successfully replicated Kahneman and Miller’s (1986) experiments with the classic hitchhiker-scenario (Part 1) and car accident-scenario (Part 2). (...) In both cases, participants examined negative outcomes and tended to indicate a protagonist who deviated from own past behavior as more regretful than another who followed routine. Pre-registered extensions also showed effects for ratings of social norms, negative affect, and perceived luck. We did not find support for the Miller and McFarland (1986) experiment robbery scenario (Part 3) using a compensation measure, in that compensation to a victim of a robbery was not significantly different comparing exceptional and routine circumstances. However, a pre-registered extension showed that robbery under exceptional circumstances was regretted more than robbery under routine circumstances. We discuss implications for current and future research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTExcessive fear generalisation is a feature characteristic of clinical anxiety and has been linked to its aetiology. Previous animal studies have shown that the mere passage of time increases fear generalisation and that brief exposure to training cues prior to long-term testing reverses this effect. The current study examined these phenomena in humans. Healthy participants learned the relationship between the presentation of a picture of a neutral male face and the delivery of a mild shock. One group was immediately tested (...) with a novel picture of a somewhat different male face. Another group was tested one week later. A third group was also tested one week later and was additionally exposed to the training picture prior to testing. During picture presentations, shock-expectancy ratings were obtained as a measure of fear. Fear generalisation increased from the immediate test to the 1-week follow-up test. This result could not be attributed to level of neuroticism or a general... (shrink)

ABSTRACTResponses to surprising events are dynamic. We argue that initial responses are primarily driven by the unexpectedness of the surprising event and reflect an interrupted and surprised state in which the outcome does not make sense yet. Later responses, after sense-making, are more likely to incorporate the valence of the outcome itself. To identify initial and later responses to surprising stimuli, we conducted two repetition-change studies and coded the general valence of facial expressions using computerised facial coding and specific facial (...) action using the Facial Action Coding System. Results partly supported our unfolding logic. The computerised coding showed that initial expressions to positive surprises were less positive than later expressions. Moreover, expressions to positive and negative surprises were initially similar, but after some time differentiated depending on the valence of the event. Importantly, these patterns were particularly pronounced in a subset of facially expres... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Theory of Event Coding predicts that exposure to affective cues can automatically trigger affectively congruent behaviour due to shared representational codes. An intriguing hypothesis from this theory is that exposure to aversive cues can automatically trigger actions that have previously been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Previous work has indeed found such a compatibility effect on reaction times in forced-choice tasks, but not for action selection in free-choice tasks. Failure to observe this compatibility effect for aversive cues in (...) free choice tasks suggests that control processes aimed at directing behaviour toward positive outcomes may overrule the automatic activation of affectively congruent responses in case of aversive cues. The present study tested whether minimising such control could cause selection of actions that have been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Results showed incidental exposure to aversive cues biased selection of behaviours with learned aver... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn earlier work we showed that individuals learn the spatial regularities within contexts and use this knowledge to guide detection of threatening targets embedded in these contexts. While it is highly adaptive for humans to use contextual learning to detect threats, it is equally adaptive for individuals to flexibly readjust behaviour when contexts once associated with threatening stimuli begin to be associated with benign stimuli, and vice versa. Here, we presented face targets varying in salience in new or old spatial (...) configurations and changed the target salience halfway through the experiment to examine if contextual learning changes with the change in target salience. Detection of threatening targets was faster in old than new configurations and this learning persisted even after the target changed to non-threatening. However, the same pattern was not seen when the targets changed from non-threatening... (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany of our emotions arise in social contexts, as we interact with and learn about others. What is not yet clear, however, is how such emotions unfold when we either react to others or attempt to regulate our emotions. To address this issue, 30 healthy volunteers reacted to or reappraised positive or negative information that was paired with neutral faces. While they were doing this task, we assessed pupillary responses. We also asked participants to provide ratings of accountability and experienced (...) emotion. Findings indicated that appraised accountability increased in response to emotional information, and changes in accountability were associated with commensurate changes in valence reports and increased pupil diameter. During reappraisal, accountability and emotion decreased, but pupil diameter increased. The findings highlight the importance of accountability appraisals during the generation and regulation of emotional reactions to others, while also documenting pupillary increases during emot... (shrink)

ABSTRACTTo commemorate that Cognition & Emotion was established three decades ago, we asked some distinguished scholars to reflect on past research on the interface of cognition and emotion and prospects for the future. The resulting papers form the Special Issue on Horizons in Cognition and Emotion Research. The contributions to Horizons cover both the field in general and a diversity of specific topics, including affective neuroscience, appraisal theory, automatic evaluation, embodied emotion, emotional disorders, emotion-linked attentional bias, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, (...) lifespan development, motivation, and social emotions. We hope that Horizons will spark constructive debates, while offering guidance for the future growth and development of research on the interface between cognition and emotion. Finally, we provide an update on how Cognition & Emotion has fared over the past year, and announce some changes in editorial policies and the editorial board. (shrink)