Affective Spectrum Research Articles

Self vs. Other in Affective Forecasting: The Role of Psychological Distance and Decision from Experience

This work tests self–other differences in the impact bias using the perspectives of psychological distance and decision from description vs. experience. Two studies compared the bias participants made for themselves and for others in a sequential gambling task. The task involved two identical gambles where the first gamble was mandatory and participants made decisions (accept or reject) for the second gamble. Planned decisions were made anticipating a gain or loss in the first gamble, and revised decisions were made following the actual experience of gain or loss. Study 1 compared decisions for self, abstract other, and a close friend. Study 2 replicated the comparison between the self and a close friend and added a measure of empathy. Both studies demonstrated an impact bias indicating that participants tended to overestimate the impact of anticipated outcomes on their tendency towards risk. Specifically, revised decisions indicated risk-aversion shifts after experienced gain and risk-seeking shifts after experienced loss. A reversed pattern emerged for close friends, indicating risky shifts after gain and cautious shifts after loss in Study 1 and for highly empathetic participants in Study 2. Assessing the utility functions that underlie participants’ decisions revealed a qualitative difference. The utility function for the self was consistent with prospect theory (with moderate intensity and diminishing sensitivity), while the utility function for others was more intense with little or no diminishing sensitivity. This research offers new insights regarding the roles of psychological distance and description vs. experience in affective forecasting and impact bias for self vs. other.

Relation between Deese-Roediger-Mcdermott recall measures of false memory and the fading affect bias

The fading affect bias (FAB) is the faster fading of unpleasant affect than pleasant affect for autobiographical event memories, and it is considered a healthy coping mechanism because it is positively related to healthy measures (e.g., self-esteem and positive PANAS), whereas it is negatively related to unhealthy measures (e.g., psychological distress and negative PANAS). Some researchers suggest that Deese-Roediger McDermott (DRM) critical lure false memories for words are conceptually equivalent to false memories for autobiographical event memories, which has not been examined. Based on the finding that false autobiographical event memories negatively predict FAB, the current study tested if false DRM word memories would negatively predict FAB for autobiographical event memories, which would demonstrate support for the conceptual equivalence of DRM memories and autobiographical event memories. We found that three measures of false word recall positively predicted FAB, which is a result that is contrary to prior findings and the contention that DRM false memories for words are conceptually the same as autobiographical event memories.

The impact of stimulus format and presentation order on social working memory updating.

Emotional faces and words have been extensively employed to examine cognitive emotional processing including social working memory, which plays a pivotal role in social interactions. However, it remains unclear which exact role these two stimulus formats play in updating specific emotional content, such as positive or negative information. Therefore, the current study examined the differences in working memory updating (WMU) of negative, neutral, and positive faces (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2), using a classic two-back paradigm with an event-related potential technique. In both experiments, emotional stimuli were presented in the same or different-valence order to further determine whether presentation order can also influence the WMU of specific emotional content. Our results showed that both stimulus format and presentation order play a role: (a) while faces showed an affective bias [larger P2 and late positive potential (LPP) for negative and positive faces than for neutral faces], words showed a negativity bias (larger LPP for negative words than both neutral and positive words); (b) While faces showed better performance with same-valence order, words showed better performance with different-valence order. Taken together, our findings indicate that, even if faces and words can contain the same emotional information, they impact social WMU differently.

Do people recover from the impact of COVID-19 social isolation? Social connectivity and negative affective bias.

Do people recover from the impact of COVID-19 social isolation? Social connectivity and negative affective bias.

In-Person and Online Studies Examining the Influence of Problem Solving on the Fading Affect Bias.

The fading affect bias (FAB) occurs in autobiographical memory when unpleasant emotions fade faster than pleasant emotions and the phenomenon appears to be a form of emotion regulation. As emotion regulation is positively related to problem solving, the current study examined FAB in the context of problem solving. In-person and online studies asked participants to provide basic demographics, describe their problem-solving abilities, and rate various healthy and unhealthy variables, including emotional intelligence and positive problem-solving attitudes. Participants also completed an autobiographical event memory form for which they recalled and described two pleasant and two unpleasant problem-solving and non-problem-solving events and rated the initial and current affect and rehearsals for those events. We found a robust FAB effect that was larger for problem-solving events than for non-problem-solving events in Study 1 but not in Study 2. We also found that FAB was positively related to healthy variables, such as grit, and negatively related to unhealthy variables, such as depression. Moreover, many of these negative relations were inverted at high levels of positive problem-solving attitudes, and these complex interactions were partially mediated by talking rehearsals and thinking rehearsals.

Political Variables Predicted the Fading Affect Bias More Strongly for Political Than Nonpolitical Events in the 2020 Presidential Election

ABSTRACTWinning and losing voters tend to experience positive and negative emotions toward elections, respectively. The emotions of autobiographical event memories fade over time with unpleasant emotions fading faster than pleasant emotions; this phenomenon is referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB). Although the FAB differs across several event types (e.g., social media and nonsocial media), the FAB and its relations to political, healthy (e.g., grit), and unhealthy variables (e.g., depression) did not differ significantly across political and nonpolitical events in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. To further explore these relations across political and nonpolitical events, the current study used two online samples (college students and MTurk) in the 2020 US presidential election context. The FAB was expected and found to be robust, it was positively predicted by rehearsal ratings, and its relations to political variables were stronger for political events than nonpolitical events.

Willingness to trade-off years of life for an HIV cure – an experimental exploration of affective forecasting

BackgroundIn the US, 1.2 million people live with HIV (PWH). Despite having near-normal life expectancies due to antiretroviral therapy (ART), many PWH seek an HIV cure, even if it means risking their lives. This willingness to take risks for a cure raises questions about “affective forecasting biases,” where people tend to overestimate the positive impact of future events on their well-being. We conducted a study to test two interventions to mitigate affective forecasting in the decisions of PWH about taking HIV cure medication.MethodsWe recruited PWH to complete a 30-minute survey about their current quality of life (QoL) and the QoL they anticipate after being cured of HIV, and assigned them to either no additional intervention, to one of two interventions intended to reduce affective forecasting bias, or to both interventions: (1) a defocusing intervention designed to broaden the number of life domains people consider when imagining life changes associated with new circumstances (e.g. HIV cure); and (2) an adaptation intervention to help them gauge fading of strong emotions over time. The study design included a 2 × 2 design: defocusing (yes/no) x adaptation (yes/no) intervention. We assessed PWH’s willingness to take hypothetical HIV sterilizing cure medication using the Time Trade-Off (TTO) and their quality of life predictions with WHOQOL-HIV.Results296 PWH participated. Counter to what we had hypothesized, neither intervention significantly reduced PWH’s willingness to trade time for a cure. Instead, the defocusing intervention increased their willingness to trade time (IRR 1.77, p = 0.03). Exploratory analysis revealed that PWH with lower current quality of life who received the defocusing intervention were more willing to trade time for a cure.ConclusionThese negative findings suggest that either these biases are difficult to overcome in the settings of HIV curative medication or other factors beyond affective forecasting biases influence willingness to participate in HIV curative studies, such as respondents’ current quality of life.

Psychometric Properties of a Novel Affective Bias Task and Its Application in Clinical and Nonclinical Populations

To mitigate limitations of self-reported mood assessments, we introduce a novel affective bias task. The task quantifies instantaneous emotional state by leveraging the phenomenon of affective bias, in which people interpret external emotional stimuli in a manner consistent with their current emotional state. This study establishes task stability in measuring and tracking depressive symptoms in clinical and nonclinical populations. Initial assessment in a large nonclinical sample established normative ratings. Depressive symptoms were measured and compared with task performance in a nonclinical sample, as well as in a clinical cohort of individuals who were undergoing surgical evaluation for severe epilepsy. In both cohorts, a stronger negative affective bias was associated with a higher Beck Depression Inventory-II score. The affective bias task exhibited high stability and interrater reliability as well as construct validity in predicting depression levels in both cohorts, suggesting that the task is a reliable proxy for mood and a diagnostic tool for detecting depressive symptoms.

Development and validation of the puppy blues scale measuring temporary affective disturbance resembling baby blues

It has been described that many puppy owners experience a state called puppy blues involving stress, worry, anxiety, strain, frustration, or regret. While puppy blues is a commonly used term among dog owners, the term is nearly nonexistent in scientific literature. In turn, analogous phenomenon, postpartum affective disturbance of infant caregivers, is well described in the literature. This study aimed to develop and validate the first questionnaire to evaluate puppy blues. The methodology involved generating scale items based on a qualitative review of 135 pilot survey responses from people who had experienced distress during the puppy period, conducting exploratory factor analysis for the final scale items from a dataset of 1801 answers from Finnish dog owners (92% women), and collecting test-retest data from 265 individuals to assess the consistency of the measurement of items and factor structure across time. In addition, we collected an independent sample of 326 owners of 1–2-year-old dogs who answered the survey both regarding puppy period and current moment. The results indicate that the scale is a valid and reliable tool for measuring dog owners’ negative experiences and feelings related to puppyhood. We discovered three factors that describe different aspects of puppy blues: Frustration, Anxiety, and Weariness, which accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in puppy blues. The study demonstrated good internal consistency and consistency across two independent samples for the three identified factors. The test-retest reliability of the factors was good. Responses for the current timeframe compared to puppyhood experiences revealed significantly lower current scores across all factors for the current period, validating that the scale captures distress during puppyhood that diminishes over time. Interestingly, we found a fading affect bias where recollections of the experiences in the puppy period became more positive with time. Our findings shed light on the characteristics of puppy blues and provide a useful retrospective tool for measuring it.

The Affective Bias Test and Reward Learning Assay: Neuropsychological Models for Depression Research and Investigating Antidepressant Treatments in Rodents.

The Affective Bias Test (ABT) quantifies acute changes in affective state based on the affective biases they generate in an associative reward learning task. The Reward Learning Assay (RLA) provides a control assay for the ABT and reward-induced biases generated in this model are sensitive to changes in core affective state. Both tasks involve training animals to associate a specific digging substrate with a food reward. Animals learn to discriminate between two digging substrates placed in ceramic bowls, one rewarded and one unrewarded. In the ABT, the animal learns two independent substrate-reward associations with a fixed reward value following either an affective state or drug manipulation, or under control conditions. Affective biases generated are quantified in a choice test where the animals exhibit a bias (make more choices) for one of the substrates which is specifically related to affective state at the time of learning. The ABT is used to investigate biases generated during learning as well as modulation of biases associated with past experiences. The RLA follows a similar protocol, but the animal remains in the same affective state throughout and a reward-induced bias is generated by pairing one substrate with a higher value reward. The RLA provides a control to determine if drug treatments affect memory retrieval more generally. Studies in depression models and following environmental enrichment suggest that reward-induced biases are sensitive to core changes in affective state. Each task offers different insights into affective processing mechanisms and may help improve the translational validity of animal studies and benefit pre-clinical drug development. © 2024 The Authors. Current Protocols published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Bowl digging and discrimination training Basic Protocol 2: The reward learning assay Basic Protocol 3: The affective bias test - new learning Basic Protocol 4: The affective bias test - modulation of affective biases associated with past experiences.

Reward Sensitivity and Noise Contribute to Negative Affective Bias: A Learning Signal Detection Theory Approach in Decision-Making.

In patients with mood disorders, negative affective biases - systematically prioritising and interpreting information negatively - are common. A translational cognitive task testing this bias has shown that depressed patients have a reduced preference for a high reward under ambiguous decision-making conditions. The precise mechanisms underscoring this bias are, however, not yet understood. We therefore developed a set of measures to probe the underlying source of the behavioural bias by testing its relationship to a participant's reward sensitivity, value sensitivity and reward learning rate. One-hundred-forty-eight participants completed three online behavioural tasks: the original ambiguous-cue decision-making task probing negative affective bias, a probabilistic reward learning task probing reward sensitivity and reward learning rate, and a gambling task probing value sensitivity. We modelled the learning task through a dynamic signal detection theory model and the gambling task through an expectation-maximisation prospect theory model. Reward sensitivity from the probabilistic reward task (β = 0.131, p = 0.024) and setting noise from the probabilistic reward task (β = -0.187, p = 0.028) both predicted the affective bias score in a logistic regression. Increased negative affective bias, at least on this specific task, may therefore be driven in part by a combination of reduced sensitivity to rewards and more variable responses.

Brain mechanisms underlying the emotion processing bias in treatment-resistant depression

Depression is associated with a cognitive bias towards negative information and away from positive information. This biased emotion processing may underlie core depression symptoms, including persistent feelings of sadness and a reduced capacity to experience pleasure. The neural mechanisms responsible for this biased emotion processing remain unknown. Here we had a unique opportunity to record stereotactic electroencephalography signals in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC) from 5 patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and 12 patients with epilepsy (as control) while they participated in an affective bias task in which happy and sad faces were evaluated. First, compared with the control group, patients with TRD showed increased amygdala responses to sad faces in the early stage (around 300 ms) and decreased amygdala responses to happy faces in the late stage (around 600 ms) following the onset of faces. Furthermore, during the late stage of happy-face processing, alpha-band activity in the PFC as well as alpha-phase locking between the amygdala and the PFC were significantly greater in patients with TRD compared with the control group. The increased amygdala activation during the early stage of sad-face processing suggests an overactive bottom-up processing system in TRD. Meanwhile, the reduced amygdala response during the late stage of happy-face processing could be attributed to increased top-down inhibition by the PFC through alpha-band oscillation, which may be relieved following deep brain stimulation in the subcallosal cingulate and the ventral capsule/ventral striatum.

The utility of measuring daily hassles and uplifts in understanding outcomes to treatments for major depressive disorder

Little is known about the effects of common daily experiences in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). The Daily Hassles and Uplifts Scale (HUPS) was assessed in 142 treatment-naïve adult MDD outpatients randomized to 12 weeks of treatment with either antidepressant medication (ADM) or Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). Three HUPS measures were analyzed: hassle frequency (HF), uplift frequency (UF), and the mean hassle intensity to mean uplift intensity ratio (MHI:MUI). Remission after treatment was not predicted by these baseline HUPS measures and did not moderate outcomes by treatment type. In contrast, HUPS measures significantly changed with treatment and were impacted by remission status. Specifically, HF and MHI:MUI decreased and UF increased from baseline to week 12, with remission leading to significantly greater decreases in HF and MHI:MUI compared to non-remission. ADM-treated patients demonstrated significant improvements on all three HUPS measures regardless of remission status. In contrast, remitters to CBT demonstrated significant improvements in HF and MHI:MUI but not UF; among CBT non-remitters the only significant change was a reduction in HF. The changes in HUPS measures are consistent with how affective biases are impacted by treatments and support the potential value of increasing attention to positive events in CBT.

Temporal Asymmetry of Pleasant and Unpleasant Feelings Among Chinese Adolescents

Previous studies have shown that anticipation induces more emotions than retrospection, known as temporal emotion asymmetry. However, the majority of previous studies have been confined to Western contexts. Eastern populations tend to emphasize the past more than their Western counterparts and may exhibit distinct forms of temporal emotion asymmetry. Therefore, we conducted an investigation involving Chinese adolescents. Our research encompassed two experiments, investigating Chinese adolescents’ temporal emotion asymmetry from a self-perspective (Experiment 1; N = 124) and an other-perspective (Experiment 2; N = 162). Participants were prompted to retrospect and anticipate events that elicited pleasant or unpleasant feelings. The results revealed that, whether from a self-perspective or an other-perspective, retrospection of past positive events elicited greater pleasure than the anticipation of future positive events. However, concerning adverse events, under a self-perspective, anticipation induced more displeasure than retrospection (Experiment 1); under an other-perspective, retrospection induced more displeasure than anticipation (Experiment 2). Our findings provide some support for the construal level theory, fading affect bias, and mobilization-minimization hypothesis of event cognition. Based on these results, retrospection seems to be a potential means for regulating the emotions of Chinese adolescents.

A theory of the neural mechanisms underlying negative cognitive bias in major depression.

The widely acknowledged cognitive theory of depression, developed by Aaron Beck, focused on biased information processing that emphasizes the negative aspects of affective and conceptual information. Current attempts to discover the neurological mechanism underlying such cognitive and affective bias have successfully identified various brain regions associated with severally biased functions such as emotion, attention, rumination, and inhibition control. However, the neurobiological mechanisms of how individuals in depression develop this selective processing toward negative is still under question. This paper introduces a neurological framework centered around the frontal-limbic circuit, specifically analyzing and synthesizing the activity and functional connectivity within the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex. Firstly, a possible explanation of how the positive feedback loop contributes to the persistent hyperactivity of the amygdala in depression at an automatic level is established. Building upon this, two hypotheses are presented: hypothesis 1 revolves around the bidirectional amygdalohippocampal projection facilitating the amplification of negative emotions and memories while concurrently contributing to the impediment of the retrieval of opposing information in the hippocampus attractor network. Hypothesis 2 highlights the involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the establishment of a negative cognitive framework through the generalization of conceptual and emotional information in conjunction with the amygdala and hippocampus. The primary objective of this study is to improve and complement existing pathological models of depression, pushing the frontiers of current understanding in neuroscience of affective disorders, and eventually contributing to successful recovery from the debilitating affective disorders.

Humanistic principles for providing culturally sensitive corrective feedback in supervision

AbstractCorrective feedback can be a difficult endeavor in supervision. This article focuses on the following six principles of humanistic education that can facilitate corrective feedback: a nonthreatening environment, affective bias, self‐evaluation, connectedness, self‐determination, and personal growth orientation. These principles offer a framework for providing culturally sensitive supervision and corrective feedback. Implications for counseling supervision are included.

Understanding latent affective bias in large pre-trained neural language models

Groundbreaking inventions and highly significant performance improvements in deep learning based Natural Language Processing are witnessed through the development of transformer based large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The wide availability of unlabeled data within human generated data deluge along with self-supervised learning strategy helps to accelerate the success of large PLMs in language generation, language understanding, etc. But at the same time, latent historical bias/unfairness in human minds towards a particular gender, race, etc., encoded unintentionally/intentionally into the corpora harms and questions the utility and efficacy of large PLMs in many real-world applications, particularly for the protected groups. In this paper, we present an extensive investigation towards understanding the existence of “Affective Bias” in large PLMs to unveil any biased association of emotions such as anger, fear, joy, etc., towards a particular gender, race or religion with respect to the downstream task of textual emotion detection. We conduct our exploration of affective bias from the very initial stage of corpus level affective bias analysis by searching for imbalanced distribution of affective words within a domain, in large scale corpora that are used to pre-train and fine-tune PLMs. Later, to quantify affective bias in model predictions, we perform an extensive set of class-based and intensity-based evaluations using various bias evaluation corpora. Our results show the existence of statistically significant affective bias in the PLM based emotion detection systems, indicating biased association of certain emotions towards a particular gender, race, and religion.

Assessing cognitive biases induced by acute formalin or hotplate treatment: an animal study using affective bias test

Pain, a universal and burdensome condition, influences numerous individuals worldwide. It encompasses sensory, emotional, and cognitive facets, with recent research placing a heightened emphasis on comprehending pain’s impact on emotion and cognition. Cognitive bias, which encompasses attentional bias, interpretation bias, and memory bias, signifies the presence of cognitive distortions influenced by emotional factors. It has gained significant prominence in pain-related research. Human studies have shown that individuals experiencing pain exhibit cognitive bias. Similarly, animal studies have demonstrated cognitive bias in pain-induced states across various species and disease models. In this study, we aimed to investigate the memory bias displayed by rats experiencing acute pain, using the affective bias test (ABT) as a tool and administering either hotplate or formalin to induce acute pain. Our data showed that rats demonstrated a significant preference for the control treatment-related substrate over the substrate associated with formalin treatment (p < 0.001), an indication of the prominent memory bias stimulated by acute formalin injections. However, when exposed to substrates related to hotplate treatment and control treatment, the acute pain induced by the hotplate treatment failed to generate a statistically significant choice bias in rats (p = 0.674). Our study demonstrates that the negative emotions associated with acute pain can be reflected by memory bias in ABT, at least for formalin-induced acute pain. This finding will augment our comprehension of the emotional and cognitive aspects of acute pain.

Age is positively associated with fading affect bias: A cross-sectional comparison.

Emotions elicited by personal event memories change over time such that negative affect fades more quickly than positive affect. This asymmetric fade is called the fading affect bias (FAB) and has been posited as a mechanism that helps promote a positive outlook on life. A similar bias toward positive information (i.e., the positivity effect) driven by greater emphasis on emotion regulation has been demonstrated in older adults. The current research uses two age-diverse community samples to examine the relationship between age and the strength of FAB. Participants recalled positive and negative event memories and rated the intensity of affect at the time of the event (i.e., retrospectively) and at the time of recollection. Participants of all ages exhibited a significant FAB, and crucially, the strength of the effect was positively associated with age. Age-based differences in psychological well-being and recalled event intensity had no influence on the relationship between age and FAB. The relationship was, however, related to greater personal importance placed on positive (but not negative) events. The findings are consistent with the socioemotional selectivity theory and suggest another mechanism through which emotion regulation is associated with aging to maintain a positive outlook on life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Rapid-acting antidepressant drugs modulate affective bias in rats.

How rapid-acting antidepressants (RAADs), such as ketamine, induce immediate and sustained improvements in mood in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) is poorly understood. A core feature of MDD is the prevalence of cognitive processing biases associated with negative affective states, and the alleviation of negative affective biases may be an index of response to drug treatment. Here, we used an affective bias behavioral test in rats, based on an associative learning task, to investigate the effects of RAADs. To generate an affective bias, animals learned to associate two different digging substrates with a food reward in the presence or absence of an affective state manipulation. A choice between the two reward-associated digging substrates was used to quantify the affective bias generated. Acute treatment with the RAADs ketamine, scopolamine, or psilocybin selectively attenuated a negative affective bias in the affective bias test. Low, but not high, doses of ketamine and psilocybin reversed the valence of the negative affective bias 24 hours after RAAD treatment. Only treatment with psilocybin, but not ketamine or scopolamine, led to a positive affective bias that was dependent on new learning and memory formation. The relearning effects of ketamine were dependent on protein synthesis localized to the rat medial prefrontal cortex and could be modulated by cue reactivation, consistent with experience-dependent neural plasticity. These findings suggest a neuropsychological mechanism that may explain both the acute and sustained effects of RAADs, potentially linking their effects on neural plasticity with affective bias modulation in a rodent model.