Effects Of Emotional Valence Research Articles

Working Memory With Emotional Distraction in Monolingual and Bilingual Children.

Extensive work has demonstrated the benefits of bilingualism on executive functioning (EF) across the lifespan. Concurrently, other research has shown that EF is related to emotion regulation (ER), an ability that is integral to healthy socio-emotional development. However, no research to date has investigated whether bilingualism-related advantages in EF can also be found in emotional contexts. The current study examined the performance of 93 children who were 9-years old, about half of whom were bilingual, on the Emotional Face N-Back Task, an ER task used to assess the interference effect of emotional processing on working memory. Bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in both 1-back and 2-back conditions but were significantly slower than monolingual children on the 2-back condition. There were significant effects of emotional valence on reaction time, but these did not differ across language groups. These results confirm previous research showing better EF performance by bilinguals, but no differences in ER were found between language groups. Findings are discussed in the context of our current understanding of the ER literature with potential implications for previously unexplored differences between monolingual and bilingual children.

Sleep-dependent enhancement of emotional memory in early childhood

Naps in early childhood support declarative memory consolidation. However, emotional memories are unique in the neural basis of encoding as well as the sleep physiology underlying consolidation. Specifically, while consolidation of declarative memories has been associated with slow wave sleep, a prevailing theory suggests that REM sleep is necessary for consolidation of memories with emotional valence. Thus, we presented children (34–64 months) with faces paired with mean or nice descriptions. There were no significant main effects of emotional valence on recognition memory. Change in memory accuracy also did not differ when probed after a nap compared to the change in memory accuracy after an interval awake. However, when memory was probed again following overnight sleep, the change in memory accuracy was greater if the child napped the previous day. Greater nap slow wave activity was associated with greater memory decay during the nap. Yet nap slow wave activity also predicted greater overnight improvement in memory. These results suggest that sleep bouts can interact to benefit memory in early childhood.

Emotional Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Effects of Age, Emotional Valence, and Social Engagement on Emotional Language Use

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficits in reporting others' emotions (Lartseva et al. in Front Hum Neurosci 8:991, 2015) and in deriving meaning in social contexts (Klin et al. in Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders, Wiley, Hoboken, 2005). However, researchers often use stimuli that conflate salient emotional and social information. Using a matched-pairs design, the impact of emotional and social information on emotional language in pre-school and school-age children, with and without ASD, was assessed with a picture description task comprising rated stimuli from the Pictures with Social Contexts and Emotional Scenes database (Teh et al. in Behav Res Methods, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0947-x , 2017). Results showed both groups with ASD produced fewer emotional terms than typically developing children, but the effects were moderated by valence, social engagement, and age. Implications for theory and clinical practice are discussed.

Visuospatial asymmetries and emotional valence influence mental time travel.

Spatial information is tightly intertwined with temporal and valence-based information. Namely, "past" is represented on the left, and "future" on the right, along a horizontal mental timeline. Similarly, right is associated with positive, whereas left is negative. We developed a novel task to examine the effects of emotional valence and temporal distance on mental representations of time. We compared positivity biases, where positive events are positioned closer to now, and right hemisphere emotion biases, where negative events are positioned to the left. When the entire life span was used, a positivity bias emerged; positive events were closer to now. When timeline length was reduced, positivity and right hemisphere emotion biases were consistent for past events. In contrast, positive and negative events were equidistant from now in the future condition, suggesting positivity and right hemisphere emotion biases opposed one another, leading events to be positioned at a similar distance. We then reversed the timeline by moving past to the right and future to the left. Positivity biases in the past condition were eliminated, and negative events were placed slightly closer to now in the future condition. We conclude that an underlying left-to-right mental representation of time is necessary for positivity biases to emerge for past events; however, our mental representations of future events are inconsistent with positivity biases. These findings point to an important difference in the way in which we represent the past and the future on our mental timeline. (PsycINFO Database Record

S142. A Predictive Approach to Identify Clinical State, Emotional Valence and Pharmacologic Effect in Human Task-Based fMRI Data

Clinically approved antidepressants modulate the brain’s emotional valence circuits, suggesting that the response of these circuits could serve as a biomarker for screening candidate antidepressant drugs. Here, we apply a cross-validated predictive model to classify clinical state, emotional valence, and pharmacologic effect across eight task-based fMRI studies (n=306) of the effect of antidepressant administration on emotional face processing.

Neural functional correlates of the impact of socio-emotional stimuli on performances on a flanker task in children aged 9–11 years

Immature cognition is susceptible to interference from competing information, and particularly in affectively charged situations. Several studies have reported activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex and amygdala associated with emotional conflict processing in adults but literature is lacking regarding children. Moreover, studies in children and adolescents still disagree regarding the functional activation of amygdala related to facial stimuli. In the purpose of investigating both the effect of socio-emotional stimuli and its interaction with interference control, we designed a flanker task associated with an event-related fMRI paradigm in 30 healthy children ages 9–11. In addition to happy, angry and neutral faces, we presented scrambled stimuli to examine a potential effect of faces. Regarding both brain and behavior results, no effect of emotional valence was observed. However, both results evidenced an emotional effect of faces compared with scrambled stimuli. This was expressed by faster RTs associated with increased amygdala activity and activation of the ventral ACC, in congruent trials only. When scrambled were inversely compared to faces, increased activity was observed within the lateral prefrontal cortex. Regarding the amygdala, the results suggest that in late school age children, activity in the amygdala seemed to underlie the socio-emotional effect induced by faces but not the emotional conflict. Studying brain regions involved in emotion regulation is important to further understand neurodevelopmental disorders and psychopathologies, particularly in late childhood and adolescence.

Event-related brain potential correlates of words’ emotional valence irrespective of arousal and type of task

Many Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) experiments have explored how the two main dimensions of emotion, arousal and valence, affect linguistic processing. However, the heterogeneity of experimental paradigms and materials has led to mixed results. In the present study, we aim to clarify words’ emotional valence effects on ERP when arousal is controlled, and determine whether these effects may vary as a function of the type of task performed. For these purposes, we designed an ERP experiment with the valence of words manipulated, and arousal equated across valences. The participants performed two types of task: in one, they had to read aloud each word, written in black on a white background; in the other, they had to name the color of the ink in which each word was written. The results showed the main effects of valence irrespective of task, and no interaction between valence and task. The most marked effects of valence were in response to negative words, which elicited an Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) and a Late Positive Complex (LPC). Our results suggest that, when arousal is controlled, the cognitive information in negative words triggers a ‘negativity bias’, these being the only words able to elicit emotion-related ERP modulations. Moreover, these modulations are largely unaffected by the types of task explored here.

The relationship between handedness and valence: A gesture study.

People with different hand preferences assign positive and negative emotions to different sides of their bodies and produce co-speech gestures with their dominant hand when the content is positive. In this study, we investigated this side preference by handedness in both gesture comprehension and production. Participants watched faceless gesture videos with negative and positive content on eye tracker and were asked to retell the stories after each video. Results indicated no difference in looking preferences regarding being right- or left-handed. Yet, an effect of emotional valence was observed. Participants spent more time looking to the right (actor's left) when the information was positive and to the left (actor's right) when the information was negative. Participants' retelling of stories revealed a handedness effect only for different types of gestures (representational vs beat). Individuals used their dominant hands for beat gestures. For representational gestures, while the right-handers used their right hands more, the left-handers gestured using both hands equally. Overall, the lack of significant difference between handedness and emotional content in both comprehension and production levels suggests that body-specific mental representations may not extend to the conversational level.

Exploring the prediction of emotional valence and pharmacologic effect across fMRI studies of antidepressants.

BackgroundClinically approved antidepressants modulate the brain's emotional valence circuits, suggesting that the response of these circuits could serve as a biomarker for screening candidate antidepressant drugs. However, it is necessary that these modulations can be reliably detected. Here, we apply a cross-validated predictive model to classify emotional valence and pharmacologic effect across eleven task-based fMRI datasets (n = 306) exploring the effect of antidepressant administration on emotional face processing.MethodsWe created subject-level contrast of parameter estimates of the emotional faces task and used the Shen whole-brain parcellation scheme to define 268 subject-level features that trained a cross-validated gradient-boosting machine protocol to classify emotional valence (fearful vs happy face visual conditions) and pharmacologic effect (drug vs placebo administration) within and across studies.ResultsWe found patterns of brain activity that classify emotional valence with a statistically significant level of accuracy (70% across-all-subjects; range from 50 to 87% across-study). Our classifier failed to consistently discriminate drug from placebo. Subject population (healthy or unhealthy), treatment group (drug or placebo), and drug administration protocol (dose and duration) affected this accuracy with similar populations better predicting one another.ConclusionsWe found limited evidence that antidepressants modulated brain response in a consistent manner, however found a consistent signature for emotional valence. Variable functional patterns across studies suggest that predictive modeling can inform biomarker development in mental health and in pharmacotherapy development. Our results suggest that case-controlled designs and more standardized protocols are required for functional imaging to provide robust biomarkers for drug development.

Breast cancer survivor testimonies: Effects of narrative and emotional valence on affect and cognition

This study examined the impact of narrative and emotion on processing of African American breast cancer survivor messages. We employed a two (narrative: present/absent) × three (emotional valence: ...

N170 Reveals the Categorical Perception Effect of Emotional Valence.

As an important attribute of facial expression, emotional valence has been well explored, but its processing mechanisms remain ambiguous. Investigating the categorical perception (CP) of emotional valence might help uncover the objective basis of the subjective dichotomy of emotional valence and identify the stage at which this processing of valence information might occur. A judgment task was used in the current study with stimuli from the within- or between-category condition, in which participants were required to decide whether two presented faces showed the same emotion. The results of the behavioral experiment revealed a significant CP effect of emotional valence, with faster RTs and greater accuracy for the between- than for the within-category stimuli. In the ERP experiment, the N170 (peaking at approximately 150–170 ms) was found to reflect the CP effect of emotional valence, with a larger amplitude for the within- than for the between-category condition. In contrast, the P1 component (peaking at approximately 100–130 ms) was insensitive to the CP effect of emotional valence. These results reveal the existence of the CP of emotional valence and indicate that the N170 is its earliest electrophysiological index. Therefore, the categorization of emotional valence not only has an objective neural basis but occurs at a relatively early stage of processing.

The Effect of Emotional Valence of Stimuli and Emotional State of Observers on Distance Perception

The Effect of Emotional Valence of Stimuli and Emotional State of Observers on Distance Perception

Effects of Scene Properties and Emotional Valence on Brain Activations: A Fixation-Related fMRI Study

Temporal and spatial characteristics of fixations are affected by image properties, including high-level scene characteristics, such as object-background composition, and low-level physical characteristics, such as image clarity. The influence of these factors is modulated by the emotional content of an image. Here, we aimed to establish whether brain correlates of fixations reflect these modulatory effects. To this end, we simultaneously scanned participants and measured their eye movements, while presenting negative and neutral images in various image clarity conditions, with controlled object-background composition. The fMRI data were analyzed using a novel fixation-based event-related (FIBER) method, which allows the tracking of brain activity linked to individual fixations. The results revealed that fixating an emotional object was linked to greater deactivation in the right lingual gyrus than fixating the background of an emotional image, while no difference between object and background was found for neutral images. We suggest that deactivation in the lingual gyrus might be linked to inhibition of saccade execution. This was supported by fixation duration results, which showed that in the negative condition, fixations falling on the object were longer than those falling on the background. Furthermore, increase in the image clarity was correlated with fixation-related activity within the lateral occipital complex, the structure linked to object recognition. This correlation was significantly stronger for negative images, presumably due to greater deployment of attention towards emotional objects. Our eye-tracking results are in line with these observations, showing that the chance of fixating an object rose faster for negative images over neutral ones as the level of noise decreased. Overall, our study demonstrated that emotional value of an image changes the way that low and high-level scene properties affect the characteristics of fixations. The fixation-related brain activity is affected by the low-level scene properties and this impact differs between negative and neutral images. The high-level scene properties also affect brain correlates of fixations, but only in the case of the negative images.

Effects of emotional valence on sense of agency require a predictive model

Sense of agency (SoA), a feeling that one’s voluntary actions produce events in the external world, is a key factor behind every goal-directed human behaviour. Recent studies have demonstrated that SoA is reduced when one’s voluntary action causes negative outcomes, compared to when it causes positive outcomes. It is yet unclear whether this emotional modulation of SoA is caused by predicting the outcome valence (prediction hypothesis) or by retrospectively interpreting the outcome (postdiction hypothesis). To address this, we emulated a social situation where one’s voluntary action was followed by either another’s negative emotional vocalisation or positive emotional vocalisation. Crucially, the relation between an action and the emotional valence of its outcome was predictable in some blocks of trials, but unpredictable in other blocks. Quantitative, implicit measures of SoA based on the intentional binding effect supported the prediction hypothesis. Our findings imply that the social-emotional modulation of SoA is based on predicting the emotional valence of action outcomes.

Effects of Emotional Valence on Hemispheric Asymmetries in Response Inhibition

Hemispheric asymmetries are a major organizational principle in human emotion processing, but their interaction with prefrontal control processes is not well understood. To this end, we determined whether hemispheric differences in response inhibition depend on the emotional valence of the stimulus being inhibited. Participants completed a lateralised Go/Nogo task, in which Nogo stimuli were neutral or emotional (either positive or negative) images, while Go stimuli were scrambled versions of the same pictures. We recorded the N2 and P3 event-related potential (ERP) components, two common electrophysiological measures of response inhibition processes. Behaviourally, participants were more accurate in withholding responses to emotional than to neutral stimuli. Electrophysiologically, Nogo-P3 responses were greater for emotional than for neutral stimuli, an effect driven primarily by an enhanced response to positive images. Hemispheric asymmetries were also observed, with greater Nogo-P3 following left versus right visual field stimuli. However, the visual field effect did not interact with emotion. We therefore find no evidence that emotion-related asymmetries affect response inhibition processes.

Modulating Effects of Emotional Valence on Recognition Memory for High-Arousal Pictures

The main aim of this paper was to provide new evidence on the effects of valence on recognition memory of emotional pictures, on the basis of rigorous experimental control of stimulus material. Valence was manipulated using pleasant and unpleasant pictures, keeping arousal constant at a high level. A reference condition with a neutral value in both dimensions was also included. We found greater discrimination and a more conservative response bias, as well as slower recognition decisions, for pleasant pictures. Also worthy of mention is the high positive correlation between response times and discrimination measures just for such pictures. These results would be consistent with an adaptive interpretation based on motivation and personal relevance of emotional information.

Effects of emotional valence and arousal on the voice perception network.

Several theories conceptualise emotions along two main dimensions: valence (a continuum from negative to positive) and arousal (a continuum that varies from low to high). These dimensions are typically treated as independent in many neuroimaging experiments, yet recent behavioural findings suggest that they are actually interdependent. This result has impact on neuroimaging design, analysis and theoretical development. We were interested in determining the extent of this interdependence both behaviourally and neuroanatomically, as well as teasing apart any activation that is specific to each dimension. While we found extensive overlap in activation for each dimension in traditional emotion areas (bilateral insulae, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdalae), we also found activation specific to each dimension with characteristic relationships between modulations of these dimensions and BOLD signal change. Increases in arousal ratings were related to increased activations predominantly in voice-sensitive cortices after variance explained by valence had been removed. In contrast, emotions of extreme valence were related to increased activations in bilateral voice-sensitive cortices, hippocampi, anterior and midcingulum and medial orbito- and superior frontal regions after variance explained by arousal had been accounted for. Our results therefore do not support a complete segregation of brain structures underpinning the processing of affective dimensions.

Memory effects of sleep, emotional valence, arousal and novelty in children.

Effectiveness of memory consolidation is determined by multiple factors, including sleep after learning, emotional valence, arousal and novelty. Few studies investigated how the effect of sleep compares with (and interacts with) these other factors, of which virtually none are in children. The present study did so by repeated assessment of declarative memory in 386 children (45% boys) aged 9-11years through an online word-pair task. Children were randomly assigned to either a morning or evening learning session of 30 unrelated word-pairs with positive, neutral or negative valenced cues and neutral targets. After immediately assessing baseline recognition, delayed recognition was recorded either 12 or 24h later, resulting in four different assessment schedules. One week later, the procedure was repeated with exactly the same word-pairs to evaluate whether effects differed for relearning versus original novel learning. Mixed-effect logistic regression models were used to evaluate how the probability of correct recognition was affected by sleep, valence, arousal, novelty and their interactions. Both immediate and delayed recognition were worse for pairs with negatively valenced or less arousing cue words. Relearning improved immediate and delayed word-pair recognition. In contrast to these effects, sleep did not affect recognition, nor did sleep moderate the effects of arousal, valence and novelty. The findings suggest a robust inclination of children to specifically forget the pairing of words to negatively valenced cue words. In agreement with a recent meta-analysis, children seem to depend less on sleep for the consolidation of information than has been reported for adults, irrespective of the emotional valence, arousal and novelty of word-pairs.

Visual CSR Messages and the Effects of Emotional Valence and Arousal on Perceived CSR Motives, Attitude, and Behavioral Intentions

Companies have frequently used visuals (e.g., still images and videos) as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategies, and those visuals often contain emotional content. As yet, however, scholars and practitioners have little understanding of how emotional design influences the effectiveness of CSR communication. This study examined how the emotional valence and arousal generated from contextual images in CSR messages affected the perceived CSR motives of companies, attitude toward the companies, purchase intention, and CSR participation intention. The results of a 2 (valence: positive vs. negative) × 2 (arousal: calm vs. arousing) experiment showed that arousing negative images elicited the highest level of attributing public-serving CSR motives to companies, the most favorable attitude toward the companies, and the strongest purchase intention, and CSR participation intention. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

Effects of learning context on the acquisition and processing of emotional words in bilinguals.

Although bilinguals respond differently to emotionally valenced words in their first language (L1) relative to emotionally neutral words, similar effects of emotional valence are hard to come by in second language (L2) processing. We examine the extent to which these differences in first and second language processing are due to the context in which the 2 languages are acquired: L1 is typically acquired in more naturalistic settings (e.g., family) than L2 (e.g., at school). Fifty German-English bilinguals learned unfamiliar German and English negative and neutral words in 2 different learning conditions: One group (emotion video context) watched videos of a person providing definitions of the words with facial and gestural cues, whereas another group (neutral video context) received the same definitions without gestural and emotional cues. Subsequently, participants carried out an emotional Stroop task, a sentence completion task, and a recall task on the words they had just learned. We found that the effect of learning context on the influence of emotional valence on responding was modulated by a) language status, L1 versus L2, and b) task requirement. We suggest that a more nuanced approach is required to capture the differences in emotion effects in the speed versus accuracy of access to words across different learning contexts and different languages, in particular with regard to our finding that bilinguals respond to L2 words in a similar manner as L1 words provided that the learning context is naturalistic and incorporates emotional and prosodic cues. (PsycINFO Database Record