Expectancy-based Processing Research Articles

Emotional voices modulate perception and predictions about an upcoming face

When we hear an emotional voice, does this alter how the brain perceives and evaluates a subsequent face? Here, we tested this question by comparing event-related potentials evoked by angry, sad, and happy faces following vocal expressions which varied in form (speech-embedded emotions, non-linguistic vocalizations) and emotional relationship (congruent, incongruent). Participants judged whether face targets were true exemplars of emotion (facial affect decision). Prototypicality decisions were more accurate and faster for congruent vs. incongruent faces and for targets that displayed happiness. Principal component analysis identified vocal context effects on faces in three distinct temporal factors: a posterior P200 (150–250 ms), associated with evaluating face typicality; a slow frontal negativity (200–750 ms) evoked by angry faces, reflecting enhanced attention to threatening targets; and the Late Positive Potential (LPP, 450–1000 ms), reflecting sustained contextual evaluation of intrinsic face meaning (with independent LPP responses in posterior and prefrontal cortex). Incongruent faces and faces primed by speech (compared to vocalizations) tended to increase demands on face perception at stages of structure-building (P200) and meaning integration (posterior LPP). The frontal LPP spatially overlapped with the earlier frontal negativity response; these components were functionally linked to expectancy-based processes directed towards the incoming face, governed by the form of a preceding vocal expression (especially for anger). Our results showcase differences in how vocalizations and speech-embedded emotion expressions modulate cortical operations for predicting (prefrontal) versus integrating (posterior) face meaning in light of contextual details.

Moral Emotions Toward Others at Work and Implications for Employee Behavior: a Qualitative Analysis Using Critical Incidents

We propose a theoretical framework for and, via critical incidents, inductively investigate (a) the situations that trigger moral emotions toward others at work and (b) worker responses to these situations. Critical incidents were collected from a heterogeneous sample of 423 workers. Participants described an incident that caused each of four moral emotions (gratitude, anger, admiration, and contempt) and their response. Incidents and responses were coded, and frequencies, differences across the moral emotions, and associations between incidents and responses were analyzed. Several morally relevant situations at work were found to trigger the moral emotions. Participants responded in ways that had implications for their performance and their own well-being. The incidents largely align with moral foundations theory (Haidt and Graham in Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116, 2007). Responses also show evidence for social exchange, social learning, and rational expectancy-based processes and behavior. The incidents specify several practices for managers and organizations to encourage and avoid. This was the first qualitative study of moral emotions at work and one of the few workplace studies to examine these emotions empirically. Several understudied factors and behavioral responses emerged.

Of Kith and Kin: Perceptual Enrichment, Expectancy, and Reciprocity in Face Perception

Race powerfully affects perceivers’ responses to faces, promoting biases in attention, classification, and memory. To account for these diverse effects, we propose a model that integrates social cognitive work with two prominent accounts of visual processing: perceptual learning and predictive coding. Our argument is that differential experience with a racial ingroup promotes both (a) perceptual enrichment, including richer, more well-integrated visual representations of ingroup relative to outgroup faces, and (b) expectancies that ingroup faces are normative, which influence subsequent visual processing. By allowing for “top-down” expectancy-based processes, this model accounts for both experience- and non-experience-based influences, such as motivation, context, and task instructions. Fundamentally, we suggest that we treat race as an important psychological dimension because it structures our social environment, which in turn structures mental representation.

Mood and Threat to Attitudinal Freedom

The present research examined when happy individuals' processing of a counterattitudinal message is guided by mood-congruent expectancies versus hedonic considerations. Recipients in positive, neutral, or negative mood read a strong or weak counterattitudinal message which either contained a threat to attitudinal freedom or did not contain such a threat. As expected, a freedom-threatening counterattitudinal message was more mood threatening than a counterattitudinal message not threatening freedom. Furthermore, as predicted by the mood-congruent expectancies approach, people in positive mood processed a nonthreatening counterattitudinal message more thoroughly than people in negative mood. Message processing in neutral mood lay in between. In contrast, as predicted by the hedonic-contingency view, a threatening counterattitudinal message was processed less thoroughly in positive mood than in neutral mood. In negative mood, processing of a threatening counterattitudinal message was as low as in positive mood. These findings suggest that message processing is determined by mood congruency unless hedonic considerations override expectancy-based processing inclinations.

Creating memory illusions: Expectancy-based processing and the generation of false memories

The present research investigated the generation of memory illusions. In particular, it attempted to delineate the conditions under which category-based thinking prompts the elicitation of false memories. Noting fundamental differences in the manner in which expected and unexpected person-related information is processed and represented in the mind, it was anticipated that, via gist-based recognition, participants would display a pronounced propensity to generate expectancy-consistent false memories. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. In addition, the research revealed that participants' false memories were accompanied by the subjective experience of knowing (Expt. 2) and that false recognition was exacerbated under conditions of executive dysfunction (Expt. 3). We consider the theoretical implications of these findings for recent treatments of memory illusions and social cognition.

Modulation of language processing in schizophrenia: effects of context and haloperidol on the event-related potential

Background: Disturbances in language associations were among the first clinical symptoms reported for individuals described as schizophrenic (Bleuler 1911/1950). Currently, associative language disturbance is a diagnostic feature of schizophrenia (American Psychiatric Association 1994); however, the mechanisms that produce this symptom remain unknown. In the present study, two candidate psychological functions were examined: sensitivity to semantic context and expectancy (attention). Methods: Visual event-related potentials were recorded during a lexical decision task in which semantic relationship and expectancy (relatedness proportions) were varied. Semantic priming processes were compared between 34 male normal control subjects tested once and 37 male schizophrenic inpatients evaluated during their participation in a double-blind haloperidol maintenance therapy and placebo replacement protocol. Results: Schizophrenic patients failed to discriminate between associated and unassociated words, as measured by the amplitude of the N400 component (i.e., absence of the N400 priming effect); however, the overall mean amplitude of N400 did not differ between patients and control subjects. In addition, patients and control subjects did not differ significantly in the amplitude of N400 elicited to associated words or to unassociated words. Finally, the effect of expectancy-based processing on the magnitude of the N400 priming effect did not differ between patients and control subjects. Conclusions: On the basis of these findings, a tentative hypothesis is suggested that schizophrenic patients are characterized by a pattern of indiscriminate or random spread of activation in their semantic network during the processing of single-word semantic contexts.

Hemispheric dissociations in controlled lexical-semantic processing.

Cognitive mechanisms of semantic priming in individuals with intact cerebral hemispheres were studied using the visual half-field method and lexical-decision tasks. In Experiment 1, unidirectionally associated word pairs were presented in a forward direction (e.g., BEAVER-TAIL) to isolate priming attributable to automatic activation or expectancy-based processing. Forward priming was restricted to the right visual field-left hemisphere, and it occurred only when expectancy-based processing was encouraged in the instructions. Experiments 2 and 3 found backward priming (e.g., TAIL-BEAVER) only in the left visual field, indicating that the right hemisphere contributes to retrospective semantic matching of the target back to the prime. The results suggest that the 2 hemispheres have different roles in controlled processing of semantic relations.

プライム刺激に対する課題とリストの構成がプライミング効果に及ぼす影響

Subjects made lexical decisions to word and nonword targets under two priming conditions. For a half of the subjects, the task for prime words was to make word associations, and for the other, to play shiritori, a Japanese word game in which a new word is generated using the last syllable of a prime word as its first syllable. A semantic priming effect was obtained for the association group, when 40 per cent of the stimulus-word list was semantically related prime-target pairs and 10 per cent orthographically related (SR-40 condition), but not when the list was 10 per cent of semantically related and 40 per cent orthographically related (OR-40 condition). An orthographic priming effect was obtained for the shiritori group in the OR-40 condition, but not in the SR-40 condition. The interaction effect seems to indicate that subject's expectancy played an important role in primed lexical decision, and the expectancy was affected not only by the stimulus-word list construction but also by the tasks for prime words. These findings were discussed in terms of the spreading activation theory that distinguishes automatic and expectancy-based processes.