Emotional Judgments Research Articles

Social Entrepreneurs as Role Models for Innovative Professional Career Developments

Through qualitative analysis, this paper examines the role of social entrepreneurs as an example of innovative and alternative professional career development. We review the dominant literature about social entrepreneurs’ distinct intentions, attitudes, abilities, and behaviors. We also directly connect social entrepreneurs’ biographies and discourses with the actual nature of their social enterprises. We have found some fundamental common factors as critical determinants of the final social entrepreneurial decision and result: (i) motivations such as emotional connection, moral judgment, personal dissatisfaction, purpose achievement and change, and social needs; (ii) personal internal resources such as connection skills, conviction, creativity, efficiency skills, and learning orientation; (iii) facilitating external factors such as financial and social support, higher and social education, relevant past events, and previous professional experience. Putting together all these factors, we develop a theoretical framework that can explain social entrepreneurship as an alternative career option and connect it with a dominant social entrepreneur’s narrative and profile.

Anodal tDCS effects over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (L-DLPFC) on the rating of facial expression: evidence for a gender-specific effect

The accurate recognition of others' facial expressions is a core skill for social interactions. The left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (L-DLPFC) represents a key node in the network for facial emotion recognition. However, its specific role is still under debate. As such, the aim of the current neuromodulation study was to assess the causal role of the L-DLPFC in humans' rating of facial expressions of emotions and implicit attitudes toward other races. In this sham-controlled single-blind between-subject experiment, we offline administered L-DLPFC transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to 69 healthy participants who were divided into three groups of 23 (each receiving anodal 1 mA tDCS, anodal 2 mA tDCS, or Sham), before completing an “Emotion Rating task and two Implicit Association Tests (IATs). The former required the intensity rating of 192 faces (half black and half white) displaying happiness, sadness, anger, or fear. The IATs were designed to assess participants' automatic associations of positive or negative attributes with racial contents. Results on the Emotion Rating task showed participants' gender-specific effect of tDCS. Specifically, a gender bias, with only males showing a tendency to underestimate negative emotions was found in Sham, and absent in the tDCS groups. When considering the race of the stimuli, females but not males in Sham exhibited a racial bias, that is, the tendency to overestimate negative emotions of other-race faces. Again, the bias disappeared in the tDCS groups. Concerning the IATs, no significant effects emerged. We conclude that the L-DLPFC plays a critical role in humans’ rating of facial expressions, and for variability in other-race emotional judgements. These results shed light on the neural bases of the human emotional system and its gender-related differences, and have potential implications for interventional settings.

Race Deficits in Pain Detection: Medical Providers and Laypeople Fail to Accurately Perceive Pain Authenticity Among Black People

Across six studies (N = 904), we suggest a novel mechanism for race disparities in pain treatment: Perceiver deficits in discriminating real from fake pain for Black (relative to White) individuals. Across Studies 1–4, White participants (Studies 1–4) and Black participants (Study 2) were better at discerning authentic from inauthentic pain expressions for White targets than for Black targets. This effect emerged for both subtle (Studies 1 and 2) and intense (Studies 3 and 4) pain stimuli. Studies 5 and 6 examined consequences for medical care decisions by examining pain treatment recommendations by laypeople (Study 5) and pain authenticity judgments by medical providers (Study 6). This work advances theory in pain perception, emotion judgment, and intergroup relations. It also has practical significance for identifying unexplored mechanisms causing racial disparities in medical care.

Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception

Emotionally expressive music and dance occur together across the world. This may be because features shared across the senses are represented the same way even in different sensory brain areas, putting music and movement in directly comparable terms. These shared representations may arise from a general need to identify environmentally relevant combinations of sensory features, particularly those that communicate emotion. To test the hypothesis that visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure, we created music and animation stimuli with crossmodally matched features expressing a range of emotions. Participants confirmed that each emotion corresponded to a set of features shared across music and movement. A subset of participants viewed both music and animation during brain scanning, revealing that representations in auditory and visual brain areas were similar to one another. This shared representation captured not only simple stimulus features but also combinations of features associated with emotion judgments. The posterior superior temporal cortex represented both music and movement using this same structure, suggesting supramodal abstraction of sensory content. Further exploratory analysis revealed that early visual cortex used this shared representational structure even when stimuli were presented auditorily. We propose that crossmodally shared representations support mutually reinforcing dynamics across auditory and visual brain areas, facilitating crossmodal comparison. These shared representations may help explain why emotions are so readily perceived and why some dynamic emotional expressions can generalize across cultural contexts.

Emotional Autobiographical Memory Associated with Insular Resection in Epileptic Patients: A Comparison with Temporal Lobe Resection.

The insula is involved in a wide variety of functions, including social and emotional processing. Despite the numerous connections it shares with brain structures known to play a role in autobiographical memory (AM), little is known on the contribution of the insula to AM processing. The aim of the study was to examine emotional AM retrieval in patients with insular resection for drug-resistant epilepsy. Ten patients who underwent partial or complete insular resection (IR) were matched on age, sex, and education, to fifteen patients who underwent temporal lobectomy (TL), and to fifteen healthy controls. Participants were asked to recall four positive, four negative, and four neutral memories from their past using the autobiographical interview procedure. The results suggest that AM for emotional and neutral events after IR was comparable to that of healthy controls, whereas deficits were observed after TL. However, an independent examiner judged IR patients’ memories as poorer than those of healthy controls on the episodic richness scale, suggesting a lack of some aspects of rich and vivid remembering. Furthermore, analysis on subjective self-rated scales revealed that, contrary to healthy controls, patients with IR judged their neutral memories as more emotional. This study suggests that AM is generally preserved after IR. However, given the small sample size and varied lesion location, one cannot totally exclude a potential role of specific insular sub-regions on some aspects of autobiographical memory. In addition, IR patients showed poor emotional judgment for neutral memories, which is congruent with previous findings of altered emotional processing in this population.

Human Emotions and Fallible Judgments

Abstract The author argues that Peirce, James, and Dewey propose a version of emotional cognitivism (the position that an emotion is in effect a judgment and, as such, highly fallible). He goes on to highlight certain features of human emotions, conceived in this light, above all emotional reflexivity (the feelings we tend to have about our own feelings, e.g., the case of becoming angry at being angry in the first place or that of feeling ashamed at allowing oneself to be shamed). Given the highly fallible character of our emotional judgments, the reference to the “I,” in addition to that to the object, can hardly be overlooked. Deliberative agents are wise to confess, “I am angry,” without eliminating what James identifies as “the intensely objective reference” of such feelings as fear, anger, and rapture.

Contour features predict valence and threat judgements in scenes

Quickly scanning an environment to determine relative threat is an essential part of survival. Scene gist extracted rapidly from the environment may help people detect threats. Here, we probed this link between emotional judgements and features of visual scenes. We first extracted curvature, length, and orientation statistics of all images in the International Affective Picture System image set and related them to emotional valence scores. Images containing angular contours were rated as negative, and images containing long contours as positive. We then composed new abstract line drawings with specific combinations of length, angularity, and orientation values and asked participants to rate them as positive or negative, and as safe or threatening. Smooth, long, horizontal contour scenes were rated as positive/safe, while short angular contour scenes were rated as negative/threatening. Our work shows that particular combinations of image features help people make judgements about potential threat in the environment.

Blunted emotion judgments of body movements in Parkinson\u2019s disease

Some of the behavioral disorders observed in Parkinson’s disease (PD) may be related to an altered processing of social messages, including emotional expressions. Emotions conveyed by whole body movements may be difficult to generate and be detected by PD patients. The aim of the present study was to compare valence judgments of emotional whole body expressions in individuals with PD and in healthy controls matched for age, gender and education. Twenty-eight participants (13 PD patients and 15 healthy matched control participants) were asked to rate the emotional valence of short movies depicting emotional interactions between two human characters presented with the “Point Light Displays” technique. To ensure understanding of the perceived scene, participants were asked to briefly describe each of the evaluated movies. Patients’ emotional valence evaluations were less intense than those of controls for both positive (p < 0.001) and negative (p < 0.001) emotional expressions, even though patients were able to correctly describe the depicted scene. Our results extend the previously observed impaired processing of emotional facial expressions to impaired processing of emotions expressed by body language. This study may support the hypothesis that PD affects the embodied simulation of emotional expression and the potentially involved mirror neuron system.

The influence of the public’s prior knowledge on their acceptance of risk control method for contaminated sites: A case study in China

As an emerging approach that aims to control, mitigate or prevent the risk of contaminated sites by cutting off the transmission routes of pollutants, risk control method has become an economic choice for researchers and governors to manage the contaminated sites. However, the public’s acceptance is at a relatively low level, and investigation into how to increase this is needed. In this study, a focus group interview was conducted to identify the dimensions of the public’s risk and benefit perception regarding the use of risk control method for contaminated sites. Using data from an online survey of 418 residents in Tianjin, a city in desperate need of this method for contaminated sites, structural equation modeling was used to examine the influence mechanism of public’s knowledge of soil pollution on their acceptance of it. The results included the following points: (1) The improvement of the public’s soil pollution knowledge causes the overestimation of risks and the underestimation of benefits regarding risk control method, which then decrease of their acceptance of it. (2) knowledge triggered emotional judgement rather than rational judgement works in their decision-making process. The study concludes that science-based propaganda should be strengthened to eliminate residents’ concerns about the environment, health, and the government’s regulations, and their negative emotion should be specially taken into account when developing projects using this method. This study innovatively explored the public’s cognitive mechanisms in relation to risk control method from both rational and emotional perspectives.

Predicting emotions in music using the onset curve

The relationship between parameters extracted from the musical stimuli and emotional response has been traditionally approached using several physical measures extracted from time or frequency domains. From time-domain measures, the musical onset is defined as the moment in that any musical instrument or human voice issues a musical note. The onsets’ sequence in the performance of a specific musical score creates what is known as the onset curve (OC). The influence of the structure of OC on the emotional judgment of people is not known. To this end, we have applied principal component analysis on a complete set of variables extracted from the OC to capture their statistical structure. We have found a trifactorial structure related to activation and valence dimensions of emotional judgment. The structure has been cross-validated using different participants and stimuli. In this way, we propose the factorial scores of the OC as a reliable and relevant piece of information to predict the emotional judgment of music.

Dual Development of Affective-Speech-Based Emotion Perception

Studies have shown that when interpreting emotions from speech, adults focus on prosody, while young children focus on lexical content. However, the kind of socio-emotional processing implemented in such emotion perception, as well as how it is developed, remains unclear. The present study examined the development of a dual process in affective-speech-induced emotion perception in 3- and 5-year-old children. Previous studies have suggested that unconscious emotion perception at the gaze level and conscious emotion judgment in response to speakers’ emotions develop differently. Children were presented with affective speech, which included inconsistent lexical content and prosody (e.g., saying ‘thank you’ in an angry tone), and asked to report the speaker’s emotions by pointing to the corresponding facial expressions (happy or angry). Additionally, the duration for which children gazed at each facial expression was examined. The results showed that 3-year-old children judged the speaker’s emotions based on lexical content more than the 5-year-olds, who used prosody. However, at the gaze level, both the 3- and 5-year-olds focused longer on the facial expressions that matched the prosody. The results suggest that two processes can be observed: unconscious emotion perception, which matches prosody and expression, and assessment of the speaker’s emotions by weighting the lexical content and prosody.

Организация учебных взаимодействий на основе диалога в цифровой среде

The authors of the article investigate the problem of the increasingly complex structure of knowledge and the education system, in which teachers have to present a large amount of knowledge in a short period of time, while most teachers understand that it is necessary to pay special attention to educational communications and interactions. This is especially true for dialogue when organizing training sessions in a digital environment. The dialogue, full of educational questions, organizes "heuristic" training of students on the individual logic of cognition. Consequently, teachers receive additional functional and emotional load of speech interaction. The results of the study showed that regardless of the style of communication (authoritarian or democratic), the teacher has to devote 4/5 or 2/3 of the academic time to speech communication, of which the lecture will take 1/3 or ¼ of the class time. Consequently, half of the lesson or a little less is spent on communication or other educational activities, corrected by the teacher. It is concluded that educational interaction is influenced by general institutional relations (usually historical and traditional for an educational institution), the level of language proficiency( vocabulary), the theoretical content of the subject or topic of the lesson, divided into microtexts; many teachers consider multi-semiotic resources as undesirable if they are not embedded in the structure of the topic of the lesson, since not all teachers have the latest scientific knowledge, which becomes a lot (this is more true for social and humanitarian knowledge in higher education); learning interactions (having an intersubjective orientation) have a dynamic character, in which students perceive the sequence of learning actions as a learning tool. Research reveals the multifaceted nature of learning interactions, in which there are not only logical, but also emotional judgments. Therefore, the teacher's correction should have intersubjective properties, since the educational dialogue is the creative discourse of students.

Effects of illuminance and correlated color temperature of indoor light on emotion perception

The acute non-image forming (NIF) effects of daytime light on momentary mood had been-although not always-established in the current literature. It still remains largely unknown whether short-time light exposure would modulate emotion perception in healthy adults. The current study (N = 48) was conducted to explore the effects of illuminance (100 lx vs. 1000 lx at eye level) and correlated color temperature (CCT, 2700 K vs. 6500 K) on explicit and implicit emotion perception that was assessed with emotional face judgment task and emotional oddball task respectively. Results showed that lower CCT significantly decreased negative response bias in the face judgment task, with labeling ambiguous faces less fearful under 2700 K vs. 6500 K condition. Moreover, participants responded slightly faster for emotional pictures under 6500 K vs. 2700 K condition, but no significant effect of illuminance or CCT on negativity bias was revealed in the emotional oddball task. These findings highlighted the differential role of illuminance and CCT in regulating instant emotion perception and suggested a task-dependent moderation of light spectrum on negativity bias.

Reflective functioning and empathy among mothers of school-aged children: Charting the space between.

Parental child-focused reflective functioning (RF)-understanding children's behavior as a function of mental states-and parental empathy-understanding, resonating with, and feeling concern for children's emotions-have each been linked to sensitive caregiving and children's attachment security in separate studies, but they have been neither directly compared nor have researchers tested whether they interact in predicting child outcomes. In this article, we offer theoretical perspectives regarding differences between the constructs, potential points of connection, and ways in which these constructs may function together. Then we test these ideas empirically with 2 samples of mothers of school-age children, exploring their unique and interactive associations with parenting sensitivity, children's attachment security, and children's emotion regulation. In Study 1, mothers (N = 105) watched their children completing a stressor task (i.e., an impossible puzzle); mothers then answered interview questions, from which separate teams coded state-like RF and empathy. In Study 2, mothers (N = 72) completed the Parent Development Interview, coded separately for trait-like parental RF and empathy. Results of the 2 studies converged, revealing moderate positive associations between parental RF and empathy. Further, both RF and empathy were positively associated with specific child outcomes (e.g., attachment security); also, there were unique patterns of association (e.g., parental empathy was uniquely associated with child physiological regulation [neuroendocrine reactivity]) and evidence that critical levels of both are important (e.g., for supportive parenting, accuracy of emotion judgment). Parental RF and empathy might be related to each other and to distinguishable capacities that contribute to attachment and related outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

You, robot? The role of anthropomorphic emotion attributions in children’s sharing with a robot

Sharing helps children form and maintain relationships with other children. Yet, children born today interact not only with other children, but increasingly with robots as well. Little is known on whether and how children treat robots as recipients of prosocial acts. We thus investigated children’s sharing behavior towards robots. Specifically, we assessed the effect of anthropomorphic appearance and affective state attributions. Children (4–9 years old; n = 120) were introduced to robots that varied in the extent to which they looked human-like. Children’s perceptions of the robots’ affective states were manipulated by explicitly demonstrating one robot as having feelings and the other one not. Subsequently, children’s sharing behavior towards and feelings about sharing with these robots were measured. Results indicate that there was no effect of anthropomorphic appearance on sharing behavior. However, importantly, children in both age groups shared more resources with a robot that they attributed with affective states, and expressed more positive emotional judgments about sharing with that robot as well. An exploratory mediation analysis further revealed that children’s positive feelings about sharing guided their actual sharing behavior with robots. In sum, children show more pro-social behavior when they believe a robot can feel.

Anxiety biases audiovisual processing of social signals

In everyday life, information from multiple senses is integrated for a holistic understanding of emotion. Despite evidence of atypical multisensory perception in populations with socio-emotional difficulties (e.g., autistic individuals), little research to date has examined how anxiety impacts on multisensory emotion perception. Here we examined whether the level of trait anxiety in a sample of 56 healthy adults affected audiovisual processing of emotion for three types of stimuli: dynamic faces and voices, body motion and dialogues of two interacting agents, and circles and tones. Participants judged emotion from four types of displays – audio-only, visual-only, audiovisual congruent (e.g., angry face and angry voice) and audiovisual incongruent (e.g., angry face and happy voice) – as happy or angry, as quickly as possible. In one task, participants based their emotional judgements on information in one modality while ignoring information in the other, and in a second task they based their judgements on their overall impressions of the stimuli. The results showed that the higher trait anxiety group prioritized the processing of angry cues when combining faces and voices that portrayed conflicting emotions. Individuals in this group were also more likely to benefit from combining congruent face and voice cues when recognizing anger. The multisensory effects of anxiety were found to be independent of the effects of autistic traits. The observed effects of trait anxiety on multisensory processing of emotion may serve to maintain anxiety by increasing sensitivity to social-threat and thus contributing to interpersonal difficulties.

행복의 관점에서 바라본 관광과 도시재생의 역학관계

This study examined the bizarre dynamics of tourism and urban regeneration in urban regeneration areas, where the proportion of tourism is increasing recently. It is judged that the originality and timeliness of the study are great in that they verify the path of the ideal happiness pursuit mechanism for both tourists and local residents. In addition, it is intended to increase the validity of the study by fusionly applying the three disciplines of happiness and urban regeneration, which are mainly studied in psychology and urban engineering, and tourism consumer behavior in tourism.<BR> This study explored the degree of realization of the pursuit of happiness that village residents generally perceived in urban regeneration projects, which have recently received a lot of social attention, as a qualitative research method.<BR> As a result of content analysis, this study found a path to pursue happiness through emotional judgment of experiential value and cognitive judgment of functional value from residents" expectations.

Nurses’ Aesthetic Responses and Emotional Judgments to Senior Leaders’ Use of Language, Action, and Behavior

Mergers can cause high anxiety for nurses. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine nurses’ emotional responses and experiences with senior leaders’ use of language, action, and behavior during a time of intense organizational change. Branding, allocations of resources, restructuring maneuvers, and leader connection wrapped in contextual fabrics were surfaced by interviews with clinical nurses. Fostering aesthetic responses and emotional judgments may help nurses feel something and to act. Mergers can cause high anxiety for nurses. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine nurses’ emotional responses and experiences with senior leaders’ use of language, action, and behavior during a time of intense organizational change. Branding, allocations of resources, restructuring maneuvers, and leader connection wrapped in contextual fabrics were surfaced by interviews with clinical nurses. Fostering aesthetic responses and emotional judgments may help nurses feel something and to act. Lucinda Easler, PhD, NEA-BC, is Director of Behavioral Care Services at Prisma Health in Columbia, South Carolina. She can be reached at [ [email protected] ].

How Much of Me Do I See in Other Minds? Modulating Egocentricity in Emotion Judgments by tDCS.

When inferring the mental states of others, individuals’ judgments are influenced by their own state of mind, an effect often referred to as egocentricity. Self–other differentiation is key for an accurate interpretation of other’s mental states, especially when these differ from one’s own states. It has been suggested that the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) is causally involved in overcoming egocentricity in the affective domain. In a double-blind randomized study, 47 healthy adults received anodal (1 mA, 20 min) or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the rSMG prior to performing a newly developed paradigm, the self–other facial emotion judgment (SOFE) task. In this task, participants made judgments of facial emotional expressions while having been previously confronted with congruent or incongruent emotion-inducing situations. To differentiate between emotional and cognitive egocentricity, participants additionally completed an established visual perspective-taking task. Our results confirmed the occurrence of emotional egocentric biases during the SOFE task. No conclusive evidence of a general role of the rSMG in emotional egocentricity was found. However, active as compared to sham tDCS induced descriptively lower egocentric biases when judging incongruent fearful faces, and stronger biases when judging incongruent happy faces, suggesting emotion-specific tDCS effects on egocentric biases. Further, we found significant tDCS effects on cognitive egocentricity. Results of the present study expanded our understanding of emotional egocentricity and point towards emotion-specific patterns of the underlying functionality.

Background factors for chronic low back pain resistant to cognitive behavioral therapy

This study examined the factors that inhibit the therapeutic effects of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and clarify the adaptation judgment criteria of CBT. We included patients with chronic low back pain and allocated them to the adaptation (with visual analog scale [VAS] improvement) or non-adaptation group (without VAS improvement). The patients were analyzed using various psychological tests. CBT improved depressive symptoms and catastrophic thinking; however, they were not correlated with the VAS and did not directly affect low back pain improvement. The non-adaptation group showed an unexplainable/vague sense of anxiety; an excessive focus on searching for pain; a strong intimacy desire; a strong tendency of medical dependency; and fantasy or distortion of the actual experience, especially self-image. Moreover, the patients showed a low ability to objectively express or attribute meaning to pain due to poor language skills, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and emotional value judgment. Individuals with the aforementioned characteristics of pre-CBT psychological tests should select a different treatment approach given the high poor-adaption possibility. Even patients with depressive or anxious symptoms are not necessarily adaptable for CBT. Therefore, pre-CBT tests for treatment suitability are necessary. Future studies should establish a protocol for psychotherapy suitable for the non-adaptation group.