Negative Scenes Research Articles

The distinct effects of fearful and disgusting scenes on self-relevant face recognition

Self-face recognition denotes the process by which a person can recognize their own face by distinguishing it from another’s face. Although many research studies have explored the inhibition effect of negative information on self-relevant face processing, few researchers have examined whether negative scenes influence self-relevant face processing. Fearful and disgusting scenes are typical negative scenes, but little research to data has examined their discriminative effects on self-relevant face recognition. To investigate these issues, the current study explored the effect of negative scenes on self-relevant face recognition. In Study 1, 44 participants (20 men, 24 women) were asked to judge the orientation of a target face (self-face or friend-face) pictured in a negative or neutral scene, whereas 40 participants (19 men, 21 women) were asked to complete the same task in a fearful, disgusting, or neutral scene in Study 2. The results showed that negative scenes inhibited the speed of recognizing self-faces. Furthermore, the above effect of negative scenes on self-relevant face recognition occurred with fearful rather than disgusting scenes. Our findings suggest the distinct effects of fearful scenes and disgusting scenes on self-relevant face processing, which may be associated with the automatic attentional capture to negative scenes (especially fearful scenes) and the tendency to escape self-awareness.

Targeted Memory Reactivation during Nonrapid Eye Movement Sleep Enhances Neutral, But Not Negative, Components of Memory.

Emotionally salient components of memory are preferentially remembered at the expense of accompanying neutral information. This emotional memory trade-off is enhanced over time, and possibly sleep, through a process of memory consolidation. Sleep is believed to benefit memory through a process of reactivation during nonrapid eye movement sleep (NREM). Here, targeted memory reactivation (TMR) was used to manipulate the reactivation of negative and neutral memories during NREM sleep. Thirty-one male and female participants encoded composite scenes containing either a negative or neutral object superimposed on an always neutral background. During NREM sleep, sounds associated with the scene object were replayed, and memory for object and background components was tested the following morning. We found that TMR during NREM sleep improved memory for neutral, but not negative scene objects. This effect was associated with sleep spindle activity, with a larger spindle response following TMR cues predicting TMR effectiveness for neutral items only. These findings therefore do not suggest a role of NREM memory reactivation in enhancing the emotional memory trade-off across a 12 h period but do align with growing evidence of spindle-mediated memory reactivation in service of neutral declarative memory.

Invited commentary on using music intervention and imagined interaction to deal with aggression and conflict

PurposeThe purpose of this commentary is discuss how musical intervention and imagined interactions can be used to deal with conflict. Music has been called the universal language because of its tonality and rhythm. It affects conflict and aggression and helps people to deal with stress. Research is reviewed showing physiological arousal with background music. The effects of music on aggression are summarized in terms of emotional regulation, catharsis and empathy, and the use of mental imagery in the form of imagined interactions, including relational maintenance catharsis and conflict linkage, is discussed. The incremental sound organizer (ISO) principle of music therapy is discussed as a mechanism to affect emotions while listening to music. Finally, a tool to measure the emotional effect of music on listeners is discussed in terms of the musical mood wheel.Design/methodology/approachThis is a commentary on the effects of background music on reducing aggression.FindingsMusic can reduce aggression, depending on how it is used. Music affects how we manage our emotions, reduces stress, provides catharsis and can be a distracting element. Music can enhance empathic feeling; induce positive moods, social bonding, physiological changes and neurobiological changes; and affect our arousal.Research limitations/implicationsMusic therapy and musical intervention can be applied to conflict resolution.Practical implicationsThe ISO principle of music therapy is designed to deal with changing a person’s emotions as they listen to a medley of music. The mood of the person is measured using a series of scales reflecting a continuum of sadness to happiness, and the music is designed to match the mood of the patient to the music being played and/or listened to, which in turn fosters the achievement of an altered state of consciousness. For example, if you are angry, start with music that is loud and gradually switch to a more tranquil piece of music. “The vectoring power of music is that we change the mood or emotion of persons from one affective pole (joy) to its opposite (anger) through small incremental changes in the rhythm and intensity of the music” (Honeycutt, 2003, p. 82).Social implicationsBackground music in music psychology literature is often referred to as musical intervention. Background music can help us recall positive and negative scenes as the music triggers endorphins in the brain (Salimpoor et al., 2011). Background music is intended to enhance the surrounding context without drawing significant attention. It is often played in spaces such as restaurants, stores, offices or public places to create a certain mood or ambiance.Originality/valueIt is important to note that the effectiveness of musical intervention in reducing aggression can vary based on individual preferences, the specific type of music used, and the context in which it is applied. Additionally, while music intervention can play a role in aggression reduction, it is often most effective when used as part of a comprehensive therapeutic approach.

The effects of transient receptor potential cation channel inhibition by BI 1358894 on cortico-limbic brain reactivity to negative emotional stimuli in major depressive disorder

Abnormal emotional processing in major depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with increased activation to negative stimuli in cortico-limbic brain regions. The authors investigated whether treatment with BI 1358894, a small-molecule inhibitor of the transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily C leads to attenuated activity in these areas in MDD patients. 73 MDD patients were randomized to receive a single oral dose of BI 1358894 (100 mg), citalopram (20 mg), or matching placebo. Brain responses to emotional faces and scenes were investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Primary endpoints were BOLD signal changes in response to negative faces in cortico-limbic brain regions, i.e. bilateral amygdala (AMY), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior insula (AI), and anterior cingulate cortex. Secondary endpoints were BOLD signal changes in response to negative scenes. For each region, separate ANOVA models were computed for the comparison of treatments (BI 1358894 or citalopram) vs. placebo. The adjusted treatment differences in the % BOLD signal changes in the faces task showed that BI 1358894 induced signal reduction in bilateral AMY and left AI. In the scenes task, BI 1358894 demonstrated significant signal reduction in bilateral AMY, AI, anterior cingulate cortex and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Citalopram failed to induce any significant reductions in BOLD signal in both tasks. BI 1358894-mediated inhibition of the transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily resulted in strong signal reduction in cortico-limbic brain regions, thereby supporting development of this mechanism of action for MDD patients.

Exogenous estradiol and oxytocin modulate sex differences in hippocampal reactivity during the encoding of episodic memories

Considerable evidence supports sex differences in episodic memory. The hormones estradiol and oxytocin both affect episodic memory and may contribute to these sex differences, but possible underlying hormonal interactions have not been tested in a sample involving both sexes. To this end, we conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel-group functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study including healthy free-cycling women (n = 111) and men (n = 115). The fMRI session was conducted under four experimental conditions: 1. transdermal estradiol (2 mg) and intranasal oxytocin (24 IU), 2. transdermal placebo and intranasal oxytocin, 3. transdermal estradiol and intranasal placebo, 4. transdermal placebo and intranasal placebo. Participants were scanned during the encoding of positive, neutral, and negative scenes. Recognition memory was tested three days following the scanning sessions without additional treatments. Under placebo, women showed a significantly better recognition memory and increased hippocampal responses to subsequently remembered items independent of the emotional valence compared to men. The separate treatments with either hormone significantly diminished this mnemonic sex difference and reversed the hippocampal activation pattern. However, the combined treatments produced no significant effect. Collectively, the results suggest that both hormones play a crucial role in modulating sex differences in episodic memory. Furthermore, possible antagonistic interactions between estradiol and oxytocin could explain previously observed opposing hormonal effects in women and men.

Attentional bias toward negative stimuli in PTSD: an eye-tracking study.

Research on biased processing of aversive stimuli in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has produced inconsistent results between response time (RT) and eye-tracking studies. Recent RT-based results of dot-probe studies showed no attentional bias (AB) for threat while eye-tracking research suggested heightened sustained attention for this information. Here, we used both RT-based and eye-tracking measures to explore the dynamics of AB to negative stimuli in PTSD. Twenty-three individuals diagnosed with PTSD, 23 trauma-exposed healthy controls, and 23 healthy controls performed an emotional dot-probe task with pairs of negative and neutral scenes presented for either 1 or 2 s. Analyses included eye movements during the presentation of the scenes and RT associated with target localization. There was no evidence for an AB toward negative stimuli in PTSD from RT measures. However, the main eye-tracking results revealed that all three groups showed longer dwell times on negative pictures than neutral pictures at 1 s and that this AB was stronger for individuals with PTSD. Moreover, although AB disappeared for the two groups of healthy controls with prolonged exposure, it persisted for individuals with PTSD. PTSD is associated with an AB toward negative stimuli, characterized by heightened sustained attention toward negative scenes once detected. This study sheds light on the dynamics of AB to negative stimuli in PTSD and encourages us to consider optimized therapeutic interventions targeting abnormal AB patterns.

Right medial temporal lobe structures particularly impact early stages of affective picture processing.

Human vision prioritizes emotional stimuli. This is reflected in stronger electrocortical activation in response to emotional than neutral stimuli, measurable on the surface of the head. Feedback projections from brain structures deep within the medial temporal lobes (mTLs), in particular the amygdala, are thought to give rise to this phenomenon, although causal evidence is rare. Given the many pathways involved in visual processing, the influence of mTL structures could be restricted to specific time windows. Therefore, we delineate the temporal dynamics of the impact of right mTL structures on affective picture processing, investigating event‐related potentials (ERPs) in 19 patients (10 female) with right mTL resections and 19 individually matched healthy participants, while they viewed negative and neutral scenes. Groups differed significantly at early‐ and mid‐latency processing stages. Patients with right mTL resection, unlike controls, showed no (P1: 90–140 ms) or marginal (N1: 170–220 ms) emotion modulation. At mid‐latency (early posterior negativity: 220–370 ms), emotion modulation over the ipsi‐resectional right hemisphere was smaller in patients than in controls, but groups did not differ over the left hemisphere. During late parietal positivities (400–650 ms and 650–900 ms), both groups had similar emotion modulation. Our results demonstrate that right mTL structures attenuate particularly early processing of affectively negative scenes. This is theoretically consistent with an initial amygdala‐dependent feedforward sweep in visual emotion processing whose absence is successively compensated. Findings specify the impact of right mTL structures on emotional picture processing and highlight the value of time‐resolved measures in affective neuroscience.

Emotional content of the event but not mood influences false memory

SummaryIn the present research, we used the misinformation paradigm to investigate the effects of participants' mood during encoding of an event, and the emotional content of the event on false memory. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three mood‐induction groups (positive, negative, or neutral) and they all watched a video of an event that was comprised of positive, negative, and neutral scenes. Participants returned 24‐h later, and were randomly assigned to one of three question groups (misleading, leading, or neutral). False memory was higher for information pertaining to the negative scenes of the event than for information pertaining to the positive scenes of the event. Mood during encoding, however, did not influence false memory of the event. These findings have important practical implications in the context of the courtroom where to‐be‐remembered events and witnesses' mood are often emotionally laden.

Social-specific impairment of negative emotion perception in alexithymia.

Alexithymia has been characterized as an impaired ability of emotion processing and regulation. The definition of alexithymia does not include a social component. However, there is some evidence that social cognition may be compromised in individuals with alexithymia. Hence, emotional impairments associated with alexithymia may extend to socially relevant information. Here, we recorded electrophysiological responses of individuals meeting the clinically relevant cutoff for alexithymia (ALEX; n = 24) and individuals without alexithymia (NonALEX; n = 23) while they viewed affective scenes that varied on the dimensions of sociality and emotional valence during a rapid serial visual presentation task. We found that ALEX exhibited lower accuracy and larger N2 than NonALEX in the perception of social negative scenes. Source reconstruction revealed that the group difference in N2 was localized at the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Irrespective of emotional valence, ALEX showed stronger alpha power than NonALEX in social but not non-social conditions. Our findings support the hypothesis of social processing being selectively affected by alexithymia, especially for stimuli with negative valence. Electrophysiological evidence suggests altered deployment of attentional resources in the perception of social-specific emotional information in alexithymia. This work sheds light on the neuropsychopathology of alexithymia and alexithymia-related disorders.

Neuroimaging of emotional dysregulation in multiple sclerosis: relationship with alexithymia

Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) often show alexithymia, but the brain mechanisms underlying this emotional disorder remains unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate alterations of emotion processing and emotion regulation in patients with MS, and their relationships with alexithymia. Nineteen MS patients with minimal disability and twenty healthy control (HC) participants took part in this cross-sectional study. During fMRI, participants viewed scenes conveying negative or positive emotions, and were asked to rate the intensity of their emotional state (1) after spontaneous viewing and (2) after emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal). Self-reported questionnaires targeting alexithymia and other affective disorders were collected, in addition to functional and anatomical MRI. We compared brain activity and functional connectivity between each group during emotion processing and reappraisal. Moreover, we performed correlation analyses between affective questionnaire scores, subjective emotion ratings, brain activity, and structural integrity. Results showed a higher rate of alexithymia in MS patients. Globally, subjective ratings of emotional state were similar between MS and HC during both spontaneous perception and reappraisal. However, in both task conditions, the MS group showed increased responses to emotional scenes in the orbital inferior frontal gyrus, compared with controls. Moreover, during the reappraisal of negative scenes, these regions displayed increased functional connectivity with the amygdala, whose activity was positively correlated with alexithymia severity in MS. Our findings suggest a direct relationship between alexithymia and a lack of down-regulation of amygdala activity in response to negative emotions during reappraisal in MS. Moreover, they highlight compensatory mechanisms in minimally disabled MS patients, recruiting fronto-striatal circuits, which may serve to preserve homeostasis of amygdala activity and affective state.

Right Hemisphere Memory Bias Does Not Extend to Involuntary Memories for Negative Scenes.

Attention is unequally distributed across the visual field. Due to greater right than left hemisphere activation for visuospatial attention, people attend slightly more to the left than the right side. As a result, people voluntarily remember visual stimuli better when it first appears in the left than the right visual field. But does this effect-termed a right hemisphere memory bias-also enhance involuntary memory? We manipulated the presentation location of 100 highly negative images (chosen to increase the likelihood that participants would experience any involuntary memories) in three conditions: predominantly leftward (right hemisphere bias), predominantly rightward (left hemisphere bias), or equally in both visual fields (bilateral). We measured subsequent involuntary memories immediately and for 3 days after encoding. Contrary to predictions, biased hemispheric processing did not affect short- or long-term involuntary memory frequency or duration. Future research should measure hemispheric differences at retrieval, rather than just encoding.

Framework for Unknown Airport Detection in Broad Areas Supported by Deep Learning and Geographic Analysis

Airports serve as important economic and military facilities, and thus, their spatial distribution can strongly impact people's lives and social economy. However, existing airport databases have incomplete information and low accuracy rates owing to the high cost associated with updates and lack of timely information. Due to the complexity of broad-area scenes, the accuracy of airport detection using only image recognition is extremely low. This article proposes a framework for detecting unknown airport distributions in a broad research area based on deep learning and geographic analysis. First, we extracted correct points from an existing airport database, and a positive and negative scene classification model based on Google image data was trained to scan and extract candidate airport regions. Next, the airport confidence was evaluated to extract the positions of airports in the candidate area. Simultaneously, geographical data such as road networks and water systems were used to comprehensively analyze the detection results. For the 21 9040.5 km <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> (Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang) study area, the recall rate of known airports of this framework was 96.4%, and the airport integrity rate was 97.2%. The speed was approximately 20 times faster than that of traditional visual searches. Through systematic comparison, eight airports were newly discovered; however, one established database airport was missing. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework can validly detect unknown airports with high accuracy in a broad area and concurrently, expand the applications of deep learning, remote sensing, and geography.

Prioritization and Interference of Emotional Information in Briefly Presented Scenes: Selection Advantage for Positive Emotional Scenes

Previous studies have repeatedly demonstrated the attentional prioritization of emotional information over neutral information. However, the parsing of interference from negative and positive stimuli has not received the same attention. In the study reported here, we examined the effect of real-world visual scenes of neutral, positive, and negative valence, as well as the effect of both high- and low-arousal (differentially categorized based on their arousal and valence ratings) on scene gist identification. Using a partial-report paradigm, participants were asked to report the gist of a post-cued scene from a briefly-presented array of four scenes. Scene gist identification performance was significantly higher for positive scenes, regardless of arousal, than for negative scenes. All emotional scenes, regardless of valence and arousal, interfered with reporting the gist of neutral scenes. The findings support the hypothesis that emotional scenes more often interfere with processing of neutral scenes and are selectively attended to during briefly-presented scene arrays. Moreover, the results suggest that the identification and the interference of positive, high-arousal scenes are prioritized in visual information processing.

Analysis of negative school scenes and comments expressed in webtoons: Focusing on career counseling scenes

Analysis of negative school scenes and comments expressed in webtoons: Focusing on career counseling scenes

Early integration of affectively contextual information when processing low-intensity fearful faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

In daily social situations, faces rarely appear in isolation and are often contextual. This study investigated individuals' behavioral and neural responses to facial expressions with different intensities embedded in emotional scenes. Participants were presented with neutral, low-intensity, and prototypical fearful expressions embedded in positive and negative scenes and instructed to categorize the facial expressions as neutral or fearful. The behavioral results showed that neutral and low-intensity fearful expressions embedded in negative scenes were rated as fearful significantly more frequently than the same faces embedded in positive scenes. Event-related potential analyses revealed the time course of the integration of contextual information when processing facial expressions. N170 modulation by scene valence was found for low-intensity and prototypical fearful expressions, showing greater N170 elicited by negative than positive scenes. The results suggest that affective information extracted from contextual scenes influences the processing of facial emotions in the early perceptual encoding stage. Furthermore, the pattern of effect varies for different intensities of expressions.

Gender differences in the experienced emotional intensity of experimentally induced memories of negative scenes

It is well documented that women have an increased risk of emotional disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Such disorders are typically characterized by intrusive memories and rumination of past events, but findings are mixed as to whether women have enhanced access to memories of emotional events. Some studies have found that women, compared with men, report more frequent and more intense memories of emotionally stressful events, whereas other studies have failed to replicate this effect. These conflicting findings may reflect the use of different memory sampling techniques (e.g., retrospective vs. experimental data) and limited control for factors associated with both gender and emotional memory. The purpose of the present study was to investigate gender differences in memory for emotionally negative events, using three different sampling methods, while at the same time controlling for parameters that might co-vary with gender. Consistent with some previous studies, we found that women and men did not differ in their frequencies of emotionally negative involuntary memories. However, women rated their memories as more intense and arousing than men did, and women also reported higher increases in state anxiety after retrieval. Female gender accounted for unique variance in the emotional intensity and subjective arousal associated with negative memories, when controlling for other theoretically derived variables. The findings provide evidence that female gender is associated with a stronger emotional response to memories of negative events, but not that women remember such events more frequently than men do.

Communication skills supervisors\u2019 monitoring of history-taking performance: an observational study on how doctors and non-doctors use cues to prepare feedback

BackgroundMedical students need feedback to improve their patient-interviewing skills because self-monitoring is often inaccurate. Effective feedback should reveal any discrepancies between desired and observed performance (cognitive feedback) and indicate metacognitive cues which are diagnostic of performance (metacognitive feedback). We adapted a cue-utilization model to studying supervisors’ cue-usage when preparing feedback and compared doctors’ and non-doctors’ cue usage.MethodTwenty-one supervisors watched a video of a patient interview, choose scenes for feedback, and explained their selection. We applied content analysis to categorize and count cue-use frequency per communication pattern (structuring/facilitating) and scene performance rating (positive/negative) for both doctors and non-doctors.ResultsBoth groups used cognitive cues more often than metacognitive cues to explain their scene selection. Both groups also used metacognitive cues such as subjective feelings and mentalizing cues, but mainly the doctors mentioned ‘missing information’ as a cue. Compared to non-doctors, the doctors described more scenes showing negative performance and fewer scenes showing positive narrative-facilitating performance.ConclusionsBoth groups are well able to communicate their observations and provide cognitive feedback on undergraduates’ interviewing skills. To improve their feedback, supervisors should be trained to also recognize metacognitive cues, such as subjective feelings and mentalizing cues, and learn how to convert both into metacognitive feedback.

Rt-fMRI neurofeedback-guided cognitive reappraisal training modulates amygdala responsivity in posttraumatic stress disorder

BackgroundTraumatic experiences are associated with neurofunctional dysregulations in key regions of the emotion regulation circuits. In particular, amygdala responsivity to negative stimuli is exaggerated while engagement of prefrontal regulatory control regions is attenuated. Successful application of emotion regulation (ER) strategies may counteract this disbalance, however, application of learned strategies in daily life is hampered in individuals afflicted by posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We hypothesized that a single session of real-time fMRI (rtfMRI) guided upregulation of prefrontal regions during an emotion regulation task enhances self-control during exposure to negative stimuli and facilitates transfer of the learned ER skills to daily life. MethodsIn a cross-over design, individuals with a PTSD diagnosis after a single traumatic event (n = 20) according to DSM-IV-TR criteria and individuals without a formal psychiatric diagnosis (n = 21) underwent a cognitive reappraisal training. In randomized order, all participants completed two rtfMRI neurofeedback (NF) runs targeting the left lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) and two control runs without NF (NoNF) while using cognitive reappraisal to reduce their emotional response to negative scenes. During the NoNF runs, two %%-signs were displayed instead of the two-digit feedback (FB) to achieve a comparable visual stimulation. The project aimed at defining the clinical potential of the training according to three success markers: (1) NF induced changes in left lateral prefrontal cortex and bilateral amygdala activity during the regulation of aversive scenes compared to cognitive reappraisal alone (primary registered outcome), (2) associated changes on the symptomatic and behavioral level such as indicated by PTSD symptom severity and affect ratings, (3) clinical utility such as indicated by perceived efficacy, acceptance, and transfer to daily life measured four weeks after the training. ResultsIn comparison to the reappraisal without feedback, a neurofeedback-specific decrease in the left lateral PFC (d = 0.54) alongside an attenuation of amygdala responses (d = 0.33) emerged. Reduced amygdala responses during NF were associated with symptom improvement (r = −0.42) and less negative affect (r = −0.63) at follow-up. The difference in symptom scores exceeds requirements for a minimal clinically important difference and corresponds to a medium effect size (d = 0.64). Importantly, 75% of individuals with PTSD used the strategies in daily life during a one-month follow-up period and perceived the training as efficient. ConclusionOur findings suggest beneficial effects of the NF training indicated by reduced amygdala responses that were associated with improved symptom severity and affective state four weeks after the NF training as well as patient-centered perceived control during the training, helpfulness and application of strategies in daily life. However, reduced prefrontal involvement was unexpected. The study suggests good tolerability of the training protocol and potential for clinical use in the treatment of PTSD.

Depressive Symptoms in Late Pregnancy Disrupt Attentional Processing of Negative-Positive Emotion: An Eye-Movement Study.

This study investigated biases for negative–positive information in component processes of visual attention (initial shift vs. maintenance of gaze) among women in late pregnancy with or without depressive symptoms. Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed a series of picture pairs depicting negative, positive, and neutral scenes. Initial orienting (latency and percentage of first fixation) and gaze duration were computed. Compared with neutral pictures, the group with major depressive symptoms (MDS) were less able to sense the positive emotion-related pictures and were over-responsive to negative emotion-related pictures. The group with suspicious depressive symptoms (SDS) had an attention bias toward both positive and negative emotion-related pictures. The group with no depressive symptoms (NDS) had an attention bias toward positive emotion-related pictures and had an initial attention avoidance tendency for negative emotion-related pictures. The initial gaze direction bias score for negative emotion-related pictures was positively correlated with the severity of depressive symptoms. Therefore, women with a risk of perinatal depression have a significant bias toward negative stimuli. Hypervigilant emotion processing during pregnancy may increase a woman’s susceptibility to depression during late pregnancy. Attention away from negative information or attention toward positive information may provide a way of buffering emotional responses.

Remembering: Does the emotional content of a photograph affect boundary extension?

Observers falsely remember seeing beyond the bounds of a photograph (i.e., boundary extension [BE]). Do observers "zoom in" when viewing negative emotion photographs, resulting in boundary restriction (Safer, Christianson, Autry, & Österlund, 1998)? Studies have yielded inconsistent outcomes, perhaps because emotional valence was compared across photographs of completely different scenes. To control physical scene structure, two contrasting (negative vs. positive) emotional versions of the same scenes were created by dramatically changing individuals' facial expressions; 14 such scene pairs were selected based on participants' (n = 134) ratings of the emotional valence elicited. We attempted to enhance sensitivity to negative scene content by including participants who scored either high (n = 104) or low (n = 104) on trait rumination, which is characterized by repetitive analysis of negative mood and a narrowing of attention. They viewed either all negative or all positive emotion scenes (15 s each). These scenes were repeated at test and rated as "the same," "closer-up," or "farther away" than the stimulus view (on a 5-point scale). Participants in all groups exhibited BE, but neither emotional valence nor trait rumination affected performance, even though mood induction had occurred. Only physical scene context affected BE (irrespective of the emotional valence of the scenes). Results underscore the importance of controlling physical scene context in tests of the effect of emotion on spatial memory. The resilience of BE to negative-mood-inducing scenes is discussed in terms of the adaptive value of anticipating one's surroundings while navigating through scenes in the world. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).