Neutral Affective State Research Articles

Prioritized Identification of Fearful Eyes during the Attentional Blink Is Not Automatic.

The eye region conveys considerable information regarding an individual's emotions, motivations, and intentions during interpersonal communication. Evidence suggests that the eye regions of an individual expressing emotions can capture attention more rapidly than the eye regions of an individual in a neutral affective state. However, how attentional resources affect the processing of emotions conveyed by the eye regions remains unclear. Accordingly, the present study employed a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task: happy, neutral, or fearful eye regions were presented as the second target, with a temporal lag between two targets of 232 or 696 ms. Participants completed two tasks successively: Task 1 was to identify which species the upright eye region they had seen belonged to, and Task 2 was to identify what emotion was conveyed in the upright eye region. The behavioral results showed that the accuracy for fearful eye regions was lower than that for neutral eye regions under the condition of limited attentional resources; however, accuracy differences across the three types of eye regions did not reach significance under the condition of adequate attentional resources. These findings indicate that preferential processing of fearful expressions is not automatic but is modulated by available attentional resources.

Is Negative Affect that Bad? The Effect of Affective States on Conventional and Unconventional Creative Thinking in University Students.

The role of affective states on the creative process has been receiving the attention of researchers and has led to contradictory results. Most research in creativity has emphasized the role of affective states, mainly positive ones, on creativity levels, namely those resulting from divergent thinking tasks that reveal the unconventional way of thinking in the creative process. However, there are no studies to date that focus on the impact of affective states on conventional and unconventional thinking, during the same creative process, which consider a single creative assessment task. The aim of this experimental study was to analyze the effect of induced affective states on both conventional and unconventional thinking of creativity in adults by using the TCT-DP (Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production). Seventy-five university students, mostly female, with a mean age of 26.95 years, were randomly assigned into three affect elicitation conditions (pleasant vs. unpleasant vs. neutral). Results indicated that the negative affective state led to higher levels of conventional thinking when compared to positive and neutral affective states. However, no significant differences were found on unconventional thinking across the three conditions. Our results do not support the assumption that the negative affect has a hindering effect on creativity nor the positive affect increases creativity. Negative affect seems to promote conventional thinking, perhaps due to its cognitive correlates, which can be manifested in focusing attention and analytic thinking. Practical and theoretical implications for future research on the role of affective states on creativity are discussed.

A Case for Neutrality: Why Neutral Affect is Critical for Advancing Affective Science.

For affective science to advance, researchers will need to develop a better understanding of neutral affect. At first glance, neutral affect may seem uninteresting to some affective scientists because the goal is to investigate hedonic experiences, not the presumed absence of them. This failure to fully consider and examine neutral affect, however, limits the field's potential for new discoveries. In this paper, I discuss how a greater understanding of neutral affect can inform researchers' views of valence, subjective well-being, and behavior. I define neutral affect and discuss evidence indicating that neutral affect is a commonly felt state that occurs independently of positive and negative affect. These data suggest that to understand the entirety of the affective landscape, researchers should move beyond traditional measures of valence and consider how positive, negative, and neutral affective states might inform their phenomenon of interest. I then illustrate how neutral affect might be a key, albeit complex, influence on subjective well-being. I also discuss how neutrality might be a fundamental and unique predictor of inaction. If affective scientists want to fully understand how feelings operate and function, it is essential that they explore the possibility that neutral affect might hold some of the essential clues needed to solve their affective puzzle.

Modifying the Trier Social Stress Test to Induce Positive Affect.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00074-6.

Subject-independent decoding of affective states using functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

Affective decoding is the inference of human emotional states using brain signal measurements. This approach is crucial to develop new therapeutic approaches for psychiatric rehabilitation, such as affective neurofeedback protocols. To reduce the training duration and optimize the clinical outputs, an ideal clinical neurofeedback could be trained using data from an independent group of volunteers before being used by new patients. Here, we investigated if this subject-independent design of affective decoding can be achieved using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals from frontal and occipital areas. For this purpose, a linear discriminant analysis classifier was first trained in a dataset (49 participants, 24.65±3.23 years) and then tested in a completely independent one (20 participants, 24.00±3.92 years). Significant balanced accuracies between classes were found for positive vs. negative (64.50 ± 12.03%, p<0.01) and negative vs. neutral (68.25 ± 12.97%, p<0.01) affective states discrimination during a reactive block consisting in viewing affective-loaded images. For an active block, in which volunteers were instructed to recollect personal affective experiences, significant accuracy was found for positive vs. neutral affect classification (71.25 ± 18.02%, p<0.01). In this last case, only three fNIRS channels were enough to discriminate between neutral and positive affective states. Although more research is needed, for example focusing on better combinations of features and classifiers, our results highlight fNIRS as a possible technique for subject-independent affective decoding, reaching significant classification accuracies of emotional states using only a few but biologically relevant features.

Negative and Neutral Valences of Affective Theory of Mind are More Impaired than Positive Valence in Clinically Stable Schizophrenia Patients.

ObjectivePeople with schizophrenia show impairment in social cognition, such as emotion recognition and theory of mind. The current study aims to compare the ability of clinically stable schizophrenia patients to decode the positive, negative and neutral affective mental state of others with educational match-paired normal control. Methods50 people with schizophrenia and 50 matched controls were compared on the positive, negative and neutral emotional valence of affective theory of mind using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Tests.ResultsThe results showed that people with schizophrenia performed worse in negative and neutral emotional valence than normal controls; however, no significant differences in decoding positive valence were found. Conclusion Our data suggest that there is variability in the performance of affective theory of mind according to emotion valence; the impairments seem to be specific to only negative and neutral emotions, but not positive ones.

Semi-Supervised Learning to Perceive Children's Affective States in a Tablet Tutor

Like good human tutors, intelligent tutoring systems should detect and respond to students' affective states. However, accuracy in detecting affective states automatically has been limited by the time and expense of manually labeling training data for supervised learning. To combat this limitation, we use semi-supervised learning to train an affective state detector on a sparsely labeled, culturally novel, authentic data set in the form of screen capture videos from a Swahili literacy and numeracy tablet tutor in Tanzania that shows the face of the child using it. We achieved 88% leave-1-child-out cross-validated accuracy in distinguishing pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral affective states, compared to only 61% for the best supervised learning method we tested. This work contributes toward using automated affect detection both off-line to improve the design of intelligent tutors, and at runtime to respond to student affect based on input from a user-facing tablet camera or webcam.

Does Neutral Affect Exist? How Challenging Three Beliefs About Neutral Affect Can Advance Affective Research.

Researchers interested in affect have often questioned the existence of neutral affective states. In this paper, we review and challenge three beliefs that researchers might hold about neutral affect. These beliefs are: (1) it is not possible to feel neutral because people are always feeling something, (2) neutrality is not an affective state because affect must be positively or negatively valenced, and (3) neutral affect is unimportant because it does not influence cognition or behavior. We review the reasons these beliefs might exist and provide empirical evidence that questions them. Specifically, we argue that neutral affect is a felt experience that provides important valence-relevant information, which influences cognition and behavior. By dispelling these beliefs about neutral affect, we hope to shine a light on the assumptions that researchers hold about the nature of affect and to provide novel theoretical and methodological perspectives that help advance our understanding of the affective landscape.

Influence of Awe on Green Consumption: The Mediating Effect of Psychological Ownership.

The increasing demand for environmental protection has given rise to burgeoning research on green consumption. The present research adds to this expanding literature by investigating a novel predictor of consumer green consumption: awe. As a self-transcendent emotion, awe arises when people encounter perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm their existing knowledge and mental structures, and, meanwhile, this also elicits a need for accommodation. This research proposes and demonstrates that, compared with happiness and a neutral affective state, experience of awe promotes green consumption via an enhanced psychological ownership of nature. Moreover, this research identifies a condition by showing that, while awe promotes green consumption when interdependent self-construal is activated, this effect diminishes when independent self-construal is activated.

Author Reply: An Appraisal Perspective on Neutral Affective States

We applaud Gasper (2018) for reviewing five approaches to operationalizing neutral states. To supplement Gasper’s important contribution, we express the five neutral conditions at the appraisal level with the hope of clarifying their defining features and helping researchers to generate suitable neutral conditions.

Tests improve memory – no matter if you feel good or bad while taking them

ABSTRACTBased on studies demonstrating that testing promotes better long-term retention than restudying (i.e., the testing effect), testing has been recommended as a powerful tool to boost knowledge acquisition in educational settings. However, a factor ubiquitous in real-life learning contexts has been ignored to date: the learner's affective state. To examine whether the learner's affective state influences the testing effect, we conducted two experiments. We employed a standard testing-effect paradigm consisting of an initial study phase and a subsequent restudy/testing phase, and induced negative, neutral, or positive affective states either before participants initially studied short expository texts (Experiment 1) or before they restudied or were tested on them (Experiment 2). After one week, memory for the texts was tested. In both experiments, previously tested material was better remembered than previously restudied material. However, in none of the experiments, did the memory advantage of testing over restudying vary as a function of affect condition. Hence, the present results suggest that testing seems to benefit long-term retention independently of the learner's affective state.

Please be logical, I am in a bad mood: An electrophysiological study of mood effects on reasoning

Several behavioral studies have reported a detrimental effect of emotion on reasoning tasks, either when the content of the reasoning and/or the mood state of the individual are emotionally loaded. However, the neural mechanisms involved in this phenomena remain largely unexplored. In an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, we examined the consequences of an induced mood over the electrophysiological signals obtained while processing logical and illogical categorical conclusions. Prior to performing a syllogism reading task, we aimed to induce, by using short film clips, high arousal negative and positive moods and neutral affective states to participants in three separate recording sessions. Our mood induction procedure was only successful at inducing a highly arousing negative state. Behaviorally, participants committed more errors overall while judging the invalidity versus the validity of illogical and logical conclusions, respectively, but no influences from mood state emerged at this logical validity task. Electrophysiologically and overall a negative going N400 deflection was larger for illogical relative to logical conclusions in a parietal region between 300 and 420 ms. However, further analysis revealed that the logical conclusions were only more expected (smaller N400 amplitudes) in the negative relative to the neutral and the positive sessions, providing support to theoretical views that posit that a more analytic reasoning style might be implemented under a negative mood state. These results provide further electrophysiological evidence of the influence of mood on other cognitive processes, particularly on the anticipation and processing of logical conclusions during online reasoning tasks.

More Than Money: Experienced Positive Affect Reduces Risk-Taking Behavior on a Real-World Gambling Task.

Previous research indicates that when people participate in multi-trial games of chance, the results of previous trials impact subsequent wager size. For example, the “house money” and “break even” effects suggest that an individual’s risk-taking propensity increases when financially winning or losing during a gambling session. Additionally, the “mood maintenance hypothesis” and affect regulation hypothesis suggest that people in positive and negative affective states are less and more likely to gamble than when in neutral affective states, respectively. In the present study, participants completed a series of trials on three computerized slot machines with varying expected values (EV; −10, 0, +10%) of return on investment, and they were paid a percentage of their final bankrolls in real money. Although results did not support the “house money” or “break even” effects, the “mood maintenance hypothesis” was robustly supported in all EV conditions. This is some of the first evidence supporting this theory using an ecologically valid, real-money gambling task.

Positive Attitude Toward Alcohol Predicts Actual Consumption in Young Adults: An Ecological Implicit Association Test

Excessive alcohol drinking, particularly among college students, is a major health concern worldwide. The implicit associations between alcohol-related concepts and affective attributes have been repeatedly postulated as a reliable predictor of these drinking behaviors. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is considered one of the most reliable tasks for measuring these associations and their impact on actual alcohol consumption. However, the majority of these tests used verbal materials as stimuli, thus being unadapted to some categories of participants. The present study aims to develop a new IAT, using pictures exclusively as stimuli, to provide a cross-cultural and language-independent evaluation of implicit associations that is more closely related to real-life drinking contexts. Sixty-five undergraduate young adults took part in this study. A new visual IAT was used to measure the implicit association between alcohol cues and alcohol-related positive attributes. Pictorial stimuli, previously validated, were used to represent both target (alcohol vs. soft drinks) and attribute (positive vs. neutral affective states) categories in seven successive experimental blocks. The IAT was followed by self-reported measures of explicit alcohol-related expectancies and alcohol consumption. The new IAT highlighted significant implicit associations between positively valenced and alcohol-related representations conveyed by pictures, with good internal consistency, thus proving its validity and reliability. Importantly, regression analyses showed that these implicit associations are a strong predictor of self-reported alcohol consumption. This visual IAT further underscores that positive implicit associations with alcohol constitute an important factor in predicting effective alcohol-related behaviors and offers a more ecological and cross-cultural way to test these associations in non-alcohol-dependent populations. Moreover, this version of the IAT might be implemented in prevention and prophylactic programs.

Utilizing Neutral Affective States in Research: Theory, Assessment, and Recommendations

Even though researchers regularly use neutral affect induction procedures (AIPs) as a control condition in their work, there is little consensus on what is neutral affect. This article reviews five approaches that researchers have used to operationalize neutral AIPs: to produce a(n) (a) minimal affective state, (b) in-the-middle state, (c) deactivated state, (d) typical state, or (e) indifferent state. For each view, the article delineates the theoretical basis for the neutral AIP, how to assess it, and provides recommendations for when and how to use it. The goal of the article is to encourage researchers to state their theoretical assumptions about neutral affect, to validate those assumptions, and to make appropriate conclusions based on them.

The influence of affective state on exogenous attention to emotional distractors: behavioral and electrophysiological correlates

The interplay between exogenous attention to emotional distractors and the baseline affective state has not been well established yet. The present study aimed to explore this issue through behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants (N = 30) completed a digit categorization task depicted over negative, positive or neutral distractor background pictures, while they experienced negative, positive and neutral affective states elicited by movie scenes. Behavioral results showed higher error rates and longer reaction times for negative distractors than for neutral and positive ones, irrespective of the current emotional state. Neural indices showed that the participants’ affective state modulated N1 amplitudes, irrespective of distractor type, while the emotional charge of distractors modulated N2, irrespective of the emotional state. Importantly, an interaction of state and distractor type was observed in LPP. These results demonstrate that exogenous attention to emotional distractors is independent from modulating effects of the emotional baseline state at early, automatic stages of processing. However, attention to emotional distractors and affective state interact at later latencies.

Negative induced mood influences word production: An event-related potentials study with a covert picture naming task

The present event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated the effects of mood on phonological encoding processes involved in word generation. For this purpose, negative, positive and neutral affective states were induced in participants during three different recording sessions using short film clips. After the mood induction procedure, participants performed a covert picture naming task in which they searched letters. The negative compared to the neutral mood condition elicited more negative amplitudes in a component peaking around 290ms. Furthermore, results from source localization analyses suggested that this activity was potentially generated in the left prefrontal cortex. In contrast, no differences were found in the comparison between positive and neutral moods. Overall, current data suggest that processes involved in the retrieval of phonological information during speech generation are impaired when participants are in a negative mood. The mechanisms underlying these effects were discussed in relation to linguistic and attentional processes, as well as in terms of the use of heuristics.

The effect of negative affects varying in motivational intensity on attentional flexibility

AbstractMany studies have found that negative affect decreased attentional flexibility. But the motivational dimensional model of affect proposed that negative affect high in motivational intensity narrows attentional focus, whereas negative affect low in motivational intensity broadens attentional focus. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between negative affective states varying in motivational intensity and attentional flexibility. Experiment 1 compared the attentional consequences of negative affect low in motivational intensity (sadness) relative to a high-motivation negative affect (disgust). Results indicated that low-motivation negative affect increased attentional flexibility on a covert attentional orienting task. Experiment 2 compared the attentional consequences of negative affect low in motivational intensity (sadness) relative to a neutral affective state and found that the low-motivation negative affect (sadness) relative to the neutral affective state increased at...

Influence of Incidental Discrete Emotions on Health Risk Perception and Persuasion

ABSTRACTThis research examines the effects of two incidental discrete emotions—fear and anger—on health risk perception (i.e., perceived susceptibility to a health problem) and persuasion. In two experiments, fear and anger were induced before participants were exposed to a public service announcement that advocated sun protection behaviors to prevent skin cancer (Experiment 1) or flossing to prevent gum diseases (Experiment 2). It was found that fearful participants perceived greater susceptibility to the health risk than angry participants and those who were in a neutral affective state. Angry participants did not differ from those in a neutral affective state in terms of perceived susceptibility. There was mixed evidence that fear exerted an indirect effect on attitude toward the recommended health behavior and intention to perform the health behavior through health risk perception. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Design and Validation of Affective Warning Pictorial on Cigarette Labels

The purpose of present study were to design and validate affective warning pictorials for cigarette label in Thailand. Brainstorming and survey techniques were used to collect the idea of possible warning pictorials. All ideas were grouped for finding candidated pictorials. Then, primary sixty warning pictorials were collected and equally classified into three affective warning pictorial groups as positive, neutral, and negative. Sixty Thai male engineering students participated in affective validation of warning pictorials using SAM rating. The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) was used to manipulate the affective state of participants to neutral affective state before the experiments. The results revealed that all affective warning pictorials were successfully evoked target affective states on participants. After refining, thirty affective warning pictorials were provided as positive, neutral, and negative affective warning pictorials for using on cigarette labels. Implications on the affective warning pictorials design and validation.