Neutral Task Research Articles

Does suggestive information cause a confirmation bias in bullet comparisons?

Several researchers have argued that the confirmation bias, the tendency to selectively gather and process information such that it fits existing beliefs, is a main threat to objective forensic examinations. The goal of the present study was to empirically investigate whether examiners making bullet comparisons are indeed vulnerable to this bias. In the first experiment, six qualified examiners evaluated 6 sets of bullets that were presented to them twice. In the neutral task condition it was mentioned in the case description that there were two perpetrators and two crime scenes, whereas in the potentially biasing task condition it was mentioned that there was only one perpetrator and one crime scene. The results showed no effect of biased information on the decision outcome. An exploratory analysis revealed rather large individual differences in two cases. In a second study we compared the conclusions of first and second examiners of actual cases that were conducted in the period between 1997 and 2006. As the second examiner mostly has no context information it may be expected that the conclusion of the first examiner should be more extreme when he or she would have become prey to a confirmation bias. The results indicate an effect in the opposite direction: the first examiner gave less extreme ratings than the second one. In all, our results indicate that examiners were not affected by biased information the case description.

Attentional control capacity for emotion: An individual-difference measure of internal controlled attention

The purpose of this study was to develop an individual-difference measure of the ability to apply internal controlled attention to emotional mental representations and investigate this measure's relationship to emotion regulation. Attentional control capacity for emotion (ACCE) was measured by adapting a task-switching paradigm where participants had to shift between emotional and neutral task sets. Undergraduate students (N = 91) were randomly assigned to perform either a task measuring ACCE or an emotionally neutral switching task to determine the discriminant validity of ACCE. ACCE predicted behaviour during a stressful anagram task. Individuals who were more efficient at an emotional to neutral task switch persisted longer on the stressful task. In contrast, individuals who more efficient at a neutral to emotional task switch persisted for a shorter time on the stressful task. These results provide insight into the role of attentional deployment in emotion regulation and clinical theories of rumination and anxiety.

Cooling the heat of temptation: Mental self‐control and the automatic evaluation of tempting stimuli

AbstractThe present research investigated whether mental self‐control strategies can reduce the automatic positivity elicited by tempting stimuli. In two studies employing chocolate as the temptation of interest, we found that participants instructed to imagine a chocolate product in a nonconsummatory manner exhibited significantly less automatic positivity with regard to the product as compared to participants instructed to imagine the hedonic, consummatory aspects of the product and control participants engaged in a neutral task. These findings were replicated in a second study. Additionally, in Study 2 we found that automatic evaluations of chocolate were lowest for participants instructed to form implementation intentions to refrain from consumption. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that mental self‐control strategies such as nonconsummatory transformation and implementation intentions extend to the level of automatic processing by reducing the positivity of automatically activated affective responses. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Social closeness increases salivary progesterone in humans

We examined whether interpersonal closeness increases salivary progesterone. One hundred and sixty female college students (80 dyads) were randomly assigned to participate in either a closeness task with a partner versus a neutral task with a partner. Those exposed to the closeness induction had higher levels of progesterone relative to those exposed to the neutral task. Across conditions, progesterone increase one week later predicted the willingness to sacrifice for the partner. These results are discussed in terms of the links between social contact, stress, and health.

Emotions and eating. Self-reported and experimentally induced changes in food intake under stress

Two studies investigated the stress–eating relationship. The first examined self-reported changes in intake of snack foods, whilst the second investigated stress-induced overconsumption in a laboratory setting comparing high (HF) and low-fat (LF) snacks. Eighty-nine females completed the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) [Van Strien, T., Fritjers, J. E. R., Bergers, G. P. A., & Defares, P. B. (1986). Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire for assessment of restrained, emotional and external eating behaviour. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 5, 295–315] and a self-report measure designed to evaluate changes in eating in response to stress. Increased intake of HF snacks was associated with high emotional eating but not with restraint. A laboratory-based experiment compared intake of HF and LF snacks after ego-threatening and neutral Stroop colour-naming tasks. Intake was suppressed by 31.8% in restrained compared to unrestrained eaters across tasks. Restrained eaters consumed significantly less after ego-threat than after the neutral manipulation, but this was associated only with intake of the LF snack. Restrained eaters’ intake of dried fruit was suppressed by 33.2% after ego-threat relative to the neutral task, despite a significant increase in hunger for this group following ego-threat. These results suggest that the type and variety of foods offered influences the link between stress and eating in laboratory settings. Further research should aim to replicate and extend these findings, with a view to informing potential interventions for stress-related eating.

Electrophysiological correlates of anxious rumination

EEG coherence and EEG power response were recorded as 63 participants engaged in one of three experimental conditions: ‘personal rumination’, ‘nominal rumination’, and ‘baseline counting’. The rumination conditions were separated by a neutral (counting) task to eliminate neural carry-over effects. For personal rumination, participants spent 2 min ruminating about something in their life about which they were in two minds (i.e., in a state of personal conflict). For nominal rumination, they were presented with a conflict scenario (concerning buying a car) and instructed to ruminate about that for 2 min. The baseline counting task simply involved counting forwards from 1 at a speed comfortable to the individual. Participants completed various questionnaires to measure mood and also traits of personality (including trait anxiety). EEG data were analysed in the following wavebands: 4–6 Hz, 6–8 Hz, 8–10 Hz, 10–12 Hz, 12–20 Hz and 20–30 Hz. Results revealed that the scalp-wide EEG theta (4–6 Hz and 6–8 Hz) coherence associated with personal rumination was significantly greater than that associated with nominal rumination and baseline counting. Similarly, the scalp-wide 6–8 Hz and parietal–occipital 4–6 Hz power associated with personal rumination were significantly greater than power associated with the nominal rumination and power for baseline counting. For alpha, the 10–12 Hz scalp-wide EEG coherence associated with personal rumination was significantly greater than that associated with baseline counting. Otherwise, the scalp-wide 10–12 Hz power related to both nominal rumination and personal rumination were significantly greater than in response to baseline counting. For 20–30 Hz scalp-wide EEG power, data in response to the nominal rumination condition were significantly increased compared to data associated with the baseline counting condition. In terms of questionnaire data, tense arousal, anger/frustration, hedonic tone and energetic arousal were all influenced by rumination. This was largely in line with expectation. Also, mood state was influenced by neuroticism and state anxiety. Our EEG results are consistent with Gray and McNaughton's [Gray, J.A., McNaughton, N., 2000. The neuropsychology of Anxiety: An Anquiry into the Functions of the Septo-Hippocampal System. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford.] account of recursive processing between the septo-hippocampal system and neocortex during goal-conflict resolution inherent in rumination. Evidence of posterior cingulate involvement in this processing was also discussed. Recommendations for future research, aimed at further evaluating the role of the SHS and the posterior cingulated, were outlined. Effects found in alpha were linked to increased vigilance whilst effects in beta were linked to cognitive and emotional aspects of the task. We conclude that these data provide new information of the neural processes associated with the psychological state of anxious rumination and, thus, hold implications for understanding normal and pathological anxiety.

Recognition of facial emotion in low vision: A flexible usage of facial features

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a major cause of visual impairment in people older than 50 years in Western countries, affecting essential tasks such as reading and face recognition. Here we investigated the mechanisms underlying the deficit in recognition of facial expressions in an AMD population with low vision. Pictures of faces displaying different emotions with the mouth open or closed were centrally displayed for 300 ms. Participants with AMD with low acuity (mean 20/200) and normally sighted age-matched controls performed one of two emotion tasks: detecting whether a face had an expression or not (expressive/non expressive (EXNEX) task) or categorizing the facial emotion as happy, angry, or neutral (categorization of expression (CATEX) task). Previous research has shown that healthy observers are mainly using high spatial frequencies in an EXNEX task while performance at a CATEX task was preferentially based on low spatial frequencies. Due to impaired processing of high spatial frequencies in central vision, we expected and observed that AMD participants failed at deciding whether a face was expressive or not but categorized normally the emotion of the face (e.g., happy, angry, neutral). Moreover, we observed that AMD participants mostly identified emotions using the lower part of the face (mouth). Accuracy did not differ between the two tasks for normally sighted observers. The results indicate that AMD participants are able to identify facial emotion but must base their decision mainly on the low spatial frequencies, as they lack the perception of finer details.

Implicit and explicit memory for affective passages in temporal lobectomy patients

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content, respectively, as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times; this target passage was alternated with other previously unread passages, and all passages had the same number of words. The Explicit Affective and Neutral Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding passage content. Verbal priming effects in terms of improved reading speed with repetition for the target but not non-target passages were found for patients with both left and right temporal lobectomies. As in the Burton, Rabin et al. [Burton, L., Rabin, L., Vardy, S.B., Frohlich, J., Wyatt, G., Dimitri, D., Constante, S., Guterman, E. (2004). Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages. Brain and Cognition, 54(3), 218–224] normative study, there were no interactions between this priming effect and affective/neutral content. For the explicit tasks, items from the repeated passages were remembered better than the unrepeated passages, and there was a trend for information from the affective passages to be remembered better than the neutral passages, similar to the normative pattern. The RTL group did not show the normative pattern of slower reading speed for affective compared to neutral passages that the LTL group showed. Thus, the present findings support the idea that intact right medial temporal structures are important for affective content to influence some aspects of verbal processing.

Reasoning and Delusion Proneness

The present study was an investigation into the reasoning of delusion prone individuals. Seventy healthy individuals in the general population completed a measure of delusion proneness and engaged in 8 trials of difficult probabilistic reasoning tasks, 4 emotionally neutral and 4 emotionally salient, and were asked to report their level of confidence in their decisions. While delusion prone individuals did not request any fewer stimuli on reasoning tasks than did individuals who were not delusion prone, delusion prone individuals were more confident in their decisions on the neutral task than individuals who were not delusion prone and were more confident in their decision on the first trial, regardless of the type of stimuli presented. Further, despite requesting less information on neutral than salient tasks, delusion prone individuals reported equivalent confidence on both tasks. Delusion proneness and delusion onset may be related to overconfidence in decisions, particularly overconfidence in initial judgment.

Cognitive mechanisms underlying implicit negative self concept in dysphoria.

Whereas explicit measures of the self-concept typically demonstrate a negative bias in depressed individuals, implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), revealed an opposite, positive bias. To address this inconsistent pattern, the authors examined, using a novel paradigm, mental set maintenance (i.e., the difficulty of maintaining active a required mental set) and set operation (the efficiency of executing the mental set while it is maintained). Dysphoric (N = 33) and nondysphoric (N = 30) participants alternated between an IAT focusing on self reference and a matched neutral task. Nondysphorics had greater difficulty in maintaining a negative self reference task compared to a neutral task. Conversely, dysphorics did not exhibit such difficulty, and they maintained a negative self-reference task more easily than nondysphorics. No group differences were evinced in smoothness of set operation. These results suggest that the shield protecting nondysphorics from maintaining negative mental sets is absent in dysphorics.

Extraversion and the consequences of social interaction on affect repair

This study explores the interaction of extraversion and social interaction on affect repair. Following a negative affect induction, participants engaged in a neutral discussion task alone or in the presence of a pleasant and supportive confederate. Results reveal that extraversion predicted affect repair in the solitary condition with extraverts (vs. introverts) experiencing a greater enhancement of positive affect. In the social condition, extraversion did not predict repair; all individuals benefited from the interaction. Thus, when alone, introverts demonstrated a maladaptive affect repair profile that was abated in the presence of a supportive individual. Other results reveal that the social condition produced the largest affect repair. These findings suggest that, while extraverts exhibit more effective affect repair when alone, pleasant interaction facilitates affect repair for all individuals (even introverts).

Benevolent Sexism Toward Men and Women: Justification of the Traditional System and Conventional Gender Roles in Spain

The present study aimed to explore sexist attitudes in young people and to investigate the role of these ideologies in the contribution of boys and girls to housework. For this purpose, 139 Spanish high school students (67 females and 72 males) responded to the ASI and AMI scales (Glick and Fiske in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70:491–512, 1996, Psychology of Women Quarterly 23:519–536, 1999) and assessed their contribution to housework in tasks considered traditionally done by women (highly gender-typed) or more neutral tasks (sex-neutral). Results showed that girls contributed significantly more to housework than boys. In addition, correlation analyses showed that benevolent sexism toward women, men and hostility toward men were significant related to highly gender typed tasks only in the female sample. This result shows the relevance of sexist ideologies in maintaining established differences between genders.

Assessment of Psychophysiological Stress Reactions During a Traumatic Reminder in Patients Treated With EMDR

This study investigates changes of stress-related psychophysiological reactions after treatment with EMDR. Sixteen patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following type I trauma underwent psychometric and psychophysiological assessment during exposure to script-driven imagery before and after EMDR and at 6-month follow-up. Psychophysiological assessment included heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) during a neutral task and during trauma script listening. PTSD symptoms as assessed by questionnaire decreased significantly after treatment and during follow-up in comparison to pretreatment. After EMDR, stress-related HR reactions during trauma script were significantly reduced, while HRV indicating parasympathetic tone increased both during neutral script and during trauma script. These results were maintained during the follow-up assessment. Successful EMDR treatment may be associated with reduced psychophysiological stress reactions and heightened parasympathetic tone.

Paranoid cognitions, failure, and focus of attention in college students

Three experiments examined aspects of the link between focus of attention, manipulated by use of video camera and monitor, and paranoid and depressive cognitions in a sample of college students. In Experiment 1 participants were exposed to either a failure or neutral task, under high (HSA) or low self-awareness (LSA) conditions. HSA triggered paranoid cognitions on neutral and failure tasks; failure alone triggered depressive cognitions. In Experiment 2 the camera switched focus thrice between participant and experimenter using only neutral tasks. Paranoia scores initially were higher in the HSA condition. Paranoia scores increased when participants moved from LSA to HSA. Paranoia scores never fell when moving from HSA to LSA conditions. Experiment 3 used only HSA and failure, and showed how a priming task that increased the accessibility of either positive or negative self-cognitions led to significantly different paranoia and depression scores.

Annoyance from and tolerance to sounds

Subjective measurements were performed on 40 normally hearing subjects to determine the annoyance caused by 10 sounds having distinctly different acoustical characteristics presented at sound pressure levels (SPLs) of 80,90 and 100 dB. In addition, subjective measurements were obtained to estimate how long the subjects could tolerate performing a neutral, manual and mental task while being exposed to the 10 sounds at 80, 90 and 100-dB SPL, and determine which sounds were the most annoying and could be tolerated for the least amount of time while performing the neutral, manual and mental tasks. The measurements showed that the SPL was the most dominant factor in the perceived annoyance of the sounds examined and the time that they could be tolerated. The higher the SPLs, the greater the perceived annoyance and the less time each sound could be tolerated, regardless of the task. At a given SPL, however, some sounds were deemed more annoying and less tolerable than others. The sounds with multiple frequencies, frequency and/or amplitude changes and time varying patterns were deemed the most annoying and least tolerable. Conversely, the broadband, steady state sounds were deemed the least annoying and most easily tolerated. At a SPL of 100 dB, the subjects estimated they could tolerate sounds approximately 60% longer for performing a neutral task than for performing a manual task and approximately 40% longer for performing a manual task than for performing a mental task.

Jumping to conclusions and the continuum of delusional beliefs

The present study examined the jumping to conclusions reasoning bias across the continuum of delusional ideation by investigating individuals with active delusions, delusion prone individuals, and non-delusion prone individuals. Neutral and highly self-referent probabilistic reasoning tasks were employed. Results indicated that individuals with delusions gathered significantly less information than delusion prone and non-delusion prone participants on both the neutral and self-referent tasks, ( p<.001). Individuals with delusions made less accurate decisions than the delusion prone and non-delusion prone participants on both tasks ( p<.001), yet were more confident about their decisions than were delusion prone and non-delusion prone participants on the self-referent task ( p=.002). Those with delusions and those who were delusion prone reported higher confidence in their performance on the self-referent task than they did the neutral task ( p=.02), indicating that high self-reference impacted information processing for individuals in both of these groups. The results are discussed in relation to previous research in the area of probabilistic reasoning and delusions.

Suppression of neutral and trauma targets: Implications for posttraumatic stress disorder

Recent findings suggest that thought suppression may lead to increased intrusive thoughts for trauma survivors, paradoxically increasing symptoms. Participants with trauma history, 31 with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 34 without PTSD, engaged in neutral white bear and trauma suppression tasks. A group difference was found for the trauma task and not for the neutral task. For the trauma task, both groups demonstrated an increase of trauma thoughts during suppression, but the PTSD group continued to report trauma thoughts at a higher level than the no-PTSD group post-suppression. These findings suggest that it is not an individual's general suppression ability, but the content of thoughts suppressed that leads to problems with intrusions for those with PTSD.

Emotion Concepts and Self-Focused Attention: Exploring Parallel Effects of Emotional States and Emotional Knowledge

Many experiments have found that emotional experience affects self-focused attention. Several approaches to cognition and emotion predict that conscious emotional experience may be unnecessary for this effect. To test this hypothesis, two experiments primed emotion concepts without affecting emotional experience. In Experiment 1, subliminal exposure to sad faces (relative to happy faces and neutral faces) increased self-focused attention but not subjectively experienced affect. In Experiment 2, a scrambled-sentences task that primed happy and sad emotion concepts increased self-focused attention relative to a neutral task. Thus, simply activating knowledge about emotions was sufficient to increase self-focused attention. The discussion considers implications for research on how emotional states affect self-awareness.

Facial affect decoding in schizophrenic disorders: A study using event-related potentials

Deficits in emotional processing are evident in schizophrenia, but the underlying processes are still under debate. In this study we tried to replicate findings of diminished prefrontal electroencephalographic response during facial affect recognition in healthy controls and subsequently in schizophrenic patients. As a first step, we analysed the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 36 healthy subjects during emotional expression decoding compared with neutral face viewing. Subsequently, the ERPs of 22 patients with schizophrenia were compared with the ERPs of 22 healthy subjects matched for age and sex. The hypothesised increase in the negative component at 200 ms over frontal brain regions during facial affect decoding was not found in this study. Instead we found increased positive amplitudes at 300 ms over parietal brain areas for the active affect-decoding task compared with the passive neutral face-viewing task. Interestingly, schizophrenic patients had higher amplitudes in the neutral condition than did healthy controls. This effect was more pronounced in the paranoid subgroup of patients.

The role of autonomic arousal in problem gambling.

The present study investigated the role of arousal in problem gambling. Three groups of subjects were recruited into the study corresponding to problem gamblers, high and low frequency social gamblers. For the two gambling groups, the preferred form of gambling was poker machine playing. Five different conditions were employed in order to determine under which conditions gambling related cues were related to increased autonomic arousal, as measured by skin conductance level (SCL), heart rate (HR) and frontalis electromyography (EMG). The five conditions were a neutral task, a videotaped poker machine gambling scenario presented with and without distraction, a personally relevant "win" situation and a videotaped horse race. Comparisons between responses for the videotaped poker machine gambling stimuli versus a horse-racing video task demonstrated differences only for the problem gambling group and only for SCL. No differences between these tasks emerged on the HR and EMG indices and no differences were evident for either of the social gambling groups. No changes were observed in any group when subject's cognitions were prevented by asking patients to count the number of wins made during the video play period while watching the same poker machine video. However, when personally relevant situations were presented and compared to a neutral task, differences were observed in all three groups. However, the nature of these differences varied between the groups and the different indices of arousal. For problem gamblers, increases were evident in all three measures. Increases were also observed for the control groups in comparison to the neutral task, but only in HR and SCL and not for EMG. For HR, the increases were equivalent across all three gambling groups. However, for SCL the problem gambling group became significantly more aroused than the control groups, but no differences were observed between the high and low frequency gamblers. Only the problem gambling groups evidenced significant increases in the personally relevant task compared to the neutral task for EMG. Theoretical and clinical implications of these results for the development, maintenance and treatment of problematic levels of gambling are discussed.