Positive Emotional Bias Research Articles

A positive emotional bias in confabulatory false beliefs about place

Some neurological patients with medial frontal lesions exhibit striking confabulations. Most accounts of the cause of confabulations are cognitive, though the literature has produced anecdotal suggestions that confabulations may not be emotionally neutral, having a (‘wish-fulfilment’) bias that shapes the patient’s perception of reality in a more affectively positive direction. The present study reviewed every case ( N=16) of false beliefs about place reported in the neuroscientific literature from 1980 to 2000, with blind raters evaluating the ‘pleasantness’ of the patient’s actual and confabulated locations. In each case the confabulated location was evaluated as more pleasant. This striking finding supports the claim that there may be a systematic affective bias in the false beliefs held by neurological patients with confabulation.

The Pleasantness of False Beliefs: An Emotion-based Account of Confabulation

This paper reports an empirical reinvestigation of data collected by Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms. It focuses on neurological patients with medial frontal lesions, who exhibit striking and strongly held false beliefs, generally referred to as confabulations. Most accounts of the cause of confabulations are cognitive, focusing on the importance of memory or executive deficits. This study attempts to test the underinvestigated suggestion that confabulations may not be emotionally neutral, having a (“wish-fulfillment”) bias that shapes the patient’s perception of reality in a more affectively positive direction. When recast in psychoanalytic terms, this proposal is consistent with Kaplan-Solms and Solms’s (2000) claim about the role of Freud’s (1915) special characteristics of the system unconscious in understanding confabulation. The present study tests this claim by a quantitative investigation of the process notes from which the Kaplan-Solms and Solms account was generated. We replicated our previous claim that confabulations show a positive emotional bias, finding that the vast majority (79%) of confabulations occurred when the patients were in a low mood state and, simultaneously, when the confabulations were affectively positive. The possible importance of these findings, and a range of important methodological issues in relation to these data, are discussed.

Ratings of Emotion in Laterally Presented Faces: Sex and Handedness Effects

Sixteen right-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) and 16 left-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) were presented with cartoon faces expressing emotions ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative. A forced-choice paradigm was used in which the participants were asked to rate the faces as either positive or negative. Compared to men, women rated faces more positively, especially in response to right visual field presentations. Women rated neutral and mildly positive faces more positively in the right than in the left visual field, whereas men rated these faces consistently across visual fields. Handedness did not affect the ratings of emotion. The data suggest a positive emotional bias of the left hemisphere in women.

Volume 2 contents

This study aimed to explore the mediating and moderating effects in the relationship between personality traits and attentional bias. A cross-sectional study was conducted among Chinese medical students. A total of 1047 Chinese medical students completed self-report measures of extraversion, neuroticism, attentional control, attention to positive information (API) and negative information (ANI). The data were analyzed with correlation, structural equation modeling, and multiple linear regression. The results revealed that attentional control mediated the effects of extraversion and neuroticism on attentional bias. Moreover, the association of neuroticism and ANI, and that of extraversion and API were both moderated by attentional control. These results extended our understanding of the relationship between extraversion, neuroticism, and attentional bias, by demonstrating that attentional control may serve as a protective factor for amplifying the positive emotional bias of extraverts and alleviating or eliminating the negative emotional bias of neurotics.