Using Primary Reinforcement to Enhance Translatability of a Human Affect and Decision-Making Judgment Bias Task

Good translatability of behavioral measures of affect (emotion) between human and nonhuman animals is core to comparative studies. The judgment bias (JB) task, which measures “optimistic” and “pessimistic” decision-making under ambiguity as indicators of positive and negative affective valence, has been used in both human and nonhuman animals. However, one key disparity between human and nonhuman studies is that the former typically use secondary reinforcers (e.g., money) whereas the latter typically use primary reinforcers (e.g., food). To address this deficiency and shed further light on JB as a measure of affect, we developed a novel version of a JB task for humans using primary reinforcers. Data on decision-making and reported affective state during the JB task were analyzed using computational modeling. Overall, participants grasped the task well, and as anticipated, their reported affective valence correlated with trial-by-trial variation in offered volume of juice. In addition, previous findings from monetary versions of the task were replicated: More positive prediction errors were associated with more positive affective valence, a higher lapse rate was associated with lower affective arousal, and affective arousal decreased as a function of number of trials completed. There was no evidence that more positive valence was associated with greater “optimism,” but instead, there was evidence that affective valence influenced the participants' decision stochasticity, whereas affective arousal tended to influence their propensity for errors. This novel version of the JB task provides a useful tool for investigation of the links between primary reward and punisher experience, affect, and decision-making, especially from a comparative perspective.

Intra-individual Associations of Perceived Stress, Affective Valence, and Affective Arousal with Momentary Cortisol in a Sample of Working Adults

Background Research pairing ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodology and ambulatory cortisol during daily life is still rare, as is careful testing of the within-person associations between stress, affect, and cortisol. Using a circumplex approach, we considered both valence and arousal components of affect. Purpose To examine the within-person covariation of momentary cortisol with momentary perceived stress, affective valence, and affective arousal in everyday life. Methods 115 working adults (Mage = 41.2; 76% women; 76% white) completed six EMA surveys per day over 3 days. Each assessment included reports of perceived stress and affect (used to construct indicators of affective valence and arousal), followed by a saliva sample (from which cortisol was assessed). Multi-level models were used to examine the momentary associations between perceived stress, affective valence, affective arousal, and cortisol. Results Moments characterized by higher perceived stress were associated with higher cortisol (p = .036). Affective valence covaried with cortisol (p = .003) such that more positive valence was associated with lower cortisol and more negative valence with higher cortisol. Momentary affective arousal was not related to cortisol (p = .131). When all predictors were tested in the same model, only valence remained a significant predictor of cortisol (p = .047). Conclusion Momentary perceived stress and affective valence, but not affective arousal, were associated with naturalistic cortisol. Cortisol was more robustly associated with affective valence than perceived stress or affective arousal. These findings extend our understanding of how moments of stress and particular characteristics of affective states (i.e., valence but not arousal) may “get under the skin” in daily life.

Pre-stimulus fluctuations in heart-synchronised neural activity predict subsequent self-association with affective stimuli

We frequently associate ourselves with certain affective attributes (e.g., I am joyful, I am lazy, etc.) and not others. However, little is understood about how such self-associations come about. Interoceptive predictive theories propose that a sense of self, especially in an affective context, results from the brain making inferences about internal bodily states. A key prediction of these theories is that for an affective attribute to be self-associated, it would depend not only on the stimulus, but also non-stimulus-specific fluctuations in one’s bodily state; a hypothesis not yet tested. We measured EEG response synchronised to the cardiac cycle – a common way to measure interoceptive neural processing – prior to the presentation of pleasant and unpleasant adjectives to participants. Participants responded if the adjectives were self-descriptive or not. We found that cardiac-pulse-synchronised neural activity prior to the presentation of unpleasant adjectives predicted whether participants subsequently associated that adjective to themselves. This effect was observed over midfrontal scalp locations, commonly observed in interoceptive neural processing. No such effect was observed for pleasant adjectives, or by randomly shuffling the cardiac peak times to account for non-interoceptive neural differences. Our results confirm a key prediction of interoceptive predictive coding theories – that bodily signals are not just modulated in response to self-related and affective arousal, but that a subjective sense of affective self arises due to neural processing of bodily signals. Our results have important implications for many neuropsychiatric disorders that involve altered self-referential processing of unpleasant stimuli.

Rousing Collective Compassion at Societal Level: Lessons from Newspaper Reports on Asian Tsunami in India

Compassion involves feeling others’ pain, being moved by it, and acting in a manner that eases the suffering. Originally conceptualized as an individual-level phenomenon, organization scholars extend the concept to the organizational level as ‘collective compassion’ and call for expanding it to societal levels. We note that the dynamics of rousing collective compassion, however, may be different in organizational as opposed to societal contexts: the observers and the sufferers are in personal or close contact in the former context, whereas mass media is often the bridge connecting both in the latter. In this paper, we seek to deepen the understanding of the dynamics of rousing collective compassion at the societal level, by delineating the elements in media reports that can feed into compassion rousing processes. Based on a thematic analysis of newspaper reports from India on the first seven days after the Asian Tsunami, we identify four groups of elements—‘attention drawing elements’, ‘cognitive framing elements’, ‘affective arousal elements’ and ‘behaviour modelling elements’—which can respectively influence each of the four individual compassion subprocesses, namely noticing, appraising, feeling and acting. We offer a conceptual model to comprehensively represent collective compassion rousing at societal level, integrating our findings with prior research.

In the Flow of Life: Capturing Affective Socializing Dynamics Using a Wearable Sensor and Intensive Daily Diaries

Interpersonal socializing is important to many sociological outcomes, but assessing the affective dynamics within interactional contexts is extremely challenging methodologically. As a first step toward capturing socializing and affective outcomes concurrently, this pilot study ( n = 118) combines intensive daily surveys with a wearable sensor that tracked affective arousal. This approach allowed the operationalization of affect along its two primary dimensions, valence and arousal, which were then linked to periods socializing with a romantic partner, a best friend, and/or a group of friends. Although socializing predicted positive and negative affective valence concurrently in time, only socializing with groups of friends consistently predicted increased affective arousal. Findings for romantic partners and/or socializing with a close friend suggest that low arousal “downtime” with close intimates may also provide important social functions. This work demonstrates a new biosignaling approach to affective dynamics broadly relevant to emotion-related sociological research.

The Impact of Visual Art and High Affective Arousal on Heuristic Decision-Making in Consumers

In marketing, the use of visual-art-based designs on products or packaging crucially impacts consumers’ decision-making when purchasing. While visual art in product packaging should be designed to induce consumer’s favorable evaluations, it should not evoke excessive affective arousal, because this may lead to the depletion of consumer’s cognitive resources. Thus, consumers may use heuristic decision-making and commit an inadvertent mistake while purchasing. Most existing studies on visual arts in marketing have focused on preference (i.e., affective valence) using subjective evaluations. To address this, we applied a neuroscientific measure, electroencephalogram (EEG) to increase experimental validity. Two successive tasks were designed to examine the effects of affective arousal and affective valence, evoked by visual artwork, on the consecutive cognitive decision-making. In task 1, to evaluate the effect of visual art, EEG of two independent groups of people was measured when they viewed abstract artwork. The abstract art of neoplasticism (AbNP) group (n = 20) was showing Mondrian’s artwork, while the abstract art of expressionism (AbEX) group (n = 18) viewed Kandinsky’s artwork. The neoplasticism movement strove to eliminate emotion in art and expressionism to express the feelings of the artist. Building on Gallese’s embodied simulation theory, AbNP and AbEX artworks were expected to induce lower and higher affect, respectively. In task 2, we investigated how the induced affect differentially influenced a succeeding cognitive Stroop task. We anticipated that the AbEX group would deplete more cognitive resources than AbNP group, based on capacity limitation theory. Significantly stronger affect was induced in the AbEX group in task 1 than in the AbNP group, especially in affective arousal. In task 2, the AbEX group showed a faster reaction time and higher error rate in the Stroop task. According to our hypotheses, the higher affective arousal state of the AbEX group might deplete more cognitive resources during task 1 and result in poorer performance in task 2 because affect impacted their cognitive resources. This is the first study using neuroscientific measures to prove that high affective arousal induced by visual arts on packaging may induce heuristic decision-making in consumers, thereby advancing our understanding of neuromarketing.

A body of evidence : ‘feeling in seeing’ predicts realness judgments for photojournalistic images.

Photography and photojournalism frame our experience of the world, especially in a culture powered by images at an unprecedented level. Images in the digital age and the era of alternative facts mediate our relations to other human beings and make our negotiation between what is real or fake challenging. We investigated how our visceral responses, as the basis of subjective feelings, influence our relation and responses to the authenticity of photojournalistic images. Higher neurophysiological and affective arousal at the first perception of an image predicted the probability with which participants would judge that image as ‘real’ in a subsequent session. These findings highlight the crucial role that physiology plays in engaging us with imagery, beyond cognitive processing. ‘Feeling in seeing’ seems to be a salient signal that at least partly determines our beliefs in a culture powered by images. By considering at the same time the underlying neural, physiological and cognitive mechanisms that guide our responses to images as well as the contextual cultural effects on how these mechanisms are recruited, these findings contribute to long-standing but still timely and multidisciplinary debates in visual culture.