Intact Differentiation of Responses to Socially-Relevant Emotional Stimuli Across Psychotic Disorders: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study

Event-related potential (ERP) studies of motivated attention in schizophrenia typically show intact sensitivity to affective vs. non-affective images depicting diverse types of content. However, it is not known whether this ERP pattern: 1) extends to images that solely depict social content, (2) applies across a broad sample with diverse psychotic disorders, and (3) relates to self-reported trait social anhedonia. We examined late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes to images involving people that were normatively pleasant (affiliative), unpleasant (threatening), or neutral in 97 stable outpatients with various psychotic disorders and 38 healthy controls. Both groups showed enhanced LPP to pleasant and unpleasant vs. neutral images to a similar degree, despite lower overall LPP in patients. Within the patients, there were no significant LPP differences among subgroups (schizophrenia vs. other psychotic disorders; affective vs. non-affective psychosis) for the valence effect (pleasant/unpleasant vs. neutral). Higher social anhedonia showed a small, significant relation to lower LPP to pleasant images across all groups. These findings suggest intact motivated attention to social images extends across psychotic disorder subgroups. Dimensional transdiagnostic analyses revealed a modest association between self-reported trait social anhedonia and an LPP index of neural sensitivity to pleasant affiliative images.

Negative valence effect in affective forecasting: The unique impact of the valence among dispositional and contextual factors for certain life events

Decades of research on affective forecasting have shown a persistent intensity bias—a strong tendency by which people overestimate their future hedonic response for positive events and underestimate it for negatives one. While previous research has provided answers on the isolated impact of various individual or contextual factors, this study is original in that it brings them together to determine which ones most influence the inaccuracy of affective forecasting. Participants were asked to predict their emotional satisfaction for a personal life event, the course (positive or negative) and date of which were already known. First, the results support previous research by showing that affective predictions are highly associated with people’s affective experience. Moreover, multiple regression showed that among the individual and contextual factors previously reported to be in relation with affective forecasting inaccuracy, only the valence of the event could explain inaccuracy of forecasting. According to a growing body of literature, these findings point out a tendency to underestimate the intensity of the affect predicted both for negative and positive, with a stronger underestimation for negative events: the negative valence effect.

Emotionality effects in ambiguous word recognition: The crucial role of the affective congruence between distinct meanings of ambiguous words

There is substantial evidence that affectively charged words (e.g., party or gun) are processed differently from neutral words (e.g., pen), although there are also inconsistent findings in the field. Some lexical or semantic variables might explain such inconsistencies, due to the possible modulation of affective word processing by these variables. The aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which affective word processing is modulated by semantic ambiguity. We conducted a large lexical decision study including semantically ambiguous words (e.g., cataract) and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., terrorism), analysing the extent to which reaction times (RTs) were influenced by their affective properties. The findings revealed a valence effect in which positive valence made RTs faster, whereas negative valence slowed them. The valence effect diminished as the semantic ambiguity of words increased. This decrease did not affect all ambiguous words, but was observed mainly in ambiguous words with incongruent affective meanings. These results highlight the need to consider the affective properties of the distinct meanings of ambiguous words in research on affective word processing.

Divisive Topics as Social Threats

The current work provides evidence for a psychological obstacle to the resolution of divisive social issues (e.g., affirmative action, drug legalization); specifically, people approach discussions of these issues with a threatened mindset. Across three studies, it is shown that the prospect of discussing topics which divide social opinion is associated with threatened responding (the dissensus effect). Divisive discussion topics are associated with both a greater level of self-reported threat (Studies 1 & 3) and a greater tendency to perceive neutral faces as threatening (Study 2). Furthermore, the effect is shown to be robust across manipulations of social opinion (ratings of multiple social issues in Studies 1 & 2; fictional polling data in Study 3), and was not reducible to individual attitude extremity (Studies 1 and 3) or a valence effect (Study 2).

Effects of emotion information on processing pain-related words in visual word recognition

We examined the effects of emotion information (valence, arousal, and emotional experience) on lexical decision and semantic categorization (using a “Is the word pain-related or not?” decision criterion) performance for pain-related words. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we observed facilitatory effects of emotional experience in both tasks, such that faster responses were associated with higher emotional experience ratings. We observed a marginally significant valence effect in the semantic categorization task, such that faster responses were associated with more unpleasantness ratings. These effects were observed even with several other predictor variables (e.g., frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness, physical pain experience ratings) included in the analyses. These results suggest that the dimensions of emotional experience and (to a lesser degree) valence underlie emotion conceptual knowledge of pain-related words; however, their influence appears to be dynamic, depending on task demands.