Processing mode causally influences emotional reactivity: Distinct effects of abstract versus concrete construal on emotional response.

Three studies are reported showing that emotional responses to stress can be modified by systematic prior practice in adopting particular processing modes. Participants were induced to think about positive and negative scenarios in a mode either characteristic of or inconsistent with the abstract-evaluative mind-set observed in depressive rumination, via explicit instructions (Experiments 1 and 2) and via implicit induction of interpretative biases (Experiment 3), before being exposed to a failure experience. In all three studies, participants trained into the mode antithetical to depressive rumination demonstrated less emotional reactivity following failure than participants trained into the mode consistent with depressive rumination. These findings provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that processing mode modifies emotional reactivity and support the processing-mode theory of rumination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The memory enhancement effect of emotion is absent in conceptual implicit memory.

Memory for emotional stimuli is superior to memory for neutral stimuli. This study investigated whether this memory advantage is present in implicit memory. Memory was tested with a test of explicit memory (associate cued recall) and a test of conceptual implicit memory (free association) identical in all respects apart from the retrieval instructions. After studying emotional and neutral paired associates, participants saw the first member of the pair, the cue; in the test of explicit memory participants were instructed to recall the associate; in the test of implicit memory participants were instructed to generate the first word coming to mind associated to the word. Depth of study processing dissociated performance in the tests, confirming that the free-association test was not contaminated by an intentional retrieval strategy. Emotional pairs were better recalled than neutral pairs in the test of explicit memory but not in the equivalent test of implicit memory. The absence of an emotion effect in implicit memory implies that emotional material does not have a privileged global mnemonic status; intentional retrieval is necessary for observing the emotion-related memory advantage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Current concerns in visual masking.

Theories of emotion postulate that emotional input is processed independently from perceptual awareness. Although visual masking has a long tradition in studying whether emotional pictures are processed below a supposed threshold of perceptual awareness (subliminal perception), a consensus has yet to be reached. This article reviews current concerns in the use of visual masking. These include a reliable presentation method, the role of masking pictures, common definitions of awareness and their problems, current models of awareness, and neural mechanisms. A useful strategy may be the study of dose-response relationships between awareness and emotion processing that avoids a dichotomous view of awareness and allows conclusions about the relative independence of emotional processing from awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No effect of inversion on attentional and affective processing of facial expressions.

The decrease in recognition performance after face inversion has been taken to suggest that faces are processed holistically. Three experiments, 1 with schematic and 2 with photographic faces, were conducted to assess whether face inversion also affected visual search for and implicit evaluation of facial expressions of emotion. The 3 visual search experiments yielded the same differences in detection speed between different facial expressions of emotion for upright and inverted faces. Threat superiority effects, faster detection of angry than of happy faces among neutral background faces, were evident in 2 experiments. Face inversion did not affect explicit or implicit evaluation of face stimuli as assessed with verbal ratings and affective priming. Happy faces were evaluated as more positive than angry, sad, or fearful/scheming ones regardless of orientation. Taken together these results seem to suggest that the processing of facial expressions of emotion is not impaired if holistic processing is disrupted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence for racial prejudice at the implicit level and its relationship with questionnaire measures

The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring a word-nonword decision. The target stimuli included attributes that varied in valence and stereotypicality for Whites and African Americans. Results showed reliable stereotyping and prejudice effects: Black primes resulted in substantially stronger facilitation to negative than positive stereotypic attributes, whereas White primes facilitated positive more than negative stereotypic traits. The magnitude of this implicit prejudice effect correlated reliably with participants' scores on explicit racial attitude measures, indicating that people's spontaneous stereotypic associations are consistent with their more controlled responses.     

Time course of processing emotional stimuli as a function of perceived emotional intelligence, anxiety, and depression.

An individual's self-reported abilities to attend to, understand, and reinterpret emotional situations or events have been associated with anxiety and depression, but it is unclear how these abilities affect the processing of emotional stimuli, especially in individuals with these symptoms. The present study recorded event-related brain potentials while individuals reporting features of anxiety and depression completed an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, and depression were associated with self-reported emotion abilities, consistent with prior literature. In addition, lower anxious apprehension and greater reported emotional clarity were related to slower processing of negative stimuli indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Higher anxious arousal and reported attention to emotion were associated with ERP evidence of early attention to all stimuli regardless of emotional content. Reduced later engagement with stimuli was also associated with anxious arousal and with clarity of emotions. Depression was not differentially associated with any emotion processing stage indexed by ERPs. Research in this area may lead to the development of therapies that focus on minimization of anxiety to foster successful emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Getting from situations to emotions: Appraisal and other routes.

Comments on the original article by S. Siemer and R. Reisenzein (see record 2007-02169-001) regarding the process of emotion inference. When processing situational information, people can reach emotional conclusions without explicitly registering corresponding appraisals. Does this mean that appraisal cues must be guiding inference in less obvious ways? If one assumes that the emotional meaning of any situation depends on the protagonist's relation to what is happening, then emotion inference can never entirely bypass relational information. However, not all relational information is specifically appraisal-based. Further, actual emotion causation, like emotion inference, can involve explicit or implicit appraisals or even no appraisals at all. Indeed, humans do not first learn to associate emotions with situations by extracting appraisal information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contributions of surface and conceptual information to performance on implicit and explicit memory tasks.

Four experiments examined the effects of perceptual and conceptual processing operations on 2 implicit and 2 explicit memory tasks. Results show an advantage of visual over auditory presentation for word-fragment completion, word-stem completion, and word-stem cued recall; there was no such advantage in recognition memory. Conceptual processing had no effect on the implicit tasks, a small effect on word-stem cued recall, and a large effect on recognition. It is concluded that there is no necessary trade-off between the 2 types of information. Speculatively, the use of perceptual information may be all or none and relatively automatic, whereas the use of conceptual information appears to be graded and more under conscious control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The siren song of implicit change detection.

Although change blindness could suggest that observers represent far less of their visual world than their conscious experience leads them to believe, they could fail to detect changes even if they fully represent all details. Reports of implicit change detection in the absence of awareness are consistent with the notion that observers' representations are more complete than previously thought. However, to provide convincing evidence, studies must separate implicit detection from explicit processes. This article reexamines the 3 primary claims of implicit change detection and, after replicating original findings, provides theoretical and empirical support for alternative, explicit explanations. Even if observers do represent more of the scene than previously thought, change detection might occur only through explicit comparisons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mere social categorization modulates identification of facial expressions of emotion.

The ability of the human face to communicate emotional states via facial expressions is well known, and past research has established the importance and universality of emotional facial expressions. However, recent evidence has revealed that facial expressions of emotion are most accurately recognized when the perceiver and expresser are from the same cultural ingroup. The current research builds on this literature and extends this work. Specifically, we find that mere social categorization, using a minimal-group paradigm, can create an ingroup emotion–identification advantage even when the culture of the target and perceiver is held constant. Follow-up experiments show that this effect is supported by differential motivation to process ingroup versus outgroup faces and that this motivational disparity leads to more configural processing of ingroup faces than of outgroup faces. Overall, the results point to distinct processing modes for ingroup and outgroup faces, resulting in differential identification accuracy for facial expressions of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age on state of awareness following implicit and explicit word-association tasks.

Younger and older participants did word-association tasks after implicit and explicit instructions and a read-generate study manipulation. No age differences were shown in the implicit version of the test. A generation effect for both age groups suggested that word-association priming can be classified as a conceptually driven task and a new task at which older adults show a relatively preserved memory function. However, the younger group did better on the explicit test in the generate condition. Participants were asked to examine their implicitly produced responses to make them accessible to conscious retrieval. Remember (R) and Know (K) measures of conscious awareness were applied to both postimplicit and postexplicit word-association responses. Age and awareness showed opposite effects in postimplicit retrieval. Younger participants tended to make more R responses than did the older adults, and K responses did not vary with age, but the older group was unaware of more primed items as study list members. Age differences were also shown in R but not in K responses after word-association cued recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociations in infant memory: Rethinking the development of implicit and explicit memory.

Extending the Jacksonian principle of the hierarchical development and dissolution of function to the development and dissolution of memory, researchers have concluded that implicit (procedural) memory is a primitive system, functional shortly after birth, that processes information automatically, whereas explicit (declarative) memory matures late in the 1st year and mediates the conscious recollection of a prior event. Support for a developmental hierarchy has only been inferred from the memory performance of adults with amnesia on priming and recognition-recall tests in response to manipulations of different independent variables. This article reviews evidence that very young infants exhibit memory dissociations like those exhibited by adults with normal memory on analogous memory tests in response to manipulations of the same independent variables. These data demonstrate that implicit and explicit memory follow the same developmental timetable and challenge the utility of conscious recollection as the defining characteristic of explicit memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

TAP, implicit and explicit memory, and adult memory development.

This paper proposes a view of memory based on the notion of transfer appropriate processing (TAP) of Morris, Bransford, and Franks (1977). The author makes three specific assumptions to explain the disassociation between implicit and explicit memory. First, the author distinguishes between two memory organizing processes--integration and elaboration. Second, the author assumes that every kind of study task engages a combination of integrative and elaborative processing, but that some tasks focus primarily on integrative processing, and others focus more heavily on elaborative processing. Third, the author also assumes that every kind of test engages a combination of integrative and elaborative processing, but that implicit memory tests depend primarily on integrative processing, whereas explicit tests focus more heavily on elaborative processing. The long term goal of several on-going experiments is to learn more about the specific stimulus attributes that serve as cues for initialing/guiding integrative versus elaborative processing, and how these cues change across the life-span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Facilitated Processing of Threatening Faces: An ERP Analysis.

Threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were presented to test the hypothesis of the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Dense sensor event-related brain potentials were measured while subjects viewed facial stimuli. Subjects had no explicit task for emotional categorization of the faces. Assessing early perceptual stimulus processing, threatening faces elicited an early posterior negativity compared with nonthreatening neutral or friendly expressions. Moreover, at later stages of stimulus processing, facial threat also elicited augmented late positive potentials relative to the other facial expressions, indicating the more elaborate perceptual analysis of these stimuli. Taken together, these data demonstrate the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Results are discussed within the context of an evolved module of fear (A. Ohman & S. Mineka, 2001). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conscious and unconscious strategy discoveries: a microgenetic analysis

We examined second graders' strategy discoveries on a task that could be solved either by arithmetic computation or by a simple insight. Strategy use was assessed on each trial through both an implicit measure and an explicit one. The results provided unambiguous evidence that strategies can be discovered without conscious awareness. Almost 90% of children showed the insight at an implicit, unreportable level before they showed it at an explicit, reportable one. When children received the relevant problems on each trial, 80% reported the insight within 5 trials of when their solution times indicated that they first generated it. Implications for understanding the relation between unconscious and conscious discoveries and for the role of competing activations in strategy discovery are discussed.     

An investigation of the implicit control of the processing of negative pictures.

The implicit control of emotion processing was investigated by varying encoding instructions for both negative and neutral pictures while measuring psychophysiological responses. Participants made comparative judgments about consecutive pictures for blocks of neutral or negative content. The highly specified judgment task was designed to minimize variance in the implementation of implicit control of processing. Affective modulation of startle amplitude was significantly reduced during judgments involving nonnegative content (how "planned" an image was compared to its predecessor), compared to those that involved negative content (how "frightening" an image was compared to its predecessor), indicating successful implicit control of processing. The more attenuated affect modulation was, the less anxious individuals became during the task, suggesting that the implicit control of emotion processing is significantly associated with emotional experience. These data provide convergent evidence for a companion neuroimaging study because of the similar neural substrates thought to underlie affective modulation of startle. This supports the view that higher-level top-down pathways modulate activation of the amygdala. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory systems do not divide on consciousness: Reinterpreting memory in terms of activation and binding.

There is a popular hypothesis that performance on implicit and explicit memory tasks reflects 2 distinct memory systems. Explicit memory is said to store those experiences that can be consciously recollected, and implicit memory is said to store experiences and affect subsequent behavior but to be unavailable to conscious awareness. Although this division based on awareness is a useful taxonomy for memory tasks, the authors review the evidence that the unconscious character of implicit memory does not necessitate that it be treated as a separate system of human memory. They also argue that some implicit and explicit memory tasks share the same memory representations and that the important distinction is whether the task (implicit or explicit) requires the formation of a new association. The authors review and critique dissociations from the behavioral, amnesia, and neuroimaging literatures that have been advanced in support of separate explicit and implicit memory systems by highlighting contradictory evidence and by illustrating how the data can be accounted for using a simple computational memory model that assumes the same memory representation for those disparate tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Subconscious facial expression mimicry is preserved in older adulthood.

It has been suggested that despite explicit recognition difficulties, implicit processing of facial expressions may be preserved in older adulthood. To directly test this possibility, the authors used facial electromyography to assess older (N = 40) and young (N = 46) adults’ mimicry responses to angry and happy facial expressions, which were presented subliminally via a backward masking technique. The results indicated that despite not consciously perceiving the facial emotion stimuli, both groups mimicked the angry and happy facial expressions. Implications for emotion recognition difficulties in late adulthood are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing alexithymia and related emotional ability constructs using multiple methods: Interrelationships among measures.

This study examined relationships among various measures of emotional ability reflecting different methods of assessment: self-report, clinical interview, collateral report, and emotion-relevant performance. On 140 young adults, the authors assessed self-reported alexithymia, emotional approach coping, and trait metamood skills; observer-reported alexithymia; interviewer-rated alexithymia; emotional awareness in response to vignettes; and emotional intelligence test performance. There were moderate magnitude correlations among the self-report measures, but correlations among other measures were relatively low. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a 3-factor model in which explicit self, implicit self, and explicit other measures were differentiated. These emotional ability measures do not form a unitary construct but differ as a function of the person providing the information and whether the measure is explicit or implicit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional Processing During Experiential Treatment of Depression.

This study explored the importance of early and late emotional processing to change in depressive and general symptomology, self-esteem, and interpersonal problems for 34 clients who received 16-20 sessions of experiential treatment for depression. The independent contribution to outcome of the early working alliance was also explored. Early and late emotional processing predicted reductions in reported symptoms and gains in self-esteem. More important, emotional-processing skill significantly improved during treatment. Hierarchical regression models demonstrated that late emotional processing both mediated the relationship between clients' early emotional processing capacity and outcome and was the sole emotional-processing variable that independently predicted improvement. After controlling for emotional processing, the working alliance added an independent contribution to explaining improvement in reported symptomology only. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)