Contextual influences on dynamic facial expressions.

Participants viewed dynamic facial expressions that moved from a neutral expression to varying degrees of angry, happy, or sad or from these emotionally expressive faces to neutral.A contrast effect was observed for expressions that moved to a neutral state. That is, a neutral expression that began as angry was rated as having a mildly positive expression, whereas the same neutral expression was rated as negatively valenced when it began with a smile. In Experiment 2, static expressions presented sequentially elicited contrast effects, but they were weaker than those following dynamic expressions. Experiment 3 assessed a broad range of facial movements across varying degrees of angry and happy expressions. We observed momentum effects for movements that ended at mildly expressive points (25% and 50% expressive). For such movements, affect ratings were higher, as if the perceived expression moved beyond their endpoint. Experiment 4 assessed sad facial expressions and found both contrast and momentum effects for dynamic expressions to and from sad faces. These findings demonstrate new and potent contextual influences on dynamic facial expressions and highlight the importance of facial movements in social-emotional communication.

Neural correlates of emotional regulation while viewing films.

Negative and arousal-inducing film clips were used to assess the neural correlates of emotional expression and suppression. Compared to viewing neutral clips, both negative (disgusting) and arousal (action) clips activated primarily posterior regions in the parietal and occipital cortex when participants were instructed to express their emotions. When instructed to suppress their emotions while viewing negative clips, a broad frontoparietal network was activated that included lateral, medial, and orbital regions in the prefrontal cortex as well as lateral and medial regions of the posterior parietal cortex. The suppression of arousal clips also activated prefrontal and parietal regions, though not to the same extent as the suppression of negative clips. The findings demonstrate the potency of using movies to engage emotional processes and highlight a broad frontoparietal network that is engaged during the suppression of negative film clips.

Neural correlates of metacognitive monitoring during episodic and semantic retrieval.

Activity in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) has been shown to be a strong correlate of successful recognition performance. We assessed the degree to which the PPC mediates metacognitive judgments by assessing the feeling of knowing (FOK) for recently learned (episodic) and well-learned (semantic) facts (e.g., "The sport that is associated with Wimbledon is . . ."). Activity in ventral regions of the PPC was observed for strong FOKs for both sets of facts, although greater activity was observed for episodic than for semantic facts. Strong semantic FOKs activated anterior temporal regions. Weaker FOK ratings, when contrasted with strong FOKs, activated dorsal parietal regions, a finding that parallels contrasts during explicit tests in which low-confident responses were compared with high-confident responses. These findings demonstrate retrieval-related parietal activity during metacognitive judgments. Furthermore, they show that the ventral PPC is particularly engaged during context-specific, episodic retrieval, as compared to semantic retrieval.

Emotions in context: pictorial influences on affective attributions.

The visual illusion Terror Subterra, by Roger Shepard (1990), depicts a seemingly large creature chasing another in a tunnel, yet both creatures are physically identical. In addition to this visual illusion, the two creatures also appear to exhibit different emotions, as the background creature (the pursuer) appears angry whereas the foreground creature (the pursued) appears fearful. We explored this context effect by first establishing the magnitude of the emotional bias effect. We then modified the original drawing in various ways, such as equating for perceived size, removing one creature from the scene, and removing the pictorial context altogether. Findings suggest that the emotional bias is due to the pictorial setting and to the perceived social-emotional relationship between the two creatures. These results highlight the importance of both perceptual and social-emotional influences in driving affective attributions.

Effect of negative emotional pictures on associative memory for peripheral information.

We investigated the influence of negative emotional pictures on associative memory. A visual object was embedded in the periphery of negative emotional or neutral pictures. Memory was assessed for central item (pictorial) information, peripheral (object) information, and the association between item and peripheral information. On tests of item information, negative emotional pictures were remembered better than neutral pictures. However, associative memory between item and peripheral information was less accurate when the pictures were negative compared to neutral. This occurred despite equivalent recall (Experiments 1 and 2) and recognition (Experiment 2) for the peripheral objects themselves. Further experiments confirmed that performance on the associative test was not influenced by testing order (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that negative emotional arousal can particularly disrupt the associative binding of peripheral information to a central emotional event.

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: evidence from taboo stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks.

This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and attention. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated three taboo Stroop effects that occur when people name the color of taboo words. One effect is longer color-naming times for taboo than for neutral words, an effect that diminishes with word repetition. The second effect is superior recall of taboo words in surprise memory tests following color naming. The third effect is better recognition memory for colors consistently associated with taboo words rather than with neutral words. None of these effects was due to retrieval factors, attentional disengagement processes, response inhibition, or strategic attention shifts. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that taboo words impair immediate recall of the preceding and succeeding words in rapidly presented lists but do not impair lexical decision times. We argue that taboo words trigger specific emotional reactions that facilitate the binding of taboo word meaning to salient contextual aspects, such as occurrence in a task and font color in taboo Stroop tasks.