Negative (but not positive) affective episodic future thinking enhances proactive behavior in 5-year-old children.

Envisioning the future and how you may feel (affective episodic future thinking [EFT]) helps adults to act in favor for their future self, according to manifold experiments. The current study tested whether and how affective EFT also helps children to behave more proactively, that is, to self-initially prepare for an upcoming event. Five-year-old (N = 90) children (data collected from 2021 to 2022) were instructed to mentally imagine how they would feel after successfully managing an upcoming test (positive affective EFT), how they would feel after failing to do so (negative affective EFT), or they were reminded of an upcoming test without a prompt to imagine (control condition, random assignment). Proactive behavior was indicated by children's choice to play one of three games before the actual test (one of the games was announced to be the test game). Mechanisms (e.g., motivation to win, psychological distance, current affect) and moderators (ability of episodically thinking about the future in everyday life, behavioral inhibition, and behavioral approach) for the possible effects of affective EFT were explored. Children in the negative affective EFT condition chose the target game significantly above chance level and more often than children in the control group, whereas children in the positive affective EFT condition did not. This effect was independent of the assumed mediators and moderators. Findings are discussed in the context of the theoretical and empirical literature on affective EFT in adults and suggestions for future studies are given. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual perspective in autobiographical memories of self-incongruent episodes.

It is widely assumed that autobiographical memory relies on an integration of episodic memory with the self-model. We hypothesise that self-memory integration depends critically on self-congruence. More specifically, self-incongruent experiences such as those that elicit shame or guilt may be more difficult to integrate. Self-incongruence may affect both the semantic reports of memories and their phenomenological characteristics, in particular their visual perspective (1PP or 3PP, i.e., field or observer perspective), their affective valence, and their perceived centrality. Diary based memories were assigned to 4 categories (shame, guilt, negative, neutral) and were rated for the different phenomenological dimensions. We used a deep neural network, univariate and multilevel models to assess differences and relationships between different variables. We found that memories that elicited shame (but not guilt) showed more pronounced 3PP as compared to other experiences. Shameful episodes also elicited the most pronounced negative affect. A multilevel analysis revealed that the amount of shame that an episode elicited, and its semantic similarity with shame episodes, predicted higher 3PP, while affective valence did not. Our results show that self-incongruence affects memories both at the level of their semantic reports and their phenomenology, and thus contributes to a mechanistic understanding of self-memory integration.

Animal thought exceeds language-of-thought.

Quilty-Dunn et al. claim that all complex infant and animal reasoning implicate language-of-thought hypothesis (LOTH)-like structures. We agree with the authors that the mental life of animals can be explained in representationalist terms, but we disagree with their idea that the complexity of mental representations is best explained by appealing to abstract concepts, and instead, we explain that it doesn't need to.

Hypnotic suggestions cognitively penetrate tactile perception through top-down modulation of semantic contents.

Perception is subject to ongoing alterations by learning and top-down influences. Although abundant studies have shown modulation of perception by attention, motivation, content and context, there is an unresolved controversy whether these examples provide true evidence that perception is penetrable by cognition. Here we show that tactile perception assessed as spatial discrimination can be instantaneously and systematically altered merely by the semantic content during hypnotic suggestions. To study neurophysiological correlates, we recorded EEG and SEPs. We found that the suggestion "your index finger becomes bigger" led to improved tactile discrimination, while the suggestion "your index finger becomes smaller" led to impaired discrimination. A hypnosis without semantic suggestions had no effect but caused a reduction of phase-locking synchronization of the beta frequency band between medial frontal cortex and the finger representation in somatosensory cortex. Late SEP components (P80-N140 complex) implicated in attentional processes were altered by the semantic contents, but processing of afferent inputs in SI remained unaltered. These data provide evidence that the psychophysically observed modifiability of tactile perception by semantic contents is not simply due to altered perception-based judgments, but instead is a consequence of modified perceptual processes which change the perceptual experience.

Profiles of animal consciousness: A species-sensitive, two-tier account to quality and distribution.

The science of animal consciousness investigates (i) which animal species are conscious (the distribution question) and (ii) how conscious experience differs in detail between species (the quality question). We propose a framework which clearly distinguishes both questions and tackles both of them. This two-tier account distinguishes consciousness along ten dimensions and suggests cognitive capacities which serve as distinct operationalizations for each dimension. The two-tier account achieves three valuable aims: First, it separates strong and weak indicators of the presence of consciousness. Second, these indicators include not only different specific contents but also differences in the way particular contents are processed (by processes of learning, reasoning or abstraction). Third, evidence of consciousness from each dimension can be combined to derive the distinctive multi-dimensional consciousness profile of various species. Thus, the two-tier account shows how the kind of conscious experience of different species can be systematically compared.

Metarepresentation, trust, and "unleashed expression".

Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of human expression leaves a number of central issues unclear - not least, whether the lack of expression in nonhuman species is attributable to their lack of the relevant metarepresentational abilities, an absence of trust, or a consequence of other factors. In place of their view, we propose a gradualistic account of the origins of human expression.

Teleology first: Goals before knowledge and belief.

Comparing knowledge with belief can go wrong in two dimensions: If the authors employ a wider notion of knowledge, then they do not compare like with like because they assume a narrow notion of belief. If they employ only a narrow notion of knowledge, then their claim is not supported by the evidence. Finally, we sketch a superior teleological view.

Determining the Function of Social Referencing: The Role of Familiarity and Situational Threat.

In ambiguous situations, infants have the tendency to gather information from a social interaction partner to regulate their behavior [social referencing (SR)]. There are two main competing theories concerning SR's function. According to social-cognitive information-seeking accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to gain information about the ambiguous situation. According to co-regulation accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to receive emotional support. This review provides an overview of the central developments in SR literature in the past years. We focus on the role of situational aspects such as familiarity of SR partners and situational threat, not only for SR (looking), but also for subsequent behavioral regulation (exploration, affect). As the competing accounts make different predictions concerning both contextual factors, this approach may reveal novel insights into the function of SR. Findings showed that a higher familiarity of SR partners consistently resulted in decreased looking (cf. social-cognitive accounts) and that higher threat remains largely understudied, but seemed to increase looking in the first few studies (cf. co-regulation accounts). Concerning behavioral regulation (exploration, affect) findings are mixed. We point out that moving toward a more complex situatedness may help to disentangle the heterogeneous results by considering the interaction between familiarity and threat rather than investigating the factors in isolation. From a general perspective, this review underlines the importance of situational factors and their interaction in eliciting a phenomenon, such as SR, but also in determining the nature of the phenomenon itself.

The Embodied Self, the Pattern Theory of Self, and the Predictive Mind.

Do we have to presuppose a self to account for human self-consciousness? If so, how should we characterize the self? These questions are discussed in the context of two alternatives, i.e., the no-self position held by Metzinger (2003, 2009) and the claim that the only self we have to presuppose is a narrative self (Dennett, 1992; Schechtman, 2007; Hardcastle, 2008) which is primarily an abstract entity. In contrast to these theories, I argue that we have to presuppose an embodied self, although this is not a metaphysical substance, nor an entity for which stable necessary and jointly sufficient conditions can be given. Self-consciousness results from an integration of an embodied, basic affective flow with an intentional object (the self as agent or as center of imagination or thought), where this integration remains anchored in an embodied self. This embodied self is a flexible and variable entity, which we can account for only with a pattern theory of the self (in line with Gallagher, 2013). Furthermore, I outline how this pattern theory of the self fits into the predictive coding framework, which also answers the open question whether self-representation is prior to world-representation or the other way around. The principal organization of a mechanism of building up a self-model is such that both types of representations are always activated and developed in parallel. Modeling oneself is a process which is always activated when one interacts with the world - much as a shadow is present when a person walks in the sun.

Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals.

Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participants to judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes-Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system.

Good things come in threes: Communicative acts comprise linguistic, imagistic, and modifying components.

Gesture and sign form an integrated communication system, as do gesture and speech. Communicative acts in both systems combine categorical linguistic (words or signs) with imagistic (gestures) components. Additionally, both sign and speech can employ modifying components that convey iconic information tied to a linguistic base morpheme. An accurate analysis of communicative acts must take this third category into account.

Why cognitive penetration of our perceptual experience is still the most plausible account.

To what extent is our perceptual experience influenced by higher cognitive phenomena like beliefs, desires, concepts, templates? Given recent arguments against the possibility of cognitive penetration, we present striking evidence against the impenetrability claims. The weak impenetrability claim cannot account for (1) extensive structural feedback organization of the brain, (2) temporally very early feedback loops and (3) functional top-down processes modulating early visual processes by category-specific information. The strong impenetrability claim could incorporate these data by widening the "perceptual module" such that it includes rich but still internal processing in a very large perceptual module. We argue that this latter view leads to an implausible version of a module. Therefore, we have to accept cognitive penetration of our perceptual experience as the best theoretical account so far given the available empirical evidence. We outline that this does not have any problematic consequences for the relation between perception and cognition.

More than words (and faces): evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing.

Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, synonyms of "happy" and "sad" were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. Accuracy was lower when two channels expressed an emotion that was incongruent with the channel participants had to focus on, compared with the cross-channel congruence condition. When participants were required to focus on verbal content, accuracy was significantly lower also when prosody was incongruent with verbal content and face. This suggests that prosody biases emotional verbal content processing, even when conflicting with verbal content and face simultaneously. Implications for multimodal communication and language evolution studies are discussed.

Intentional action processing results from automatic bottom-up attention: An EEG-investigation into the Social Relevance Hypothesis using hypnosis.

Social stimuli grab our attention. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus.

Cognitive penetrability and emotion recognition in human facial expressions.

Do our background beliefs, desires, and mental images influence our perceptual experience of the emotions of others? In this paper, we will address the possibility of cognitive penetration (CP) of perceptual experience in the domain of social cognition. In particular, we focus on emotion recognition based on the visual experience of facial expressions. After introducing the current debate on CP, we review examples of perceptual adaptation for facial expressions of emotion. This evidence supports the idea that facial expressions are perceptually processed as wholes. That is, the perceptual system integrates lower-level facial features, such as eyebrow orientation, mouth angle etc., into facial compounds. We then present additional experimental evidence showing that in some cases, emotion recognition on the basis of facial expression is sensitive to and modified by the background knowledge of the subject. We argue that such sensitivity is best explained as a difference in the visual experience of the facial expression, not just as a modification of the judgment based on this experience. The difference in experience is characterized as the result of the interference of background knowledge with the perceptual integration process for faces. Thus, according to the best explanation, we have to accept CP in some cases of emotion recognition. Finally, we discuss a recently proposed mechanism for CP in the face-based recognition of emotion.

Varieties of cognitive penetration in visual perception.

Is our perceptual experience a veridical representation of the world or is it a product of our beliefs and past experiences? Cognitive penetration describes the influence of higher level cognitive factors on perceptual experience and has been a debated topic in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Here, we focus on visual perception, particularly early vision, and how it is affected by contextual expectations and memorized cognitive contents. We argue for cognitive penetration based on recent empirical evidence demonstrating contextual and top-down influences on early visual processes. On the basis of a perceptual model, we propose different types of cognitive penetration depending on the processing level on which the penetration happens and depending on where the penetrating influence comes from. Our proposal has two consequences: (1) the traditional controversy on whether cognitive penetration occurs or not is ill posed, and (2) a clear-cut perception-cognition boundary cannot be maintained.

Reconceptualizing second-person interaction.

Over the last couple of decades, most neuroscientific research on social cognition has been dominated by a third-person paradigm in which participating subjects are not actively engaging with other agents but merely observe them. Recently this paradigm has been challenged by researchers who promote a second-person approach to social cognition, and emphasize the importance of dynamic, real-time interactions with others. The present article's contribution to this debate is twofold. First, we critically analyze the second-person challenge to social neuroscience, and assess the various ways in which the distinction between second- versus third-person modes of social cognition has been articulated. Second, we put forward an alternative conceptualization of this distinction-one that gives pride of place to the notion of reciprocity. We discuss the implications of our proposal for neuroscientific studies on social cognition.

Hypnotic ingroup-outgroup suggestion influences economic decision-making in an Ultimatum Game.

Studies in economic decision-making have demonstrated that individuals appreciate social values supporting equity and disapprove unfairness when distributing goods between two or more parties. However, this seems to critically depend on psychological mechanisms partly pertaining to the ingroup-outgroup distinction. Little is known as to what extent economic bargaining can be manipulated by means of psychological interventions such has hypnosis. Here we show that a hypnotic ingroup versus outgroup suggestion impacts the tolerance of unfairness in an Ultimatum Game. Specifically, the ingroup suggestion was associated with significantly greater acceptance rates of unfair offers than the outgroup suggestion, whereas hypnosis alone exerted only small effects on unfairness tolerance. These findings indicate that psychological interventions such as hypnotic suggestion can contribute to ingroup favoritism and outgroup rejection.

Self-deception as pseudo-rational regulation of belief.

Self-deception is a special kind of motivational dominance in belief-formation. We develop criteria which set paradigmatic self-deception apart from related phenomena of auto-manipulation such as pretense and motivational bias. In self-deception rational subjects defend or develop beliefs of high subjective importance in response to strong counter-evidence. Self-deceivers make or keep these beliefs tenable by putting prima-facie rational defense-strategies to work against their established standards of rational evaluation. In paradigmatic self-deception, target-beliefs are made tenable via reorganizations of those belief-sets that relate relevant data to target-beliefs. This manipulation of the evidential value of relevant data goes beyond phenomena of motivated perception of data. In self-deception belief-defense is pseudo-rational. Self-deceivers will typically apply a dual standard of evaluation that remains intransparent to the subject. The developed model of self-deception as pseudo-rational belief-defense is empirically anchored. So, we hope to put forward a promising candidate.