An Audience Facilitates Facial Feedback: A Social-Context Hypothesis Reconciling Original Study and Nonreplication.

Nonreplications of previously undisputed phenomena tend to leave a theoretical vacuum. This theoretical perspective seeks to fill the gap left by the failure to replicate unobtrusive facial feedback. In the emblematic original study, participants who held a pen between the teeth (i.e., requiring activity of the zygomaticus major muscle) rated cartoons more positively than participants who held the pen between the lips. We argue that the same social mechanisms (e.g., the presence of an audience) modulate facial feedback to emotion as are involved in the feed-forward shaping of facial actions by emotions. Differing social contexts could thus help explain the contrast between original findings and failures to obtain unobtrusive facial feedback. An exploratory analysis that included results only from (unobtrusive) facial-feedback studies without explicit reference to emotion in the facial manipulation provided preliminary support for this hypothesis. Studies with a social context (e.g., due to experimenter presence) showed a medium-sized aggregate facial-feedback effect, whereas studies without a social context (e.g., when facial actions were only filmed), revealed a small effect. Video awareness strengthened facial feedback considerably within an engaging social context, but seemed to reduce it without a social context. We provisionally conclude that a (pro-)social interpretation of facial actions facilitates feedback to (primarily positive) emotion, and suggest further research explicitly manipulating this context.

A mobile approach-avoidance task.

Approach and avoidance tendencies have helped explain phenomena as diverse as addiction (Mogg, Field, & Bradley, 2005), phobia (Rinck & Becker, 2007), and intergroup discrimination (Bianchi, Carnaghi, & Shamloo, 2018; Degner, Essien, & Reichardt, 2016). When the original approach-avoidance task (AAT; Solarz, 1960) that measures these tendencies was redesigned to run on regular desktop computers, it made the task much more flexible but also sacrificed some important behavioral properties of the original task-most notably its reliance on physical distance change (Chen & Bargh, 1999). Here, we present a new, mobile version of the AAT that runs entirely on smartphones and combines the flexibility of modern tasks with the behavioral properties of the original AAT. In addition, it can easily be deployed in the field and, next to traditional reaction time measurements, includes the novel measurement of response force. In two studies, we demonstrate that the mobile AAT can reliably measure known approach-avoidance tendencies toward happy and angry faces both in the laboratory and in the field.

Experimentally induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception.

The effects of emotion on time perception are elusive: depending on the intensity, valence and arousal of the situation, implicit and explicit time perception seems to slow down or speed up. Awe is a strong and powerful positive emotion that is typically elicited in response to vast stimuli and therefore inducing awe may be optimally suited for studying the relationship between emotion and time perception. In two studies we investigated whether the experience of awe would result in an expanded perception of time. Participants watched awe-eliciting, positive and neutral videos and simultaneously conducted a temporal bisection task, in which they classified vibrotactile stimuli as short or long. As expected awe videos elicited stronger feelings of awe than positive and control videos, while they were matched with positive videos in terms of subjective valence and arousal. However across both studies we did not find consistent effects of awe on implicit and retrospective time perception. Only in the first study, stronger subjective feelings of awe were associated with an increased dilation of time perception. The current findings indicate that lab-induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception and we suggest that more ecologically valid ways to induce awe may be required in future studies.

Shared states: using MVPA to test neural overlap between self-focused emotion imagery and other-focused emotion understanding.

The present study tested whether the neural patterns that support imagining 'performing an action', 'feeling a bodily sensation' or 'being in a situation' are directly involved in understanding other people's actions, bodily sensations and situations. Subjects imagined the content of short sentences describing emotional actions, interoceptive sensations and situations (self-focused task), and processed scenes and focused on how the target person was expressing an emotion, what this person was feeling, and why this person was feeling an emotion (other-focused task). Using a linear support vector machine classifier on brain-wide multi-voxel patterns, we accurately decoded each individual class in the self-focused task. When generalizing the classifier from the self-focused task to the other-focused task, we also accurately decoded whether subjects focused on the emotional actions, interoceptive sensations and situations of others. These results show that the neural patterns that underlie self-imagined experience are involved in understanding the experience of other people. This supports the theoretical assumption that the basic components of emotion experience and understanding share resources in the brain.

Looking into the crystal ball of our emotional lives: emotion regulation and the overestimation of future guilt and shame.

In the present study, we examined the impact of emotion regulation on the intensity bias in guilt and shame. Fifty-two undergraduates either forecasted their emotions and emotion regulation following a guilt- and shame-eliciting situation or reported their actual experienced emotions and employed emotion regulation. Results showed a clear intensity bias, that is, forecasters predicted to experience more guilt and shame than experiencers actually experienced. Furthermore, results showed that forecasters predicted to employ less down-regulating emotion regulation (i.e. less acceptance) and more up-regulating emotion regulation (i.e. more rumination) than experiencers actually employed. Moreover, results showed that the intensity differences between forecasted and experienced guilt and shame could be explained (i.e. were mediated) by the differences between forecasted and actually employed emotion regulation (i.e. acceptance and rumination). These findings provide support for the hypothesis that the intensity bias can-at least in part-be explained by the misprediction of future emotion regulation.

Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts.

With a series of three studies, using an adapted dot-probe paradigm, we investigated the elicitation of spontaneous affective meaning. Although it is well established that humans show delays in disengaging their attention from conventional affective stimuli, it is unknown whether contextually acquired affective meaning similarly impacts attention. We examined attentional disengagement following pairs of neutral or slightly ambiguous words that in combination could evoke sex, violence or neutral associations. Study 1 demonstrated slower disengagement following words that conveyed sex or violence associations compared to words that conveyed neutral associations. This pattern was only present for participants who were aware of sex or violence associations. Study 2 replicated these results in a large sample, but only for sex associations. Study 3 replicated the effect while instructing participants explicitly to expect sex and violence associations. Finally, two control studies countered reasonable alternative explanations for our findings. Together, these studies show that contextually driven affective associations can arise quickly with the potential to influence attentional processes. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of emotion and language that highlight the importance of context in the generation of affective meaning.

Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat.

People derive their sense of belonging from perceptions of being a moral person. Research moreover suggests that social cues of rejection rapidly influence visual scanning, and result in avoidant gaze behavior, especially in socially anxious individuals. With the current eye-tracking experiment, we therefore examined whether moral integrity threats and affirmations influence selective avoidance of social threat, and how this varies with individual differences in social anxiety. Fifty-nine participants retrieved a memory of a past immoral, moral, or neutral act. Next, participants passively viewed angry, happy, and neutral faces, while we recorded how often they first fixated on the eyes. In addition, we administered the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (1987). Participants first fixated less on angry eyes compared to happy or neutral eyes when their moral integrity was threatened, and this selective avoidance was enhanced with increasing social anxiety. Following a moral affirmation, however, participants no longer selectively avoided the eyes of angry faces, regardless of individual differences in social anxiety. The results thus suggest that both low and high socially anxious people adjust their social gaze behavior in response to threats and affirmations of their moral integrity, pointing to the importance of the social context when considering affective processing biases.

Easy moves: Perceptual fluency facilitates approach-related action.

It is well established that processing fluency impacts preference judgments and physiological reactions indicative of affect. Yet, little is known about how fluency influences motivation-related action. Here, we offer a novel demonstration that fluency facilitates action-tendencies related to approach. Four experiments investigated this action effect, its boundary conditions, and concomitant affective responses. Experiment 1 found faster approach movements (reaction times [RTs] to initiate arm flexion) to perceptually fluent stimuli when participants acted to rapidly classify stimuli as either "good" or "bad." Experiment 2 eliminated this fluency effect on action when participants performed nonaffective classifications ("living" or "nonliving"), even though fluency robustly enhanced liking judgments. Experiment 3 demonstrated that fluency can also facilitate approach action that is not immediate, as long as the delayed action involves affective classification. This experiment also found that fluent stimuli elicit genuine hedonic responses, as reflected in facial electromyography (fEMG) activity over zygomaticus "smiling" muscle. Experiment 4 replicated the physiological (fEMG) evidence for hedonic responses to fluent stimuli, but similar to Experiment 2, we observed no fluency effects on actions involving nonaffective classification. The current studies offer the first evidence that perceptual fluency can facilitate approach-related movements, when such movements are embedded in the context of affective decisions. Generally, these results suggest that variations in processing dynamics can flexibly and implicitly shape action-tendencies. (PsycINFO Database Record

The path of ambivalence: tracing the pull of opposing evaluations using mouse trajectories.

Ambivalence refers to a psychological conflict between opposing evaluations, often experienced as being torn between alternatives. This dynamic aspect of ambivalence is hard to capture with outcome-focused measures, such as response times or self-report. To gain more insight into ambivalence as it unfolds, the current work uses an embodied measure of pull, drawing on research in dynamic systems. In three studies, using different materials, we tracked people's mouse movements as they chose between negative and positive evaluations of attitude objects. When participants evaluated ambivalent attitude objects, their mouse trajectories showed more pull of the non-chosen evaluative option than when they evaluated univalent attitude objects, revealing that participants were literally torn between the two opposing evaluations. We address the relationship of this dynamic measure to response time and self-reports of ambivalence and discuss implications and avenues for future research.

Turning the hands of time again: a purely confirmatory replication study and a Bayesian analysis.

In a series of four experiments, Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012) found support for the conjecture that clockwise movements induce psychological states of temporal progression and an orientation toward the future and novelty. Here we report the results of a preregistered replication attempt of Experiment 2 from Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012). Participants turned kitchen rolls either clockwise or counterclockwise while answering items from a questionnaire assessing openness to experience. Data from 102 participants showed that the effect went slightly in the direction opposite to that predicted by Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012), and a preregistered Bayes factor hypothesis test revealed that the data were 10.76 times more likely under the null hypothesis than under the alternative hypothesis. Our findings illustrate the theoretical importance and practical advantages of preregistered Bayes factor replication studies, both for psychological science and for empirical work in general.

On the automatic link between affect and tendencies to approach and avoid: Chen and Bargh (1999) revisited.

Within the literature on emotion and behavioral action, studies on approach-avoidance take up a prominent place. Several experimental paradigms feature successful conceptual replications but many original studies have not yet been replicated directly. We present such a direct replication attempt of two seminal experiments originally conducted by Chen and Bargh (1999). In their first experiment, participants affectively evaluated attitude objects by pulling or pushing a lever. Participants who had to pull the lever with positively valenced attitude objects and push the lever with negatively valenced attitude objects (i.e., congruent instruction) did so faster than participants who had to follow the reverse (i.e., incongruent) instruction. In Chen and Bargh's second experiment, the explicit evaluative instructions were absent and participants merely responded to the attitude objects by either always pushing or always pulling the lever. Similar results were obtained as in Experiment 1. Based on these findings, Chen and Bargh concluded that (1) attitude objects are evaluated automatically; and (2) attitude objects automatically trigger a behavioral tendency to approach or avoid. We attempted to replicate both experiments and failed to find the effects reported by Chen and Bargh as indicated by our pre-registered Bayesian data analyses; nevertheless, the evidence in favor of the null hypotheses was only anecdotal, and definitive conclusions await further study.

Looking with different eyes: The psychological meaning of categorisation goals moderates facial reactivity to facial expressions.

In the present research we examined whether the psychological meaning of people's categorisation goals affects facial muscle activity in response to facial expressions of emotion. We had participants associate eye colour (blue, brown) with either a personality trait (extraversion) or a physical trait (light frequency) and asked them to use these associations in a speeded categorisation task of angry, disgusted, happy and neutral faces while assessing participants' response times and facial muscle activity. We predicted that participants would respond differentially to the emotional faces when the categorisation criteria allowed for inferences about a target's thoughts, feelings or behaviour (i.e., when categorising extraversion), but not when these lacked any social meaning (i.e., when categorising light frequency). Indeed, emotional faces triggered facial reactions to facial expressions when participants categorised extraversion, but not when they categorised light frequency. In line with this, only when categorising extraversion did participants' response times indicate a negativity bias replicating previous results. Together, these findings provide further evidence for the contextual nature of people's selective responses to the emotions expressed by others.

Enactivism and neonatal imitation: conceptual and empirical considerations and clarifications.

Recently within social cognition it has been argued that understanding others is primarily characterized by dynamic and second person interactive processes, rather than by taking a third person observational stance. Within this enactivist view of intersubjective understanding, researchers differ in their claims regarding the innateness of such processes. Here we proposed to distinguish nativist enactivists-who argue that studies on neonatal imitation support the view that infants already have a non-mentalistic embodied form of intersubjective understanding present at birth-from empiricist enactivists, who claim that those intersubjective processes are learned through social interaction. In this article, we critically examine the empirical studies on neonate imitation and conclude that the available evidence is at least mixed for most types of specific gesture imitations. In the end, only the tongue protrusion imitation appears to be consistent across different studies. If neonates imitate only one single gesture, then a more parsimonious explanation for the tongue protrusion effect could be put forward. Consequently, the nativist enactivist claim that understanding others depends on second person interactive processes already present at birth seems no longer plausible. Although other strands of evidence provide converging evidence for the importance of intersubjective processes in adult social cognition, the available evidence on neonatal imitation calls for a more careful view on the innateness of such processes and suggests that this way of interacting needs to be learned over time. Therefore the available empirical evidence on neonate imitation is in our view compatible with the empiricist enactivist position, but not with the nativist enactivist position.

Approach, avoidance, and affect: a meta-analysis of approach-avoidance tendencies in manual reaction time tasks.

Approach action tendencies toward positive stimuli and avoidance tendencies from negative stimuli are widely seen to foster survival. Many studies have shown that approach and avoidance arm movements are facilitated by positive and negative affect, respectively. There is considerable debate whether positively and negatively valenced stimuli prime approach and avoidance movements directly (i.e., immediate, unintentional, implicit, automatic, and stimulus-based), or indirectly (i.e., after conscious or non-conscious interpretation of the situation). The direction and size of these effects were often found to depend on the instructions referring to the stimulus object or the self, and on explicit vs. implicit stimulus evaluation. We present a meta-analysis of 29 studies included for their use of strongly positive and negative stimuli, with 81 effect sizes derived solely from the means and standard deviations (combined N = 1538), to examine the automaticity of the link between affective information processing and approach and avoidance, and to test whether it depends on instruction, type of approach-avoidance task, and stimulus type. Results show a significant small to medium-sized effect after correction for publication bias. The strongest arguments for an indirect link between affect and approach-avoidance were the absence of evidence for an effect with implicit evaluation, and the opposite directions of the effect with self and object-related interpretations. The link appears to be influenced by conscious or non-conscious intentions to deal with affective stimuli.

Evaluating ambivalence: social-cognitive and affective brain regions associated with ambivalent decision-making.

Ambivalence is a state of inconsistency that is often experienced as affectively aversive. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the role of cognitive and social-affective processes in the experience of ambivalence and coping with its negative consequences. We examined participants' brain activity during the dichotomous evaluation (pro vs contra) of pretested ambivalent (e.g. alcohol), positive (e.g. happiness) and negative (e.g. genocide) word stimuli. We manipulated evaluation relevance by varying the probability of evaluation consequences, under the hypothesis that ambivalence is experienced as more negative when outcomes are relevant. When making ambivalent evaluations, more activity was found in the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus, for both high and low evaluation relevance. After statistically conservative corrections, activity in the TPJ and PCC/precuneus was negatively correlated with experienced ambivalence after scanning, as measured by Priester and Petty's felt ambivalence scale (1996). The findings show that cognitive and social-affective brain areas are involved in the experience of ambivalence. However, these networks are differently associated with subsequent reduction of ambivalence, thus highlighting the importance of understanding both cognitive and affective processes involved in ambivalent decision-making.

One way and the other: the bidirectional relationship between ambivalence and body movement.

Prior research exploring the relationship between evaluations and body movements has focused on one-sided evaluations. However, people regularly encounter objects or situations about which they simultaneously hold both positive and negative views, which results in the experience of ambivalence. Such experiences are often described in physical terms: For example, people say they are "wavering" between two sides of an issue or are "torn." Building on this observation, we designed two studies to explore the relationship between the experience of ambivalence and side-to-side movement, or wavering. In Study 1, we used a Wii Balance Board to measure movement and found that people who are experiencing ambivalence move from side to side more than people who are not experiencing ambivalence. In Study 2, we induced body movement to explore the reverse relationship and found that when people are made to move from side to side, their experiences of ambivalence are enhanced.

Gamma flicker elicits positive affect without awareness.

High-frequency oscillations emerged as a neural code for both positive affect and fluent attentional processing from evolutionary simulations with artificial neural networks. Visual 50 Hz flicker, which entrains neural oscillations in the gamma band, has been shown to foster attentional switching, but can it also elicit positive affect? A three-faces display (2-female/1-male or 2-male/1-female) was preceded by a 50, 25, or 0 Hz flicker on the position of the odd-one-out (i.e., the target). Participants decided on the gender (Block 1) or on the subjective valence (Block 2) of this neutral target in an approach-avoidance task, which served as an implicit affective measure. Only the detection of 25 Hz flicker, but not of 50 Hz flicker, was above chance (Block 3). Faces primed by invisible 50 Hz flicker were explicitly evaluated more positively than with 25 Hz or 0 Hz. This gamma flicker also facilitated approach reactions, and inhibited avoidance reactions relative to 25 Hz and 0 Hz flicker in Blocks 1 and 2. Attentional switching was, moreover, enhanced by the 50 Hz flicker. According to the Affect-Gamma hypothesis, also in biological neural networks, high-frequency gamma oscillations may code for positive affect.

Affective monitoring: a generic mechanism for affect elicitation.

In this paper we sketch a new framework for affect elicitation, which is based on previous evolutionary and connectionist modeling and experimental work from our group. Affective monitoring is considered a local match-mismatch process within a module of the neural network. Negative affect is raised instantly by mismatches, incongruency, disfluency, novelty, incoherence, and dissonance, whereas positive affect follows from matches, congruency, fluency, familiarity, coherence, and resonance, at least when an initial mismatch can be solved quickly. Affective monitoring is considered an evolutionary-early conflict and change detection process operating at the same level as, for instance, attentional selection. It runs in parallel and imparts affective flavor to emotional behavior systems, which involve evolutionary-prepared stimuli and action tendencies related to for instance defensive, exploratory, attachment, or appetitive behavior. Positive affect is represented in the networks by high-frequency oscillations, presumably in the gamma band. Negative affect corresponds to more incoherent lower-frequency oscillations, presumably in the theta band. For affect to become conscious, large-scale synchronization of the oscillations over the network and the construction of emotional experiences are required. These constructions involve perceptions of bodily states and action tendencies, but also appraisals as well as efforts to regulate the emotion. Importantly, affective monitoring accompanies every kind of information processing, but conscious emotions, which result from the later integration of affect in a cognitive context, are much rarer events.

Mere exposure revisited: the influence of growth versus security cues on evaluations of novel and familiar stimuli.

Combining regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) and novelty categorization theory (Förster, Marguc, & Gillebaart, 2010), we predicted that novel stimuli would be more positively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security and that familiar stimuli would be more negatively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security. This would occur, at least in part, because of changes in category breadth. We tested effects of several variables linked to growth and security on evaluations of novel and familiar stimuli. Using a subliminal mere exposure paradigm, results showed novel stimuli were evaluated more positively in a promotion focus compared to a prevention focus (Experiments 1A-1C), with high power compared to low power (Experiment 2A), and with the color blue compared to red (Experiment 2B). For familiar stimuli, all effects were reversed. Additionally, as predicted by novelty categorization theory, novel stimuli were liked better after broad compared to narrow category priming, and familiar stimuli were liked better after narrow compared with broad category priming (Experiment 3). We suggest, therefore, that although familiarity glows warmly in security-related contexts, people prefer novelty when they are primarily focused on growth.

Mental states inside out: switching costs for emotional and nonemotional sentences that differ in internal and external focus.

Mental states-such as thinking, remembering, or feeling angry, happy, or dizzy-have a clear internal component. We feel a certain way when we are in these states. These internal experiences may be simulated when people understand conceptual references to mental states. However, mental states can also be described from an "external" perspective, for example when referring to "smiling." In those cases, simulation of visible outside features may be more relevant for understanding. In a switching costs paradigm, we presented semantically unrelated sentences describing emotional and nonemotional mental states while manipulating their internal or external focus. The results show that switching costs occur when participants shift between sentences with an internal and an external focus. This suggests that different forms of simulation underlie understanding these sentences. In addition, these effects occurred for emotional and nonemotional mental states, suggesting that they are grounded in a similar way-through the process of simulation.