Same but different: The influence of context framing on subjective disgust, eye movements and pupillary responses.

The adaptive value of disgust has been associated with situations of threat to our survival. This study explored this topic using eye-tracking, which provides an objective measurement of attention, while solving previous methodological issues (e.g., not considering discrete emotions and comparing across perceptually-different stimuli). We used the same stimuli and manipulated the emotional state via contextual framing. Participants' eye movements and pupillary responses were recorded while they explored pictures of objects held by clean or dirty hands; the latter were framed in a disease or a non-disease context. Pictures were then rated for arousal, disgust, and valence. Framing stimuli in a disease (vs non-disease) context induced a more adverse subjective emotional experience. Importantly, our objective measures revealed that such manipulation also led to a higher information-seeking behavior and greater pupil constriction. Overall, our data suggest that the same stimuli can effectively be used to induce different emotional states by manipulating their framing.

Exogenous attention and memory for faces following contextual behavioral immune system activation.

The behavioral immune system (BIS) is characterized by affective, cognitive and behavioral processes that work in an articulated manner to prevent the occurrence of infections. Attention and memory evolved to enhance the organism's chances of survival and have been proposed to play an important role in the BIS. The present study investigated the effects of attention and memory for neutral faces after a contextual activation of the BIS. Participants were primed, by the use of film clips, either with infectious disease concerns or non-infectious disease concerns. They performed an exogenous attentional task involving the discrimination of target letters, with face stimuli presented as distractors, which was then followed by a surprise recognition task for the faces. The results showed that participants in the infectious disease condition were more accurate in the attentional task than participants in the control condition. No significant difference between groups was found in the response times during the attention task nor in memory performance. Overall, these results suggest that the BIS might be associated with a hypervigilant state towards cues in general and that BIS activation through this type of priming may not be sufficient to clearly activate mnemonic mechanisms.

Presenting new stimuli to study emotion: Development and validation of the Objects-on-Hands Picture Database.

A long-standing goal shared by researchers has been to design optimal experimental procedures, including the selection of appropriate stimuli. Pictures are commonly used in different research fields. However, until recently, researchers have relied mostly on line-drawings, which can have poor ecological validity. We developed a set of high quality standardized photographs of objects from six different categories, recorded under two camera viewpoints, and five presentation conditions (on its own, held by clean hands, and by hands covered with different substances: sauce, chocolate and mud). These various staging conditions can be used to induce different emotional states while maintaining the object of interest constant. We first report normative data on the objects' name agreement and familiarity collected from North American and Portuguese participants. Results showed high name agreement and familiarity in both samples. Next, arousal, disgust and valence ratings were collected for the stimuli under either an emotional-activating or a neutral context. Subjective ratings varied according to the staging condition and the context, confirming that the same items can effectively be used in different emotional conditions. This database allows researchers to select more ecologically-valid stimuli according to their research purposes while considering several variables of interest and avoiding item-selection problems commonly present when comparing responses to neutral and emotional items.

Adaptive Memory: Remembering Potential Mates.

According to the adaptive memory perspective, memory should function more efficiently in fitness-relevant domains. The current work explored whether there is a mnemonic tuning in a fundamental domain for human evolution: reproduction. In two experiments, female participants assessed how desirable potential male candidates (represented by a face and a short descriptor) would be in the context of a long-term mating relationship or in the context of a long-term work relationship. Then, after a short distractor task, participants performed a recognition task for the faces and a source memory task. Finally, they were asked to recall the descriptors presented during encoding. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design, whereas Experiment 2 employed a within-subject design. In both experiments, participants remembered the faces best when they were encoded in the mating condition. Also, in Experiment 1, source memory performance was better in the mating condition than in the working condition with the reverse being true for free recall of the descriptors. The latter difference was not observed in Experiment 2. These results suggest a potential mnemonic tuning for the faces of potential mate partners.