Memory enhancement for emotional words is attributed to both valence and arousal.

We do not memorize items in our surroundings with equal priority. Previous literature has widely shown that emotional stimuli are better remembered than neutral stimuli. However, given emotional stimuli and neutral stimuli often differ in both valence and arousal dimensions, it remains unclear whether the enhancement effects can be attributed to valence, or just to arousal. Importantly, most prior studies relied on a relatively small number of stimuli and non-emotional factors such as word length, imageability and other confounds were hard to control. To address these challenges, we analyzed multiple large databases of recognition memory and free recall tasks from previous research by items with many lexical and semantic covariates included, examining the effects of valence or arousal when controlling for each other. Our results showed a U-shaped relationship between valence and memory performance for both recognition and free recall, and a linear relationship between arousal and memory performance for both tasks. These findings showed that the memory enhancement effects can be attributed to both valence and arousal. We demonstrated these effects with generalizability across many stimuli and controlled for non-emotional factors. Together, these findings disentangle the contribution of valence and arousal in emotional memory enhancement effects and provide insights for current major theories of emotional memory.

Negative emotion amplifies retrieval practice effect for both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information.

Selective retrieval of task-relevant information often facilitates memory retention of that information. However, it is still unclear if selective retrieval of task-relevant information can alter memory for task-irrelevant information, and the role of emotional arousal in it. In two experiments, we used emotional and neutral faces as stimuli, and participants were asked to memorise the name (who is this person?) and location (where does he/she come from?) associated with each face in initial study. Then, half of the studied faces were presented as cues, and participants were asked to retrieve the corresponding names (Experiment 1) or locations (Experiment 2). Finally, all the faces were presented and participants were asked to retrieve both the corresponding names and locations. The results of the final test showed that retrieval practice not only enhanced memory of task-relevant information but also enhanced memory of task-irrelevant information. More importantly, negative emotion amplified the retrieval practice effect overall, with a larger retrieval-induced benefit for the negative than neutral condition. These findings demonstrated an emotional arousal amplification effect on retrieval-induced enhancement effects, suggesting that the advantage of the retrieved memory representations can be amplified by emotional arousal even without explicit goals in a task setting.

The effect of auditory valence on subsequent visual semantic processing.

Emotion influences many cognitive processes and plays an important role in our daily life. Previous studies focused on the effects of arousal on subsequent cognitive processing, but the effect of valence on subsequent semantic processing is still not clear. The present study examined the effect of auditory valence on subsequent visual semantic processing when controlling for arousal. We used instrumental music clips varying in valence while matching in arousal to induce valence states and asked participants to make natural or man-made judgements on subsequent neutral objects. We found that positive and negative valences similarly impaired subsequent semantic processing compared with neutral valence. The linear ballistic accumulator model analyses showed that the valence effects can be attributed to drift rate differences, suggesting that the effects are likely related to attentional selection. Our findings are consistent with a motivated attention model, indicating comparable attentional capture by both positive and negative valences in modulating subsequent cognitive processes.

Functional lateralization of the medial temporal lobe in novel associative processing during creativity evaluation.

Although hemispheric lateralization of creativity has been a longstanding topic of debate, the underlying neurocognitive mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we designed 2 types of novel stimuli-"novel useful and novel useless," adapted from "familiar useful" designs taken from daily life-to demonstrate how the left and right medial temporal lobe (MTL) respond to novel designs of different usefulness. Taking the "familiar useful" design as a baseline, we found that the right MTL showed increased activation in response to "novel useful" designs, followed by "novel useless" ones, while the left MTL only showed increased activation in response to "novel useful" designs. Calculating an asymmetry index suggests that usefulness processing is predominant in the left MTL, whereas the right MTL is predominantly involved in novelty processing. Moreover, the left parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) showed stronger functional connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex when responding to "novel useless" designs. In contrast, the right PHG showed stronger connectivity with the amygdala, midbrain, and hippocampus. Critically, multivoxel representational similarity analyses revealed that the left MTL was more effective than the right MTL at distinguishing the usefulness differences in novel stimuli, while representational patterns in the left PHG positively predicted the post-behavior evaluation of "truly creative" products. These findings suggest an apparent dissociation of the left and right MTL in integrating the novelty and usefulness information and novel associative processing during creativity evaluation, respectively. Our results provide novel insights into a longstanding and controversial question in creativity research by demonstrating functional lateralization of the MTL in processing novel associations.

SCOPE: The South Carolina psycholinguistic metabase.

The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of lexical variables, and the multitude of associated databases, makes the choice, comparison, and standardization of these variables in psycholinguistic research increasingly difficult. Here, we introduce The South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabase (SCOPE), which is a metabase (or a meta-database) containing an extensive, curated collection of psycholinguistic variable values from major databases. The metabase currently contains 245 lexical variables, organized into seven major categories: General (e.g., frequency), Orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency), Phonological (e.g., phonological uniqueness point), Orth-Phon (e.g., consistency), Semantic (e.g., concreteness), Morphological (e.g., number of morphemes), and Response variables (e.g., lexical decision latency). We hope that SCOPE will become a valuable resource for researchers in psycholinguistics and affiliated disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience of language, computational linguistics, and communication disorders. The availability and ease of use of the metabase with comprehensive set of variables can facilitate the understanding of the unique contribution of each of the variables to word processing, and that of interactions between variables, as well as new insights and development of improved models and theories of word processing. It can also help standardize practice in psycholinguistics. We demonstrate use of the metabase by measuring relationships between variables in multiple ways and testing their individual contribution towards a number of dependent measures, in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date. The metabase is freely available at go.sc.edu/scope.

Social Support, Internalized HIV Stigma, Resilience and Depression Among People Living with HIV: A Moderated Mediation Analysis.

Internalized HIV stigma has been associated with depression among people living with HIV (PLWH). However, it is still unclear whether resilience would mediate the association between internalized HIV stigma and depression and how this indirect effect would be moderated by social support. Data were collected from 402 PLWH in South Carolina using a cross-sectional survey. Data were fitted using a path model that specified the extent to which internalized HIV stigma and depression were related through resilience and how this effect was moderated by social support. Sociodemographic characteristics were included in the model as covariates. The indirect effect of internalized HIV stigma on depression through resilience was statistically significant for high social support but not for low social support. To mitigate negative impacts of internalized HIV stigma on mental health of PLWH, intervention efforts should integrate multilevel components for promoting both resilience and social support.

Audiovisual integration in the human brain: a coordinate-based meta-analysis.

People can seamlessly integrate a vast array of information from what they see and hear in the noisy and uncertain world. However, the neural underpinnings of audiovisual integration continue to be a topic of debate. Using strict inclusion criteria, we performed an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis on 121 neuroimaging experiments with a total of 2,092 participants. We found that audiovisual integration is linked with the coexistence of multiple integration sites, including early cortical, subcortical, and higher association areas. Although activity was consistently found within the superior temporal cortex, different portions of this cortical region were identified depending on the analytical contrast used, complexity of the stimuli, and modality within which attention was directed. The context-dependent neural activity related to audiovisual integration suggests a flexible rather than fixed neural pathway for audiovisual integration. Together, our findings highlight a flexible multiple pathways model for audiovisual integration, with superior temporal cortex as the central node in these neural assemblies.

Affective valence of words differentially affects visual and auditory word recognition.

Recognizing written or spoken words involves a sequence of processing stages, transforming sensory features into lexical-semantic representations. Whereas the later processing stages are common across modalities, the initial stages are modality-specific. In the visual modality, previous studies have shown that words with positive valence are recognized faster than neutral words. Here, we examined whether the effects of valence on word recognition are specific to the visual modality or are common across visual and auditory modalities. To address this question, we analyzed multiple large databases of visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, relating the valence of words to lexical decision times while controlling for a large number of variables, including arousal and frequency. We found that valence differentially influenced visual and auditory word recognition. Valence had an asymmetric effect on visual lexical decision times, primarily speeding up recognition of positive words. By contrast, valence had a symmetric effect on auditory lexical decision times, with both negative and positive words speeding up word recognition relative to neutral words. The modality-specificity of valence effects were consistent across databases and were observed when the same sets of words were compared across modalities. We interpret these findings as indicating that valence influences word recognition partly at the sensory-perceptual stage. We relate these effects to the effects of positive (reward) and negative (punishment) reinforcers on perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Crossmodal negativity bias in semantic processing.

Negative events have greater influence on cognitive processing compared with positive events, a phenomenon referred to as the negativity bias. Previous studies have shown that reaction times (RTs) to negatively valenced items are slower in semantic tasks. According to the automatic vigilance hypothesis, these effects are caused by preferential attention to negative stimuli or features diverting cognitive resources away from semantic processing. However, it is still unclear whether the negativity bias can be modulated by affective context in a crossmodal setting and how that occurs. Experiment 1 examined individually presented pictures and words and established that participants were slower to judge negatively valenced picture and word targets in a semantic task. Experiments 2 and 3 probed the crossmodal influences of valence on subsequent semantic processing by using short music clips as primes and valenced pictures or words as targets. Both experiments demonstrated that priming negative versus positive music slowed RTs in a semantic task, irrespective of target valence. Hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion model analyses suggest that the slow-down effects for negative conditions are mainly attributed to reduced drift rates. Together, these experiments demonstrate that negative auditory valence can impair subsequent semantic processing of visual targets in an additive fashion. These results provide further support for the automatic vigilance hypothesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of retrieval and emotion on within-item associative memory - Evidence from ERP and oscillatory subsequent memory effects.

Previous studies have shown the effects of retrieval practice and emotion on associative memory separately. However, it is yet not clear what are the related neural mechanisms and how the two factors together influence associative memory? We examined this question by instructing participants to memorize emotional or neutral words using different ways of learning. Behaviorally, the source memory was enhanced by the retrieval practice compared to the restudy condition, and impaired by the negative compared to the neutral condition without an interaction. Consistent neural effects of retrieval practice were also found, in which subsequent memory effects (SME) of 500-700 ms parietal ERPs and alpha desynchronization were found for the retrieval practice but not for the restudy. No significant difference of SME for ERPs and time-frequency analyses regarding the emotion effect was found. These results demonstrated the neural mechanism for the effects of emotion and retrieval practice on subsequent memory.

Evaluating non-affective cross-modal congruence effects on emotion perception.

Although numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to integrate consistent visual and auditory signals, the role of non-affective congruence in emotion perception is unclear. This registered report examined the influence of non-affective cross-modal congruence on emotion perception. In Experiment 1, non-affective congruence was manipulated by matching or mismatching gender between visual and auditory modalities. Participants were instructed to attend to emotion information from only one modality while ignoring the other modality. Experiment 2 tested the inverse effectiveness rule by including both noise and noiseless conditions. Across two experiments, we found the effects of task-irrelevant emotional signals from one modality on emotional perception in the other modality, reflected in affective congruence, facilitation, and affective incongruence effects. The effects were stronger for the attend-auditory compared to the attend-visual condition, supporting a visual dominance effect. The effects were stronger for the noise compared to the noiseless condition, consistent with the inverse effectiveness rule. We did not find evidence for the effects of non-affective congruence on audiovisual integration of emotion across two experiments, suggesting that audiovisual integration of emotion may not require automatic integration of non-affective congruence information.

Modality-general and modality-specific audiovisual valence processing.

A fundamental question in affective neuroscience is whether there is a common hedonic system for valence processing independent of modality, or there are distinct neural systems for different modalities. To address this question, we used both region of interest and whole-brain representational similarity analyses on functional magnetic resonance imaging data to identify modality-general and modality-specific brain areas involved in valence processing across visual and auditory modalities. First, region of interest analyses showed that the superior temporal cortex was associated with both modality-general and auditory-specific models, while the primary visual cortex was associated with the visual-specific model. Second, the whole-brain searchlight analyses also identified both modality-general and modality-specific representations. The modality-general regions included the superior temporal, medial superior frontal, inferior frontal, precuneus, precentral, postcentral, supramarginal, paracentral lobule and middle cingulate cortices. The modality-specific regions included both perceptual cortices and higher-order brain areas. The valence representations derived from individualized behavioral valence ratings were consistent with these results. Together, these findings suggest both modality-general and modality-specific representations of valence.

Evoked and induced power oscillations linked to audiovisual integration of affect.

Our affective experiences are influenced by combined multisensory information. Although the enhanced effects of congruent audiovisual information on our affective experiences have been well documented, the role of neural oscillations in the audiovisual integration of affective signals remains unclear. First, it is unclear whether oscillatory activity changes as a function of valence. Second, the function of phase-locked and non-phase-locked power changes in audiovisual integration of affect has not yet been clearly distinguished. To fill this gap, the present study performed time-frequency analyses on EEG data acquired while participants perceived positive, neutral and negative naturalistic video and music clips. A comparison between the congruent audiovisual condition and the sum of unimodal conditions was used to identify supra-additive (Audiovisual > Visual + Auditory) or sub-additive (Audiovisual < Visual + Auditory) integration effects. The results showed that early evoked sub-additive theta and sustained induced supra-additive delta and beta activities are linked to audiovisual integration of affect regardless of affective content.

Time course of attentional bias in social anxiety: The effects of spatial frequencies and individual threats.

Hypervigilance and attentional bias to threat faces with low-spatial-frequency (LSF) information have been found in individuals with social anxiety. The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis posits that socially anxious individuals exhibit initial vigilance and later avoidance to threatening cues. However, the temporal dynamics of these two processes in response to various LSF threats in social anxiety remain unclear. In the current study, we presented faces containing anger, disgust, and fear in high and low spatial frequencies and compared the neural correlates with sensory perception and attention in individuals with high versus low social anxiety (HSA/LSA, n = 24). A visual search task was used to investigate the attentional effects of threats and spatial frequencies, and event-related potentials, particularly, the visual components of P1 and P250, were measured to index visual perceptual and attentional processes, respectively. We found that HSA individuals showed pronounced P1 and reduced P250 to LSF (vs. HSF) faces, regardless of emotion type, suggesting a general pattern of initial vigilance and later avoidance to LSF faces in social anxiety. Furthermore, while LSA individuals showed enhanced P250 to both fear and disgust (vs. neutral) faces, HSA individuals showed pronounced P250 to disgust faces alone. Our results, thus, elucidate the temporal profile of early vigilance and later avoidance in social anxiety, highlighting its broad implication for all faces and predominance in the low spatial frequency. Considering individual threats, our results demonstrate specific attentional avoidance of fear faces in social anxiety.

A study in affect: Predicting valence from fMRI data.

Previous studies have shown that affective valence states induced by brief stimulus presentations are identifiable from whole brain activation patterns observed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, it is unclear whether those results will generalize to identification of continuous changes in affective valence states under naturalistic settings, such as watching a movie. We examined neural representations of signed (positive versus negative) and unsigned (valenced versus non-valenced) valence on previously collected fMRI data from 17 participants who watched a TV show episode in a passive viewing task in the scanner (Chen et al., 2017). These data were correlated with behavioral valence ratings from a separate group of 125 participants. We spatially localized both signed and unsigned valence representations and were able to predict valence ratings for most participants based on the signed valence model in a cross-participant cross-validation procedure. These findings extend previous results from controlled experimental studies to naturalistic settings, demonstrating the ecological validity of prior findings.

The function of the hippocampus and middle temporal gyrus in forming new associations and concepts during the processing of novelty and usefulness features in creative designs.

Creative thought relies on the reorganization of existing knowledge to generate novel and useful concepts. However, how these new concepts are formed, especially through the processing of novelty and usefulness (which are usually regarded as the key properties of creativity), is not clear. Taking familiar and useful (FU) objects/designs as the starting point or fundamental baseline, we modified them into novel and useless (NS) objects/designs or novel and useful (NU) ones (i.e., truly creative ones) to investigate how the features of novelty and usefulness are processed (processing of novelty: NU minus FU; processing of usefulness: NU minus NS). Specifically, we predicted that the creative integration of novelty and usefulness entails not only the formation of new associations, which could be critically mediated by the hippocampus and adjacent medial temporal lobe (MTL) areas, but also the formation of new concepts or categories, which is supported by the middle temporal gyrus (MTG). We found that both the MTL and the MTG were involved in the processing of novelty and usefulness. The MTG showed distinctive patterns of information processing, reflected by strengthened functional connectivity with the hippocampus to construct new concepts and strengthened functional connectivity with the executive control system to break the boundaries of old concepts. Additionally, participants' subjective evaluations of concept distance showed that the distance between the familiar concept (FU) and the successfully constructed concept (NU) was larger than that between the FU and the unsuccessfully constructed concept (NS), and this pattern was found to correspond to the patterns of their neural representations in the MTG. These findings demonstrate the critical mechanism by which new associations and concepts are formed during novelty and usefulness processing in creative design; this mechanism may be critically mediated by the hippocampus-MTG connection.

An fMRI Study of Affective Congruence across Visual and Auditory Modalities.

Evaluating multisensory emotional content is a part of normal day-to-day interactions. We used fMRI to examine brain areas sensitive to congruence of audiovisual valence and their overlap with areas sensitive to valence. Twenty-one participants watched audiovisual clips with either congruent or incongruent valence across visual and auditory modalities. We showed that affective congruence versus incongruence across visual and auditory modalities is identifiable on a trial-by-trial basis across participants. Representations of affective congruence were widely distributed with some overlap with the areas sensitive to valence. Regions of overlap included bilateral superior temporal cortex and right pregenual anterior cingulate. The overlap between the regions identified here and in the emotion congruence literature lends support to the idea that valence may be a key determinant of affective congruence processing across a variety of discrete emotions.

Audiovisual Representations of Valence: a Cross-study Perspective.

Hedonic valence describes the pleasantness or unpleasantness of psychological states elicited by stimuli and is conceived as a fundamental building block of emotional experience. Multivariate pattern analysis approaches contribute to the study of valence representation by allowing identification of valence from distributed patterns of activity. However, the issue of construct validity arises in that there is always a possibility that classification results from a single study are driven by factors other than valence, such as the idiosyncrasies of the stimuli. In this work, we identify valence across participants from six different fMRI studies that used auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli, thus increasing the likelihood that classification is driven by valence and not by the specifics of the experimental paradigm of a particular study. The studies included a total of 93 participants and differed on stimuli, task, trial duration, number of participants, and scanner parameters. In a leave-one-study-out cross-validation procedure, we trained the classifiers on fMRI data from five studies and predicted valence, positive or negative, for each of the participants in the left-out study. Whole-brain classification demonstrated a reliable distinction between positive and negative valence states (72% accuracy). In a searchlight analysis, the representation of valence was localized to the right postcentral and supramarginal gyri, left superior frontal and middle frontal cortices, and right pregenual anterior cingulate and superior medial frontal cortices. The demonstrated cross-study classification of valence enhances the construct validity and generalizability of the findings from the combined studies.

Emotional arousal influences remembrance of goal-relevant stimuli.

Emotional stimuli rarely occur in isolation; instead, they often cluster with nearby neutral items in time and space. Research suggests that emotional arousal at encoding strengthens memory retention for temporally adjacent goal-relevant neutral stimuli. It is an open question whether these emotion-induced enhancement effects are the same for spatially adjacent stimuli. The present study examined how emotional arousal influenced memory of temporally or spatially adjacent goal-relevant neutral items. In Experiment 1, two stimuli were presented consecutively as a temporally adjacent pair during the study phase, with a neutral-test stimulus paired with either a negative or neutral bystander stimulus. Participants were instructed to attend to the neutral-test stimulus in the goal-relevant condition and to the bystander stimulus in the goal-irrelevant condition. The method for Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 except that the two stimuli were presented simultaneously during the study, so that they were spatially rather than temporally adjacent. Memory performance was measured for neutral-test items using a recognition test with a remember-know paradigm. Emotional arousal at encoding enhanced the remembrance of temporally adjacent goal-relevant neutral stimuli but impaired the remembrance of spatially adjacent goal-relevant neutral stimuli. Using a similar procedure, Experiment 3 collected behavioral data from two samples for temporally and spatially adjacent conditions and replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2. The effects of emotional arousal on remembrance of goal-relevant neutral items double dissociated for temporally and spatially adjacent conditions support that arousal-biased competition amplifies the effects of goal relevance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of conceptual priming on subsequent familiarity: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

Previous studies on the neural mechanisms of how priming influences subsequent recognition memory have mainly focused on repetition priming, whereas the neural mechanisms of how conceptual priming affects subsequent recognition memory is still not clear. The present study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of how conceptual priming influences subsequent recognition memory. The behavioral results showed that conceptual priming only affected subsequent familiarity. The ERP results showed that conceptual priming was associated with reduced N400, and that the N400 conceptual priming effect predicted the behavioral effect of conceptual priming on subsequent familiarity. These results indicated that conceptual priming could influence subsequent familiarity by facilitating semantic processing in the encoding phase.