Time flies faster when you're feeling blue: sad mood induction accelerates the perception of time in a temporal judgment task.

Investigating the interaction of mood and time perception has provided key information in the mechanisms that underlie cognition and emotion. However, much of the literature that has investigated the role of emotions in time perception has focused on the valence of stimuli, or correlational studies of self-reported mood. In the present study, 31 healthy undergraduates completed a temporal judgment task before and after an autobiographical sad mood induction procedure. In the temporal judgment task, participants identified whether a presented neutral stimulus was onscreen for the same duration as a target (2 s). Along with target trials, very short (1.25 s), short (1.6 s), long (2.25 s), and very long (3.125 s) trials were presented in random order and in equal proportion. Following mood induction, ratings of sadness and fear increased, but returned to baseline at the end of the study. After the mood induction, participants significantly increased temporal overestimation as participants were more likely to affirm short than long-duration trials as matching the target. These results indicate that transient changes in mood in otherwise healthy adults can accelerate the subjective experience of time. Sadness may increase physiological components of time perception that are related approach motivation.

Preferential activation for emotional Western classical music versus emotional environmental sounds in motor, interoceptive, and language brain areas.

Recent meta analyses suggest there is a common brain network involved in processing emotion in music and sounds. However, no studies have directly compared the neural substrates of equivalent emotional Western classical music and emotional environmental sounds. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging we investigated whether brain activation in motor cortex, interoceptive cortex, and Broca's language area during an auditory emotional appraisal task differed as a function of stimulus type. Activation was relatively greater to music in motor and interoceptive cortex - areas associated with movement and internal physical feelings - and relatively greater to emotional environmental sounds in Broca's area. We conclude that emotional environmental sounds are appraised through verbal identification of the source, and that emotional Western classical music is appraised through evaluation of bodily feelings. While there is clearly a common core emotion-processing network underlying all emotional appraisal, modality-specific contextual information may be important for understanding the contribution of voluntary versus automatic appraisal mechanisms.

Sweet-cheeks vs. pea-brain: embodiment, valence, and task all influence the emotional salience of language.

Previous research has found that more embodied insults (e.g. numbskull) are identified faster and more accurately than less embodied insults (e.g. idiot). The linguistic processing of embodied compliments has not been well explored. In the present study, participants completed two tasks where they identified insults and compliments, respectively. Half of the stimuli were more embodied than the other half. We examined the late positive potential (LPP) component of event-related potentials in early (400-500 ms), middle (500-600 ms), and late (600-700 ms) time windows. Increased embodiment resulted in improved response accuracy to compliments in both tasks, whereas it only improved accuracy for insults in the compliment detection task. More embodied stimuli elicited a larger LPP than less embodied stimuli in the early time window. Insults generated a larger LPP in the late time window in the insult task; compliments generated a larger LPP in the early window in the compliment task. These results indicate that electrophysiological correlates of emotional language perception are sensitive to both top-down and bottom-up processes.

Valence and arousal influence the late positive potential during central and lateralized presentation of images.

The motivated attention network is believed to be the system that allocates attention toward motivationally relevant, emotional stimuli in order to better prepare an organism for action [Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M., & Cuthbert, B. N. (1997). Motivated attention: Affect, activation, and action. In P. J. Lang, R. F. Simons, M. Balaban, & R. Simons (Eds.), Attention and orienting: Sensory and motivational processes (pp. 97-135). Psychology Press]. The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) that is a manifestation of the motivated attention network, has not been found to reliably differentiate the valence of emotionally relevant stimuli. In two studies, we systematically varied epoch, stimulus arousal, stimulus valence, and hemisphere of presentation (Study 2) to investigate valence effects in the LPP. Both central and divided visual field presentations of emotional stimuli found the LPP to be sustained in later windows for high-arousing unpleasant images compared to pleasant images. Further, this effect was driven by sustained LPP responses following left hemisphere presentations of unpleasant stimuli compared to right. Findings are discussed regarding hemispheric processing of emotion and how lateralized emotion processes might contribute to psychopathology.

A single session of meditation reduces of physiological indices of anger in both experienced and novice meditators.

The goal of the present study was to explore how anger reduction via a single session of meditation might be measured using psychophysiological methodologies. To achieve this, 15 novice meditators (Experiment 1) and 12 practiced meditators (Experiment 2) completed autobiographical anger inductions prior to, and following, meditation training while respiration rate, heart rate, and blood pressure were measured. Participants also reported subjective anger via a visual analog scale. At both stages, the experienced meditators' physiological reaction to the anger induction reflected that of relaxation: slowed breathing and heart rate and decreased blood pressure. Naïve meditators exhibited physiological reactions that were consistent with anger during the pre-meditation stage, while after meditation training and a second anger induction they elicited physiological evidence of relaxation. The current results examining meditation training show that the naïve group's physiological measures mimicked those of the experienced group following a single session of meditation training.

Detection of sarcastic speech: The role of the right hemisphere in ambiguity resolution.

Two experiments were conducted to determine if the right hemisphere (RH) plays a central role in understanding sarcasm. In Experiment 1, 48 participants completed a target detection task using dichotically presented phrases that were sincere (message compatible), sarcastic (conflicting semantic and prosodic message), or neutral (no emotional prosody). Sarcastic phrases presented to the left ear (LE)/RH produced faster response times than sarcastic phrases presented to the right ear/left hemisphere. Accuracy results indicated an overall LE/RH advantage for detecting both sarcastic and sincere phrases. Experiment 2 utilized the same task with the addition of event-related potential recording. There was a reliable N400 seen in response to the sarcastic phrases, but only with LE/RH presentation. These results suggest that the RH is particularly sensitive to the mismatch between semantic and prosodic information characterized by sarcasm.

Biased processing of sad faces: an ERP marker candidate for depression susceptibility.

Depression has been associated with task-relevant increased attention toward negative information, reduced attention toward positive information, or reduced inhibition of task-irrelevant negative information. This study employed behavioural and psychophysiological measures (event-related potentials; ERP) to examine whether groups with risk factors for depression (past depression, current dysphoria) would show attentional biases or inhibitory deficits related to viewing facial expressions. In oddball task blocks, young adult participants responded to an infrequently presented target emotion (e.g., sad) and inhibited responses to an infrequently presented distracter emotion (e.g., happy) in the context of frequently presented neutral stimuli. Previous depression was uniquely associated with greater P3 ERP amplitude following sad targets, reflecting a selective attention bias. Also, dysphoric individuals less effectively inhibited responses to sad distracters than non-dysphoric individuals according to behavioural data, but not psychophysiological data. Results suggest that depression risk may be most reliably characterised by increased attention toward others' depressive facial emotion.

Human and AI collaboration in the higher education environment: opportunities and concerns.

In service of the goal of examining how cognitive science can facilitate human-computer interactions in complex systems, we explore how cognitive psychology research might help educators better utilize artificial intelligence and AI supported tools as facilitatory to learning, rather than see these emerging technologies as a threat. We also aim to provide historical perspective, both on how automation and technology has generated unnecessary apprehension over time, and how generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT are a product of the discipline of cognitive science. We introduce a model for how higher education instruction can adapt to the age of AI by fully capitalizing on the role that metacognition knowledge and skills play in determining learning effectiveness. Finally, we urge educators to consider how AI can be seen as a critical collaborator to be utilized in our efforts to educate around the critical workforce skills of effective communication and collaboration.

Depression reduces perceptual sensitivity for positive words and pictures.

There is evidence of maladaptive attentional biases for lexical information (e.g., Atchley, Ilardi, & Enloe, 2003; Atchley, Stringer, Mathias, Ilardi, & Minatrea, 2007) and for pictographic stimuli (e.g., Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004) among patients with depression. The current research looks for depressotypic processing biases among depressed out-patients and non-clinical controls, using both verbal and pictorial stimuli. A d' measure (sensitivity index) was used to examine each participant's perceptual sensitivity threshold. Never-depressed controls evidenced a detection bias for positive picture stimuli, while depressed participants had no such bias. With verbal stimuli, depressed individuals showed specific decrements in the detection of positive person-referent words (WINNER), but not with positive non-person-referent words (SUNSHINE) or with negative words. Never-depressed participants showed no such differences across word types. In the current study, depression is characterised both by an absence of the normal positivistic biases seen in individuals without mood disorders (consistent with McCabe & Gotlib, 1995), and by a specific reduction in sensitivity for person-referent positive information that might be inconsistent with depressotypic self-schemas.

The Blink and the Body.

We evaluated the interaction of emotion, interoceptive awareness (IA), and attention using an attentional blink (AB) task. Healthy undergraduates completed a cardiac awareness task and, based on previously validated cut scores, were classified as high or average perceivers (n = 19 in each group; matched on age and gender). Participants completed an AB task with counterbalanced emotional and/or neutral lexical stimuli as the first target (T1) and/or the second target (T2). Both high and average perceivers exhibited retroactive interference in conditions where T2 immediately followed T1. However, only the average perceivers exhibited a significant blink effect: They reported T2 inaccurately in trials in which one intervening stimulus occurred between T1 and T2. High perceivers exhibited their best performance in trials where both targets were emotional; average perceivers exhibited their worst performance in these trials. These results contribute to a small but growing literature that suggests IA and exteroceptive attention are related systems.

Examining lateralized semantic access using pictures.

A divided visual field (DVF) experiment examined the semantic processing strategies employed by the cerebral hemispheres to determine if strategies observed with written word stimuli generalize to other media for communicating semantic information. We employed picture stimuli and vary the degree of semantic relatedness between the picture pairs. Participants made an on-line semantic relatedness judgment in response to sequentially presented pictures. We found that when pictures are presented to the right hemisphere responses are generally more accurate than the left hemisphere for semantic relatedness judgments for picture pairs. Furthermore, consistent with earlier DVF studies employing words, we conclude that the RH is better at accessing or maintaining access to information that has a weak or more remote semantic relationship. We also found evidence of faster access for pictures presented to the LH in the strongly-related condition. Overall, these results are consistent with earlier DVF word studies that argue that the cerebral hemispheres each play an important and separable role during semantic retrieval.

The Creative Healthcare Architect.

The objectives of the research described in this article focus on an understanding of factors that influence creativity in healthcare design. Two areas of emphasis include the personality strengths of successful healthcare architects and elements of the current project delivery process. As part of the research, 48 healthcare architects participated in a battery of personality and creativity tests including Myers/Briggs, The Big Five, the Remote Associates Test (RAT), and an architectural creativity test. Results of the test point to strong "openness" for new ideas, particularly with the designers sampled. As a group, respondents scored low in "narcistic" bias (indicating emotional stability) and did not score high in verbal creativity. Compared to earlier studies of creative architects, the sample group included significantly fewer "perceiver" (Myers/Briggs), associated with a high level of curiosity. A second interesting finding was a significant difference between younger and older architects in the architectural creativity test. One possible hypothesis is the experience of the older architects. A second, and potentially more alarming, hypothesis is that technological disruptions are interfering with the ability to stimulate divergent thinking, particularly in the younger generation raised with smart phones and other network tools. Creativity in healthcare architecture demonstrates the case for domain-specific experience and skills along with creative input from other knowledge domains. The ability to establish group creativity may be inhibited by pressures to condense project time lines and not fully implement lean and other process strategies for exploring alternative solutions. Effective participation in group creativity tasks is particularly important for the complex world of healthcare design.

Offset masking in a divided visual field study.

A problem in divided visual field studies (especially those using event-related potentials as a dependent measure) is the large number of horizontal eye movements participants make during experimental trials. Past attention research suggests that eye movements to lateralised targets should be significantly reduced using a dynamic, offset mask, causing a reduction in attentional capture. The current study attempted to replicate past divided visual field language studies using offset masking procedures. Using a basic offset procedure, eye movements were not reduced in Experiment 1. However, Experiment 2 did show a significant reduction in eye movements using a new dynamic offset masking procedure. Low accuracy rates were a concern throughout. In conclusion, horizontal eye movements can be reduced with a dynamic offset procedure but the low accuracy rates and the inconsistent behavioural findings throughout the study suggest that further study and refinement of the paradigm is needed.

Increased neural sensitivity to self-relevant stimuli in major depressive disorder.

The current research examined how individuals with depression process emotional, self-relevant stimuli. Across two studies, individuals with depression and healthy controls read stimuli that varied in self-relevance while EEG data were recorded. We examined the late positive potential (LPP), an ERP component that captures the dynamic allocation of attention to motivationally salient stimuli. In Study 1, participants read single words in a passive-viewing task. Participants viewed negative, positive, or neutral words that were either normative or self-generated. Exploratory analyses indicated that participants with depression exhibited affective modulation of the LPP for self-generated stimuli only (both positive and negative) and not for normative stimuli; healthy controls exhibited similar affective modulation of the LPP for both self-relevant and normative stimuli. In Study 2, using a separate sample and a different task, stimuli were provided within the context of sentence stems referring to the self or other people. Participants with depression were more likely to endorse negative self-referent sentences and reject positive ones compared to healthy controls. Depressed participants also exhibited an increased LPP to negative stimuli compared to positive or neutral stimuli. Together, these two studies suggest that depression is characterized by relatively increased sensitivity to affective self-relevant stimuli, perhaps in the context of a broader reduction in emotional reactivity to stimuli that are not self-relevant. Thus, depression may be characterized by a more nuanced pattern based on the degree of stimulus self-relevance than either a global decrease or increase in reactivity to affective stimuli.

Central and Divided Visual Field Presentation of Emotional Images to Measure Hemispheric Differences in Motivated Attention.

Two dominant theories on lateralized processing of emotional information exist in the literature. One theory posits that unpleasant emotions are processed by right frontal regions, while pleasant emotions are processed by left frontal regions. The other theory posits that the right hemisphere is more specialized for the processing of emotional information overall, particularly in posterior regions. Assessing the different roles of the cerebral hemispheres in processing emotional information can be difficult without the use of neuroimaging methodologies, which are not accessible or affordable to all scientists. Divided visual field presentation of stimuli can allow for the investigation of lateralized processing of information without the use of neuroimaging technology. This study compared central versus divided visual field presentations of emotional images to assess differences in motivated attention between the two hemispheres. The late positive potential (LPP) was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) methodologies to assess motivated attention. Future work will pair this paradigm with a more active behavioral task to explore the behavioral impacts on the attentional differences found.

A comparison of semantic and syntactic event related potentials generated by children and adults.

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13) processed spoken stimuli containing either semantic or syntactic anomalies. Adult participants showed a significant N400 in response to semantic anomalies and P600 components in response to syntactic anomalies. Children also show evidence of both ERP components. The children's N400 component differed from the adults' in scalp location, latency, and component amplitude. The children's P600 was remarkably similar to the P600 shown by adults in scalp location, component amplitude, and component latency. Theoretical implication for theories of language comprehension in adults and children will be discussed.

Neural Processing of Emotional Musical and Nonmusical Stimuli in Depression.

BACKGROUND: Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and striatum are part of the emotional neural circuitry implicated in major depressive disorder (MDD). Music is often used for emotion regulation, and pleasurable music listening activates the dopaminergic system in the brain, including the ACC. The present study uses functional MRI (fMRI) and an emotional nonmusical and musical stimuli paradigm to examine how neural processing of emotionally provocative auditory stimuli is altered within the ACC and striatum in depression. METHOD: Nineteen MDD and 20 never-depressed (ND) control participants listened to standardized positive and negative emotional musical and nonmusical stimuli during fMRI scanning and gave subjective ratings of valence and arousal following scanning. RESULTS: ND participants exhibited greater activation to positive versus negative stimuli in ventral ACC. When compared with ND participants, MDD participants showed a different pattern of activation in ACC. In the rostral part of the ACC, ND participants showed greater activation for positive information, while MDD participants showed greater activation to negative information. In dorsal ACC, the pattern of activation distinguished between the types of stimuli, with ND participants showing greater activation to music compared to nonmusical stimuli, while MDD participants showed greater activation to nonmusical stimuli, with the greatest response to negative nonmusical stimuli. No group differences were found in striatum. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that people with depression may process emotional auditory stimuli differently based on both the type of stimulation and the emotional content of that stimulation. This raises the possibility that music may be useful in retraining ACC function, potentially leading to more effective and targeted treatments.

Correction: Neural Processing of Emotional Musical and Nonmusical Stimuli in Depression.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156859.].

Hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of emotional content in word meanings: the effect of current and past depression.

We examined hemispheric lateralization of emotion processing by comparing the performance of clinically depressed, previously depressed, and control individuals on a divided visual field task. Participants were asked to make affective valence judgments for each in a series of laterally presented person-descriptive adjectives. Study results suggest that the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) is preferentially sensitive to the affective context of language. Among targets presented to the RH, depressed and previously depressed participants were significantly faster and more accurate in their judgments of negative target words, while controls responded more quickly and accurately to positive target words. No such effects were observed for targets presented to the left hemisphere. It is hypothesized that affective sensitivity may result in differences in semantic network organization across individuals who vary in affective experience.

Creativity in the wild: improving creative reasoning through immersion in natural settings.

Adults and children are spending more time interacting with media and technology and less time participating in activities in nature. This life-style change clearly has ramifications for our physical well-being, but what impact does this change have on cognition? Higher order cognitive functions including selective attention, problem solving, inhibition, and multi-tasking are all heavily utilized in our modern technology-rich society. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that exposure to nature can restore prefrontal cortex-mediated executive processes such as these. Consistent with ART, research indicates that exposure to natural settings seems to replenish some, lower-level modules of the executive attentional system. However, the impact of nature on higher-level tasks such as creative problem solving has not been explored. Here we show that four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naive hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli that are both emotionally positive and low-arousing and a corresponding decrease in exposure to attention demanding technology, which regularly requires that we attend to sudden events, switch amongst tasks, maintain task goals, and inhibit irrelevant actions or cognitions. A limitation of the current research is the inability to determine if the effects are due to an increased exposure to nature, a decreased exposure to technology, or to other factors associated with spending three days immersed in nature.