Investigating the suitability of online eye tracking for psychological research: Evidence from comparisons with in-person data using emotion-attention interaction tasks.

The future is bound to bring rapid methodological changes to psychological research. One such promising candidate is the use of webcam-based eye tracking. Earlier research investigating the quality of online eye-tracking data has found increased spatial and temporal error compared to infrared recordings. Our studies expand on this work by investigating how this spatial error impacts researchers' abilities to study psychological phenomena. We carried out two studies involving emotion-attention interaction tasks, using four participant samples. In each study, one sample involved typical in-person collection of infrared eye-tracking data, and the other involved online collection of webcam-based data. We had two main findings: First, we found that the online data replicated seven of eight in-person results, although the effect sizes were just 52% [42%, 62%] the size of those seen in-person. Second, explaining the lack of replication in one result, we show how online eye tracking is biased toward recording more gaze points near the center of participants' screen, which can interfere with comparisons if left unchecked. Overall, our results suggest that well-powered online eye-tracking research is highly feasible, although researchers must exercise caution, collecting more participants and potentially adjusting their stimulus designs or analytic procedures.

The Human Affectome.

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective constructs and operationalizations. However, an assumption about the purpose of affective phenomena can guide us to a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. In this capstone paper, we home in on a nested teleological principle for human affective phenomena in order to synthesize metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions. Under this framework, human affective phenomena can collectively be considered algorithms that either adjust based on the human comfort zone (affective concerns) or monitor those adaptive processes (affective features). This teleologically-grounded framework offers a principled agenda and launchpad for both organizing existing perspectives and generating new ones. Ultimately, we hope the Human Affectome brings us a step closer to not only an integrated understanding of human affective phenomena, but an integrated field for affective research.

Emotional dissociations in temporal associations: opposing effects of arousal on memory for details surrounding unpleasant events.

Research targeting emotion's impact on relational episodic memory has largely focused on spatial aspects, but less is known about emotion's impact on memory for an event's temporal associations. The present research investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create stories linking successive images. Later, participants performed a surprise memory test, which measured temporal associations between pairs of consecutive pictures where one picture was negative and one was neutral. Analyses focused on how the order of negative and neutral images during encoding influenced retrieval accuracy. Converging results from a discovery study (N = 72) and pre-registered replication study (N = 150) revealed a "forward-favouring" effect of emotion in temporal memory encoding: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. This finding may reflect a novel trade-off regarding emotion's effects on memory and is relevant for understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualised as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal details.

Social Expectations are Primarily Rooted in Reciprocity: An Investigation of Fairness, Cooperation, and Trustworthiness.

Social expectations guide people's evaluations of others' behaviors, but the origins of these expectations remain unclear. It is traditionally thought that people's expectations depend on their past observations of others' behavior, and people harshly judge atypical behavior. Here, we considered that social expectations are also influenced by a drive for reciprocity, and people evaluate others' actions by reflecting on their own decisions. To compare these views, we performed four studies. Study 1 used an Ultimatum Game task where participants alternated Responder and Proposer roles. Modeling participants' expectations suggested they evaluated the fairness of received offers via comparisons to their own offers. Study 2 replicated these findings and showed that observing selfish behavior (lowball offers) only promoted acceptance of selfishness if observers started acting selfishly themselves. Study 3 generalized the findings, demonstrating that they also arise in the Public Goods Game, emerge cross-culturally, and apply to antisocial punishment whereby selfish players punish generosity. Finally, Study 4 introduced the Trust Game and showed that participants trusted players who reciprocated their behavior, even if it was selfish, as much as they trusted generous players. Overall, this research shows that social expectations and evaluations are rooted in drives for reciprocity. This carries theoretical implications, speaking to a parallel in the mechanisms driving both decision-making and social evaluations, along with practical importance for understanding and promoting cooperation.

ConnSearch: A framework for functional connectivity analysis designed for interpretability and effectiveness at limited sample sizes.

Functional connectivity studies increasingly turn to machine learning methods, which typically involve fitting a connectome-wide classifier, then conducting post hoc interpretation analyses to identify the neural correlates that best predict a dependent variable. However, this traditional analytic paradigm suffers from two main limitations. First, even if classifiers are perfectly accurate, interpretation analyses may not identify all the patterns expressed by a dependent variable. Second, even if classifiers are generalizable, the patterns implicated via interpretation analyses may not replicate. In other words, this traditional approach can yield effective classifiers while falling short of most neuroscientists' goals: pinpointing the neural correlates of dependent variables. We propose a new framework for multivariate analysis, ConnSearch, which involves dividing the connectome into components (e.g., groups of highly connected regions) and fitting an independent model for each component (e.g., a support vector machine or a correlation-based model). Conclusions about the link between a dependent variable and the brain are based on which components yield predictive models rather than on interpretation analysis. We used working memory data from the Human Connectome Project (N = 50-250) to compare ConnSearch with four existing connectome-wide classification/interpretation methods. For each approach, the models attempted to classify examples as being from the high-load or low-load conditions (binary labels). Relative to traditional methods, ConnSearch identified neural correlates that were more comprehensive, had greater consistency with the WM literature, and better replicated across datasets. Hence, ConnSearch is well-positioned to be an effective tool for functional connectivity research.

The impact of focused attention on emotional evaluation: An eye-tracking investigation.

Emotional well-being depends on the ability to successfully engage a variety of coping strategies to regulate affective responses. Most studies have investigated the effectiveness of emotion regulation (ER) strategies that are deployed relatively later in the timing of processing that leads to full emotional experiences (i.e. reappraisal and suppression). Strategies engaged in earlier stages of emotion processing, such as those involved in attentional deployment, have also been investigated, but relatively less is known about their mechanisms. Here, we investigate the effectiveness of self-guided focused attention (FA) in reducing the impact of unpleasant pictures on the experienced negative affect. Participants viewed a series of composite images with distinguishable foreground (FG, either negative or neutral) and background (BG, always neutral) areas and were asked to focus on the FG or BG content. Eye-tracking data were recorded while performing the FA task, along with participants' ratings of their experienced emotional response following the presentation of each image. First, proving the effectiveness of self-guided FA in down-regulating negative affect, focusing away from the emotional content of pictures (BG focus) was associated with lower emotional ratings. Second, trial-based eye-tracking data corroborated these results, showing that spending less time gazing within the negative FG predicted reductions in emotional ratings. Third, this reduction was largest among subjects who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions. Overall, the present findings expand the evidence regarding the FA's effectiveness in controlling the impact of emotional stimuli and inform the development of training interventions emphasizing attentional control to improve emotional well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Direct feedback and social conformity promote behavioral change via mechanisms indexed by centroparietal positivity: Electrophysiological evidence from a role-swapping ultimatum game.

Our behavior is shaped by multiple factors, including direct feedback (seeing the outcomes of our past actions) and social observation (in part, via a drive to conform to other peoples' behaviors). However, it remains unclear how these two processes are linked in the context of behavioral change. This is important to investigate, as behavioral change is associated with distinct neural correlates that reflect specific aspects of processing, such as information integration and rule updating. To clarify whether these processes characterize both direct learning and conformity, we elicited the two within the same task, using a role-swapping version of the Ultimatum Game-a fairness paradigm where subjects decide how to share a pot of money with other players-while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded. Behavioral results showed that subjects decided how to divide the pot based on both direct feedback (seeing whether their past proposals were accepted or rejected) and social observation (copying the splits that others just proposed). Converging EEG evidence revealed that increased centroparietal positivity (P2, P3b, and late positivity) indexed behavioral changes motivated by direct feedback and those motivated by drives to conform. However, exploratory analyses also suggest that these two motivating factors may also be dissociable, and that frontal midline theta oscillations may predict behavioral changes linked to direct feedback but not conformity. Overall, this study provides novel electrophysiological evidence regarding the different forms of behavioral change. These findings are also relevant for understanding the mechanisms of social information processing that underlie successful cooperation.

Pride and guilt as place-based affective antecedents to pro-environmental behavior.

The interrelated concepts of place attachment and place meaning are antecedents to pro-environmental behavior and essential for supporting decisions that foster relationships between people and places. Previous research has argued that affect is instrumental in conceptualizing place-related phenomena but has not yet been considered in terms of discrete emotions. We disentangled the empirical relationships between concepts of place and the emotions of pride and guilt to understand how they collectively contributed to individuals' decisions about environmental sustainability. Specifically, we conducted an online survey of residents living in the Midwestern US and asked questions about their attachments to places and their place-related behavior. We then tested a latent variable path model with first- and second-order factors that shaped the behavioral intentions of survey respondents, as well as evaluated the psychometric properties of a place meaning scale, to uncover the range of reasons why human-nature relationships were formed. Our findings show that multiple place meanings predicted place attachment, which in turn predicted the discrete emotions of pride and guilt. Place attachment, pride, and guilt positively correlated with pro-environmental behavior. We also observed that the relationships between multi-dimensional conceptualizations of place attachment and behavioral intentions were partially mediated by pride but not guilt, as hypothesized in response to the broaden and build theory of positive emotions. This study develops theoretical insights to clarify how cognitive-emotional bonding can lead people to behave in more environmentally friendly ways.

Electrophysiological Correlates of Social Decision-making: An EEG Investigation of a Modified Ultimatum Game.

Cooperation behaviors during social decision-making have been shown to be sensitive to manipulations of context. However, it remains unclear how aspects of context in dynamic social interactions, such as observed nonverbal behaviors, may modulate cooperation decisions and the associated neural mechanisms. In this study, participants responded to offers from proposers to split $10 in an Ultimatum Game following observation of proposer approach (friendly) or avoidance (nonfriendly) behaviors, displayed by dynamic whole-body animated avatars, or following a nonsocial interaction control condition. As expected, behavioral results showed that participants tended to have greater acceptance rates for unfair offers following observed nonverbal social interactions with proposers compared with control, suggesting an enhancing effect of social interactions on cooperative decisions. ERP results showed greater N1 and N2 responses at the beginning of social interaction conditions compared with control, and greater sustained and late positivity responses for observed approach and avoidance proposer behaviors compared with control. Event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) results showed differential sensitivity within theta, alpha, and beta bands during observation of social interactions and offers that was associated with subsequent decision behaviors. Together, these results point to the impact of proposers' nonverbal behaviors on subsequent cooperation decisions at both behavioral and neural levels. The ERP and ERSP findings suggest modulated attention, monitoring, and processing of biological motion during the observed nonverbal social interactions, influencing the participants' responses to offers. These findings shed light on electrophysiological correlates of response to observed social interactions that predict subsequent social decisions.

Proof-of-concept evidence for trimodal simultaneous investigation of human brain function.

The link between spatial (where) and temporal (when) aspects of the neural correlates of most psychological phenomena is not clear. Elucidation of this relation, which is crucial to fully understand human brain function, requires integration across multiple brain imaging modalities and cognitive tasks that reliably modulate the engagement of the brain systems of interest. By overcoming the methodological challenges posed by simultaneous recordings, the present report provides proof-of-concept evidence for a novel approach using three complementary imaging modalities: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERPs), and event-related optical signals (EROS). Using the emotional oddball task, a paradigm that taps into both cognitive and affective aspects of processing, we show the feasibility of capturing converging and complementary measures of brain function that are not currently attainable using traditional unimodal or other multimodal approaches. This opens up unprecedented possibilities to clarify spatiotemporal integration of brain function.

Cultivating Affective Resilience: Proof-of-Principle Evidence of Translational Benefits From a Novel Cognitive-Emotional Training Intervention.

Available evidence highlights the importance of emotion regulation (ER) in psychological well-being. However, translation of the beneficial effects of ER from laboratory to real-life remains scarce. Here, we present proof-of-principle evidence from a novel cognitive-emotional training intervention targeting the development of ER skills aimed at increasing resilience against emotional distress. This pilot intervention involved training military veterans over 5-8 weeks in applying two effective ER strategies [Focused Attention (FA) and Cognitive Reappraisal (CR)] to scenarios presenting emotional conflicts (constructed with both external and internal cues). Training was preceded and followed by neuropsychological, personality, and clinical assessments, and resting-state functional MRI data were also collected from a subsample of the participants. Results show enhanced executive function and psychological well-being following training, reflected in increased working memory (WM), post-traumatic growth (PTG), and general self-efficacy (GSE). Brain imaging results showed evidence of diminished bottom-up influences from emotional and perceptual brain regions, along with evidence of normalized functional connectivity in the large-scale functional networks following training. The latter was reflected in increased connectivity among cognitive and emotion control regions and across regions of self-referential and control networks. Overall, our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that resilience and well-being can be learned through ER training, and that training-related improvements manifested in both behavioral change and neuroplasticity can translate into real-life benefits.

Religiosity and Resilience: Cognitive Reappraisal and Coping Self-Efficacy Mediate the Link between Religious Coping and Well-Being.

Qualitative evidence points to the engagement of religious coping strategies when facing adversity, and evidence also highlights the effectiveness of cognitive reappraisal in reducing the impact of distressing emotions on well-being. It has been suggested that religious practices could facilitate the use of reappraisal, by promoting reframing of negative cognitions to alter emotional states. However, the link between religiosity and reappraisal in influencing resilience against symptoms of distress is not known. The current study (N = 203) examined connections among these aspects, using self-reported measures of religious coping, habitual use of specific coping strategies (positive reappraisal) and perceived confidence in using coping strategies, as well as questionnaires assessing symptoms of distress (anxiety and depression). Results point to a mediating role of reappraisal and coping self-efficacy as part of mechanisms that provide a protecting role of religious coping against emotional distress. These results provide novel scientific evidence further validating millennia-old traditional coping practices and shed light on psychological factors influencing adaptive behaviors that promote increased resilience, reduce symptoms of distress, and maintain emotional well-being. These findings inform general counseling practices and counseling of religious clients alike.

Intrinsic functional network contributions to the relationship between trait empathy and subjective happiness.

Subjective happiness (well-being) is a multi-dimensional construct indexing one's evaluations of everyday emotional experiences and life satisfaction, and has been associated with different aspects of trait empathy. Despite previous research identifying the neural substrates of subjective happiness and empathy, the mechanisms mediating the relationship between the two constructs remain largely unclear. Here, we performed a data-driven, multi-voxel pattern analysis of whole-brain intrinsic functional connectivity to reveal the neural mechanisms of subjective happiness and trait empathy in a sample of young females. Behaviorally, we found that subjective happiness was negatively associated with personal distress (i.e., self-referential experience of others' feelings). Consistent with this inverse relationship, subjective happiness was associated with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex exhibiting decreased functional connectivity with regions important for the representation of unimodal sensorimotor information (e.g., primary sensory cortices) or multi-modal summaries of brain states (e.g., default mode network) and increased functional connectivity with regions important for the attentional modulation of these representations (e.g., frontoparietal, attention networks). Personal distress was associated with the medial prefrontal cortex exhibiting functional connectivity differences with similar networks--but in the opposite direction. Finally, intrinsic functional connectivity within and between these networks fully mediated the relationship between the two behavioral measures. These results identify an important contribution of the macroscale functional organization of the brain to human well-being, by demonstrating that lower levels of personal distress lead to higher subjective happiness through variation in intrinsic functional connectivity along a neural representation vs. modulation gradient.

Memory of my victory and your defeat: Contributions of reward- and memory-related regions to the encoding of winning events in competitions with others.

Social interactions enhance human memories, but little is known about how the neural mechanisms underlying episodic memories are modulated by rewarding outcomes in social interactions. To investigate this, fMRI data were recorded while healthy young adults encoded unfamiliar faces in either a competition or a control task. In the competition task, participants encoded opponents' faces in the rock-paper-scissors game, where trial-by-trial outcomes of Win, Draw, and Lose for participants were shown by facial expressions of opponents (Angry, Neutral, and Happy). In the control task, participants encoded faces by assessing facial expressions. After encoding, participants recognized faces previously learned. Behavioral data showed that emotional valence for opponents' Angry faces as the Win outcome was rated positively in the competition task, whereas the rating for Angry faces was rated negatively in the control task, and that Angry faces were remembered more accurately than Neutral or Happy faces in both tasks. fMRI data showed that activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) paralleled the pattern of valence ratings, with greater activation for the Win than Draw or Lose conditions of the competition task, and the Angry condition of the control task. Moreover, functional connectivity between the mOFC and hippocampus was increased in Win compared to Angry, and the mOFC-hippocampus functional connectivity predicted individual differences in subsequent memory performance only in Win of the competition task, but not in any other conditions of the two tasks. These results demonstrate that the memory enhancement by context-dependent social rewards involves interactions between reward- and memory-related regions.

Immediate and long-term effects of emotional suppression in aging: A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation.

Available evidence suggests enhanced spontaneous emotion regulation in healthy aging, but the effects of specific strategies and the associated age-related neural mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, younger and older participants rated the emotional content of negative and neutral images, after explicit instructions or implicit priming to engage emotional suppression as an emotion regulation strategy, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were recorded. Participants' memory for the images was also tested 1 week later. Behaviorally, younger and older adults were similarly successful in using explicit suppression to inhibit immediate emotional responses. However, this was associated with reduced long-term memory only for younger adults. fMRI data showed dissociable activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) coupled with similar activity in the amygdala in younger and older adults after the engagement of emotional suppression. Results also identified a lateral-to-medial shift in the functional connectivity of the PFC in aging, linked to the engagement of explicit suppression. Regarding memory, younger adults uniquely showed bilateral modulation of encoding-related activity in the hippocampus (HC), as well as a left-lateralized decrease of the HC-PFC functional connectivity after explicit emotional suppression. This is consistent with diminished involvement of typical mechanisms associated with emotional memory because of successful engagement of explicit suppression in younger adults. Taken together, these findings identified similar and differential effects of suppression on immediate emotional responses and long-term memory for emotional information, in younger and older adults, and provide insights into the neural mechanisms by which younger and older adults adaptively cope with emotional challenges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Impact of Focused Attention on Emotional Experience: A Functional MRI Investigation.

Emotional well-being depends on the ability to adaptively cope with various emotional challenges. Most studies have investigated the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation strategies deployed relatively later in the timing of processing that leads to full emotional experiences. However, less is known about strategies that are engaged in earlier stages of emotion processing, such as those involving attentional deployment. We investigated the neural mechanisms associated with self-guided Focused Attention (FA) in mitigating subjective negative emotional experiences. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were recorded while participants viewed a series of composite negative and neutral images with distinguishable foreground (FG) and background (BG) areas. Participants were instructed to focus either on the FG or BG components of the images, and then rated their emotional experiences. Behavioral results showed that FA was successful in decreasing emotional ratings for negative images viewed in BG Focus condition. At the neural level, the BG Focus was associated with increased activity in regions typically implicated in top-down executive control (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and lateral parietal cortex) and decreased activity in regions linked to affective processing (amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex). Dissociable brain activity linked to FA also was identified in visual cortices, including between the parahippocampal and fusiform gyri, showing increased versus decreased activity, respectively, during the BG Focus. These findings complement the evidence from prior FA studies with recollected emotional memories as internal stimuli and further demonstrate the effectiveness of self-guided FA in mitigating negative emotional experiences associated with processing of external unpleasant stimuli.

The impact of focused attention on subsequent emotional recollection: A functional MRI investigation.

In his seminal works, Endel Tulving argued that functionally distinct memory systems give rise to subjective experiences of remembering and knowing (i.e., recollection- vs. familiarity-based memory, respectively). Evidence shows that emotion specifically enhances recollection, and this effect is subserved by a synergistic mechanism involving the amygdala (AMY) and hippocampus (HC). In extreme circumstances, however, uncontrolled recollection of highly distressing memories may lead to symptoms of affective disorders. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that can diminish such detrimental effects. Here, we investigated the effects of Focused Attention (FA) on emotional recollection. FA is an emotion regulation strategy that has been proven quite effective in reducing the impact of emotional responses associated with the recollection of distressing autobiographical memories, but its impact during emotional memory encoding is not known. Functional MRI and eye-tracking data were recorded while participants viewed a series of composite negative and neutral images with distinguishable foreground (FG) and background (BG) areas. Participants were instructed to focus either on the FG or BG content of the images and to rate their emotional responses. About 4 days later, participants' memory was assessed using the R/K procedure, to indicate whether they Recollected specific contextual details about the encoded images or the images were just familiar to them - i.e., participants only Knew that they saw the pictures without being able to remember specific contextual details. First, results revealed that FA was successful in decreasing memory for emotional pictures viewed in BG Focus condition, and this effect was driven by recollection-based retrieval. Second, the BG Focus condition was associated with decreased activity in the AMY, HC, and anterior parahippocampal gyrus for subsequently recollected emotional items. Moreover, correlation analyses also showed that reduced activity in these regions predicted greater reduction in emotional recollection following FA. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of FA in mitigating emotional experiences and emotional recollection associated with unpleasant emotional events.

Smaller amygdala volume and increased neuroticism predict anxiety symptoms in healthy subjects: A volumetric approach using manual tracing.

Volume reductions in the amygdala (AMY) have been found in patients with anxiety disorders, but findings are mixed in subclinical participants with high trait anxiety scores, in whom both reductions and increases in AMY volume have been identified. One potential reason for such discrepancies could be the employment of different methods to determine the AMY volume (i.e., manual tracing in psychiatric research vs. automated methods), in non-patient research. In addition to trait anxiety, smaller AMY volume has also been linked to neuroticism, a personality trait consistently linked to increased vulnerability to anxiety. However, it is not clear how AMY volume and neuroticism together may contribute to anxiety symptoms in healthy functioning. These issues were investigated in a sample of 46 healthy participants who underwent anatomical MRI scanning and completed questionnaires measuring trait anxiety and neuroticism. AMY volume was assessed using manual tracing, based on anatomical landmarks identified in each participant's anatomical image. First, smaller left AMY volume was linked to higher levels of neuroticism (p = .013) and trait anxiety (p = .024), which in turn were positively correlated with each other. Moreover, AMY volume had a significant indirect effect on trait anxiety through neuroticism (ab = - .009, 95% CI [- .019, - .002]). This effect was not bidirectional, as trait anxiety did not predict AMY volume through neuroticism. Collectively, these findings provide support for a brain-personality-symptom framework of understanding affective dysregulation, which may help inform the development of prevention and intervention paradigms targeting preservation of AMY volume and reduction of neuroticism, to protect against anxiety symptoms.

Item and source memory for emotional associates is mediated by different retrieval processes.

Recent event-related potential (ERP) data showed that neutral objects encoded in emotional background pictures were better remembered than objects encoded in neutral contexts, when recognition memory was tested one week later. In the present study, we investigated whether this long-term memory advantage for items is also associated with correct memory for contextual source details. Furthermore, we were interested in the possibly dissociable contribution of familiarity and recollection processes (using a Remember/Know procedure). The results revealed that item memory performance was mainly driven by the subjective experience of familiarity, irrespective of whether the objects were previously encoded in emotional or neutral contexts. Correct source memory for the associated background picture, however, was driven by recollection and enhanced when the content was emotional. In ERPs, correctly recognized old objects evoked frontal ERP Old/New effects (300-500 ms), irrespective of context category. As in our previous study (Ventura-Bort et al., 2016b), retrieval for objects from emotional contexts was associated with larger parietal Old/New differences (600-800 ms), indicating stronger involvement of recollection. Thus, the results suggest a stronger contribution of recollection-based retrieval to item and contextual background source memory for neutral information associated with an emotional event.