Emotion dysregulation in nonsuicidal self-injury: Dissociations between global self-reports and real-time responses to emotional challenge.

INTRODUCTION: Prominent theories of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) propose that the behaviour is characterised by amplified emotional responses. However, little is known about how people who self-injure respond during emotional challenge. METHODS: We measured subjective and physiological responding (heart rate, heart rate variability, and electrodermal responding) among young adults with past-year NSSI (n = 51) and those with no lifetime NSSI (n = 50) during a resting baseline, a stress induction, and a post-stress resting phase. Participants reported the extent to which they spontaneously used cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression during the post-stress phase. Two weeks later, a subset of the sample (n = 42) reported how they remembered feeling during the laboratory session. RESULTS: Although the NSSI group reported considerably greater emotion dysregulation than Controls, both groups showed similar subjective and psychological reactivity to, and recovery from, emotional challenge. Both groups used reappraisal and suppression regulation strategies following acute stress to a similar extent, and later came to remember the emotional challenge in a similar manner. LIMITATIONS: Within the NSSI group, past-year self-injury tended to be infrequent and sporadic. Only 43.6% of the sample participated in the follow-up survey assessing memory of emotional challenge. CONCLUSIONS: Findings demonstrate that the role of emotion in NSSI is more complex than prominent theories can account for, raising substantial questions regarding the nature of emotion in NSSI. A more comprehensive understanding of the role of emotion in NSSI is needed to inform intervention strategies to better support people who self-injure.

The presence of fear: How subjective fear, not physiological changes, shapes the experience of presence.

When we become engrossed in novels, films, games, or even our own wandering thoughts, we can feel present in a reality distinct from the real world. Although this subjective sense of presence is, presumably, a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience, the mechanisms that produce it are unknown. Correlational studies conducted in virtual reality have shown that we feel more present when we are afraid, motivating claims that physiological changes contribute to presence; however, such causal claims remain to be evaluated. Here, we report two experiments that test the causal role of subjective and physiological components of fear (i.e., activation of the sympathetic nervous system) in generating presence. In Study 1, we validated a virtual reality simulation capable of inducing fear. Participants rated their emotions while they crossed a wooden plank that appeared to be suspended above a city street; at the same time, we recorded heart rate and skin conductance levels. Height exposure increased ratings of fear, presence, and both measures of sympathetic activation. Although presence and fear ratings were correlated during height exposure, presence and sympathetic activation were unrelated. In Study 2, we manipulated whether the plank appeared at height or at ground level. We also captured participants' movements, which revealed that alongside increases in subjective fear, presence, and sympathetic activation, participants also moved more slowly at height relative to controls. Using a mediational approach, we found that the relationship between height exposure and presence on the plank was fully mediated by self-reported fear, and not by sympathetic activation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion in motion: perceiving fear in the behaviour of individuals from minimal motion capture displays.

The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm. Across three studies, participants made judgments about the emotional states of others based on motion-capture body movement recordings of those individuals actively engaged in walking a virtual plank at ground-level or 80 stories above a city street. Results indicated that participants were reliably able to differentiate between height and non-height conditions (Studies 1 & 2), were more likely to spontaneously describe target behaviour in the height condition as fearful (Study 2) and their fear estimates were highly calibrated with the fear ratings from the targets (Studies 1-3). Findings show that VR height scenarios can induce fearful behaviour and that people can perceive fear in minimal representations of body movement.

Emotional responding to overt and subtle social exclusion among young women who engage in non-suicidal self-injury.

People who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) consistently report greater emotion reactivity and dysregulation than their peers. However, evidence that these self-reports reflect an amplified emotional response under controlled conditions is limited. Here we test the effects of both subtle and overt social exclusion, to determine whether self-reported emotion dysregulation reflects responses to real-time emotional challenge for people who self-injure. We recruited 100 young women with past-year NSSI and 100 without NSSI to an online experiment. Participants took part in a baseline social inclusion ball-tossing game, followed by either an overt or subtle social exclusion ball-tossing game, while we measured negative mood and belongingness. Despite reporting greater emotion reactivity (d = 1.40) and dysregulation (d = 1.63) than controls, women with past-year NSSI showed no differences in negative mood or belongingness ratings in response to either overt or subtle social exclusion. Within the NSSI group, exploratory analyses found greater endorsement of intrapersonal functions predicted greater negative mood following social exclusion (ß = 0.19). Given that amplified emotional responding is central to prominent theoretical models of NSSI, findings highlight the need to better understand the divergence in findings between self-reported emotion dysregulation and real-time emotional responding among people who self-injure.

Lateralized Learning to Solve Complex Boolean Problems.

Modern classifier systems can effectively classify targets that consist of simple patterns. However, they can fail to detect hierarchical patterns of features that exist in many real-world problems, such as understanding speech or recognizing object ontologies. Biological nervous systems have the ability to abstract knowledge from simple and small-scale problems in order to then apply it to resolve more complex problems in similar and related domains. It is thought that lateral asymmetry of biological brains allows modular learning to occur at different levels of abstraction, which can then be transferred between tasks. This work develops a novel evolutionary machine-learning (EML) system that incorporates lateralization and modular learning at different levels of abstraction. The results of analyzable Boolean tasks show that the lateralized system has the ability to encapsulate underlying knowledge patterns in the form of building blocks of knowledge (BBK). Lateralized abstraction transforms complex problems into simple ones by reusing general patterns (e.g., any parity problem becomes a sequence of the 2-bit parity problem). By enabling abstraction in evolutionary computation, the lateralized system is able to identify complex patterns (e.g., in hierarchical multiplexer (HMux) problems) better than existing systems.

Monetary and non-monetary rewards reduce attentional capture by emotional distractors.

Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards (monetary and non-monetary) can prevent this attentional capture. Participants completed a central letter identification task while attempting to ignore negative, positive, and neutral distractor images that appeared above or below the targets on 25% of trials. Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor-present trials. Half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward, while the other half earned points for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1, points translated into monetary reward, but in Experiment 2, points had no monetary value. In both experiments, reward reduced capture by emotional distractors, showing that even non-monetary reward can aid attentional control. These findings suggest that motivation encourages use of effective cognitive control mechanisms that effectively prevent attentional capture, even when distractors are emotional.

Proactive Control of Emotional Distraction: Evidence From EEG Alpha Suppression.

Biased attention towards emotional stimuli is adaptive, as it facilitates responses to important threats and rewards. An unfortunate consequence is that emotional stimuli can become potent distractors when they are irrelevant to current goals. How can this distraction be overcome despite the bias to attend to emotional stimuli? Recent studies show that distraction by irrelevant flankers is reduced when distractor frequency is high, even if they are emotional. A parsimonious explanation is that the expectation of frequent distractors promotes the use of proactive control, whereby attentional control settings can be altered to minimize distraction before it occurs. It is difficult, however, to infer proactive control on the basis of behavioral data alone. We therefore measured neural indices of proactive control while participants performed a target-detection task in which irrelevant peripheral distractors (either emotional or neutral) could appear either frequently (on 75% of trials) or rarely (on 25% of trials). We measured alpha power during the pre-stimulus period to assess proactive control and during the post-stimulus period to determine the consequences of control for subsequent processing. Pre-stimulus alpha power was tonically suppressed in the high, compared to low, distractor frequency condition, regardless of expected distractor valence, indicating sustained use of proactive control. In contrast, post-stimulus alpha suppression was reduced in the high-frequency condition, suggesting that proactive control reduced the need for post-stimulus adjustments. Our findings indicate that a sustained proactive control strategy accounts for the reduction in both emotional and non-emotional distraction when distractors are expected to appear frequently.

Response inhibition to emotional faces is modulated by functional hemispheric asymmetries linked to handedness.

Effective response inhibition requires efficient bottom-up perceptual processing and effective top-down inhibitory control. To investigate the role of hemispheric asymmetries in these processes, 49 right- and 50 left-handers completed a tachistoscopic Go/Nogo task with positive and negative emotional faces while ERPs were recorded. Frontal resting state EEG asymmetry was assessed as a marker of individual differences in prefrontal inhibitory networks. Results supported a dependency of inhibitory processing on early lateralized processes. As expected, right-handers showed a stronger N170 over the right hemisphere, and better response inhibition when faces were projected to the right hemisphere. Left-handers showed a stronger N170 over the left hemisphere, and no behavioural asymmetry. Asymmetries in response inhibition were also valence-dependent, with better inhibition of responses to negative faces when projected to the right, and better inhibition of responses to positive faces when projected to the left hemisphere. Frontal asymmetry was not related to handedness, but did modulate response inhibition depending on valence. Consistent with the asymmetric inhibition model (Grimshaw & Carmel, 2014), greater right frontal activity was associated with better response inhibition to positive than to negative faces; subjects with greater left frontal activity showed an opposite trend. These findings highlight the interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes in explaining hemispheric asymmetries in response inhibition.

Reduction of emotional distraction during target processing by attentional manipulations.

Previous research has demonstrated that fully irrelevant distractors - i.e., not sharing any feature with the target - capture our attention and modulate our responses. In the present study, we explored this interference by irrelevant distractors in a series of three experiments wherein the emotional valence of distractors (negative vs. neutral valence) was manipulated along with endogenous and exogenous attention. We aimed at jointly investigating - within the same paradigm - the possible modulations over the interference effect by these three critical variables in a systematic way. Although we replicated the interference effect by distractors previously reported in Martín-Arévalo et al. (2015), results showed no attentional and only weak emotional valence modulations over the interference effect. We discuss the possible boundary conditions underlying the absence (or weakness) of modulations over the interference effect by distractors observed in our experiments.

Erratum: Dissociating the physiological components of unconscious emotional responses.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/nix021.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/nix021.].

Reward elicits cognitive control over emotional distraction: Evidence from pupillometry.

Attention is biased toward emotional stimuli, even when they are irrelevant to current goals. Motivation, elicited by performance-contingent reward, reduces behavioural emotional distraction. In emotionally neutral contexts, reward is thought to encourage use of a proactive cognitive control strategy, altering anticipatory attentional settings to more effectively suppress distractors. The current preregistered study investigates whether a similar proactive shift occurs even when distractors are highly arousing emotional images. We monitored pupil area, an online measure of both cognitive and emotional processing, to examine how reward influences the time course of control. Participants (n = 110) identified a target letter flanking an irrelevant central image. Images were meaningless scrambles on 75% of trials; on the remaining 25%, they were intact positive (erotic), negative (mutilation), or neutral images. Half the participants received financial rewards for fast and accurate performance, while the other half received no performance-contingent reward. Emotional distraction was greater than neutral distraction, and both were attenuated by reward. Consistent with behavioural findings, pupil dilation was greater following emotional than neutral distractors, and dilation to intact distractors (regardless of valence) was decreased by reward. Although reward did not enhance tonic pupil dilation (an index of sustained proactive control), exploratory analyses showed that reward altered the time course of control-eliciting a sharp, rapid, increase in dilation immediately preceding stimulus onset (reflecting dynamic use of anticipatory control), that extended until well after stimulus offset. These findings suggest that reward alters the time course of control by encouraging proactive preparation to rapidly disengage from emotional distractors.

Fleeting reliability in the dot-probe task.

In a dot-probe task, two cues-one emotional and one neutral-are followed by a probe in one of their locations. Faster responses to probes co-located with the emotional stimulus are taken as evidence of attentional bias. Several studies indicate that such attentional bias measures have poor reliability, even though ERP studies show that people reliably attend to the emotional stimulus. This inconsistency might arise because the emotional stimulus captures attention briefly (as indicated by ERP), but cues appear for long enough that attention can be redistributed before the probe onset, causing RT measures of bias to vary across trials. We tested this hypothesis by manipulating SOA (stimulus onset asynchrony between onset of the cues and onset of the probe) in a dot-probe task using angry and neutral faces. Across three experiments, the internal reliability of behavioural biases was significantly greater than zero when probes followed faces by 100 ms, but not when the SOA was 300, 500, or 900 ms. Thus, the initial capture of attention shows some level of consistency, but this diminishes quickly. Even at the shortest SOA internal reliability estimates were poor, and not sufficient to justify the use of the task as an index of individual differences in attentional bias.

New insights on real-world human face recognition.

Humans are supposedly expert in face recognition. Because of limitations in existing research paradigms, little is known about how faces become familiar in the real world, or the mechanisms that distinguish good from poor recognizers. Here, we capitalized on several unique features of the TV series Game of Thrones to develop a highly challenging test of face recognition that is ecologically grounded yet controls for important factors that affect familiarity. We show that familiarization with faces and reliable person identification require much more exposure than previously suggested. Recognition is impaired by the mere passage of time and simple changes in appearance, even for faces we have seen frequently. Good recognizers are distinguished not by the number of faces they recognize, but by their ability to reject novel faces as unfamiliar. Importantly, individuals with superior recognition abilities also forget faces and are not immune to identification errors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Hugs and kisses - The role of motor preferences and emotional lateralization for hemispheric asymmetries in human social touch.

Social touch is an important aspect of human social interaction - across all cultures, humans engage in kissing, cradling and embracing. These behaviors are necessarily asymmetric, but the factors that determine their lateralization are not well-understood. Because the hands are often involved in social touch, motor preferences may give rise to asymmetric behavior. However, social touch often occurs in emotional contexts, suggesting that biases might be modulated by asymmetries in emotional processing. Social touch may therefore provide unique insights into lateralized brain networks that link emotion and action. Here, we review the literature on lateralization of cradling, kissing and embracing with respect to motor and emotive bias theories. Lateral biases in all three forms of social touch are influenced, but not fully determined by handedness. Thus, motor bias theory partly explains side biases in social touch. However, emotional context also affects side biases, most strongly for embracing. Taken together, literature analysis reveals that side biases in social touch are most likely determined by a combination of motor and emotive biases.

Psychiatric framing affects positive but not negative schizotypy scores in psychology and medical students.

When testing risk for psychosis, we regularly rely on self-report questionnaires. Yet, the more that people know about this condition, the more they might respond defensively, in particular with regard to the more salient positive symptom dimension. In two studies, we investigated whether framing provided by questionnaire instructions might modulate responses on self-reported positive and negative schizotypy. The O-LIFE (UK study) or SPQ (New Zealand study) questionnaire was framed in either a "psychiatric", "creativity", or "personality" (NZ only) context. We tested psychology students (without taught knowledge about psychosis) and medical students (with taught knowledge about psychosis; UK only). We observed framing effects in psychology students in both studies: positive schizotypy scores were lower after the psychiatric compared to the creativity instruction. However, schizotypy scores did not differ between the creativity and personality framing conditions, suggesting that the low scores with psychiatric framing reflect defensive responding. The same framing effect was also observed in medical students, despite their lower positive schizotypy scores overall. Negative schizotypy scores were not affected by framing in either study. These results highlight the need to reduce response biases when studying schizotypy, because these might blur schizotypy-behaviour relationships.

Face processing skills predict faithfulness of portraits drawn by novices.

Individuals show astonishing variability in their face recognition abilities, and the causes and consequences of this heterogeneity are unclear. Special expertise with faces, for example in portraitists, is associated with advantages on face processing tasks, especially those involving perceptual abilities. Do face processing skills improve through practice, or does drawing skill reflect pre-existing individual differences? If the latter, then the association between face processing skills and production of faithful portraits should also exist in people without practice in drawing. Two exploratory studies and one follow-up confirmatory study provide support for this hypothesis. Drawing ability of novices was predicted by their performance on face recognition tasks involving perceptual discrimination and visual short-term memory, but not by those that rely more heavily on long-term memory or memory for non-face objects. By examining non-experts, we show that expertise with faces might build upon pre-existing individual differences in face processing skills.

Motivation enhances control of positive and negative emotional distractions.

Using cognitive control to ignore distractions is essential for successfully achieving our goals. In emotionally-neutral contexts, motivation can reduce interference from irrelevant stimuli by enhancing cognitive control. However, attention is commonly biased towards emotional stimuli, making them potent distractors. Can motivation aid control of emotional distractions, and does it do so similarly for positive and negative stimuli? Here, we examined how task motivation influences control of distraction from positive, negative, and neutral scenes. Participants completed a simple perceptual task while attempting to ignore task-irrelevant images. One group received monetary reward for fast and accurate task performance; another (control) group did not. Overall, both negative (mutilation) and positive (erotic) images caused greater slowing of responses than neutral images of people, but emotional distraction was reduced with reward. Crucially, despite the different motivational directions associated with negative and positive stimuli, reward reduced negative and positive distraction equally. Our findings suggest that motivation may encourage the use of a sustained proactive control strategy that can effectively reduce the impact of emotional distraction.

Contrasting reactive and proactive control of emotional distraction.

Attending to emotional stimuli is often beneficial, because they provide important social and environmental cues. Sometimes, however, current goals require that we ignore them. To what extent can we control emotional distraction? Here we show that the ability to ignore emotional distractions depends on the type of cognitive control that is engaged. Participants completed a simple perceptual task at fixation while irrelevant images appeared peripherally. In 2 experiments, we manipulated the proportion of trials in which images appeared, to encourage use of either reactive control (rare distractors) or proactive control (frequent distractors). Under reactive control, both negative and positive images were more distracting than neutral images, even though they were irrelevant and appeared in unattended locations. However, under proactive control, distraction by both emotional and neutral images was eliminated. Proactive control was triggered by the meaning, and not the location, of distracting images. Our findings argue against simple bottom-up or top-down explanations of emotional distraction, and instead show how the flexible use of cognitive control supports adaptive processing of emotional distractors. (PsycINFO Database Record

Faces are special, but facial expressions aren't: Insights from an oculomotor capture paradigm.

We compared the ability of angry and neutral faces to drive oculomotor behaviour as a test of the widespread claim that emotional information is automatically prioritized when competing for attention. Participants were required to make a saccade to a colour singleton; photos of angry or neutral faces appeared amongst other objects within the array, and were completely irrelevant for the task. Eye-tracking measures indicate that faces drive oculomotor behaviour in a bottom-up fashion; however, angry faces are no more likely to capture the eyes than neutral faces are. Saccade latencies suggest that capture occurrs via reflexive saccades and that the outcome of competition between salient items (colour singletons and faces) may be subject to fluctuations in attentional control. Indeed, although angry and neutral faces captured the eyes reflexively on a portion of trials, participants successfully maintained goal-relevant oculomotor behaviour on a majority of trials. We outline potential cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying oculomotor capture by faces.

Dissociating the physiological components of unconscious emotional responses.

Conscious emotional processing is characterized by a coordinated set of responses across multiple physiological systems. Although emotional stimuli can evoke certain physiological responses even when they are suppressed from awareness, it is not known whether unconscious emotional responses comprise a similar constellation or are confined to specific systems. To compare physiological responses to emotional stimuli with and without awareness, we measured a range of responses while participants viewed positive, negative and neutral images that were accompanied by noise bursts to elicit startle reflexes. We measured four responses simultaneously - skin conductance and heart rate changes in response to the images themselves; and startle eye-blink and post-auricular reflexes in response to the noise bursts that occurred during image presentation. For half of the participants, the images were masked from awareness using continuous flash suppression. The aware group showed the expected pattern of response across physiological systems: emotional images (regardless of valence) evoked larger skin conductance responses (SCRs) and greater heart rate deceleration than neutral images, negative images enhanced eye-blink reflexes and positive images enhanced post-auricular reflexes. In contrast, we found a striking dissociation between measures for the unaware group: typical modulation of SCRs and post-auricular reflexes, but no modulation of heart rate deceleration or eye-blink reflexes. Our findings suggest that although some physiological systems respond to emotional stimuli presented outside of awareness, conscious emotional processing may be characterized by a broad and coordinated set of responses across systems.