A context-dependent perspective to understand the relation between parent-child physiological synchrony and child socioemotional adjustment.

Physiological synchrony is an important biological process during which parent-child interaction plays a significant role in shaping child socioemotional adjustment. The present study held a context-dependent perspective to examine the conditional association between parent-child physiological synchrony and child socioemotional adjustment (i.e., relationship quality with parents and child emotion regulation) under different (i.e., from highly unsupportive to highly supportive) emotional contexts. One hundred and fifty school-age Chinese children (Mage = 8.64 years, 63 girls) and their primary caregivers participated in this study. After attaching electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes, parent-child dyads were instructed to complete a 4-minute conflict discussion task. Parent-child physiological synchrony was calculated based on the within-dyad association between parents' and children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) levels across eight 30-second epochs. Parental emotional support, child relationship quality with parents, and child emotion regulation during the discussion task were coded by trained research assistants. Supporting our hypotheses, parental emotional support moderated the relations of parent-child RSA synchrony with both child relationship quality with parents and child emotion regulation. Furthermore, the Johnson-Neyman technique of moderation indicated that the associations between parent and child RSA synchrony and child socioemotional adjustment indicators shifted from negative to positive as the parental emotional support became increasingly high. Our findings suggest that parent-child physiological synchrony may not be inherently adaptive or maladaptive, highlighting the importance of understanding the function of parent-child physiological synchrony under specific contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Physiological synchrony may not be inherently adaptive or maladaptive, and the meanings of parent-child physiological synchrony might be contingent on contextual factors. Parental emotional support moderated the relations between parent-child respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) synchrony and child socioemotional adjustment indicators (i.e., child relationship quality with parents and child emotion regulation). More positive/less negative parent-child RSA synchrony was associated with better child socioemotional adjustment under a supportive emotional context, whereas with poorer child socioemotional adjustment under an unsupportive emotional context. These findings highlight the significance of considering the emotional context in physiological synchrony studies.

If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix it: Positive Versus Negative Emotion Regulation in Daily Life and Depressive Symptoms.

BACKGROUND: Despite the importance of positive emotions for affective psychopathology, prior research primarily focused on negative emotion regulation. To address this gap, this ecological momentary assessment study compared a broad set of emotion regulation strategies in the context of positive versus negative emotions regarding their effectiveness and associations with depressive symptoms. METHODS: We analyzed data from 1066 participants who were notified five times daily for seven consecutive days to complete a smartphone survey assessing their predominant emotions, strategies to regulate them, and subsequent emotional outcomes. RESULTS: Findings show that the effectiveness of most regulation strategies depended on whether the emotional context was positive or negative. While acceptance and savoring predicted improved emotional outcomes across emotional contexts, reappraisal and problem-solving were associated with deteriorated emotional outcomes and increased depressive symptoms when regulating positive but not negative emotions. LIMITATIONS: Future studies should replicate our findings in demographically and culturally diverse clinical samples to improve generalizability. CONCLUSION: These results emphasize that strategies effective for regulating negative emotions may be less helpful in the context of positive emotions. Thus, context-specific interventions may be a promising approach to improve the treatment of affective disorders.

Acute psychosocial stress weakens the sense of agency in healthy adults.

The sense of agency (SoA) refers to the feeling of being in control of one's actions and the subsequent consequence of these actions. Emotional context seems to alter the strength of sense of agency. The present study explored the influence of acute psychosocial stress on the SoA by means of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Self-assessment manikin (SAM) and objective physiological indicators (e.g. heart rate, electrodermal activity, and salivary cortisol levels) were utilized to evaluate the effect of the TSST. We also employed the temporal binding effect as an implicit assessment of the participant's SoA. The results indicated that the stress level of the experimental group after TSST was significantly higher than the control group, whilst the temporal binding scores of the experimental group decreased after TSST manipulation. In short, acute psychosocial stress with intense emotional arousal weakened the sense of agency.

The role of familiarity with the experimenter on cognitive performance, metacognition, pro-social behaviors, and the well-being of adults with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities.

BACKGROUND: Few studies have evaluated the explanatory factors of poor performance and the effects of context in adults with intellectual disabilities. The aim of this study is to assess the role of a familiar experimenter on their cognitive performance, well-being, metacognitive experiences, and social behaviors. METHOD: Participants with moderate to severe intellectual disability were recruited into two groups, one with a familiar and one with an unfamiliar experimenter. They carried out a categorization task. Before and after they reported their metacognitive experiences and level of well-being. The experimenter observed their pro-social behavior. RESULTS: Performance and some social behaviors were better when the participant knew the experimenter. However, he did not affect the level of well-being. The participants' metacognitive experiences were poor, whether or not they knew the experimenter. CONCLUSIONS: The familiarity of the experimenter plays a determining role, both on the participants' performance, and on their compliance with certain pro-social behavior.

Effects of emotional contexts on respiratory attention task performance.

Negative emotions have been found associated with high prevalence of respiratory disease and increased subjective feelings of dyspnea, while positive emotional stimulus has been suggested to alleviate dyspneic feelings. However, the extent to which different emotional contexts affect individuals' respiratory interoceptive attention was not clear. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the influences of emotional contexts on respiratory interoceptive accuracy, and the relationships between respiratory interoceptive accuracy and negative emotions as well as respiratory symptoms. Fifty-six healthy participants completed the self-reported questionnaires of depression, anxiety, and respiratory symptoms. During the experiment, the participants were instructed to watch one neutral and one positive affective picture series and mentally count the number of perceived occlusions (reported at the end of the trials). The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test and Spearman's correlations were used to examine the effect of the emotional pictures and to explore the relationships between the level of emotional status or respiratory symptoms and respiratory interoceptive task performance. The significance level was set at p < 0.05. Our results did not show a significant difference in participants' occlusion counting task performance between the neutral and positive emotional context. However, Spearman's Rho correlation analysis revealed that depression level was negatively correlated with accuracy of the task performance in the neutral emotional context, and this relationship diminished in the positive emotional context. In summary, our study demonstrated that negative emotional status, especially depression, may lead to decreased respiratory interoceptive accuracy. Future studies are recommended to test the effect of positive emotional context on respiratory interoceptive task performance in individuals with clinical depression and anxiety.

Intermuscular coherence reveals that affective emotional pictures modulate neural control mechanisms during the initiation of arm pointing movements.

Introduction: Several studies in psychology provided compelling evidence that emotions significantly impact motor control. Yet, these evidences mostly rely on behavioral investigations, whereas the underlying neurophysiological processes remain poorly understood. Methods: Using a classical paradigm in motor control, we tested the impact of affective pictures associated with positive, negative or neutral valence on the kinematics and patterns of muscle activations of arm pointing movements performed from a standing position. The hand reaction and movement times were measured and electromyography (EMG) was used to measure the activities from 10 arm, leg and trunk muscles that are involved in the postural maintenance and arm displacement in pointing movements. Intermuscular coherence (IMC) between pairs of muscles was computed to measure changes in patterns of muscle activations related to the emotional stimuli. Results: The hand movement time increased when an emotional picture perceived as unpleasant was presented as compared to when the emotional picture was perceived as pleasant. When an unpleasant emotional picture was presented, beta (ß, 15-35 Hz) and gamma (γ, 35-60 Hz) IMC decreased in the recorded pairs of postural muscles during the initiation of pointing movements. Moreover, a linear relationship between the magnitude of the intermuscular coherence in the pairs of posturo-focal muscles and the hand movement time was found in the unpleasant scenarios. Discussion: These findings reveal that emotional stimuli can significantly affect the content of the motor command sent by the central nervous system to muscles when performing voluntary goal-directed movements.

The impact of emotional context on neural substrates of respiratory sensory gating.

Psychological challenges have been found to impact respiratory symptom perception in healthy individuals as well as in patients with various neurological disorders. Human respiratory sensory gating is an objective measure to examine respiratory sensory information processing of repetitive respiratory mechanical stimuli in the central nervous system. With this electrophysiological method, patients with higher anxiety levels showed reduced respiratory sensory gating function in the cortex, and increased symptom perception. In addition, positive emotional contexts were found to increase the respiratory sensory gating function using RREPs. However, neural substrates related to emotional impacts on respiratory sensory gating remain still unclear. In the present study, we examined the emotion processing of respiratory sensory gating using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We hypothesized that positive compared with neutral stimuli would result in reduced brain activations in cortical areas with the paired occlusion paradigm. Thirty-five healthy adults participated in this event-designed fMRI experiment. Paired inspiratory occlusions (two transient occlusions with a 500 ms inter-stimulus-interval are delivered during one inspiration) were provided using an external trigger outside of the scanner. At least 40 paired inspiratory occlusions were collected for each trial. The experiment contained three runs during which participants underwent 12 min for the paired inspiratory occlusion paradigm while watching a fixation cross (the control condition), neutral and positive emotional picture series. The order of emotional picture series was randomized across the participants. Our results revealed an overall trend of reduction of brain activity from the neutral (minus fixation) condition, to the pleasant (minus fixation) condition. For bilateral thalamus and primary visual cortices, there was no significant difference in neural activation between the two contrasts of pleasant (ContrastP-F) and neutral condition (ContrastN-F). The activation of the mid-cingulate and the orbitofrontal cortex was lower in ContrastP-F compared to ContrastN-F. In conclusion, our results suggest that emotional context, especially positive valence, modulates neural correlates in middle cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in terms of respiratory sensory gating. Future studies are recommended to test emotional impacts on respiratory sensations in patients with neurological disorders.

Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions.

While face masks prevent the spread of disease, they occlude lower face parts and thus impair facial emotion recognition. Since emotions are often also contextually situated, it remains unknown whether providing a descriptive emotional context alongside the facial emotion may reduce some of the negative impact of facial occlusion on emotional communication. To address this question, here we examined how emotional inferences were affected by facial occlusion and the availability of emotional context. Participants were presented with happy or sad emotional faces who were either fully visible or partially obstructed by an opaque surgical mask. The faces were shown either within an emotionally congruent (e.g., "Her cat was found/lost yesterday afternoon") or neutral ("Get ready to see the next person") context. Participants were asked to infer the emotional states of the protagonists by rating their emotional intensity and valence. Facial occlusion by masks impacted the ratings, such that protagonists were judged to feel less intense and more neutral emotions when they wore masks relative to when their face was fully visible. Importantly, this negative impact of visual occlusion by mask was reduced but not fully eliminated when the faces were presented within a congruent emotional context. Thus, visual occlusion of facial emotions impairs understanding of emotions, with this negative effect of face masks partially mitigated by the availability of a larger emotional context.

Neural computations underlying contextual processing in humans.

Context shapes our perception of facial expressions during everyday social interactions. We interpret a person's face in a hostile situation negatively and judge the same face under pleasant circumstances positively. Critical to our adaptive fitness, context provides situation-specific framing to resolve ambiguity and guide our interpersonal behavior. This context-specific modulation of facial expression is thought to engage the amygdala, hippocampus, and orbitofrontal cortex; however, the underlying neural computations remain unknown. Here we use human intracranial electroencephalograms (EEGs) directly recorded from these regions and report bidirectional theta-gamma interactions within the amygdala-hippocampal network, facilitating contextual processing. Contextual information is subsequently represented in the orbitofrontal cortex, where a theta phase shift binds context and face associations within theta cycles, endowing faces with contextual meanings at behavioral timescales. Our results identify theta phase shifts as mediating associations between context and face processing, supporting flexible social behavior.

Emotional Context Shapes the Serial Position Curve.

Emotional contexts affect memory processes. However, the impact of contextual priming as a function of the emotional valence on the recall of neutral information is not fully understood. The aim of the present study was to evaluate how a conditioning of emotional context during encoding may influence the subsequent memory of otherwise neutral materials in a well-established phenomenon as the serial position effect. Participants performed a free recall task for neutral words in three conditions: (i) word list alone; (ii) word list coupled with positive or neutral images; and (iii) word list coupled with negative or neutral images. Images were presented before each word stimulus. In three different experiments, the emotional context during the word list presentation was manipulated separately for primacy and recency clusters, and for the middle words ('middlecy'). Emotional context affects free recall of neutral stimuli, changing the serial position curve effect across conditions. Namely, emotional images presented in the primacy and recency clusters worsen accuracy, whereas their occurrence in the 'middlecy' cluster reduces the oblivion. The present findings show that the typical pattern related to the serial position curve for neutral information can be shaped by the conditioning of emotional context. Findings have implications in medical-legal contexts in the case of the recollection of events with high emotional content.

Replicating remembering "remembering".

When examining spontaneously recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, victims report that there had been periods in which they had forgotten the abuse. However, there are sometimes people with whom the victim had spoken about the abuse during the period in which the victim had supposedly forgotten the abuse, suggesting the victim had not forgotten the abuse but the prior recall of the abuse. The underestimation of previous knowledge is termed the forgot-it-all-along effect. The goal of the present study was replicating the results of a laboratory study that had provided a theoretical understanding for the forgot-it-all-along effect by showing that people have difficulties remembering "remembering" when the memory had previously been recalled in a different context. The effect was replicated by using the same neutral context sentences, suggesting the finding was robust. We also extended the experimental design by using positive and negative context sentences, but it did not become smaller when the positive sentences provided the different context or larger when the negative sentences provided the different context. Although the sample sizes were sufficiently large to provide statistical power for the forgot-it-all-along effect, they may not have been sufficiently large to observe the moderation effects of emotional context.

Contrast effect of emotional context on interpersonal distance with neutral social stimuli.

In social interactions, valence-based judgments are an important component of interpersonal distances regulation. Within the framework of the Range-Frequency model, we tested whether temporal presentation of an emotional context, known to produce a contrast effect on valence ratings, also influences the regulation of interpersonal distances. Two groups of participants were shown virtual characters with either a neutral facial expression (target stimuli) or an emotional facial expression (contextual stimuli) in two successive sessions (angry then happy emotional context, or vice-versa). Participants rated the valence of the characters and judged the appropriateness of various interpersonal distances. The results showed a contrast effect of the emotional context on the valence rating of neutral characters, which extended to preferred interpersonal distance, although sparingly. The findings revealed thus that the emotional context alters more perceptual-related valence-based judgments than action-related interpersonal distance judgments.

How do word valence and classes influence lexical processing? Evidence from virtual reality emotional contexts.

The current study examines the influence of word class (i.e., noun vs. adjective) and valence (i.e., positive vs. negative vs. neutral) on the processing of emotional words under different virtual reality (VR) emotional contexts. To this end, 115 participants performed a modified affect labeling task after experiencing different VR scenarios. Their galvanic skin responses were also examined to further gauge the different effects of VR contexts. The results demonstrated significant main effect for word valence, indicating more processing of positive words relative to neutral words which are processed more than negative words. The results also demonstrated significant main effect for word class, indicating more processing of nouns in contrast to adjectives. Additionally, the results indicated that both positive and negative VR contexts could stimulate participants to select more positive words though negatively valenced words were processed more under negative VR context relative to positive VR context. However, the amplitude of galvanic skin responses in positive VR was lower than that in negative VR. The results were interpreted in line with the situation-consistency effects, the mood-consistency effects, the specific nature of VR context, and the different features of different word classes in terms of concreteness, imageability, arousal, and valence.

Infants' Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context.

Development of selective attention during the first year of life is critical to cognitive and socio-emotional skills. It is also a period that the average child's interactions with their mother dominate their social environment. This study examined how maternal negative affect and an emotion face prime (mother/stranger) jointly effect selective visual attention. Results from linear mixed-effects modeling showed that 9-month olds (N=70) were faster to find a visual search target after viewing a fearful face (regardless of familiarity) or their mother's angry face. For mothers with high negative affect, infants' attention was further impacted by fearful faces, resulting in faster search times. Face emotion interacted with mother's negative affect, demonstrating a capacity to influence what infants attend in their environment.

What's in a Face? Amygdalar Sensitivity to an Emotional Threatening Faces Task and Transdiagnostic Internalizing Disorder Symptoms in Participants Receiving Attention Bias Modification Training.

BACKGROUND: Altered amygdala activation in response to the emotional matching faces (EMF) task, a task thought to reflect implicit emotion detection and reactivity, has been found in some patients with internalizing disorders; mixed findings from the EMF suggest individual differences (within and/or across diagnoses) that may be important to consider. Attention Bias Modification (ABM), a mechanistic attention-targeting intervention, has demonstrated efficacy in treatment of internalizing disorders. Individual differences in neural activation to a relatively attention-independent task, such as the EMF, could reveal novel neural substrates relevant in ABM's transdiagnostic effects, such as the brain's generalized threat reactivity capacity. METHODS: In a sample of clinically anxious patients randomized to ABM (n = 43) or sham training (n = 18), we measured fMRI activation patterns during the EMF and related them to measures of transdiagnostic internalizing symptoms (i.e., anxious arousal, general distress, anhedonic depression, and general depressive symptoms). RESULTS: Lower baseline right amygdala activation to negative (fearful/angry) faces, relative to shapes, predicted greater pre-to-post reduction in general depression symptoms in ABM-randomized patients. Greater increases in bilateral amygdalae activation from pre-to-post ABM were associated with greater reductions in general distress, anhedonic depression, and general depression symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: ABM may lead to greater improvement in depressive symptoms in individuals exhibiting blunted baseline amygdalar responses to the EMF task, potentially by enhancing neural-level discrimination between negative and unambiguously neutral stimuli. Convergently, longitudinal increases in amygdala reactivity from pre-to-post-ABM may be associated with greater improvement in depression, possibly secondary to improved neural discrimination of threat and/or decreased neurophysiological threat avoidance in these specific patients.

Retrieval orientation for memories encoded in emotional contexts: An ERP study.

Retrieval orientation, which is involved in recognition cue processing, optimizes goal-directed memory retrieval. However, whether the emotionality of encoding context affects subsequent retrieval orientation remains unclear. To clarify this, neutral objects were paired with either emotional or neutral background scenes during the study phase. During recognition test, only neutral objects were presented. The ERP analysis on the correctly rejected new items indicated that at least two processes were modulated by the emotionality of memory: 1) the arousal-modulated effect on the right-frontal scalp, and 2) the posterior-distributed effect, which was found to differentiate between memories with positive and negative valence. Furthermore, the magnitude of posterior-distributed effect was correlated with affective rating. The topographical distribution indicated that retrieval orientation for positive memories involves at least partially different neural circuitries from neutral or negative memories. Our results suggest that the emotionality of encoding context affects subsequent retrieval orientation.

The interaction between reward and the task-irrelevant emotional context in memory.

Reward improves task performance while the emotional contexts irrelevant to the task impair task performance. An interaction between reward and the task-irrelevant emotional context has been discovered by some studies using perceptual tasks. However, it is unclear that how memory performance would be affected by both variables. This study aimed to answer this question and explore the role of arousal induced by emotional stimuli, to which was seldomly paid attention by previous studies. We conducted two experiments with the study-test paradigm. The first difference between the experiments was the way that the emotional stimuli were presented. They were presented with the words (Experiment 1) or separately (Experiment 2). The second difference was that the manipulation of the emotional arousal was phasic (Experiment 1) or tonic (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed that the reward effect was greater in emotional context compared to the neutral context, which is not only due to the poorer memory of no reward-associated words but also the better memory of reward-associated words in emotional contexts especially in negative one. These results supported the view that emotional arousal enhanced the memory of high priority stimuli (reward-associated words) and impaired the memory of low priority stimuli (no reward-associated words).

Developmental Changes in Emotion Regulation during Adolescence: Associations with Socioeconomic Risk and Family Emotional Context.

Although theoretical work proposes that emotion regulation development exhibits a positive growth trajectory across adolescence as prefrontal brain regions continue to mature, individual differences in developmental changes of emotion regulation merit elucidation. The present study investigates longitudinal links between the family environment (i.e., socioeconomic risk and family emotional context) and emotion regulation development. The sample included 167 adolescents (53% males) who were first recruited at 13-14 years of age and assessed annually four times. Latent change score analyses identified family emotional context as a mediator between socioeconomic risk and emotion regulation development, such that lower socioeconomic risk (higher socioeconomic status and lower household chaos) at Time 1 was associated with a more positive family emotional context (parent emotion regulation, parenting practices, and parent-adolescent relationship quality), which in turn was associated with larger year-to-year increases in emotion regulation. The findings highlight the important role of the family emotional context as a process explaining how the challenges of growing up in a household laden with socioeconomic risk may be associated with emotion regulation development during adolescence.

Emotional Contexts Influence Toddlers' Prosocial Strategies.

Prosocial behavior is a highly heterogeneous construct, and young children use distinct prosocial actions in response to differing emotional needs of another person. This study examined whether toddlers' prosocial responses differed in response to two understudied emotional contexts-whether or not children caused a victim's distress, and the specific emotion expressed by the victim. Toddlers (N = 86; M age =35 months) and their parent participated in two separate mishap paradigms in which parents feigned pain and sadness, respectively. Half of the sample was led to believe they had transgressed to cause their parent's distress, whereas the other half simply witnessed parent distress as bystanders. Results indicated that toddlers were overall equally prosocial when they were transgressors compared to when they were bystanders, and significantly more prosocial in response to sadness than pain Toddlers were significantly more likely to use affection as transgressors than bystanders, information seeking as bystanders than transgressors, and affection in response to pain than sadness. All children used greater helping in response to sadness than pain, and this was especially true when they were bystanders. Findings add to mounting evidence of the complexity of prosocial action in early childhood by identifying that two, distinct emotional contexts influence the amount and type of prosocial behaviors that toddlers use to help others.

Efeito Kuleshov: a influência do contexto emocional no processamento de faces / Kuleshov Effect: the influence of emotional context on face processing / Efecto Kuleshov: la influencia del contexto emocional en el procesamiento facial

Em 1920, Lev Vladimirovitch Kuleshov relatou que o contexto emocional quando justaposto à face neutra poderia afetar a percepção da face, tornando-a emocional. Na área do cinema este fenômeno foi denominado de efeito Kuleshov. A existência do efeito tem sido cientificamente questionada, e desde então, neurocientistas tentam validar o efeito Kuleshov. Neste artigo iremos sumarizar os diferentes modelos experimentais que têm sido utilizados na investigação do efeito Kuleshov e os resultados encontrados até o momento por meio do método científico; mais precisamente em pesquisas experimentais e da neurociência. Os resultados desses estudos mostram indícios do efeito Kuleshov a nível comportamental e de processamento neuronal, entretanto, nenhum estudo conseguiu comprová-lo.

In 1920, Lev Vladimirovitch Kuleshov reported that the emotional context juxtaposed with the neutral face could affect the face perception making it reported as emotional. In the cinema area, this phenomenon was denominate of Kuleshov effect. The existence of the effect is scientifically questionable, and neuroscientists are engaged in validating the Kuleshov effect. In this article we will summarize the different experimental models that have been used in the investigation of the Kuleshov effect and the results found so far through the scientific method; more precisely in experimental and neuroscience research.The results of these studies show some evidence, however, there is no complete proof of the Kuleshov effect.

En 1920, Lev Vladimirovitch Kuleshov demostró que el contexto emocional, cuando se yuxtaponía con un rostro neutro, afectaba la percepción del rostro, haciéndolo emocional. En el área del cine, este fenómeno se denominaba efecto Kuleshov. La existencia del efecto es científicamente cuestionable, y los neurocientíficos se dedican a validar el efecto Kuleshov. En este artículo resumiremos los diferentes modelos experimentales que se han utilizado en la investigación del efecto Kuleshov y los resultados encontrados hasta ahora a través del método científico; más precisamente en investigación experimental y neurociencia. Los resultados de estos estudios mostran alguna evidencia, sin embargo, no hay una prueba completa del efecto Kuleshov.