Bumpy ride ahead: Anticipated effort as emotional evidence?

Conscious reportable (un)pleasantness feelings were shown to be successfully described by a process in which evidence favoring pleasant and unpleasant feelings accumulates until one response wins the race. This approach is challenged by (a) insufficient specification of "evidence," and (b) incomplete verification that participants report their truly experienced (un)pleasant feelings and not what they expect to feel. In each trial in this preregistered experiment, the (un)pleasant feeling reports regarding emotion evoking pictures was embedded in a period when participants expected a low-effort task (feature visual search) or a high-effort task (feature-conjunction search). Fitting the Linear Ballistic Accumulator model to the feeling report data shows that anticipated effort was associated with a higher rate of unpleasant evidence accumulation, but only when the emotion evoking pictures were normatively unpleasant and not when they were normatively pleasant. These results suggest that anticipated effort may be one source of "evidence," but only given a certain interpretation of the findings, and that genuinely felt emotions contribute to the emotion reports, assuming that participants intended to react to the pictures, as instructed, and not to the anticipated effort.

Both pleasant and unpleasant emotional feelings follow Weber's law but it depends how you ask.

It remains unclear how we become aware of our emotions. The perceptual theory argues that emotions are a form of perception and reach awareness just like simple sensations. The theory was recently supported by Berkovich and Meiran (2023) showing, using evidence accumulation modeling of pleasantness reports, that pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws, Weber's Law, as nearly all sensations do. Contrary to predictions, this was true for pleasantness and not for unpleasantness. In this work, of which data were collected at the end of 2022, we employed the same experimental approach and successfully replicated the results but only when pleasantness was probed directly (emotions described as either "positive feeling" or "positive vs. negative feeling"). We unexpectedly found that the results flipped when we probed unpleasantness directly (i.e., "negative feeling") where we found that unpleasantness followed Weber's Law while pleasantness did not. Thus, Weber's Law holds for both pleasant and unpleasant feelings when probed directly, thereby providing an even stronger support for the perceptual theory. This in turn suggests that Weber's Law contributes to phenomena such as the unsuccessful pursuit of happiness and why psychotherapy is especially effective in leading to felt improvement when focusing on enhancing positive emotions and not on reducing negative emotions. The findings are limited by the fact that the participants were nondepressed undergraduate students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

One Standard for All: Uniform Scale for Comparing Individuals and Groups in Hierarchical Bayesian Evidence Accumulation Modeling.

In recent years, a growing body of research uses Evidence Accumulation Models (EAMs) to study individual differences and group effects. This endeavor is challenging because fitting EAMs requires constraining one of the EAM parameters to be equal for all participants, which makes a strong and possibly unlikely assumption. Moreover, if this assumption is violated, differences or lack thereof may be wrongly found. To overcome this limitation, in this study, we introduce a new method that was originally suggested by van Maanen & Miletic (2021), which employs Bayesian hierarchical estimation. In this new method, we set the scale at the population level, thereby allowing for individual and group differences, which is realized by de facto fixing a population-level hyper-parameter through its priors. As proof of concept, we ran two successful parameter recovery studies using the Linear Ballistic Accumulation model. The results suggest that the new method can be reliably used to study individual and group differences using EAMs. We further show a case in which the new method reveals the true group differences whereas the classic method wrongly detects differences that are truly absent.

Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber's law) as most sensations do.

Emotion episodes may include a conscious aspect of the emotion, namely being aware of our own emotional experience. Despite explosion in research over previous years, it remains unclear how emotions reach awareness and become feelings. Already in 1884, William James argued that emotional feelings resemble ordinary sensations in this respect. Here, using a novel model-based ratio scale of emotion intensity, we provide one of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting James' perceptual theory by showing that emotion awareness obeys one of the most fundamental laws of perception, Weber's law. According to this law, stimulus encoding accuracy decreases with intensity. In this work, we asked participants to provide binary pleasant-versus-unpleasant reports of their experience when watching normed emotion-eliciting pictures (NAPS; Marchewka et al., 2014). The results validate our model's measure of emotion intensity by showing its monotonous relation to picture norms. Most importantly, they show, for the first time, that in humans, pleasant emotion experiences follow Weber's classical psychophysical law-indicating decreased encoding precision with increasing pleasantness. This result supports James' theory, suggesting that (pleasant) emotions reach awareness just as ordinary sensations do. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).