Events

 

 ADSR Colloquium and series

 2010    
     
  November17th Disa Sauter - More than happy: The need for disentangling positive emotions
  April 19th Oliver Langner - Face processing, spatial frequencies, and social anxiety
  March 22nd Sylvie Willems - La fluence : un indice métacognitif omniprésent pour nos jugements.
  February 22nd Alexandre Heeren - Selective attention and emotional vulnerability in Social Phobia: The experimental manipulation of attentional bias using a modified dot-probe task
  February 8th Nicolas Vermeulen - The attentional blink paradigm: A fascinating tool to put the mind under the microscope
2009    
     
  November 23rd Siegfried Dewitte - Premature Purchase Plans: Forming implementation intentions reduces purchase likelihood of novel products
  March 23rd Lotte Van Dillen - The limited resources of affective processing
2008    
     
  June 16th Céline Douilliez - Effet de l’anxiété sociale sur l’évaluation de visages présentés individuellement vs. sous forme de matrice
     
  June 2nd Delphine Grynberg - Impact of individual differences in terms of emotional competences on perspective taking: mediation by executive functions in clinical population
     
  May 19th Seminar session: Post-doctoral job talks
     
  April 21th Chiara Storari - Infrahumanization and helping behaviour: When perceiving victims as human favour helping
  April 7th Claudia Toma - Projection and transparency of cooperative behavior in decision making: The impact of self-other interdependence
     
  March 10th Dennis Küster - Physical exercise and a risky choice: Can we dissociate the emotional state from the nature of the prize"
    Morgane Van Haelen - The role of relational context and consciousness on the interpersonal outcomes of non-verbal mimicry"
     
  January 28th  Sandie Mauduit - The influence of emotions in a criminal justice context 
     
 2007    
     
  December 17th  Gayannée Kedia  -  Moral emotions: Psychological and neurofunctional approach
  December 3rd Anne Gast - The influence of a valence focus on evaluative conditioning
    Marwan Sinaceur - Suspending Judgment to Create Value: Suspicion and Trust in Negotiations
     
  November 19th Dennis Küster -  Psychophysiological measures: What can they do (for you)?
  November 5th  Moïra Mikolajczak - The moderating effect of emotional intelligence onaffective and endocrine responses to an acute stressor
     
  October16th  Maya Machunsky - Another peek inside the cognitive toolbox: Interpersonal and intrapersonal (emotional) projection as a cognitive heuristic
     
  May 29th  Seminar session: Post-doctoral job talks (part 2)
  May 24th  Raffaella Di Schiena - The role of emotions in the omission vs commission dilemmas
  May 10th Seminar session: Post-doctoral job talks (part 1)
  May 9th  Alexandre Schaefer -  Le rôle de l'amygdale dans les processus cognitifs de haut niveau
     
  April 19th Marwan Sinaceur - The dark side of negotiations: When suspicion, anger, and threats are beneficial 
     
  March 26th   Barney Dunn -  Follow your heart: Validating Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis
  March 22nd Santiago Garcia Rodriguez - Numeracy and decision 
     
  January 18th Valérie Le Floch - Psychologie des conduites de jeux de hasard et d'argent: à qui le tour?
     

 

January 2007
Valérie Le Floch (Maître de conférence à l'Université de Toulouse II, Laboratoire Travail et Cognition, LTC, CNRS)
"Psychologie des conduites de jeux de hasard et d'argent : à qui le tour ?"

Pourquoi consacrer un ensemble de recherches aux jeux de hasard et d'argent ?

La raison essentielle tient à un paradoxe. Les gens investissent de l'argent qui à coup sûr leur en fait perdre à long terme. Bien sûr, quelques personnes gagnent occasionnellement beaucoup plus que ce qu'elles ont dépensé, mais une perte financière est inévitable pour la quasi-totalité des gens. Comment alors l'espoir d’un gain quasi-impossible peut-il apparaître avoir plus de valeur que le prix d'un billet ….?  C'est à cette question que la première partie de l'exposé répondra en revisitant les différentes perspectives théoriques (en particulier pathologie, biais du jugement et apprentissage social) ciblant l'explicitation du renouvellement des conduites de jeu de hasard et d'argent. Ces différents facteurs explicatifs ont permis de mettre en évidence que : 1) Les autres (présence réelle ou supposée de l’autre) affectent la prise de risque monétaire ; 2) Tout individu indépendamment des autres à une mauvaise compréhension des lois du hasard.
Qu'en est-il alors dès lors que l'on mêle ces 2 résultats de recherche : Soi et Les autres…les autres et soi dès lors que l'on s'attarde un tant soi peu sur le type d'annonce effectué par les médias : « Ici, un gagnant à 1 500€, le 29.11.2004 ». A partir de données expérimentales, l'objectif de la seconde partie de l'exposé est de proposer un modèle causal de la prise de risque dans un jeu de hasard et d'argent (la roulette française) après différents types d’annonce, en particulier l'annonce d'un gain d'autrui. Il est supposé que cette annonce fixe un point de référence interpersonnel, qui induit une illusion de contrôle (tel que définit par Langer, 1975) incitant alors une augmentation de la prise de risque.

Click here for the slides of the talk (pdf file)

March 2007

Santiago Garcia Rodriguez

"Numeracy and Decision-making"

Numeracy, the ability to understand and perform mathematical concepts and operations (Lipkus, Samsa, & Rimer, 2001), has pervasive effects on people’s decision making processes and beliefs (Paulos, 1988). Very recently, a line of research has been opened investigating the differences in decision making processes between low- and high-numerate individuals. According to Peters et al. (2006), high numerates (1) suffer less from attribute framing effects than low numerates, and (2) are less affected by the framing of probabilistic (e.g. 10%) vs. frequentistic (1 out of 10) information. Paradoxically, high numerates make, in some cases, more sub-optimal choices than low numerates. In a between-subjects experiment, Peters et al. (2006) found that high numerates rated as more attractive a gamble in which they had a 7/36 chance of wining $9 and losing 5cents, than a gamble in which they had a 7/36 chance of wining $9 and losing nothing. Low numerates, however did not differ significantly in evaluating the attractiveness of the bet. Peters et al. (2006) explain this paradoxical effect on the basis of high numerates being more able to draw affect from numbers than low numerates. For high numerates, the loss of 5 cents (versus losing nothing) makes it more attractive to win $9.

Expanding on the research of the effects of numeracy on decision making processes, Garcia-Rodriguez and Peters (unpublished data) found high numerates (1) to be less risk-averse, and (2) to suffer less from risky-choice framing effects than low numerates. Using a within-subjects methodology in an attribute-framing series of problems, Garcia-Rodriguez and Peters (unpublished data) also found the typical framing effect happening for both low- and high-numerates. When the frame manipulation was made more evident to participants, a reverse framing effect occurred for the low numerates (rating the negatively framed option higher than the positively framed and vice versa), while the high numerates remain unaffected.
Future lines of research on the field of affect, numeracy and decision making will also be discussed.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

Barney Dunn (University of Cambridge, MRC)

"Follow your heart: Validating Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis"

Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis makes the controversial claim that emotional biasing signals emerging from the body help us make adaptive decisions, particularly in situations of complexity and uncertainty (Damasio, 1994). Principal evidence for the SMH derives from the Iowa Gambling task (IGT), a computerised decision-making paradigm that requires participants to follow their 'intuitions'. Successful behavioural acquisition of this task has been linked to the development of anticipatory electrodermal responses, which differentiate between profitable and unprofitable response options. However, a range of methodological problems with the IGT undermine the support it can offer the Somatic Marker Hypothesis (see Dunn et al, 2006).

This talk will critique the IGT and then present data on a novel decision-making task that attempts to control for many of these problems.
Study One replicates the key finding of anticipatory differentiation between good and bad response options on the revised task. Further, for the first time it is demonstrated that interoception (how accurately individuals perceive changes in the body) moderates the relationship between anticipatory changes in the body and successful decision-making performance.
Study Two shows that the revised task appears to be more genuinely 'intuitive' than the IGT. The extent to which these findings better validate the somatic marker hypothesis will be discussed.
Finally, whether disturbances in the somatic marker system could potentially account for some of the emotional and decision-making symptoms of mood disorders will be considered.
References
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes Error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Avon.
Dunn, B. D., Dalgleish, T., & Lawrence, A. D. (2006). The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation. Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews, 30, 239 - 271.
April 2007
Marwan Sinaceur
The dark side of negotiations: When suspicion, anger, and threats are beneficial
Cancelled.

May 2007

Alexandre Schaefer (University of Leeds)

Le rôle de l'amygdale dans les processus cognitifs de haut niveau

Un important corpus de données expérimentales recueillies au long de plus d'un siècle montre sans équivoque que l'amygdale est une composante centrale des substrats cérébraux des émotions. Ces données ont été obtenues d'abord grâce à des recherches sur l'animal, et ensuite chez l'humain par l'étude de patients cérébrolésés ou par l'utilisation de techniques de neuroimagerie fonctionnelle telles que la tomographie par émission de positrons (TEP) ou l'imagerie par résonance magnétique fonctionnelle (IRMf). Cependant, des données récentes chez l'humain montrent que l'amygdale joue également un rôle important dans des processus cognitifs de haut niveau tels que la mémoire épisodique ou la mémoire de travail.

 

L'objet de cette présentation sera une série de 3 études IRMf qui montrent que l'activité de l'amygdale est prédictive de la performance dans une tâche de mémoire de travail recrutant des processus exécutifs (voir Figure). Le rôle de certains processus médiateurs (états émotionnels, charge cognitive, et dimensions de personnalité) sera discuté, ainsi que les implications théoriques et pratiques de ces résultats, notamment en ce qui concerne le rôle de facteurs motivationnels et différentiels dans les processus d'adaptation et de prise de décision.

 

 

Bilateral inverse correlation between the amygdala and response time in a working memory task (3-back) on coronal (a), transverse (b) and sagittal (c) views. Clusters of correlated voxels are in blue. The scatterplot shows the correlation for the peak left amygdala voxel.

 

Schaefer et al. (2006). Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 10120-10128.

Click here for the slides of the talk (pdf file)

 

Seminar session:
Post-doctoral job talks (public session) - first part

10.45: Angela Maitner (UC Santa Barbara) - Seeing the World Through a Group Lens: Effects of Social Identification and Perspective on Perception and Emotion
When people identify with social groups, they tend to perceive the world from an ingroup perspective. Thus, social identification biases people’s experience of their environment. Highly identified group members are likely to interpret events in terms of their costs and benefits to the ingroup, experience events emotionally in line with their group’s outcomes, and engage in behavior aimed at furthering the group’s cause. Such bias likely leads to a failure to consider all sides of an issue before deciding to act. However, people are able to take the perspective of other individuals and groups, and doing helps de-bias their experience of intergroup events. Future work will investigate whether de-biasing experience leads to accurate prediction of outgroup actions and better decision-making.
Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)
11.30: Sarah Konrath (University of Michigan) - Egos inflating: Rising narcissism and its implications for self-construal, cognitive style, and behavior
In this presentation I discuss three of my dissertation papers. In the first we conduct a cross-temporal meta-analysis examining scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory in published and unpublished data, and find that narcissism has been rising over time in American college students. The next study examines the self-construals and cognitive style of narcissists. We find that narcissists score high on independence and low on interdependence of self-construal. They also score high on the Embedded Figures Test, a test of field independence (analytic cognitive style), while scoring low on a personality test of holism. Past research has shown that narcissists are likely to aggress when a ‘different’ other criticizes them. Unfortunately, their natural tendency is to see themselves as different and unique from others (independent self-construal), and this tendency extends to the processing of their visual environments with a disconnected cognitive style. In our final paper we successfully attempt to reduce narcissistic aggression through similarity manipulations. When narcissists perceive a sense of connection between themselves and others, they no longer aggress, even when criticized.
Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)
12h15: Claudia Toma (Université Pierre Mendès France Grenoble II) - Decision making in groups: strategic behaviour, biased processing and interpersonal emotions
Decision making involves processing of task- and affective-relevant information. One important question is how relevant information processing impacts decision quality in situations involving social threat and interpersonal interdependence. In the area of group decision making, hidden profiles represent such situations. This research investigated the impact of outcome interdependence (cooperation, competition) on strategic information sharing and use in a three-person group decision making task. Disconfirmation of various suboptimal individual decisions was required to solve the task. Groups in competition shared and repeated less information than groups in cooperation, especially unshared information. In competition, compared to cooperation, less dissent was expressed during group discussion which affected unshared information pooling and disconfirmation of individual decisions. Unshared information and disconfirmation mediated the effects of outcome interdependence on decision quality. Moreover, affective cues such as mistrust and self and other’s harmful intentions were linked to information withholding and biased processing. Less trust and more jealousy characterized interactions in competition compared to cooperation. These results suggest a novel explanation of the biased sampling effect, namely a strategic pooling of information induced by intragroup competition and uncertainty of decision task.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

Raffaella Di Schiena (University of Bari)

The role of emotions in the omission vs commission dilemmas

When making a decision, people are not only assessing the available information, but also experiencing emotions triggered by the situations.  As it was recently suggested, these emotions are not epiphenomenal but might have a strong influence either on judgment either on choice behaviour.

Anxiety and fear can be evoked by the risk (Loewenstein, Weber, & Hsee, 2001) and make people act more irrational. Or we can also be afraid of regretting possible negative outcome and then decide in a way that is regret minimizing (Zeelenebrg, 1999). Or still we can make our choice just relying on our gut feelings instead of assessing all the available information (Pacini & Epstein, 1999).

The aim of my PhD is to bridge the gap between this recent literature about Emotions and Decision Making and research conducted on Omission Bias (OB) (Ritov & Baron, 1990). OB is a tendency to prefer inactive over active options even when the omission is riskier.

I will present 7 experiments. The first three experiments examines whether the omission bias is a real phenomenon, and whether it occurs in domains other than the typical medical domain (Connolly & Reb, 2003). Here it is shown that OB is a real effect (exp. 1) and consistent across domains, although to a different extent (exp. 2 and 3). It is also suggested that differences between OB in medical domain and in economical domain are mediated by the perceived emotionality of the choice situation.
The next two experiments explore the role of emotion. It is shown that Ss induced to anticipate possible regret display a higher OB, and also that Ss induced to think affectively instead of analytically, show a higher OB. Possible combined effects of affective processing and anticipated regret have also been explored.
Basing on collected evidence about OB in medical domain, the last two experiments test the possibility that the emotionality effect was conditioned by the trust in physician and health care. We are currently analyzing the results.
Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

Seminar session:
Post-doctoral job talks (public session) - second part

9.00: Mauro Bianchi (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) - Spontaneous Ingroup Projection: Evidence from sequential priming
According to the Ingroup Projection Model (Mummendey & Wenzel, 1999), people who belong to a group tend to generalize typical ingroup characteristics to the superordinate category. That is, they project ingroup features onto the inclusive category. As a consequence of this process, the more group members perceive their ingroup as prototypical for the inclusive category the more the attitudes towards an outgroup become negative (Waldzus & Mummendey, 2004).
Following a procedure used by Wittenbrink, Judd and Park (1997), evidence was found for a “spontaneous ingroup projection”, that is, an association between a superordinate category prime and the ingroup instead of the outgroup prototype.
In Experiment 1 (N=95), it has been tested whether a superordinate category prime, namely European, facilitated the processing of ingroup rather than outgroup stereotypical attributes in two different populations, namely Italian and German undergraduate students. The target stimuli were attributes that varied in their valence as well as in their relevance to the groups under consideration. In Experiment 2 (N=53), my goal was to investigate the process of spontaneous ingroup projection in the absence of an inter-group context and to compare this “solo” situation (i.e., intra-group context) with a situation in which the ingroup is compared with an other group (i.e., inter-group context).  Different from Experiment 2, in Experiment 3 two different inter-group contexts were compared (e.g., Germans vs. Italians or Germans vs. British). Results indicated that the superordinate category prime facilitated the processing of ingroup rather than outgroup traits (Experiments 1a and 1b), and that these traits depended on the particular content of the ingroup prototype made salient in the context (Experiments 2 and 3).
Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

9.45: Dennis Küster (Jacob University Bremen) - Automatic processes underlying emotion in social contexts: Induced happiness and sadness affect facial EMG, EEG, RTs, and subjective ratings
Fridlund (1991) demonstrated that the mere implicit presence of a friend believed to be watching the same funny film in another room was sufficient to affect Zygomaticus Major activity. Hess, Banse, and Kappas (1995) found that implicit sociality moderated facial activity at Zygomaticus Major and Orbicularis Oculi sites differently for friends vs. strangers. Towards friends, both the intensity of a funny film as well as the level of sociality produced significant effects, while the facial activity to strangers appeared to be surprisingly unrelated to either of these factors. To systematically investigate the underlying mechanisms of this kind of social context effects, we conducted a multi-method set of 4 studies focusing on facial EMG, response times, and subjective data.
Together, the results of our studies demonstrate that friends appear to be implicitly associated with showing emotions (in particular happiness), that implicit sociality effects can be primed, and that the type of implicit social context (friends vs. strangers) appears to trigger diverging automatic vs. controlled mechanisms in the production of facial activity. In addition to these findings, my talk will present a brief overview of the past research I have been conducting for my diploma thesis concerning induced sadness and its effects on Alpha-EEG and event related potentials. The talk will therefore touch upon a broad range of paradigms and dependent variables that I have been employing. I will discuss how such a multi-method approach may be used to illuminate the underlying processes linking emotional states and facial expression in different social contexts.
Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

10.30: Yang-Ming Huang (University of York) - The effect of task-irrelevant emotional information on attentional process
Present study used the visual search task and the attentional blink task to examine how task-irrelevant emotional information affects attentional process. In the visual search task, task-irrelevant emotional information only affected attentional process when emotional information is salient in the visual search display. Furthermore, the effect caused by task-irrelevant emotional information was modulated by both the task difficulty and the goal relevancy. In the attentional blink task, task-irrelevant emotional information did not cause more interference on target detection when perceptual or phonological processing of targets was required. Only when semantic processing of targets was required did task-irrelevant emotional information capture more attention and increase attentional blink magnitude. In conclusion, task-irrelevant emotional information did not always affect attentional process supporting recent evidence (e.g. Pessoa, McKenna, Gutierrez & Ungerleider, 2002) that showed emotional processing is not as automatic as previously hypothesized.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

October 2007

Maya Machunsky (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany)

Another peek inside the cognitive toolbox: Interpersonal and intrapersonal (emotional) projection as a cognitive heuristic?

The major aim of this research project is to demonstrate that social projection is a heuristic process similar to stereotyping. I hypothesize that self-other similarity increases as the outcome of projection under conditions that increase heuristic processing. In showing an increase in the use of self information (i.e. projection) and a simultaneous decrease in the use of individuating target information under heuristic processing conditions, this project would complete the understanding of projective processes as another mental tool besides stereotyping. To provide further evidence for the parallelism of stereotyping and projection, it needs to be demonstrated that the motivation to form an accurate impression of a target person can reduce projection. In sum, the aim is to provide evidence for the claim that projection is a tool of the cognitive toolbox that works similar to stereotyping as it comes particularly into play under depleted resources and leads to the neglect of individuating target information whereas the opposite is true for an enhanced accuracy motivation. Furthermore, the proposed research project further extends previous research by considering the projection of emotion. Social projection has been mainly investigated with regard to traits or behavioral preferences. In the literature other projective processes are also well-known, namely inter- and intrapersonal empathy gaps. Whereas for the projection of traits it has been assumed that they enhance predictive accuracy (e.g., Hoch, 1987), intra- and interpersonal empathy gaps lead to erroneous predictions in most cases. People being in a cold state (affectively neutral state) fail to accurately predict their affect and judgments in hot states (intrapersonal empathy gap). For instance, people in affectively neutral states are not very accurate in predicting how much they would appreciate water after having been lost in the forest for three days (hot state). However, after having performed on a bike for half an hour (hot state), prediction accuracy increased (Van Boven et al., 2003). Furthermore, intrapersonal empathy gaps are responsible for erroneous predictions of other persons’ affective states because the mental simulation of the “hot state”-situation and the resulting assumptions about one’s own affect given one would be in the same situation as the target person is taken as an anchor for 
predicting others’ affective states (interpersonal empathy gaps). Research on empathy gaps has mainly focused on motivational states like hunger, thirst, sexual arousal etc. (Van Boven & Kane, 2006). Although emotions are extremely relevant for behaviours and decisions (Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003), only few studies have investigated more emotion-related empathy gaps. In a study by Van Boven, Loewenstein and Dunning (2005) participants were asked to decide whether they would dance in front of their class in exchange for 5 $. In addition, participants were asked to rate how much they would think about being 
evaluated by others in this situation. The authors demonstrated that one’s own fear rating predicted the estimated fear of another person (interpersonal projection). However, in how far people project their current emotional states (current feelings of fear or shame) onto future emotional states (intrapersonal projection), as predicted by the model of Van Boven and Loewenstein (2005a), is still an empirical question. Hence, the second aim of this project is to provide empirical evidence for emotional intrapersonal empathy gaps and to demonstrate that both intra- and interpersonal emotional projection are especially prevalent when people are in a heuristic processing mode. Concerning behavioural decisions (e.g., to dance in exchange for 5 $), it is hypothesised that the current emotion is a strong predictor for decisions only when people are in a heuristic processing mode.

In sum, this project pursues two goals. First, in demonstrating that projection is a heuristic process this research project would 
contribute to the understanding of projection as a very general cognitive tool. Second, this research wants to extend existing 
research in demonstrating that projection is also a prevailing mechanism concerning the prediction of emotional states in oneself 
(intrapersonal projection). Furthermore, for both intra- and interpersonal emotional projection it needs to be proven that it is a 
heuristic process. Finally, I am interested in how empathy gaps influence the evaluation of others. I hypothesize that mispredictions of others emotions and decisions (based on mispredictions for oneself) have major consequences. For instance if one anticipates that in a sexual harassment situation the primary emotion would be anger and that one would confront a sexual harasser, then one might be more critical of a woman who did not confront the sexual harasser and who experience fear instead of anger (which seems to be indeed the reaction of the vast majority of women who have been confronted with such a situation) – or even blame the victim (Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001). Evidence for negative evaluation after mispredictions also derives from the endowment effect. The endowment effect describes the differential monetary evaluation of an object by sellers and buyers that often leads to failed selling negotiations. Because buyers project their own valuation of the object on sellers and do not anticipate the “special” attachment of owners to the object, prices offered by the buyer are typically to low. Moreover, both sellers and buyers attributed the failed negotiation to dispositional greed of the other side (Van Boven, Dunning, & Loewenstein, 2006). Thus, predicting other’s preferences or choices from one’s own preference or choice leads to erroneous predictions and, maybe even more critical, to negative evaluations of others. Hence, I hypothesize that the divergence between a target person’s actual emotions and decisions and one’s own expectations might be a predictor for target evaluation and dispositional attributions.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

 

November 2007

 

Moïra Mikolajczak  (Université de Louvain-la-Neuve)

The moderating effect of emotional intelligence on affective and endocrine responses to an acute stressor

The literature has shown that emotions can both enhance and bias decision-making. Individuals are, however, not equal vis-à-vis their susceptibility to emotion-related benefits and biases. Although we have never investigated the question of decision-making per se, we propose that the construct of emotional intelligence (EI) might be useful in the investigation individual differences in decision-making. Emotional Intelligence refers to the individual differences in the identification, comprehension, utilization and regulation of self and others'emotions. Studies to date have found that trait EI was related to several parameters known to influence decision-making processes: the affective and physiological changes in emotional situations, the awareness of one's
moods,… The study we will present today shows that different self-reported levels of emotional intelligence are underlined by strong differences in HPA activation amidst stress. We will discuss how such differences in affective and biological reactivity to stress might influence decisions made in stressful circumstances.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

 

Dennis Küster  (Université de Louvain-la-Neuve)

Psychophysiological measures: What can they do (for you)?

In this session, I would like to facilitate a discussion about the possibilities provided by peripheral psychophysiological measures for the ADSR lab. I will give a brief overview of different relatively simple physiological measures that may be of interest for various studies of affect and decision making. To give some concrete examples, I will present an overview of a number of studies that have recently been presented at the annual meeting of the Society fo Psychophysiological Research in Savannah. The goal I see for
this session is to provide a basic background and understanding of these measures and their role in the toolbox of cognitive/social psychologists.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

 

December 2007

 

Anne Gast (University of Jena, Germany)
The influence of a valence focus on evaluative conditioning
Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to the change of valence of a neutral stimulus (CS) into the direction of a positively or negatively evaluated stimulus (US) after paired presentation of the two stimuli. We examined the role of an evaluative focus during conditioning.
In a series of studies conditioning trials were combined with two different secondary tasks, focusing either on valence or on a non-evaluative dimension. The EC-effect is diminished through the non-evaluative secondary task. This result supports the impact of an evaluative focus on EC-effects.
Studies designed to shed light on the underlying processes of this effect, suggest that the non-evaluative task suppresses valence temporarily. It is discussed whether valence suppression is stimulus specific or can be transferred to other objects in the situation.
These results point at a crucial border condition of evaluative conditioning. As it is often weakly controlled what participants focus on during conditioning, some failures to show EC- effects may have suffered from an unintended temporal suppression of valence. More generally, the results are an example of how a certain attitude can exert influence in one situation and not in another, similar one.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

 

Marwan Sinaceur (INSEAD, France)

Suspending Judgment to Create Value: Suspicion and Trust in Negotiations

This paper introduces a distinction between suspicion and distrust. While distrust (trust) involves having negative (positive) expectations about another's motives, suspicion is defined as the state in which perceivers experience ambiguity about another's motives. Four experiments supported this distinction and showed that suspicion can present greater benefits than trust for generating information search and attaining integrative agreements in negotiations. 

In Experiment 1a, suspicious perceivers were characterized by consciously attributing motives and purposes (e.g.,desires) to a target in comparison to both distrusting and trusting perceivers. Experiment 1b showed suspicious perceivers were more willing to seek information. In Experiment 2, Suspicious-Trusting dyads negotiating face-to-face achieved greater joint outcomes than did both Trusting-Trusting and Suspicious-Suspicious dyads; no difference in outcomes was observed between the latter two.  Experiment 3 showed that the suspicious participant's ability to seek information in Suspicious-Trusting dyads mediated the superior performance of Suspicious-Trusting dyads over Trusting-Trusting dyads in attaining integrative agreements. These results suggest that a lack of trust in the form of suspicion may be beneficial in negotiations.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

 

Gayannée Kedia (Université Toulouse 2; INSERM-CEA)

Moral emotions: Psychological and neurofunctional approach
Converging evidence in neuroscience and psychology has recently suggested that moral behaviour relies to a greater extent on affective mechanisms than on rational processes. On the one hand social psychology studies have demonstrated that moral emotions, in particular guilt and empathy, are powerful driving forces behind moral behaviour. On the other hand, neuroimaging experiments, as well as studies on brain lesions, have highlighted that the cerebral processing of moral situations involves networks underlying emotions appraisal and regulation.
The present study aimed at connecting these different levels of investigation in order to explore the relations between: (1) altruism (cash donation to charities), (2) personality traits (notably guilt, empathy and anxiety proneness, moral reasoning) and (3) cerebral activity in response to moral stimuli (self-anger, guilt, other-anger and compassion inducing situations) as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Results indicated that higher guilt proneness and state anxiety in participants were associated with donating money. Moreover, guilt and anxiety were the only personality traits to be correlated with brain activations, especially in structures of the limbic system – i.e. the insula and ventromedial prefrontal cortex – that have been shown to play a crucial role in social decision-making. Finally, our fMRI data revealed that picturing oneself in guilt inducing situations activated the same network, including the amygdala and insula.

Therefore, these results strongly suggest that guilt and anxiety play a major role in the processing of moral situations and in motivating altruistic behaviour.

 

January 2008

 

Sandie Mauduit (Paris X - Nanterre, France)

The influence of emotions in a criminal justice context
In my thesis, I study the relationship between judgment of intentionality and punishment in a criminal justice context. Before a perpetrator can be sentenced in a legal court there are two issues that have to be verified according to the legal model. First, it needs to be judged whether the criminal act was conducted intentionally. Second, it needs to be clarified whether the accused can be considered as responsible for the criminal act. The punishment and the modality of the sentence is determined as a function of the above factors.
However, previous research has shown that in everyday life the described legal model can be reversed. In particular, the judgment of intentionality is not an antecedent of punishment but rather a justification (justification model). For example, Tostain and Lebreuilly (2006) showed that if crimes had severe consequences, perpetrators are punished harsher irrespective of responsibility judgments.
Goldberg, Lerner, and Tetlock (1999) studied the influence of anger on the attribution of intentionality and responsibility. Primed anger influenced the amount of punishment for unrelated targets. More precisely, participants saw a video of a severe crime that was afterwards either punished or not. Then, they were presented another legal case and asked to impose sentences. The analyses revealed that imposed sentences were higher when the previous crime was not punished compared to when it was punished. The authors also provided evidence that anger over injustice mediates the relationship between intention and punishment.
In my research project the influence of various emotions will be considered. In particular, I hypothesize that different emotions are triggered by criminal acts and I want to investigate their particular influence on judgments of intentionality, sentences, modality of punishment and the relation between these variables.

Among these emotions, I assume that anger, fear, and sadness play an important role in criminal judgments.  Moreover, according to the appraisal theories of emotion (Frijda, 1986 ; Roseman, 1984 ; Scherer, 1988 ; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), anger leads to a heuristic treatment of information. Therefore, I assume that participants will not use the legal model for judging the perpetrator but rather the justification model. Anger triggers approach tendencies, whereas fear triggers avoidance of danger tendencies (Cosmodis & Tooby, 2000). In the case of a criminal act, these tendencies should be expressed by the wish to strongly condemn the perpetrator or to protect “oneself”, both tendencies resulting in the same outcome: longer prison sentences. Contrary to anger, sadness triggers a more systematic information processing style. Hence, I assume that sadness leads to lower attributions of intentionality and, therefore, to shorter prison sentences. I also assume intentionality attribution and prison sentences to be related under sadness but not, or to a lesser extent, under anger or fear.

 

March 2008

 

Morgane Van Haelen (UCL)

The role of relational context and consciousness on the interpersonal outcomes of non-verbal mimicry

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)


 

 

Dennis Küster (UCL)

Physical exercise and a risky choice: Can we dissociate the emotional state from the nature of the prize?

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April 2008

 

Claudi Toma (UCL)

Projection and transparency of cooperative behavior in decision making: The impact of self-other interdependence

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

 

Chiara Storari (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

Infrahumanization and helping behaviour: When perceiving victims as human favour helping

The aim of this work is to deepening the study of the link between infrahumanization (the tendency to attribute more secondary emotions to ingroups than to outgroups) and helping behaviour. Studies show that attribution of secondary emotions to outgroups positively predicted willingness to volunteer in relief effort in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and that people are more willing to propose psychological help to ingroup members and material help to outgroup members. Therefore, our first aim was to differentiate between two sorts of helping behaviour: medical (helping others as they were helpless) or empowerment (helping others to help themselves). We supposed that attribution of secondary emotions to outgroup members would positively predict medical help but not empowerment help.

Participants (French speaking Belgians) read a cover story, presented as a news coverage of an accident occurring to either ingroup or outgroup members.

Results showed infraumanization effect: participants attributed more secondary emotions to ingroup than to outgroup members and no difference was observed concerning attribution of primary emotions. Contrary to our expectation, no significant effect was found on medical or empowerment helping behaviour.

However, regression analyses illustrated a moderated mediation on willingness to help more in general: the more participants attributed secondary emotions to victims, the less they felt well, and the more they were willing to help victims. However, this was true if victims were ingroup members. In addition, there was an interaction effect between groups and attribution of secondary emotions on predictions of general belief in a just world. The more participants attributed secondary emotions to ingroup members, the less they perceived the world as a just place. On the opposite, the more they attributed secondary emotions to outgroup members, the more they perceived the world as a just place.

We consider that more analyses are needed to fully understand these results and the aim of the presentation is to discuss on this matter.

 

 

May 2008

 

Seminar session:
Post-doctoral job talks (public session)

11.00: Maxime Denizeau (University of Paris X, France) - Denial of responsibility: A new mode of cognitive dissonance

Our work is to report the existence of a new way of reduction of the cognitive dissonance: the denial of responsibility.
To conceptualize this strategy of reduction, we were inspired by works of Zanna and Sande (1987) which demonstrate that the persons can reduce the dissonance by diffusing their responsibility. We then assume that a single person cannot maybe diffuse its responsibility on the others but, on the other hand, she can possibly deny it.

The reasoning on the base of our work on the denial of responsibility is similar to that made by Simon, Greenberg and Brehm (1995) concerning the trivialization: if the perceived importance of the behavior or the attitude increases the level of dissonance (as clarifies it Festinger in 1957), we can deduct from it that the decrease of this importance allows to reduce the dissonance. So, we assume that if the sense of responsibility allows the arousal of the dissonance, the denial of responsibility must be able to, for its part, reduce the dissonance.

To bring additional information on the use of the denial, we were also interested in the influence of contextual factors, such as the order of presentation of the modes of reduction (Simon and al., 1995) and the presence of post-behavioral delay (Leippe and Eisenstadt, 1994). We also wanted to make sure that this strategy reduced well in a direct way the psychological discomfort provoked by the dissonance.

Through four experiments that are going to be presented to you, we shall demonstrate that the denial of responsibility can be considered as being a viable mode of reduction.

 

11.45: Raphaella Di Schiena (University of Bari, Italy) - To act or not to act? The role of emotions in omission vs. commission dilemmas

When faced with a risky choice, where the alternative is between action and omission, individuals tend to prefer the omission, even when this leads to greater risk. This Omission Bias (OB) was firstly found by Ritov & Baron (1990) in front of dilemmas mainly dealing with health (e.g. having a vaccination or not, having an intervention or not, etc). The present research is aimed at understanding the role of emotions in this phenomenon in three steps, which correspond to the three main levels of the emotional influence on decision making: emotion anticipation, emotionality of the evaluation process, experienced emotions.

Based on a large evidence showing that individuals regret the action more than the omission (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Landman, 1993), in the first step it was tested the hypothesis that individuals prefer the omission because they anticipate to regret it less in case of a negative outcome. With this purpose, anticipated regret was experimentally manipulated in two experiments, both of which supported the hypothesis: the more intense was the regret participants expected to feel, the more they preferred the omission.

In the second step an exploratory study was conducted, aimed at investigating whether OB was associated to a more affective (less analytical) type of evaluation strategy. In order to assess the amount of affective and analytical process, a content analysis on “think aloud” verbal protocols was run. Unexpectedly, regression analyses showed that a more affective type of evaluation implied an Action Bias (AB), instead of an OB.

In the third step it was investigated the role of anxiety generated by the choice situation, together with a domain-specific attitudinal factor as a mediator: trust in health care. Those with high trust towards health care were expected to prefer the action, and to display an AB if they were in high anxiety; conversely, those with low trust were expected to prefer the omission, and to display an OB if they were in high anxiety. With this purpose anxiety and trust were experimentally manipulated and crossed between subjects. Results showed a main effect of trust in the expected direction and supported the interaction hypothesis between anxiety and trust.

Taken together these results suggest that emotions play an important role in omission vs. commission dilemmas at different levels, but also that domain-specific beliefs have to be taken into account.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

14.00: Claudia Marinetti (Oxford University, UK) - Emotion experience and the Illusion of Transparency: do we always express what we feel as much as we think?

The term Illusion of Transparency (Gilovich et al., 1998) describes a phenomenon in which people tend to overestimate the extent to which their emotions are readable by others who can see their facial expressions. In our research, we investigate the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, assessing the impact of different cognitive (e.g. attentional focus) and social (e.g. social context, display rules) variables on the Illusion of Transparency and, in general, on emotion experience.

The studies I will present consider the extent to which people are influenced by Illusion of Transparency, and the impact of attention focus (attention to emotions vs attention to details of an emotional situation vs attention to the main character of an emotional situation), social context (competitive vs non-competitive; shared vs non shared), and interactants’ relationship closeness (friends vs strangers) on Illusion of Transparency using different laboratory settings: a quiz-game task, a speech task, a film viewing task, and a joke telling task.

I will discuss results from these studies, with a particular focus on the comparison between self-ratings and observers’ ratings of participants’ expressivity. Illusion of transparency was supported in most conditions but the predicted moderators of the effect did not always operate as expected.

Finally, I will discuss the potential impact of Illusion of Transparency on communication and interpersonal behaviour and the implications of my findings.

Click here for the slides of the talk (ppt file)

 

14.45: Karl-Andrew Woltin (University of Jena, Germany) - Group-based Self-control

Recently, it has been suggested that research on motivation in (inter)group contexts would benefit from a self-regulation approach looking at the process (rather than the content) of motivation and goal pursuit strategies. Thus, the current research combines the action phase model (Heckhausen, 1999), describing four control strategies given a pre- or a post-deadline phase of individual goal pursuit, with social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). I expect that the more group members identify with their respective group, the more they will engage in phase-adequate control strategy usage (i.e., show adaptive group-based self-control) during group goal pursuit.

The moderating role of social identification was tested in a scenario experiment using different natural groups (Study 1) and in two laboratory experiments using quasi-minimal groups (Studies 2 and 3). In line with the hypothesis, across all three studies especially highly identified individuals adequately selected and applied the control strategies, even without obtaining individual profit by the group reaching its goal (Studies 2 and 3). The findings point to the fruitful application of control strategies suggested for individual goal pursuit to (inter)group contexts.

The final section of the talk will briefly outline future perspectives concerning this research and research related to empathy gaps in social predictions.

Click here for the slides of the talk (pdf file)

 

June 2008

 

Delphine Grynberg (UCL)

Impact of individual differences in terms of emotional competences on perspective taking: mediation by executive functions in clinical population

Introduction: The aim of the study consists of evaluating the impact of Alexithymia (difficulty identify, differentiate, describing emotions and an externally oriented thinking) on a Perspective Taking (PT) task in health and clinical populations. PT consists of understanding that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions different from the self. It refers to cognitively taking the perspective of another person in terms of beliefs, intentions, and emotions. Eye gazes processing supposes a critical role and represent a precursor of the PT. Indeed, eye gazes processing corresponds to essential communicative cues and enhances closeness.

Hypothesis: We are making the hypothesis that difficulty identify our own emotions would predict difficulty identify emotions and broader metal state of others in schizophrenia population. Inter-individual impact of alexithymia (in terms of empathy) has already been assessed by auto-evaluative questionnaires correlations, but any study has used a real
ecological task like Reading the Mind in the Eyes from Baron-Cohen et al. (2001). The hypothesis supposed a deficit for mental states identification in clinical population with high level of alexithymia.

Click here for the slides of the talk (pdf file)

Céline Douilliez (Laboratoire PSITEC, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3, France)

Effet de l’anxiété sociale sur l’évaluation de visages présentés individuellement vs. sous forme de matrice

Les modèles cognitifs de la phobie sociale (e.g. Clark & Wells, 1995 ; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) suggèrent que les personnes socialement anxieuses sont biaisées dans leur interprétation des informations sociales. Les études utilisant du matériel verbal ont en effet mis en évidence un biais d’interprétation dans l’anxiété sociale (e.g. Gilboa-Schechtman, Franklin & Foa, 2000). Par contre, la plupart des études utilisant du matériel non-verbal n’ont pas démontré de biais d’évaluation des Expressions Faciales Emotionnelles [EFE] (e.g. Philippot & Douilliez, 2005 ; Winton, Clark & Edelman, 1995 ; mais Heuer & al., 2007). Cependant, les situations les plus fréquemment craintes par les personnes souffrant de phobie sociale comprennent plus d’un seul indice non-verbal ; par exemple, la personne peut être confrontée à plusieurs personnes présentant des EFE différentes. Dans ces situations complexes, les personnes souffrant d’anxiété sociale attribuent une pertinence élevée aux informations sociales qui sont congruentes avec leur schéma social négatif et par conséquent, portent plus d’attention aux indices sociaux menaçants. La détection d’indices négatifs peut les mener à interpréter négativement la situation sociale. Par exemple, Gilboa-Schechtman, Presburger, Marom & Hermesh (2005) ont montré que les personnes souffrant de phobie sociale sont négativement biaisés dans leur interprétation d’ensemble de visages présentant des EFE divergentes.

La présente étude avait pour but de comparer l’évaluation d’EFE par des individus faiblement vs. fortement anxieux socialement dans deux tâches : une tâche d’évaluation de visages présentés individuellement, dans laquelle on demandait aux participants d’évaluer des visages neutres et en colère et une tâche d’évaluation de matrices d’EFE, dans laquelle on leur demandait d’évaluer des matrices de 9 EFE, dans lesquels le nombre de visages en colère variait de 0 à 8. Les résultats de cette étude ainsi que nos études en cours et futures sur cette problématique seront présentés.

Ce programme de recherche est mené en collaboration avec :

Eva Gilboa-Schechtmann, University Bar-Ilian (Israël)
Pierre Philippot, University de Louvain (Belgique)
Laurent Sparrow, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3 (France)
Vincent Yzerbyt, Université de Louvain (Belgique)

 

March 2009

 

Lotte Van Dillen (Utrecht Universiteit)

The limited resources of affective processing

Attentional control plays a crucial role in the temporal unfolding of motivational processes. What people attend to determine how they experience, and respond to a certain situation. Research agrees that attention to affective information depends on the relevance of this information for current behavior. How exactly this relevance is determined remains less clear. For example, to what degree is affective valence, or even emotion-specific information, automatically derived from the environment? Can specific task-goals override attention to affective cues?
In the present research I discuss the role of working memory in controlling attention to affective information. More specifically, I will argue that just like the processing of ‘cold’ cognitive information, the processing of ‘hot’ affective information is contingent on the availability of limited processing resources.

 

 

November 2009

 

Siegfried Dewitte (KUL, Belgique)

The Premature Purchase Plans: Forming implementation intentions reduces purchase likelihood of novel products

 

 

 

February 2010 

Nicolas Vermeulen (UCL)

The attentional blink paradigm: A fascinating tool to put the mind under the microscope 

 

Alexandre Heeren (UCL)

    Selective attention and emotional vulnerability in Social Phobia: The experimental manipulation of attentional bias using a       modified dot-probe task
 

     

    

 

 March 2010 

Sylvie Willems (ULg)

La fluence : un indice métacognitif omniprésent pour nos jugements.

La fluence est l’expérience subjective d’aisance avec laquelle une information est traitée.  La fluence guide une grande variété de jugements – incluant les jugements de plausibilité, de préférence, de familiarité, mais aussi de recollection. Ainsi, manipuler  la fluence, à l’aide de techniques très diversifiées, produira des biais de jugements remarquablement consistants. Par exemple, un stimulus précédé d’une amorce sémantique, d’un contexte prédictif (fluence conceptuelle), présenté de façon  répétée ou précédé d’une amorce perceptive (fluence perceptive) sera jugé comme plus attractif, plus plausible, plus familier, etc., qu’un stimuli équivalent mais moins fluent. La fluence semble être un indice métacognitif omniprésent dans nos jugements subjectifs. Nous nous concentrerons sur le mode de fonctionnement de cet indice métacognitif, chez le sujet normal mais aussi dans différentes
populations neuropsychologiques. 

     

 

 April 2010 

Oliver Langner (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Face processing, spatial frequencies, and social anxiety

In social anxiety, processing of faces especially with negative facial expressions is altered. Here, I will present a series of experiments showing that socially anxious individuals choose different facial information when judging facial expressions. Our early visual system is tuned to analyse visual information in terms of spatial frequencies, where low spatial frequencies contain rough configural information and  high spatial frequencies code fine details like exact contours. I will show three studies that show that socially anxious individuals are specifically biased towards processing low spatial frequency information of faces.

Further, I will present preliminary results on how mood affects the usage of low spatial frequencies in emotion discrimination.

 

  

 November 2010 

Disa Sauter (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)

                    More than happy: The need for disentangling positive emotions

                   Despite great advances in scientific understanding of emotional processes in the last decades, research into the communication of               emotions has been constrained by a strong bias toward negative affective states. While studies typically distinguish between different negative emotions, such as disgust, sadness, anger, and fear, most research uses only one category of positive affect, “happiness”, which is assumed to encompass all positive emotional states. In my talk, I will discuss recent research showing that a number of positive affective states have discrete, recognizable signals.
In particular, I will discuss why the domain of affective vocalizations offers a promising avenue for investigating positive affect. I will argue that understanding of the functions, signals, and mechanisms of emotions
requires abandoning the unitary concept of happiness.

                   

 

 

| contact : Anne-Catherine Defeldre | 26/11/2010 |