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Affective effects on breadth of attention have been related to aspects of different components of affective states such as the arousal and valence of affective experience and the motivational intensity of action tendency. As none of these explanations fully aligns with existing evidence, we hypothesised that affective effects on breadth of attention may arise from the appraisal component of affective states. Based on this reconceptualisation, we tested the effects of conduciveness and power appraisals on two measures of breadth of attention. In two web-based experiments, we manipulated these appraisals in a 2 × 2 design using a game-like arithmetic task where participants could (1) gain or lose rewards (goal conducive vs. obstructive) based on (2) either their action or the actions of a "robot" (high vs. low power). Breadth of attention was assessed using the flanker task (Experiment 1; n = 236) and the Navon task (Experiment 2; n = 215). We found that appraisals did not directly influence breadth of attention even though high power appraisal significantly improved the overall performance in both experiments indicating successful appraisal manipulation. We discuss ways in which these findings inform future efforts to explain the origins of affective effects on attentional breadth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of the article, the central role of theory in emotion psychology is underscored and reasons are given why more theoretical psychology of emotion is needed. In the second part, nine tasks for the theoretical psychology of emotion are defined, by refining and extending three of the general tasks of theoretical psychology proposed 70 years ago by Sigmund Koch [Theoretical psychology, 1950: An overview. Psychological Review, 58(4), 295. ]. The nine tasks are: (1) Analysis, rational reconstruction and critique of existing emotion theories. (2) Comparison of different theories. (3) Systematization and integration of theories. (4) Reconstruction of the development of theories over time. (5) Analysis, reconstruction and critique of theory-data and data-theory inferences. (6) Analysis, reconstruction and critique of the complete set of arguments for and against specific emotion-theoretic assumption and whole theories. (7) Analysis, reconstruction and critique of measurement theories for emotions. (8) Development of new emotion theories and theories of emotion measurement. (9) Information about theoretical and methodological developments of interest to emotion psychology in other subdisciplines of psychology and in neighbouring sciences, and export of theories and methods to other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesised that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art for their beauty or liking while having to remember the location of 1, 3, or 5 dots in a 4 by 4 matrix. We also examined the effect of individual differences in working memory capacity. Our results show that holding information about the location of the dots in working memory delayed judgments of beauty but not of liking. Also, the greater participants' working memory capacity, the faster they completed the working memory task when judging liking, but not when judging beauty. Our study provides evidence that judging beauty draws more on working memory resources than judging liking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Response inhibition is sensitive to unexpected changes in the environment triggered by emotional stimuli. Whereas the impact of visual material on inhibition has been widely documented, the attention on the influence of olfactory stimuli has been neglected. Here, we examined the effect of pleasant (orange), unpleasant (trimethyloxazole), and control (clean air) odour primes in a stop-signal task. Twenty-five participants had to elicit or inhibit reach-to-press actions which allowed to examine the olfactory influences on both the planning (release phase) and the on-line control (reaching phase) of responses. Additionally, we manipulated the distance between the initial hand position and the target to be pressed (10 vs. 20 vs. 30 cm). The pleasant (vs. control) odour impaired inhibition, as reflected in slower stop-signal reaction times and higher release errors, indicating greater mobilisation of inhibitory resources by pleasant stimuli. Further, faster release responses were triggered by pleasant and unpleasant primes, supporting the idea of perceptual prioritisation of emotional (vs. non-emotional) stimuli. The olfactory manipulation did not affect the reaching phase of the responses. Instead, the distance manipulation modulated the reaching but not the release phase. These results extend the sparse literature on the influences of odour stimuli on response inhibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-control does not always work effectively. Whether this reflects the depletion of a global self-control resource is subject to an ongoing debate. We turned to boredom as a potential confounding variable to advance this debate. In a high-powered experiment (N = 719), participants worked on a primary (transcription) task of varying self-control demands (low, high) and length (2, 4, 8 min), followed by a secondary (Stroop) task with low and high self-control demanding trials. In addition to trait boredom, we measured effort, difficulty, tiredness, frustration, and boredom after the primary task and repeatedly during the secondary task. Effort, difficulty, tiredness, and frustration increased with the demand and duration of the primary task; however, without affecting performance in the secondary task. Importantly, participants rated both the primary and the secondary task as boring, and higher boredom at the state and the trait level was associated with lower effort and higher difficulty, tiredness, and frustration. During the secondary task, boredom increased steadily but was generally lower in more self-control demanding trials. Finally, boredom predicted performance in the secondary task. These results show an intricate relationship between self-control and boredom that research on these two constructs should carefully disentangle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interoceptive processes emanating from baroreceptor signals support emotional functioning. Previous research suggests a unique link to fear: fearful faces, presented in synchrony with systolic baroreceptor firing draw more attention and are rated as more intense than those presented at diastole. This study examines whether this effect is unique to fearful faces or can be observed in other emotional faces. Participants (n = 71) completed an emotional visual search task (VST) in which fearful, happy, disgust and sad faces were presented during systolic and diastolic phases of the cardiac cycle. Visual search accuracy and emotion detection accuracy and latency were recorded, followed by a subjective intensity task. A series of interactions between emotion and cardiac phase were observed. Visual search accuracy for happy and disgust faces was greater at systole than diastole; the opposite was found for fearful faces. Fearful and happy faces were perceived as more intense at systole. Previous research proposed that cardiac signalling has specific effects on the attention and intensity ratings for fearful faces. Results from the present tasks suggest these effects are more generalised and raise the possibility that interoceptive signals amplify emotional superiority effects dependent on the task employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetically appealing stimuli can improve performance in demanding target localisation tasks compared to unappealing stimuli. Two search-and-localisation experiments were carried out to examine the possible underlying mechanism mediating the effects of appeal on performance. Participants (N = 95) were put in a positive or negative mood prior to carrying out a visual target localisation task with appealing and unappealing targets. In both experiments, positive mood initially led to faster localisation of appealing compared to unappealing stimuli, while an advantage for appealing over unappealing stimuli emerged over time in negative mood participants. The findings are compatible with the idea that appealing stimuli may be inherently rewarding, with aesthetic appeal overcoming the detrimental effects of negative mood on performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that temporary task goals capture more attention than negative, threatening cues, even in anxious individuals. In the current study, we investigated whether temporary task goals would also capture more attention than alcohol-related cues. In Experiment 1, 59 hazardous drinkers performed both a modified dot-probe and a flanker task in which temporary goal- and alcohol-relevant stimuli were presented together. Results of the dot-probe task confirmed an attentional bias towards goal-relevant stimuli in the presence of alcohol cues. This effect was absent in a modified flanker task, although there was a general slowing when the targets appeared on top of goal-relevant stimuli, suggesting that goal-related backgrounds captured more attention than alcohol backgrounds. In Experiment 2, we replicated the dot-probe procedure in 29 hazardous drinkers who had been exposed to a prime dose of alcohol prior to performing the task. Our findings indicate that temporary goal stimuli are more salient than alcohol cues, which might lead the way to novel clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In three experiments we investigated whether memory-independent evaluative conditioning (EC) and other memory-independent contingency learning (CL) effects occur in the valence contingency task (VCT). In the VCT, participants respond to the valence of a target word that is preceded by a nonword. Across trials, each nonword is mostly combined with either positive or negative targets. Schmidt and De Houwer (2012. Contingency learning with evaluative stimuli. Experimental Psychology, 59, 175–182. doi:) showed faster and more often correct responses on trials that conformed to this contingency. Additionally, the authors found EC on valence ratings assessed after the VCT. All effects occurred also in the absence of contingency memory. Our Experiments 1a and 1b replicated the CL effects on measures assessed during the VCT (RT, errors) and showed that they occurred in the absence of contingency memory, but they did not replicate the EC effect assessed after the VCT. In Experiment 2, we tested whether this dissociation between EC and other CL effects was due to the different phases (during vs. after VCT) with a CL measure that could be used in both phases. On this measure, the CL effect was memory-dependent after, but not during the VCT. Across measures and experiments, we thus find memory-independent CL during the VCT, but not afterwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our everyday life, we frequently switch between different tasks, a faculty that changes with age. However, it is still not understood how emotion impacts on age-related changes in task switching. Using faces with emotional and neutral expressions, Experiment 1 investigated younger (n = 29; 18–38 years old) and older adults' (n = 32; 61–80 years old) ability to switch between an emotional and a non-emotional task (i.e. responding to the face's expression vs. age). In Experiment 2, younger and older adults also viewed emotional and neutral faces, but switched between two non-emotional tasks (i.e. responding to the face's age vs. gender). Data from Experiment 1 demonstrated that switching from an emotional to a non-emotional task was slower when the expression of the new face was emotional rather than neutral. This impairment was observed in both age groups. In contrast, Experiment 2 revealed that neither younger nor older adults were affected by block-wise irrelevant emotion when switching between two non-emotional tasks. Overall, the findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion can impair task switching through reactivation of the competing emotional task set. They also suggest that this effect and the ability to shield task-switching performance from block-wise irrelevant emotion are preserved in ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the response dynamics of the evaluative priming effect (i.e. facilitation of target responses following evaluatively congruent compared with evaluatively incongruent primes) using a mouse tracking procedure that records hand movements during the execution of categorisation tasks. In Experiment 1, when participants performed the evaluative categorisation task but not the non-evaluative semantic categorisation task, their mouse trajectories for evaluatively incongruent trials curved more toward the opposite response than those for evaluatively congruent trials, indicating the emergence of evaluative priming effects based on response competition. In Experiment 2, implementing a task-switching procedure in which evaluative and non-evaluative categorisation tasks were intermixed, we obtained reliable evaluative priming effects in the non-evaluative semantic categorisation task as well as in the evaluative categorisation task when participants assigned attention to the evaluative stimulus dimension. Analyses of hand movements revealed that the evaluative priming effects in the evaluative categorisation task were reflected in the mouse trajectories, while evaluative priming effects in the non-evaluative categorisation tasks were reflected in initiation times (i.e. the time elapsed between target onset and first mouse movement). Based on these findings, we discuss the methodological benefits of the mouse tracking procedure and the underlying processes of evaluative priming effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial cueing paradigms are popular tools to assess human attention to emotional stimuli, but different variants of these paradigms differ in what participants' primary task is. In one variant, participants indicate the location of the target (location task), whereas in the other they indicate the shape of the target (identification task). In the present paper we test the idea that although these two variants produce seemingly comparable cue validity effects on response times, they rest on different underlying processes. Across four studies (total N = 397; two in the supplement) using both variants and manipulating the motivational relevance of cue content, diffusion model analyses revealed that cue validity effects in location tasks are primarily driven by response biases, whereas the same effect rests on delay due to attention to the cue in identification tasks. Based on this, we predict and empirically support that a symmetrical distribution of valid and invalid cues would reduce cue validity effects in location tasks to a greater extent than in identification tasks. Across all variants of the task, we fail to replicate the effect of greater cue validity effects for arousing (vs. neutral) stimuli. We discuss the implications of these findings for best practice in spatial cueing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examined whether induced joy influences fifth graders’ performance in literacy tasks. Children were asked to recall a joyful experience, used as a joy induction, before completing either a grammar (Study 1) or textual comprehension task (Study 2). The grammar task involved understanding at the surface level and retrieval of appropriate declarative and procedural knowledge, but limited elaboration unlike the textual comprehension task, which tackled inference generation. By differentiating tasks based on depth of processing required for completion we aimed at testing the validity of two concurrent hypotheses: that of a facilitating effect and that of a detrimental effect of induced joy. Compared to controls, joy induced children showed better performance on the grammar task – specifically children with lower language ability. No differences across groups emerged as a function of joy induction on the text comprehension task. Results are discussed with respect to emotion effects on cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]