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Research targeting emotion’s impact on relational episodic memory has largely focused on spatial aspects, but less is known about emotion’s impact on memory for an event’s temporal associations. The present research investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create stories linking successive images. Later, participants performed a surprise memory test, which measured temporal associations between pairs of consecutive pictures where one picture was negative and one was neutral. Analyses focused on how the order of negative and neutral images during encoding influenced retrieval accuracy. Converging results from a discovery study (N = 72) and pre-registered replication study (N = 150) revealed a “forward-favouring” effect of emotion in temporal memory encoding: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. This finding may reflect a novel trade-off regarding emotion’s effects on memory and is relevant for understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualised as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social expectations guide people's evaluations of others' behaviors, but the origins of these expectations remain unclear. It is traditionally thought that people's expectations depend on their past observations of others' behavior, and people harshly judge atypical behavior. Here, we considered that social expectations are also influenced by a drive for reciprocity, and people evaluate others' actions by reflecting on their own decisions. To compare these views, we performed four studies. Study 1 used an Ultimatum Game task where participants alternated Responder and Proposer roles. Modeling participants' expectations suggested they evaluated the fairness of received offers via comparisons to their own offers. Study 2 replicated these findings and showed that observing selfish behavior (lowball offers) only promoted acceptance of selfishness if observers started acting selfishly themselves. Study 3 generalized the findings, demonstrating that they also arise in the Public Goods Game, emerge cross‐culturally, and apply to antisocial punishment whereby selfish players punish generosity. Finally, Study 4 introduced the Trust Game and showed that participants trusted players who reciprocated their behavior, even if it was selfish, as much as they trusted generous players. Overall, this research shows that social expectations and evaluations are rooted in drives for reciprocity. This carries theoretical implications, speaking to a parallel in the mechanisms driving both decision‐making and social evaluations, along with practical importance for understanding and promoting cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our behavior is shaped by multiple factors, including direct feedback (seeing the outcomes of our past actions) and social observation (in part, via a drive to conform to other peoples' behaviors). However, it remains unclear how these two processes are linked in the context of behavioral change. This is important to investigate, as behavioral change is associated with distinct neural correlates that reflect specific aspects of processing, such as information integration and rule updating. To clarify whether these processes characterize both direct learning and conformity, we elicited the two within the same task, using a role‐swapping version of the Ultimatum Game—a fairness paradigm where subjects decide how to share a pot of money with other players—while electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded. Behavioral results showed that subjects decided how to divide the pot based on both direct feedback (seeing whether their past proposals were accepted or rejected) and social observation (copying the splits that others just proposed). Converging EEG evidence revealed that increased centroparietal positivity (P2, P3b, and late positivity) indexed behavioral changes motivated by direct feedback and those motivated by drives to conform. However, exploratory analyses also suggest that these two motivating factors may also be dissociable, and that frontal midline theta oscillations may predict behavioral changes linked to direct feedback but not conformity. Overall, this study provides novel electrophysiological evidence regarding the different forms of behavioral change. These findings are also relevant for understanding the mechanisms of social information processing that underlie successful cooperation. Despite the importance of conformity for cooperative behavior, its mechanisms are unclear. We addressed this issue by investigating similarities and differences with direct learning, linked to behavioral change. Our novel approach revealed overlapping and dissociable mechanisms indexed by centroparietal positivity and frontal midline theta. These findings shed light on the systems associated with processing social information that underlie successful cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Available evidence highlights the importance of emotion regulation (ER) in psychological well-being. However, translation of the beneficial effects of ER from laboratory to real-life remains scarce. Here, we present proof-of-principle evidence from a novel cognitive-emotional training intervention targeting the development of ER skills aimed at increasing resilience against emotional distress. This pilot intervention involved training military veterans over 5–8 weeks in applying two effective ER strategies [Focused Attention (FA) and Cognitive Reappraisal (CR)] to scenarios presenting emotional conflicts (constructed with both external and internal cues). Training was preceded and followed by neuropsychological, personality, and clinical assessments, and resting-state functional MRI data were also collected from a subsample of the participants. Results show enhanced executive function and psychological well-being following training, reflected in increased working memory (WM), post-traumatic growth (PTG), and general self-efficacy (GSE). Brain imaging results showed evidence of diminished bottom-up influences from emotional and perceptual brain regions, along with evidence of normalized functional connectivity in the large-scale functional networks following training. The latter was reflected in increased connectivity among cognitive and emotion control regions and across regions of self-referential and control networks. Overall, our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that resilience and well-being can be learned through ER training, and that training-related improvements manifested in both behavioral change and neuroplasticity can translate into real-life benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral rules come with exceptions, and moral judgments come with uncertainty. For instance, stealing is wrong and generally punished. Yet, it could be the case that the thief is stealing food for their family. Such information about the thief's context could flip admonishment to praise. To varying degrees, this type of uncertainty regarding the context of another person's behavior is ever-present in moral judgment. Hence, we propose a model of how people evaluate others' behavior: We argue that individuals principally judge the righteousness of another person's behavior by assessing the likelihood that they would act the same way if they were in the person's shoes. That is, if you see another person steal, you will consider the contexts where you too would steal and assess the likelihood that any of these contexts are true, given the available information. This idea can be formalized as a Bayesian model that treats moral judgment as probabilistic reasoning. We tested this model across four studies (N = 601) involving either fictional moral vignettes or economic games. The studies yielded converging evidence showing that the proposed model better predicts moral judgment under uncertainty than traditional theories that emphasize social norms or perceived harm/utility. Overall, the present studies support a new model of moral judgment with the potential to unite research on social judgment, decision-making, and probabilistic reasoning. Beyond this specific model, the present studies also more generally speak to how individuals parse uncertainty by integrating across different possibilities., (© 2024 The Author(s). Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).)

Although episodic memory is typically impaired in older adults (OAs) compared to young adults (YAs), this deficit is attenuated when OAs can leverage their rich semantic knowledge, such as their knowledge of schemas. Memory is better for items consistent with pre-existing schemas and this effect is larger in OAs. Neuroimaging studies have associated schema use with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and hippocampus (HPC), but most of this research has been limited to YAs. This fMRI study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying how schemas boost episodic memory in OAs. Participants encoded scene-object pairs with varying congruency, and memory for the objects was tested the following day. Congruency with schemas enhanced object memory for YAs and, more substantially, for OAs. FMRI analyses examined how cortical modulation of HPC predicted subsequent memory. Congruency-related vmPFC modulation of left HPC enhanced subsequent memory in both age groups, while congruency-related modulation from angular gyrus (AG) boosted subsequent memory only in OAs. Individual differences in cortico-hippocampal modulations indicated that OAs preferentially used their semantic knowledge to facilitate encoding via an AG-HPC interaction, suggesting a compensatory mechanism. Collectively, our findings illustrate age-related differences in how schemas influence episodic memory encoding via distinct routes of cortico-hippocampal interactions., Competing Interests: Conflict of Interest: All authors confirm that there is no conflict of interest.

The effects of emotion on memory are wide-ranging and powerful, but they are not uniform. Although there is agreement that emotion enhances memory for individual items, how it influences memory for the associated contextual details (relational memory, RM) remains debated. The prevalent view suggests that emotion impairs RM, but there is also evidence that emotion enhances RM. To reconcile these diverging results, we carried out three studies incorporating the following features: (1) testing RM with increased specificity, distinguishing between subjective (recollection based) and objective (item-context match) RM accuracy, (2) accounting for emotion-attention interactions via eye-tracking and task manipulation, and (3) using stimuli with integrated item-context content. Challenging the prevalent view, we identified both enhancing and impairing effects. First, emotion enhanced subjective RM, separately and when confirmed by accurate objective RM. Second, emotion impaired objective RM through attention capturing, but it enhanced RM accuracy when attentional effects were statistically accounted for using eye-tracking data. Third, emotion also enhanced RM when participants were cued to focus on contextual details during encoding, likely by increasing item-context binding. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded from a subset of participants showed that emotional enhancement of RM was associated with increased activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, along with increased intra-MTL and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex-MTL functional connectivity. Overall, these findings reconcile evidence regarding opposing effects of emotion on RM and point to possible training interventions to increase RM specificity in healthy functioning, posttraumatic stress disorder, and aging, by promoting item-context binding and diminishing memory decontextualization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional well-being depends on the ability to successfully engage a variety of coping strategies to regulate affective responses. Most studies have investigated the effectiveness of emotion regulation (ER) strategies that are deployed relatively later in the timing of processing that leads to full emotional experiences (i.e. reappraisal and suppression). Strategies engaged in earlier stages of emotion processing, such as those involved in attentional deployment, have also been investigated, but relatively less is known about their mechanisms. Here, we investigate the effectiveness of self-guided focused attention (FA) in reducing the impact of unpleasant pictures on the experienced negative affect. Participants viewed a series of composite images with distinguishable foreground (FG, either negative or neutral) and background (BG, always neutral) areas and were asked to focus on the FG or BG content. Eye-tracking data were recorded while performing the FA task, along with participants' ratings of their experienced emotional response following the presentation of each image. First, proving the effectiveness of self-guided FA in down-regulating negative affect, focusing away from the emotional content of pictures (BG focus) was associated with lower emotional ratings. Second, trial-based eye-tracking data corroborated these results, showing that spending less time gazing within the negative FG predicted reductions in emotional ratings. Third, this reduction was largest among subjects who habitually use suppression to regulate their emotions. Overall, the present findings expand the evidence regarding the FA's effectiveness in controlling the impact of emotional stimuli and inform the development of training interventions emphasizing attentional control to improve emotional well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).