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Ambiguous stimuli are useful for assessing emotional bias. For example, surprised faces could convey a positive or negative meaning, and the degree to which an individual interprets these expressions as positive or negative represents their “valence bias.” Currently, the most well-validated ambiguous stimuli for assessing valence bias include nonverbal signals (faces and scenes), overlooking an inherent ambiguity in verbal signals. This study identified 32 words with dual-valence ambiguity (i.e., relatively high intersubject variability in valence ratings and relatively slow response times) and length-matched clearly valenced words (16 positive, 16 negative). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that the words-based valence bias correlated with the bias for faces, rs(213) = .27, p < .001, and scenes, rs(204) = .46, p < .001. That is, the same people who interpret ambiguous faces/scenes as positive also interpret ambiguous words as positive. These findings provide a novel tool for measuring valence bias and greater generalizability, resulting in a more robust measure of this bias.

Purpose This paper aims to identify psychological factors that influence people to be involved in Ponzi and pyramid schemes. Design/methodology/approach A psychological approach to finance or behavioural finance is applied in this research because of the assumption that human beings are not always rational. The sample consisted of 98 investors in 11 cities in Indonesia who were or had invested in an investment program with a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. The snowball sampling technique was applied. Findings The conclusion is that optimism (emotional bias), confirmation bias, representativeness bias, framing bias and overconfidence (cognitive bias) positively influenced investment decisions related to Ponzi and pyramid schemes. Originality/value The novelty aspect of this research is the implementation of a behavioural finance perspective to answer and express the fascinating phenomenon of Ponzi and pyramid investment schemes.

We examined whether differential self-perception influences the salience of emotional stimuli in depressive disorders, using a perceptual matching task in which geometric shapes were arbitrarily assigned to the self and an unknown other. Participants associated shapes with personal labels (e.g. "self" or "other"). Each geometric shape additionally contained a happy, sad or neutral line drawing of a face. Participants then judged whether shape-label pairs were as originally shown or re-paired, whilst facial emotion was task-irrelevant. The results showed biased responses to self-relevant stimuli compared to other-relevant stimuli, regardless of facial emotion, for both control and depressed participants. This was reflected in sensitivity (d') and drift rate (v) measures, suggesting that self-bias and a bias towards emotion may reflect different underlying processes. We further computed bias scores by subtracting the "neutral" value of each measure (acting as baseline) from the "happy" and "sad" values of each measure, indexing an "emotional bias" (EB) score for "self" and "other" separately. Compared to control participants, depressed participants exhibited reduced "happy" and "sad" emotional biases, regardless of the self-relevance of stimuli. This finding indicates that depressed participants may exhibit generalised Emotion Context Insensitivity (ECI), characterised by hyopoattention to both positive and negative information, at short stimulus presentations. The implications of this are discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to document the relation between the bank’s regional CEO’s emotional bias (optimism and loss aversion) and the delegation of decision rights to the account manager. Design/methodology/approach The partial least squares (PLS) method is applied to investigate the degree to which bank’s regional CEO delegate decisions and the circumstances that drive variation in delegation. Findings The results show that delegation does not appear to be monolithic; instead, the results show that delegation varies with the personal characteristics of the bank’s regional CEO. Practical implications Banks are invited to take into account the effect of the emotional biases of the directors on the delegation of its power. Originality/value The authors put forward an original effort that is intended to discuss in particular the effect of psychological biases on the decentralization of the decision-making rights.

This article generalizes the performed theoretical review of scientific research on the parasocial theory. The author separates key concepts of the parasocial theory such as parasocial interactions and parasocial relationships and gives a brief description of them. She describes phenomenon of parasocial processing, which is studied rarely. This phenomenon is generated while mass-media watching, but does not lead to the formation of neither parasocial interaction nor parasocial relationships; however media consumers demonstrate reactions to media persons or on their certain phrases or actions on the cognitive, emotional and behavioural levels. Basing on the theoretical analysis, by synthesizing and generalizing world scientific achievements, the author presents, within parasocial theory, ten media effects the most common among consumers. The presented media effects demonstrate various options of consequences (from emotional to behavioural) characteristic for the audience with formed parasocial relationships. The author divides media effects on the following groups: the illusory effects, appearing if young people, while watching, experience something that does not actually exist (the effects of parasocial presence, paraidentification, virtual reversed parasocial projection); the effects of emotional bias, when people immerse emotionally into a relationship with a media figure and starts to think of them as of a real person (when they are not) and, consequently, because of emotions, media consumers stop to look at this media figure objectively or analyze their actions (the effects of paraempathy, parasocial belonging, influenced perception of a media figure); the effects of a changed personal ideology, when people influenced by parasocial relationship change their opinions or values (the effects of parasocial contact, self-concept modification); and behavioural effects when the existing parasocial relations change an individual’s behavioural patterns and add a new ones (the effects of fans’ paracreativity, consumer behaviour, self-concept modification). It is also important to note that each of the described effects cannot be considered as positive or negative as they all depend on personal life circumstances.

This paper aims to propose some behavioural biases of trading in Bitcoin. It is review literature in the areas of behavioural finance that address issues related to Bitcoin to underpin the conceptual model. A conceptual model for understanding the behavioural bias that affects investing in cryptocurrency is proposed. The biases are herding, optimism, overconfidence, confirmation bias, loss aversion, and gamblers’ fallacy. This paper ought to fill the research gap on cryptocurrency from the behavioral perspective. This paper implies that prices and Bitcoin transactions are more determined by psychological factors.

As elucidated by prior research, children with hearing loss have impaired vocal emotion recognition compared with their normal-hearing peers. Cochlear implants (CIs) have achieved significant success in facilitating hearing and speech abilities for people with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, due to the current limitations in neuroimaging tools, existing research has been unable to detail the neural processing for perception and the recognition of vocal emotions during early stage CI use in infant and toddler CI users (ITCI). In the present study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging was employed during preoperative and postoperative tests to describe the early neural processing of perception in prelingual deaf ITCIs and their recognition of four vocal emotions (fear, anger, happiness, and neutral). The results revealed that the cortical response elicited by vocal emotional stimulation on the left pre-motor and supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), right middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and right superior temporal gyrus (STG) were significantly different between preoperative and postoperative tests. These findings indicate differences between the preoperative and postoperative neural processing associated with vocal emotional stimulation. Further results revealed that the recognition of vocal emotional stimuli appeared in the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) after CI implantation, and the response elicited by fear was significantly greater than the response elicited by anger, indicating a negative bias. These findings indicate that the development of emotional bias and the development of emotional perception and recognition capabilities in ITCIs occur on a different timeline and involve different neural processing from those in normal-hearing peers. To assess the speech perception and production abilities, the Infant-Toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (IT-MAIS) and Speech Intelligibility Rating (SIR) were used. The results revealed no significant differences between preoperative and postoperative tests. Finally, the correlates of the neurobehavioral results were investigated, and the results demonstrated that the preoperative response of the right SMG to anger stimuli was significantly and positively correlated with the evaluation of postoperative behavioral outcomes. And the postoperative response of the right SMG to anger stimuli was significantly and negatively correlated with the evaluation of postoperative behavioral outcomes.

This study sheds the light on the effect of the emotional bias and the gender on the credit risk management of Tunisian banks. We may expect that male and female CEO react differently to emotions and that gender-based behavior differences will affect the organizational design of the credit decision making. We opt for a Bayesian Net Work method which uses the variables to express the events or objects and analyze their behaviors to model such causal relationships. Results show that emotional bias can explain the cross-sectional heterogeneity in risk-taking behavior among banks and that managers’ gender types influences the propensity to delegate the credit decision making. Overconfident and optimist female banks’ manager are more conservative than males and they tend to centralize the credit decision-making process. Findings show also that financial literacy significatively affect the credit decision making, whereas bank size have no effect.

Your favourite gelato shop has a locally famous Belgian Chocolate flavour that has been your favourite for many years. There are many other enticing flavours—pistachio, rum and raisin, nougat—but you never choose a different one. Even when the owner creates a Belgian Chocolate Plus flavour, and an even richer Death By Chocolate which becomes a best seller and wins an award for ice cream excellence, you stick with your original favourite. You are exhibiting a fear of change and an emotional bias for choosing the known option even if it is not necessarily the best. You are exhibiting status quo bias.

This study examined whether emotion responses during reading are co-constituted by lexical items and the preceding context. Event-related potentials to coherent emotion and neutral words finishing sentences with or without strong constraint for the incoming valence were analyzed. Typical frontal P200 and posterior late positive component (LPC) emotion responses were seen to emotion words relative to neutral words in the neutral context, indicating heightened attention allocation and further valence analysis induced by word-level emotionality. With emotional bias in the context, words elicited reduced N400 responses, indicating facilitated semantic processing. Critically, we obtained evidence for contextualized emotion responses during coherent sentence comprehension. With active anticipation of the incoming emotionality (evidenced by the frontal positivity to plausible emotionally unpredicted words), enhanced P200 and LPC responses were seen to neutral words in emotional contexts. These findings demonstrated that, like word emotionality, emotion-constraining contexts could similarly engage motivational circuits and attention resources, affecting early perception and later further affective evaluation of the incoming information, even for emotionally neutral words. Despite the seeming similarity, multiple routes may be involved for giving rise to these neurophysiological reactions during emotion processing - while lexically driven LPCs were significantly correlated with empathy, contextually driven LPCs were not. Together, these findings provide support for contextualized emotion responses during congruent sentence reading when explicit emotional judgment on the materials is not required. These findings also provide an initial understanding about how these responses are mediated by empathy - an important aspect of human ability to perceive emotion.

Contagious yawning differs from spontaneous yawning because it occurs when an individual yawns in response to someone else’s yawn. In Homo sapiens and some non-human primates contagious yawning is higher between strongly than weakly bonded individuals. Up to date, it is still unclear whether this social asymmetry underlies emotional contagion (a basic form of empathy preferentially involving familiar individuals) as predicted by the Emotional Bias Hypothesis (EBH) or is linked to a top-down, selective visual attention bias (with selective attention being preferentially directed toward familiar faces) as predicted by the Attentional Bias Hypothesis (ABH). To verify whether the visual attentional bias explained the yawn contagion bias or not, in this study, we considered only yawns that could be heard but not seen by potential responders (auditory yawns). Around 294 of auditory yawning occurrences were extrapolated from over 2000 yawning bouts collected in free ranging humans for over nine years. Via GLMM, we tested the effect of intrinsic features (i.e., gender and age) and social bond (from strangers to family members) on yawn. The individual identity of the subjects (trigger and potential responder) was included as random factor. The social bond significantly predicted the occurrence of auditory yawn contagion, which was highest between friends and family members. A gender bias was also observed, with women responding most frequently to others’ yawns and men being responded to most frequently by others. These results confirm that social bond is per se one of the main drivers of the differences in yawn contagion rates between individuals in support of the EBH of yawn contagion.

Consumptor economicus, the economic consumer, is more complex than homo economicus. We find consumers form monthly expectations on inflation, unemployment and economic conditions based on coherent evaluations of relevant news. Relevant information is incorporated gradually, leading to a transient bias in consumer expectations, an established result. But expectations are also based on emotional responses to irrelevant events. We borrow the partisan bias from the political science and social psychology literature to identify exogenously emotional responses. Our results demonstrate that consumers also incorporate irrelevant emotive events immediately, leading to a persistent emotional bias in expectations, a new result.

This ECNP meeting was designed to build bridges between different constituencies of mental illness treatment researchers from a range of backgrounds with a specific focus on enhancing the development of novel, evidence based, psychological treatments. In particular we wished to explore the potential for basic neuroscience to support the development of more effective psychological treatments, just as this approach is starting to illuminate the actions of drugs. To fulfil this aim, a selection of clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists were invited to sit at the same table. The starting point of the meeting was the proposition that we know certain psychological treatments work, but we have only an approximate understanding of why they work. The first task in developing a coherent mental health science would therefore be to uncover the mechanisms (at all levels of analysis) of effective psychological treatments. Delineating these mechanisms, a task that will require input from both the clinic and the laboratory, will provide a key foundation for the rational optimisation of psychological treatments. As reviewed in this paper, the speakers at the meeting reviewed recent advances in the understanding of clinical and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, experimental psychopathology, and treatment delivery technology focussed primarily on anxiety disorders and depression. We started by asking three rhetorical questions: What has psychology done for treatment? What has technology done for psychology? What has neuroscience done for psychology? We then addressed how research in five broad research areas could inform the future development of better treatments: Attention, Conditioning, Compulsions and addiction, Emotional Memory, and Reward and emotional bias. Research in all these areas (and more) can be harnessed to neuroscience since psychological therapies are a learning process with a biological basis in the brain. Because current treatment approaches are not fully satisfactory, there is an imperative to understand why not. And when psychological therapies do work we need to understand why this is the case, and how we can improve them. We may be able to improve accessibility to treatment without understanding mechanisms. But for treatment innovation and improvement, mechanistic insights may actually help. Applying neuroscience in this way will become an additional mission for ECNP.

Anxiety disorders cause mental distress and low wellbeing in many people worldwide. Theories of anxiety describe negative worldviews and self-views as maintaining factors of the disorders. Recent research in social cognition has found a link between depression and altered perceptual biases to emotions, but the same research on anxiety is still missing. In this study, we measured perceptual biases to emotional and self-related stimuli in sub-clinically anxious participants and healthy controls using a self-emotional shape-label matching task. Results demonstrate that anxious participants had a diminished perceptual self-bias compared with healthy controls. Furthermore, the severity of anxiety was related to an emotional bias towards valanced other-related stimuli. The findings confirm the hypothesis that anxious individuals display an altered self-prioritisation effect in comparison with healthy individuals and that anxiety severity is linked to altered responses to emotionally valanced others. These findings have potential implications for early diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders.

OBJECTIVE This virtual issue of the International Journal of Eating Disorders highlights recently published research that is based on neuroscience concepts, to mark the 49th Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL, in November 2019. METHODS AND RESULTS The collection of articles includes research published between 2018 and 2019 that fall within the broader field of clinical neuroscience. Those articles span a broad range of themes, including food intake regulation and reward circuitry, taste perception, decision-making, cognitive and emotional bias, and targeting altered brain circuits using novel therapeutic methods. DISCUSSION The eating disorders field as a whole is increasingly incorporating neuroscience-based concepts when studying those disorders and developing disease models. We hope that this virtual issue will further stimulate discussion and research that is focused on brain circuits and neurobiology to study etiology and pathophysiology of eating disorders to develop more effective treatments.

Prior research suggests that conservatives are more fear-motivated, disgust-sensitive, and happy than liberals. Yet when it comes to political targets (e.g., politicians), both liberals and conservatives can get very emotional. We examined whether the ideological differences in emotion seen in past research apply to emotions towards specific ideologically similar vs. dissimilar targets, or whether these emotions are instead equivalent between liberals and conservatives. Across two studies, liberals and conservatives rated their anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and happiness towards Democratic and Republican congresspersons. We compared participants’ levels of each emotion towards their respective ideologically dissimilar and ideologically similar congresspersons. Liberals and conservatives both experienced stronger negative emotions towards ideologically dissimilar congresspersons than they did towards ideologically similar ones. Neither liberals nor conservatives differed in negative emotions towards politicians overall (i.e., on average). However, there were ideological differences in emotional bias. In Study 1, liberals exhibited a greater contempt bias (i.e., a larger gap in contempt ratings between ideologically similar and ideologically dissimilar politicians) than conservatives did. In Study 2, liberals exhibited greater contempt, anger, disgust, and happiness biases than conservatives did. The need to consider context in the study of ideological differences in emotion is discussed.

With the development of human-computer interaction technology, user emotion recognition, as an important factor in the process of natural language communication, has become a hot research topic. Current studies mainly analyze the emotional within a single long sentence, but in real communication, the transmission of information and emotion is more often achieved by multi-round dialogue. In this paper, we construct the emotional sequence between people and people in different scenarios to identify their multi-round conversational emotions, and analyze their emotional changes through sequence mining. This article takes several novels as the analysis corpus, and proceeds the scene segmentation according to the chapters of the novel. Then we analyze the emotional bias of each conversation between different people in each scene, and then construct the emotional matrix between people in each scene. Finally, the LSTM algorithm is used to mine different emotional patterns and changing trends between people compared with machine learning algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed sequential-based emotion recognition method can recognize the emotions between people very well and predict the future emotional patterns.

Background Overly negative appraisals of negative life events characterize depression but patterns of emotion bias associated with life events in depression are not well understood. The goal of this paper is to determine under which situations emotional responses are stronger than expected given life events and which emotions are biased. Methods Depressed (n = 16) and non-depressed (n = 14) participants (mean age = 41.4 years) wrote about negative life events involving their own actions and inactions, and rated the current emotion elicited by those events. They also rated emotions elicited by someone else's actions and inactions. These ratings were compared with evaluations provided by a second, ‘benchmark’ group of non-depressed individuals (n = 20) in order to assess the magnitude and direction of possible biased emotional reactions in the two groups. Results Participants with depression reported greater anger and disgust than expected in response to both actions and inactions, whereas they reported greater guilt, shame, sadness, responsibility and fear than expected in response to inactions. Relative to non-depressed and benchmark participants, depressed participants were overly negative in the evaluation of their own life events, but not the life events of others. Conclusion A standardized method for establishing emotional bias reveals a pattern of overly negative emotion only in depressed individuals' self-evaluations, and in particular with respect to anger and disgust, lending support to claims that major depressives' evaluations represent negative emotional bias and to clinical interventions that address this bias. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The visual processing capacity of tinnitus patients is worse than normal controls, indicating cross-modal interference. However, the mechanism underlying the tinnitus-modulated visual processing is largely unclear. In order to explore the influence of tinnitus on visual processing, this study used a signal recognition paradigm to observe whether the tinnitus group would display a significantly longer reaction time in processing the letter symbols (Experiment 1) and emotional faces (Experiment 2) than the control group. Signal detection and signal recognition, which reflect the perceptual and conceptual aspects of visual processing respectively, were manipulated individually in different conditions to identify the pattern of the cross-modal interference of tinnitus. The results showed that the tinnitus group required a significantly prolonged reaction time in detecting and recognizing the letter symbols and emotional faces than the control group; meanwhile, no between-group difference was detected in signal encoding. In addition, any gender- and distress-modulated effects of processing were not found, suggesting the universality of the present findings. Finally, follow-up studies would be needed to explore the neural mechanism behind the decline in speed of visual processing. The positive emotional bias in tinnitus patients also needs to be further verified and discussed. Highlights: - The bottom-up visual processing speed is decreased in tinnitus patients. - Tinnitus primarily interferes with the detection of the visual signals in individuals.

Studies of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) combining MEG/EEG with behavioral data have described two main time ranges relating to conscious perception: 130–320 (the visual awareness negativity; VAN) and 300–500 (P3a) ms after stimulus onset. At the same time, two event-related potential (ERP) peaks have shown an emotional modulation of endogenous attention: the early posterior negativity (EPN; peaking around 250 msec) and the late positive potential (LPP, peaking around 600 msec). Furthermore, an emotional bias on conscious perception has been reported in Binocular Rivalry (BR) studies. Here, we combined an intermittent BR paradigm with neutral and emotional stimuli while recording the behavioral subjective perception and ERPs with two aims: i) to explore the NCCs of emotional content in the time ranges previously described, and ii) to study the emotional bias in conscious perception as first percept when neutral and emotional images rival against each other. First, results revealed a specific ERP emotional modulation (emotional content awareness modulation; ECAM) at the VAN time range. This was the first time window sensitive to the emotional information and showing the strongest modulation in conscious emotional content. Second, results revealed an emotional bias in conscious perception towards the positive valence. This work shows how conscious perception pertaining to emotional content relates to perceptual areas at the VAN latency, which supports the claim of the 130–320 msec time window as the earliest NCC and extends the claim to apply to more than visual perceptual features. Additionally, our findings show that positive and negative content modulates the conscious perception differently.

Affect and emotion are inherent properties of human-human communication and interaction. Recent research interest in chatbots and conversational agents aims at making human-machine interaction more human-like in both behavioral and attitudinal terms. This paper intends to present some baby steps in this direction by analyzing a large dialogue dataset in terms of tonal, affective and emotional bias, with the objective of providing a valuable resource for developing and training datadriven conversational agents with discriminative power across such dimensions. Preliminary results of the conducted analysis demonstrate that only a relative small, although not negligible, percentage of the dialogue turns present clear orientation in any of the considered dimensions. Future research is still needed to determine whether this proportion is enough for biasing system responses in order to create different personality trends in conversational agents that are perceptible by humans when interacting with them.

In this article, we investigate the perception of gender from the motion of virtual humans under different emotional conditions and explore the effect of emotional bias on gender perception (e.g., anger being attributed to males more than females). As motion types can present different levels of physiological cues, we also explore how two types of motion (walking and conversations) are affected by emotional bias. Walking typically displays more physiological cues about gender (e.g., hip sway) and therefore is expected to be less affected by emotional bias. To investigate these effects, we used a corpus of captured facial and body motions from four male and four female actors, performing basic emotions through conversation and walk. We expected that the appearance of the model would also influence gender perception; therefore, we displayed both male and female motions on two virtual models of different sex. Two experiments were then conducted to assess gender judgments from these motions. In both experiments, participants were asked to rate how male or female they considered the motions to be under different emotional states, then classified the emotions to determine how accurately they were portrayed by actors. Overall, both experiments showed that gender ratings were affected by the displayed emotion. However, we found that conversations were influenced by gender stereotypes to a greater extent than walking motions. This was particularly true for anger, which was perceived as male on both male and female motions, and sadness, which was perceived as less male when portrayed by male actors. We also found a slight effect of the model when observing gender on different types of virtual models. These results have implications for the design and animation of virtual humans.

Almost invariably in the disability literature, the terms ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ are used as though they have some commonly understood meaning. They do not, and authors rarely offer a definition. This problem adds opacity to the literature describing people’s living environment and the nature of their interaction with others living in the same area. This ambiguity becomes crucial to understanding when these terms are linked to other vague, but emotionally-charged words, such as ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’. This review presents some of the ways ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ may be correctly employed. It also explores the theoretical basis for understanding how and why their use may be misleading. Finally, it is demonstrated that the assumed relevance of neighbourhood participation for life quality has been greatly exaggerated. We recommend that authors carefully define their use of these terms in order to facilitate understanding free from emotional bias.

In this paper, we generalize the classic therapeutic decision-making model, developed by Pauker and Kassirer, from the expected utility(EU) to the rank-dependent utility (RDU) framework. In contrast with EU, the RDU can incorporate a physician’s optimistic and pessimistic biases into decision-making model, both of which is closely related to physician’s attitude toward probability of uncertainty events and critical to physician’s treatment decision-making. We show that a physician with RDU preference has a lesser treatment threshold than that of EU decision-maker with same utility function and that of DU decision-maker with same probability distortion function. Furthermore, we also examine the effects of degree of risk-aversion, optimism and pessimism on the physician’s treatment threshold, and find out that the higher a physician’s degree of risk-aversion is, the lower the treatment threshold is. In addition, a higher pessimistic degree will lead to a lower treatment threshold, and a higher optimistic degree will produce a higher threshold levels. Finally, we briefly discuss the possible application of big data in the treatment decision problem.

Las teorías cognitivo-emocionales del envejecimiento afirman que con la edad aumenta el sesgo emocional con valencia positiva en el procesamiento de la información que realizan las personas mayores. En este artículo se aborda el concepto de positividad en el envejecimiento y se discute en relación al déficit del control inhibitorio y la percepción del tiempo limitado, características asociadas a la edad.

The main purpose of the present study is to compare the perception of recalling pleasant and unpleasant face pictures in the case of depressed and manic people. Methodology: The present study is an analysis based on a comparative type research; the statistical sample is made up of depressed and manic people (males) referred to LAVASANI Hospital in Tehran City using Beck’s depression questionnaire and a diagnostic interview based on (SCID) DSMIV 30 depressed individuals who were selected after the process of screening. Ranging from moderate to high depression levels (with a cut-off point of 21 and higher), samples of 30 people with manic and 30 depressed people were compared with 30 healthy individuals. It should be mentioned that three groups were convergent in terms of age, gender, marital status and educational level. Then, a test involving computer-based cognitive-neural recall (emotional facial Pictures) was carried out on the related subjects. Findings: A t test of both independent groups was used to evaluate the convergence of the groups and multi variable bilateral variance analysis (MANOVA) was used to assess the pleasant and unpleasant perception of images among three groups. The results of the study showed that there is a difference among three groups in terms of recalling pleasant and unpleasant faces so that the depressed group shows a higher level of recall in terms of unpleasant images than the other two groups, but it indicates little recall of pleasant images in comparison to the other two groups (p Conclusion: The findings of the present study include some explicit outcomes in relation to the application of therapeutic approaches and concentrated educational methods on the amendment of emotional bias in depressed and manic people.

Theories of auditory attention suggest that humans decompose complex auditory input into individual auditory objects, which then compete for attention to dominate auditory perception. Since emotional significance of external stimuli has been argued to provide cues for sensory prioritization and allocation of attention, emotionally salient auditory objects can receive attention to dominate auditory perception. On the basis of the function of audition as an alarm system that informs the organism about its immediate surroundings, and on empirical evidence that emotion can modulate auditory perception, we argue that auditory stimuli with greater emotional saliency would dominate perception in multisource environments. To test our hypothesis, we employed a change detection task in which participants were asked to indicate whether multisource auditory scenes were identical or different. Participants were better at detecting changes at the presence of an emotionally negative environment compared to neutral environment. Further, we found that participants were better at detecting changes of emotionally negative targets compared to neutral targets. Our results demonstrate that detecting changes in auditory scenes is influenced by emotion. The findings are discussed in the light of the theories of auditory attention, emotional modulation of attention, and the adaptive function of emotion for perception.

This study explored whether voluntary attention to emotion is distinguishable from involuntary attention to emotion. University students ( N = 166) completed self-report questionnaires, designed for this study, intended to measure voluntary and involuntary attention to one’s own emotions. Moreover, participants completed questionnaires measuring other emotional constructs and distress. Finally, participants completed a dot probe task intended to obtain a behavioral measure of voluntary attention to emotion. Affect intensity was positively correlated with both voluntary and involuntary attention to emotion. As expected, dot probe emotional bias scores were associated with self-reported voluntary attention to emotion, but not with involuntary attention to emotion. Voluntary and involuntary attention to emotion were also differentially associated with clarity of emotion, anhedonic depression, and worry. The results of this study suggest it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary attention to one’s own emotions.

Identifying and modifying the negative interpretation bias that characterises depression is central to successful treatment. While accumulating evidence indicates that mental imagery is particularly effective in the modification of emotional bias, this research typically incorporates static and unrelated ambiguous stimuli. SenseCam technology, and the resulting video-like footage, offers an opportunity to produce training stimuli that are dynamic and self-relevant. Here participants experienced several ambiguous tasks and subsequently viewed SenseCam footage of the same tasks, paired with negative or positive captions. Participants were trained to use mental imagery to inter-relate SenseCam footage and captions. Participants reported increased levels of happy mood, reduced levels of sad mood, and increased task enjoyment following SenseCam review with positive versus negative captions. This shift in emotional bias was also evident at 24-hour follow-up, as participants recollected greater task enjoyment for those tasks previously paired with positive captions. Mental imagery appears to play an important role in this process. These preliminary results indicate that in healthy volunteers, SenseCam can be used within a bias modification paradigm to shift mood and memory for wellbeing associated with performing everyday activities. Further refinements are necessary before similar methods can be applied to individuals suffering from subclinical and clinical depression.

Our paper reconsiders the triadic design proposed by Cox (Games and Economic Behavior 46:260–281, 2004) to identify trust and reciprocity in investment games. Specifically, we extend the design in two directions. First, we collect information on investors’ choices by using both the direct-response (as does Cox) and strategy methods. Using the latter, we are able to condition reciprocity on initial inequality, which is endogenous when investigating reciprocity. We demonstrate that the triadic design provides evidence for reciprocity once that initial inequality is considered. Second, we elicit expectations and test their coherence with the triadic outcomes. By examining the relationship between trust actions and expected gains, we analyze whether investors’ expectations are consistent with their behavior. Finally, we test for the existence of an emotional bias, i.e., whether expectation mismatches induce trustees to change actual choices from the planned ones.

Article history: Received October 1, 2011 Received in Revised form November, 14, 2011 Accepted 15 February 2012 Available online 23 February 2012 This research examines the determinants of firms’ investment introducing a behavioral perspective that has received little attention in corporate finance literature. The following central hypothesis emerges from a set of recently developed theories: Investment decisions are influenced not only by their fundamentals but also depend on some other factors. One factor is the biasness of any CEO to their investment, biasness depends on the cognition and emotions, because some leaders use them as heuristic for the investment decision instead of fundamentals. This paper shows how CEO emotional bias (optimism, loss aversion and overconfidence) affects the investment decisions. The proposed model of this paper uses Bayesian Network Method to examine this relationship. Emotional bias has been measured by means of a questionnaire comprising several items. As for the selected sample, it has been composed of some 100 Tunisian executives. Our results have revealed that the behavioral analysis of investment decision implies leader affected by behavioral biases (optimism, loss aversion, and overconfidence) adjusts its investment choices based on their ability to assess alternatives (optimism and overconfidence) and risk perception (loss aversion) to create of shareholder value and ensure its place at the head of the management team. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper assumes that managers, investors, or both behave irrationally. In addition, even though scholars have investigated behavioral irrationality from three angles, investor sentiment, investor biases and managerial biases, we focus on the relationship between one of the managerial biases, overconfidence and dividend policy. Previous research investigating the relationship between overconfidence and financial decisions has studied investment, financing decisions and firm values. However, there are only a few exceptions to examine how a managerial emotional bias (optimism, loss aversion and overconfidence) affects dividend policies. This stream of research contends whether to distribute dividends or not depends on how managers perceive of the company’s future. We will use Bayesian network method to examine this relation. Emotional bias has been measured by means of a questionnaire comprising several items. As for the selected sample, it has been composed of some 100 Tunisian executives. Our results have revealed that leader affected by behavioral biases (optimism, loss aversion, and overconfidence) adjusts its dividend policy choices based on their ability to assess alternatives (optimism and overconfidence) and risk perception (loss aversion) to create of shareholder value and ensure its place at the head of the management team.

The visual illusion Terror Subterra, by Roger Shepard (1990), depicts a seemingly large creature chasing another in a tunnel, yet both creatures are physically identical. In addition to this visual illusion, the two creatures also appear to exhibit different emotions, as the background creature (the pursuer) appears angry whereas the foreground creature (the pursued) appears fearful. We explored this context effect by first establishing the magnitude of the emotional bias effect. We then modified the original drawing in various ways, such as equating for perceived size, removing one creature from the scene, and removing the pictorial context altogether. Findings suggest that the emotional bias is due to the pictorial setting and to the perceived social-emotional relationship between the two creatures. These results highlight the importance of both perceptual and social-emotional influences in driving affective attributions.

Crowding occurs when nearby flankers impede the identification of a peripheral stimulus. Here, we studied whether crowded features containing inaccessible emotional information can nevertheless affect preference judgments. We relied on gaze-contingent crowding, a novel method allowing for constant perceptual unawareness through eye-tracking control, and we found that crowded facial expressions can bias evaluative judgments of neutral pictographs. Furthermore, this emotional bias was effective not only for static images of faces, but also for videos displaying dynamic facial expressions. In addition to showing an alternative approach for probing nonconscious cognition, this study reveals that crowded information, instead of being fully suppressed, can have important influences on decisions.

This paper deals with the relationship existing between the emotional aspect and decision-making. More specifically, it examines the links between managerial optimism, and effectiveness of the investment decision. We introduce an approach based Decision Tree analysis with a series of semi-directive interviews. CEO optimism level was measured using a questionnaire with several items. As for the selected sample was composed of 100 Tunisian managers. The originality of this research paper is guaranteed since it traits the behavioral corporate policy choice in emergent markets. In the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the Tunisian context that explores such area of research. Our results show that Tunisian optimistic leader who seeks the pioneering advantage for him and his company is encouraged to adjust its specific investment decision (investment, overinvestment or under-investment in the short term or long term ...) to ensure that advantage pioneer.

We compared the speed of discrimination for emotional and neutral faces in four experiments, using a forced-choice saccadic and manual reaction time task. Unmasked, brief (20 ms) bilateral presentation of schematic (Exp. 1) or naturalistic (Exp. 2) emotional/neutral face pairs, led to shorter discrimination of emotional stimuli in saccadic localisation task. When the effect of interference from emotional stimuli is ruled out by showing a pairing of the emotional or neutral face with an outline face, faster saccadic discrimination was obtained for fearful facial expression only (Exp. 3). The manual discrimination reaction time was not significantly different for emotional versus neutral stimuli. To explore the absence of a manual RT effect we manipulated the stimulus duration (20 ms vs. 500 ms: Exp. 4). Faster saccadic discrimination of emotional stimuli was observed at both durations. For manual responses, emotional bias was observed only at the longest duration (500 ms). Overall, comparison of saccadic and manual responses shows that faster discrimination of emotional/neutral stimuli can be carried out within the oculomotor system. In addition, emotional stimuli are processed preferentially to neutral face stimuli.

Deficits in emotional processes are often observed by clinicians in anorexia nervosa and may have an impact on social functioning. Recognition of emotion was mostly investigated using visual stimuli as faces of emotional scenes. Only one study (Kucharska-Pietura et al., 2004) demonstrated impairments in emotional prosody using positive and negative valenced stimuli. However, this study did not provide a highlight for the identification of emotional bias (for example, to recognize an intense fear in a friendly voice). The aim of this study is to better understand the recognition of emotional prosody in anorexia nervosa using a wide range of positive, negative and neutral stimuli (Belin et al., 2008).In order to test emotion recognition biases in emotional prosody, we exposed 15 patients with anorexia nervosa and 15 healthy controls (HCs) to emotional vocal tasks asking them to rate emotional intensity on visual analog scales. In addition, we assessed clinical symptomatology and cognitive functioning for all participants.We showed that patients with anorexia nervosa provided higher intensity ratings on the non-target scales (e.g., surprise scale for fear stimuli) than HCs for sadness, fear and neutral voices. Furthermore, with the exception of neutral vocal stimuli, they provided the same intensity ratings on the target scales as the HCs.These findings suggested a bias in the processing of emotional prosody and may impact the social functioning of patients with anorexia nervosa. The bias may result from a sensorial deficit or a high-order cognitive dysfunction and have to be investigated in future studies.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Excessive empathy has been associated with compassion fatigue in health professionals and caregivers. We investigated an effect of empathy on emotion processing in 137 healthy individuals of both sexes. We tested a hypothesis that high empathy may underlie increased sensitivity to negative emotion recognition which may interact with gender. Facial emotion stimuli comprised happy, angry, fearful, and sad faces presented at different intensities (mild and prototypical) and different durations (500ms and 2000ms). The parameters of emotion processing were represented by discrimination accuracy, response bias and reaction time. We found that higher empathy was associated with better recognition of all emotions. We also demonstrated that higher empathy was associated with response bias towards sad and fearful faces. The reaction time analysis revealed that higher empathy in females was associated with faster (compared with males) recognition of mildly sad faces of brief duration. We conclude that although empathic abilities were providing for advantages in recognition of all facial emotional expressions, the bias towards emotional negativity may potentially carry a risk for empathic distress.

Some neurological patients with medial frontal lesions exhibit striking confabulations. Most accounts of the cause of confabulations are cognitive, though the literature has produced anecdotal suggestions that confabulations may not be emotionally neutral, having a ('wish-fulfilment') bias that shapes the patient's perception of reality in a more affectively positive direction. The present study reviewed every case (N = 16) of false beliefs about place reported in the neuroscientific literature from 1980 to 2000, with blind raters evaluating the 'pleasantness' of the patient's actual and confabulated locations. In each case the confabulated location was evaluated as more pleasant. This striking finding supports the claim that there may be a systematic affective bias in the false beliefs held by neurological patients with confabulation.

Background: Theorists differ in their opinion whether interpersonal difficulties in depression is associated more with perceptual impairment or with emotional bias. The present study intended to resolve such differences of opinion. Method: Major depressives, general medical patients, and non-patient controls were administered three visuospatial and two affective tasks to examine the nature of performance deficit associated with each group. Results: Major depressives were found significantly impaired in both visuospatial and affective tasks in comparison to general medical patients, who in turn, were impaired than non-patient controls. Conclusion: Major depressives' perceptual deficit is pervasive and not specific to affective categories. Limitation: The study could have been more informative if more psychiatric groups had been included as subjects. Clinical Relevance: Improvement in depressives' ability for visuospatial and affective tasks may be considered as a marker of their clinical improvement.

SYNOPSIS It is apparent that much of the criticism of plantation forestry as a form of land-use is based on emotional bias rather than on hard evidence. The results of a perception survey are presented to support this supposition. Two accusations that are commonly levelled against forestry—namely that it leads to a serious reduction in biodiversity, and secondly that it uses a disproportionate amount of water—are debated and more reasoned views are presented. The need for research and monitoring to provide the factual evidence that decision makers need for the wise management of land-use options—including forestry—is highlighted.

Cognitive deficits have been only recently recognized as a major phenotype determinant of major depressive disorder, although they are an integral part of the definition of the depressive state. Congruent evidence suggest that these cognitive deficits persist beyond the acute phase and may be identified at all ages. The aim of the current study was to review the main meta-analyses on cognition and depression, which encompasses a large range of cognitive domains. Therefore, we discuss the "cold" (attention, memory, executive functions) and "hot" (emotional bias) cognitive impairments in MDD, as well as those of social cognition domains (empathy, theory of mind). Several factors interfere with cognition in MDD such as clinical (melancholic, psychotic...) features, age, age of onset, illness severity, medication and comorbid condition. As still debated in the literature, the type of relationship between the severity of cognitive symptoms and functioning in depression is detailed, thus highlighting their predictive value of functional outcome, independently of the affective symptoms. A better identification of the cognitive deficits in MDD and a monitoring of the effects of different treatments require appropriate instruments, which may be developed by taking advantage of the increasing success of computing tools. Overall, current data suggest a core role for different cognitive deficits in MDD, therefore opening new perspectives for optimizing the treatment of depression.

The concept of Loss aversion bias was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. It was first introduced as a part of Prospect Theory. By virtue of different experimental observations, it is established that People are averse to losses because losses loom larger than gains. It makes a common individual primarily as risk-averse. This is followed by the secondary observation that a common risk-averse individual has a demand of minimum double return for any amount placed at a risk. This is particularly because an individual feels a stronger impulse for losses than gains. An individual never wants to lose and so, there is always an additional risk premium when losses are apprehended as alternate outcome. Loss aversion bias is thus ever influencing emotional bias existing in investment decision-making process.

In the present work, an intra-organisational analysis has been undertaken with reference organisational architecture theory, for the purpose of investigating a major loan-granting decision governing mechanism, namely, the incentive system. The paper is primarily axed around highlighting the bank CEO emotional biases' critical impact on explaining the banks' adopted incentive systems, as applied to motivate lower-rank managers, particularly account managers, who are in direct contact with client companies. Our analysis of responses, as drawn from a questionnaire sent to a number of Tunisian bank CEOs, proves to reveal well that the bank CEO's opting for incentive mechanisms specifically reserved to the account manager, turns out to be highly devoted to his proper skillful evaluation (optimism and overconfidence) and a matter of his particular perception of the possible relevant risk (loss aversion).

Building effective management also depends, to a great extent, on self-learning by managers. There are various ways to develop one’s competence. One of the most effective ways of self-development, however, is a relatively neglected one in modern western management development literature. It is the use of introspection as a tool for self-development.

Objectives: It is often stressed that anxiety alters perceptions of the world by way of processes like the rapid detection of threats and the exaggeration of risks. Given that these processes are active during all information processing, they are thought to influence not only the interpretation of current events, but also the recall of past events. In patient’s anamnesis, we have often attempted to incorporate the events that patients recollect into our functional explanation of their disorder, forgetting that the meaning of what a patient relates may be intrinsically linked to his/her pathology and pathological functioning. We are interested here in potential biases in the events remembered by anxious patients. Methods: We contacted twenty-seven men aged 25 or older suffering from generalized anxiety disorder. They were asked to recollect childhood events from cue words and then rate each remembered event on its subjective emotional valence and intensity, its frequency of recollection, and the vividness of the memory. The responses of the anxious subjects were compared to those of control subjects without psychiatric disorders. Results: Findings seem to show that anxious patients’ memories of childhood events may be impaired by emotional interpretation biases. Indeed, anxious patients remember more negative events than participants in the control group. The emotional intensity of negative or positive events remembered by anxious patients is also considered more important.

Article accompanying a poster presentation for the 2011 Computational Neuroscience Annual Meeting. This article discusses gender difference of emotional bias in sharing love.