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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.

The present study examined whether the cognitive bias for threat is a stable phenomenon in spider phobics and not in nonphobic controls. The rationale of this study was that the use of emotional bias for individual assessment in clinical practice requires stability of this phenomenon. In order to assess the stability of the emotional bias, the spider Stroop task was administered twice to spider phobics and controls, with a time lag of 3 weeks. In two experiments, spider phobics (nexp. 1 = 20; nexp. 2 = 33) and controls (nexp. 1 = 24; nexp. 2 = 25) were selected on basis of a structured interview. In the second experiment, subjects anticipated exposure to a real-life spider. Emotional bias was inferred from color-naming latencies on spider words versus control words. In line with our prediction, the bias for threat was stable in spider phobic individuals but not in controls. This stability could not be attributed to a general cognitive characteristic because a standard Stroop task did not differentiate between the spider phobics and the controls. The results support the view that cognitive processing of threat in anxiety is stable. It is proposed to use both the emotional bias and its stability as measures of the constraints on the flexibility of the cognitive fear-network.

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.

The present study examined the influence of trait anxiety on the early stages of emotional face processing. In order to test if such early effect of anxiety could appear in response to positive as well as to negative stimuli, we recorded event-related potentials in response to both happy and fearful faces – contrasted with neutral faces – during a task where attention was explicitly directed to the emotion, in two groups differing by their anxiety level. We observed an amplification of the occipital P1 peak (90–120 ms) in response to happy compared to neutral faces in high trait anxious participants but not in the low trait anxious ones. Additionally, the N170 and EPN components were enhanced for the negative (fearful) faces, with no impact of trait anxiety. Our results provide evidence for an early bias towards positive stimuli in trait anxiety.

Although the main hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD) are its motor symptoms, such as bradykinesia, resting tremor, postural instability, and rigidity, it has been increasingly recognized that such disease constitutes, in fact, a complex degenerative process which presents a variety of different clinical manifestations. Actually, in the last years, significant attention has been devoted to the so-called non-motor symptoms of PD, especially psychiatric ones, such as anxiety, depression, apathy, dysphoria and irritability, which have been shown to be present even in the early stages of disease (Leroi et al., 2012) and which show increasing intensity with its progression. Similarly, sleep disorders (such as difficulty for initiating sleep, frequent night awakenings, nocturia, restless legs syndrome, apnea, parasomnias and increased daytime sleepiness) have already been shown to occur with increased prevalence in patients with PD in comparison to the healthy population (Raggi et al., 2013). Nevertheless, the literature on the effects of PD upon other higher cognitive features, such as musical processing, is still scarce. Motivated by such increased attention to non-motor symptoms PD, and with basis on previous physiological studies which have demonstrated that the perception of music rhythm and beat is mediated mainly by the basal ganglia (the major anatomical complex involved in the etiology of PD) (Grahn, 2009), several recent studies have investigated the effects of PD over music perception. For example, it has already been shown that patients with PD have reduced capacity of synchronizing movements to a beat and, in turn, discriminating changes in tempo (“faster” vs. “slower”) (Grahn and Brett, 2009). Interestingly, such difficulty has been shown to be more marked when the beat is introduced at a slower tempo and progressively speeded up (McAuley et al., 2012). In such study, however, the capacity of patients with PD of discriminating changes in non “beat-based” rhythms did not significantly differ from that of a healthy control group. Ultimately, by correlating the impairment in beat perception with a decline in the coordinated functional activity between the basal ganglia, thalamus, premotor and supplementary motor regions, such studies have underscored the importance of the motor circuitry in beat perception. Nevertheless, in a recently published study, Lima et al. (2013) demonstrated that the effects of PD upon music perception may not be limited to rhythm detection, but may also involve the recognition of emotions as expressed through music. The authors of such investigation have demonstrated that patients with PD had increased difficulty to recognize happiness and peacefulness, when combinedly expressed through music lyrics and rhythm, while presenting intact perception of sadness and fear. Comparatively, in relation to non-musical speech, such patients presented only a mild global impairment of emotion recognition which seemed to be more a result of an executive dysfunction that a direct effect of the disease over the limbic system. Similarly, other previous investigations had already demonstrated that a dysfunction in the dopaminergic system may only partially explain the observed impairment in emotion recognition through facial expressions in patients with PD (Bediou et al., 2012), as the treatment with levodopa did not significantly modify such deficit. This finding was further confirmed by a recent meta-analysis on the issue (Gray and Tickle-Degnen, 2010). Conversely, in studies evaluating the effects of surgical treatment for Parkinson disease with deep brain stimulation (DBS), a therapeutic strategy which has been suggested to have broader effects in terms of modulating several interconnected circuits and not only the deep basal ganglia, it was possible to observe a synergistic improvement in the ability of recognizing the emotional content of facial expressions after combined treatment with both DBS and levodopa (Mondillon et al., 2012). In another study which also demonstrated impaired recognition of emotions as expressed through music in patients with PD, it was possible to observe that, although the observed deficit in fear recognition was at least partially associated with some degree of executive dysfunction, the deficit in emotion recognition in patients with PD persisted even after adjusting for executive functioning levels (van Tricht et al., 2010). Additionally, despite the fact that a previous study has suggested that depressed patients may have a negative emotional bias when evaluating musical stimuli (Punkanen et al., 2011), in this study the observed deficit in emotion recognition through music was not related to depressive symptoms, disease duration or severity of motor symptoms. All these results suggest that, although the observed impairment of emotion recognition through music in patients with PD may be partially related to a certain degree of executive dysfunction, it most likely reflect a separate primary cognitive deficit in emotional processing. The suggestion that it may be possible to localize specific cognitive features of emotional and music processing to single anatomical areas of the brain has been investigated by some recent studies which evaluated the neuroanatomical regions activated by facial and music recognition in patients with semantic dementia and Alzheimer's disease (Omar et al., 2011). The results of such investigations demonstrated that the neurocognitive process involved in emotion recognition through facial expressions and music seems to be mediated by different but interconnected networks, with specific patterns of activation depending on the familiarity of the presented sensorial stimuli. In practical terms, the anterior tip of the right anterior temporal lobe seems to directly correlated with the ability to recognize famous tunes and famous faces, while the ability of identifying everyday tunes seems to activate the right mesial temporal structures, especially the amygdala (Hsieh et al., 2011). In opposition to the presented evidence which support the thesis that music and speech prosody may be mediated by different neurophysiological networks, several previous investigations have demonstrated a very close relationship between music perception and prosody (Thompson et al., 2004; Hutchins et al., 2010; Escoffier et al., 2013). Therefore, the verification of isolated effects of PD upon emotional processing through music perception (but not prosody) may consist in either a bias of the employed methodological approach, or an isolated effect related to motor-related rhythm dysfunction in patients with PD, rather than a true evidence of the existence of distinct networks for processing emotions (one musical and one non-musical) in normal physiological situations. Ultimately, further clinical and imaging studies are still required in order to confirm the validity of generalizing such findings in patients with PD to the healthy population. Finally, from a methodological standpoint, the findings of Lima et al. study suggest that future attempts of investigating the effects of degenerative diseases (as well as their treatment) upon the cognitive psychology of emotion processing should focus on specific neuropsychological domains (Hsieh et al., 2012), as there might be significant differences among the effects of such diseases upon recognition of emotional content from specific sensory inputs (for example, through visual or auditory modalities), and even among specific variations within one specific sensory modality (such as the difference between emotional recognition through musical and non-musical speech).

Although major depression is projected to be among the top three causes of disability-adjusted life years lost in 2030, relatively little is known concerning the extent to which depressed mood states can bias social-economic decision making away from optimal outcomes. One experimental framework to study the interaction between negative emotion and social-economic decisions is the ultimatum game (UG), where the fair, cooperative player altruistically punishes the unfair, non-cooperative player. To assess a potential susceptibility of altruistic punishment to depressed mood, we repeatedly administered the UG task to a cohort of 20 currently depressed patients with a diagnosis of recurrent major depressive disorder and 20 healthy controls. Furthermore, valence and arousal ratings of emotionally laden pictures were obtained from all participants in order to assess a depressed mood-related distortion of emotion judgments. Compared to healthy controls, depressed patients over-sanctioned unfair proposals in the UG and judged emotional stimuli too negatively. Thus, major depression is associated with a negative emotional bias that hampers social-economic decision making and produces large personal costs.

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).

Diminished emotional capacity is a core characteristic of psychopathic personality. We examined behavioral and electrophysiological differences in attentional bias to emotional material in 34 healthy individuals rated high or low in psychopathic traits using the short form of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (18 high-trait, 16 low-trait). While performing an emotional Stroop task, high-trait participants displayed reduced emotional modulation of the late positive potential (LPP, 400-600 ms), and early anterior positivity (EAP, 200-300 ms) amplitudes. Results suggest blunted bias to affective content in psychopathic personality, characterized by diminished early capture to emotional salience (EAP) and dampened cognitive emotional processing (LPP).

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.

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.

Background Serotonin (5-HT) 1A and 2A receptors have been associated with dysfunctional emotional processing biases in mood disorders. These receptors further predominantly mediate the subjective and behavioral effects of psilocybin and might be important for its recently suggested antidepressive effects. However, the effect of psilocybin on emotional processing biases and the specific contribution of 5-HT2A receptors across different emotional domains is unknown. Methods In a randomized, double-blind study, 17 healthy human subjects received on 4 separate days placebo, psilocybin (215 μg/kg), the preferential 5-HT2A antagonist ketanserin (50 mg), or psilocybin plus ketanserin. Mood states were assessed by self-report ratings, and behavioral and event-related potential measurements were used to quantify facial emotional recognition and goal-directed behavior toward emotional cues. Results Psilocybin enhanced positive mood and attenuated recognition of negative facial expression. Furthermore, psilocybin increased goal-directed behavior toward positive compared with negative cues, facilitated positive but inhibited negative sequential emotional effects, and valence-dependently attenuated the P300 component. Ketanserin alone had no effects but blocked the psilocybin-induced mood enhancement and decreased recognition of negative facial expression. Conclusions This study shows that psilocybin shifts the emotional bias across various psychological domains and that activation of 5-HT2A receptors is central in mood regulation and emotional face recognition in healthy subjects. These findings may not only have implications for the pathophysiology of dysfunctional emotional biases but may also provide a framework to delineate the mechanisms underlying psylocybin's putative antidepressant effects.

The aim of the current research was to examine for the first time the extent to which bias to negative emotions in an inhibitory control paradigm is a state or trait marker in major depressive disorder (MDD) in adolescents. We administered the affective go/no go task which measures the ability to switch attention to or away from positive or negative emotional stimuli to 40 adolescents with MDD (20 in acute episode (MDDa) and 20 in remission (MDDr)) and 17 healthy controls (HC). MDDa were significantly faster on the shift to negative target blocks as compared to shift to positive target blocks while HC and MDDr displayed the opposite pattern as measured by an "emotional bias index" (EBI=latency (shift to negative targets)-latency (shift to positive targets)). There was also a trend for an effect of group on commission errors, suggesting more impulsive responding by MDDa than both MDDr and HC independently of stimulus valence throughout the task. Negative bias was not associated with depression severity or medication status. In conclusion, bias to negative emotional stimuli appears to be present in the acute stage of MDD and absent in remission suggesting that it is a depression state-specific marker of MDD in adolescents. Latency emerges as a better proxy of negative bias than commission errors and accuracy on this inhibitory control task in adolescents with MDD.

Agomelatine is a new antidepressant with a novel profile of pharmacological action. The clinical efficacy of agomelatine has been established in major depression, but its actions on emotional bias are unknown. Consequently, the current experimental study assessed the effect of agomelatine on emotional processing in healthy volunteers using an Emotional Test Battery shown to be sensitive to serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors. Volunteers were randomized to receive placebo, 25 mg or 50 mg of agomelatine over a 7-day period in a double-blind parallel groups design. Emotional processing ( n = 48) was assessed on the morning of day 8 using the Emotional Test Battery which included facial expression recognition, emotional memory, attentional visual probe and emotion-potentiated startle. Mood and subjective state were monitored before and during treatment. Agomelatine (25 mg) decreased subjective ratings of sadness, reduced recognition of sad facial expressions, improved positive affective memory and reduced the emotion-potentiated startle response. The results show that agomelatine has more selective effects on the processing of social facial cues than conventional antidepressants, which could contribute to less blunting of emotional experience. The study highlights the potential value of volunteer models in drug development for screening and profiling of novel antidepressants.

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

Previous binocular rivalry studies with younger adults have shown that emotional stimuli dominate perception over neutral stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of age on patterns of emotional dominance during binocular rivalry. Participants performed a face/house rivalry task where the emotion of the face (happy, angry, neutral) and orientation (upright, inverted) of the face and house stimuli were varied systematically. Age differences were found with younger adults showing a general emotionality effect (happy and angry faces were more dominant than neutral faces) and older adults showing inhibition of anger (neutral faces were more dominant than angry faces) and positivity effects (happy faces were more dominant than both angry and neutral faces). Age differences in dominance patterns were reflected by slower rivalry rates for both happy and angry compared to neutral face/house pairs in younger adults, and slower rivalry rates for happy compared to both angry and neutral face/house pairs in older adults. Importantly, these patterns of emotional dominance and slower rivalry rates for emotional-face/house pairs disappeared when the stimuli were inverted. This suggests that emotional valence, and not low-level image features, were responsible for the emotional bias in both age groups. Given that binocular rivalry has a limited role for voluntary control, the findings imply that anger suppression and positivity effects in older adults may extend to more automatic tasks.

Narrative understanding supposes the viewer’s mental activity of constructing causal links, an activity biased by emotions and other mental or psychological circumstances, making the causal links we construct while watching the film sometimes quite different from those the viewers obtain as a consequence of a thorough logical analysis of a narrative. This article argues that this is not the difference between “misunderstanding” and “adequate understanding,” but rather the fact that the viewers cannot discount emotional bias when talking about narrative causality. Because most films are made to be seen and understood after one viewing, they are meant to be understood through emotionally biased causal inference rather than by the pure analytical mind. In order to understand how emotionally biased causal thinking works, it is necessary to conduct empirical research with real audiences. Theories of narrative understanding can only be corroborated by such empirical research.

The definitions and current practice of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) are considered in relation to the fundamental principles of toxicology. The salient problem with MCS is that there is no consistent and specific effect from exposure to any specific chemical. This does not allow for any objective test for any disease entity which might be caused by the chemicals as indicated by the theory of MCS. The effects of exposure to chemicals as defined today as MCS are subjective and no report is available to convincingly demonstrate that these effects would not have occurred merely by chance. It is concluded that (1) MCS, as defined, does not allow specificity or consistency for biological reactions to the effects of chemicals; (2) MCS does not provide a testable hypothesis; (3) MCS is contradictory to the fundamental principles of toxicology; (4) current testing procedures for MCS are so subjective that they are useless; (5) there is no evidence that the responses attributed to MCS are any other than those that would occur merely by chance; and (6) the MCS literature attaches an emotional bias to chemicals.

Our autobiographical self depends on the differential recollection of our personal past, notably including memories of morally laden events. Whereas both emotion and temporal recency are well known to influence memory, very little is known about how we remember moral events, and in particular about the distribution in time of memories for events that were blameworthy or praiseworthy. To investigate this issue in detail, we collected a novel database of 758 confidential, autobiographical narratives for personal moral events from 100 well-characterized healthy adults. Negatively valenced moral memories were significantly more remote than positively valenced memories, both as measured by the valence of the cue word that evoked the memory as well as by the content of the memory itself. The effect was independent of chronological age, ethnicity, gender or personality, arguing for a general emotional bias in how we construct our moral autobiography.

Background Depression is a highly prevalent mood disorder, that impairs a person's social skills and also their quality of life. Populations affected with depression also suffer from a higher mortality rate. Depression affects person's ability to recognize emotions. We designed a novel experiment to test the hypothesis that depressed patients show a judgment bias towards negative emotions. Methods To investigate how depressed patients differ in their perception of emotions conveyed by musical examples, both healthy (n = 30) and depressed (n = 79) participants were presented with a set of 30 musical excerpts, representing one of five basic target emotions, and asked to rate each excerpt using five Likert scales that represented the amount of each one of those same emotions perceived in the example. Results Depressed patients showed moderate but consistent negative self-report biases both in the overall use of the scales and their particular application to certain target emotions, when compared to healthy controls. Also, the severity of the clinical state (depression, anxiety and alexithymia) had an effect on the self-report biases for both positive and negative emotion ratings, particularly depression and alexithymia. Limitations Only musical stimuli were used, and they were all clear examples of one of the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger and tenderness. No neutral or ambiguous excerpts were included. Conclusions Depressed patients' negative emotional bias was demonstrated using musical stimuli. This suggests that the evaluation of emotional qualities in music could become a means to discriminate between depressed and non-depressed subjects. The practical implications of the present study relate both to diagnostic uses of such perceptual evaluations, as well as a better understanding of the emotional regulation strategies of the patients.

Reduced inhibition has been demonstrated in both schizophrenic and bipolar patients through the findings of increased interference on the Stroop Colour-Word Task (SCWT) and increased emotional interference on specific versions of the Emotional Stroop Task (EST). Despite previous findings of enhanced interference in unaffected relatives of schizophrenic and bipolar patients, it remains unclear whether interference might be a candidate endophenotype to both disorders. Moreover, data regarding emotional interference in unaffected relatives are critically lacking. In the present study, we aimed to compare unaffected relatives of patients with schizophrenia (SZ-rel, N = 30) and bipolar disorder (BD-rel, N= 30) with normal controls (N = 60) when performing the SCWT and an EST designed with neutral, depressive, paranoid and manic words. SZ-rel exhibited greater interference effect on both the SCWT and the EST as compared to either BD-rel or normal controls. BD-rel, and by contrast to SZ-rel and controls, showed increased emotional interference effect on the EST that was specifically associated to the disease-related words. The findings support the hypothesis of different markers of vulnerability to schizophrenic and bipolar disorders; impairment in cognitive inhibition could characterize high-risk individuals for schizophrenia whereas an emotional bias towards mood-related information could be a trait marker of bipolar disease.

First impressions, especially of emotional faces, may critically impact later evaluation of social interactions. Activity in limbic regions, including the amygdala and ventral striatum, has previously been shown to correlate with identification of emotional content in faces; however, little work has been done describing how these signals may influence emotional face memory. We report an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 21 healthy adults where subjects attempted to recognize a neutral face that was previously viewed with a threatening (angry or fearful) or nonthreatening (happy or sad) affect. In a hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis, we found that neutral faces previously presented with a threatening affect recruited the left amygdala. In contrast, faces previously presented with a nonthreatening affect activated the left ventral striatum. A whole-brain analysis revealed increased response in the right orbitofrontal cortex to faces previously seen with threatening affect. These effects of prior emotion were independent of task performance, with differences being seen in the amygdala and ventral striatum even if only incorrect trials were considered. The results indicate that a network of frontolimbic regions may provide emotional bias signals during facial recognition.

Contents related to threat and associated cognitive processes are proposed to be the central characteristic of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) according to 'threat-relatedness hypothesis'. However, evidence for attention bias toward emotionally salient stimuli using the emotional Stroop test is equivocal. This discrepancy could be due to methodological issues, mainly differences in the lexical characters of words. Fifty Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV) OCD patients (23 washers and 27 checkers) and 50 age-, handedness- and sex-matched healthy controls were examined with an optimized version of the emotional Stroop test (i.e., with lexically matched words) and color-Stroop test. Twenty-four patients were clinically symptomatic and 26 were remitted. OCD patients had significantly higher attention bias only for negative OCD stimuli as calculated by negatively valenced OCD interference score but not for neutral or non-OCD emotional stimuli. Symptomatic patients had significantly higher bias, but not the remitted patients. There were no significant correlations between other illness-related variables (age at onset, illness duration, and medication dose) and Stroop test performance. Study findings suggest the presence of selective emotional bias for OCD relevant stimuli in these patients and this bias is potentially related to symptomatic status. These observations are in tune with the threat-relatedness hypothesis.

BACKGROUND: Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with both dysfunction of the central serotonergic system and abnormal responses to emotional stimuli. We used acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) to investigate the effect of temporarily reducing brain serotonin synthesis on neural and behavioral responses to emotional stimuli in remitted MDD subjects (rMDD) and healthy control subjects. METHODS: Twenty control subjects and 23 rMDD subjects who had been unmedicated and in remission for > or =3 months completed the study. Following tryptophan or sham depletion, participants performed an emotional-processing task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. In addition, resting state regional blood flow was measured using arterial spin labeling. RESULTS: Neither group exhibited significant mood change following ATD. However, tryptophan depletion differentially affected the groups in terms of hemodynamic responses to emotional words in a number of structures implicated in the pathophysiology of MDD, including medial thalamus and caudate. These interactions were driven by increased responses to emotional words in the control subjects, with little effect in the patients under the ATD condition. Following ATD, habenula blood flow increased significantly in the rMDD subjects relative to the control subjects, and increasing amygdala blood flow was associated with more negative emotional bias score across both groups. CONCLUSIONS: These data provide evidence for elevated habenula blood flow and alterations in the neural processing of emotional stimuli following ATD in rMDD subjects, even in the absence of overt mood change. However, further studies are required to determine whether these findings represent mechanisms of resilience or vulnerability to MDD.

Psychology is the study of human and animal behavior and thinking. Religion, according to Webster, is “the belief in and worship of God or gods.”1 For many years the position in both quarters allowed for little or no dialogue. But in recent years there has been a rapprochement.2 The study of a religion necessitates the study of its psychology, the make up of the mental and emotional processes fueling its beliefs and behaviors, and vice versa. Both disciplines are attempting to understand human existence and answer many of the same questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What does my existence mean? Where am I going? What will my death mean?

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of cognitive/emotional bias on central nervous odor processing. Forty-five female participants were divided into three groups and were either led to believe the odor was a natural, healthy extract (positive bias), potentially hazardous (negative bias), or a common test odorant (control). The odor (isobornyl acetate) was presented via a constant-flow olfactometer and the EEG was recorded from 60 scalp locations. In the negative bias condition, participants reported reduced well-being and judged the odor as less pleasant. However, neither the thresholds nor the intensity ratings were changed by the context condition. Chemosensory event-related potential (CSERP) analysis revealed that the latencies of the N1 and P2 components were prolonged in the negative bias condition and shortened in the positive bias condition. Current source densities were most prominent in the frontal lobe in negatively biased participants. The findings show that expecting to perceive an emotionally significant odor affects the early encoding of odors.

Delusions, a cardinal feature of schizophrenia, are characterized by the development and preservation of false beliefs despite reason and evidence to the contrary. A number of cognitive models have made important contributions to our understanding of delusions, though it remains unclear which core cognitive processes are malfunctioning to enable individuals with delusions to form and maintain erroneous beliefs. We propose a modified dual-stream processing model that provides a viable and testable mechanism that can account for this debilitating symptom. Dual-stream models divide decision-making into two streams: a fast, intuitive and automatic form of processing (Stream 1); and a slower, conscious and deliberative process (Stream 2). Our novel model proposes two key influences on the way these streams interact in everyday decision-making: conflict and emotion. Conflict: in most decision-making scenarios one obvious answer presents itself and the two streams converge onto the same conclusion. However, in instances where there are competing alternative possibilities, an individual often experiences dissonance, or a sense of conflict. The detection of this conflict biases processing towards the more deliberative Stream 2. Emotion: highly emotional states can result in behavior that is reflexive and action-oriented. This may be due to the power of emotionally valenced stimuli to bias reasoning towards Stream 1. We propose that in schizophrenia, an abnormal response to these two influences results in a pathological schism between Stream 1 and Stream 2, enabling erroneous intuitive explanations to coexist with contrary logical explanations of the same event. Specifically, we suggest that delusions are the result of a failure to reconcile the two streams due to both a failure of conflict to bias decision-making towards Stream 2 and an accentuated emotional bias towards Stream 1.

This fMRI study investigates neural activity associated with the interfering effects of emotional distracters. While in the scanner, participants made simple motor responses to target stimuli that were preceded and followed by positive, negative, or neutral images. Despite instructions to disregard the pictorial images, participants were slower to respond in the presence of positive or negative relative to neutral distracters, and significantly slower for negative relative to positive distracters. Enhanced activity in the amygdala and visual cortex was evident during trials that included positive and negative distracters. In contrast, increased activity in inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47) was only observed during trials that involved negative distracters. Connectivity analysis showed that activity in right amygdala correlated with activity in cingulate gyrus, posterior cingulate, middle temporal cortex, and was negatively correlated with activity in lateral superior frontal gyrus, middle frontal/orbital gyrus, and parietal cortex. The pattern of neural activity observed was interpreted within the framework of current cognitive models of attention. During a task demonstrating behavioural interference in the context of emotional distracters, increased activity in neural regions implicated in emotional processing (the amygdala) was associated with reduced activity in regions thought to be involved in exerting attentional control over task-relevant sensory representations (a frontoparietal network).

This study tested the convergence of behavioral inhibition measures across emotional and non-emotional versions of the same go/no-go task in 85 college students. The two tasks differed only in the stimuli used for trial cues (i.e., circles versus facial expressions). Moderate correlations (r = .51 to r = .56) between commission errors across the emotional and non-emotional tasks support the construct validity of behavioral inhibition. Further, parametric manipulation of preceding context had comparable effects on performance on the two tasks. Responses were slower and more variable, commission errors were more numerous, and perceptual sensitivity was lower on the emotional than the non-emotional task. A bias for happy faces on the emotional task resulted in faster responses and more commission errors for happy than sad faces despite marginally greater sensitivity for the latter. These results suggest that the basic neuropsychological constructs of the original go/no-go task were preserved in the emotional adaptation.

A widespread presumption in the law is that giving jurors nullification instructions would result in "chaos"-jurors guided not by law but by their emotions and personal biases. We propose a model of juror nullification that posits an interaction between the nature of the trial (viz. whether the fairness of the law is at issue), nullification instructions, and emotional biases on juror decision-making. Mock jurors considered a trial online which varied the presence a nullification instructions, whether the trial raised issues of the law's fairness (murder for profit vs. euthanasia), and emotionally biasing information (that affected jurors' liking for the victim). Only when jurors were in receipt of nullification instructions in a nullification-relevant trial were they sensitive to emotionally biasing information. Emotional biases did not affect evidence processing but did affect emotional reactions and verdicts, providing the strongest support to date for the chaos theory.

OBJECTIVES: Previous studies have reported deficits in selective attention and specific emotional biases in patients with bipolar (BP) disorder. The extent to which these distinguish BP patients from those with major depressive disorder (MDD) remain unclear. We aimed to examine the relationship between selective attentional impairments and emotional biases in symptomatic and euthymic BP, and symptomatic MDD patients. DESIGN: A between-group design was used. The time taken for BP patients to perform on Stroop tasks was compared with that in patients with MDD, and a normal healthy control group. METHODS: BP patients during manic (N = 14) and depressed (N = 13) episodes, and euthymia (N = 15), together with symptomatic patients with MDD (N = 17) and normal healthy controls (N = 18) were matched for IQ, gender, and age. Selective attention was measured using the Golden (1978) version of the Stroop task, and emotional bias, using the Lyon, Startup, and Bentall (1999) version of the emotional Stroop task. RESULTS: On the Card Stroop, all patients were significantly slower than normal healthy controls on all three conditions. On the emotional Stroop Test, all patients were slower on neutral, positive, and negative conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that both BP and MDD patients demonstrate impaired performance on neutral and emotionally salient attentionally demanding tasks. The finding of impaired performance in all patients on baseline conditions in each task, however, indicates the need for inclusion of additional baseline conditions in these tasks in order to elucidate the nature of attentional impairments specific to these patient populations.

BACKGROUND: Divergences in cognitive disturbances in hypothyroidism reported in the literature are a result of a methodological bias. METHODS: By using a precise methodology, we examined attention and executive functions in hypothyroidism, verified the presence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in hypothyroidism, and examined the possible link between these symptoms and the cognitive disturbances (searching for attentional bias for words with a negative emotional valence). We administered a battery of cognitive tests to 23 participants who had undergone thyroidectomy for thyroid carcinoma: for the first time in an euthyroid state, then 3 weeks later (still in the euthyroid state) to assess the test/retest effect, and finally 4 weeks later in an hypothyroid state. We compared their performance with that of a group of 26 control participants who were also administered the same cognitive tests, also 3 times. RESULTS: In hypothyroidism, the thyroid participants were more anxious and depressed than the controls and presented attentional and executive disturbances that reflected general slowing and difficulties in using their capacities of inhibition. However, they did not exhibit an attentional bias for words with a negative emotional valence. CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to what was expected, symptoms of anxiety and not symptoms of depression interfered with the cognitive performance of participants in hypothyroidism.

The attentional blink (AB) is an important paradigm to probe attention, observed when a subject tries to change the focus of their attention as fast as possible from one target input to another, when a rapid stream of targets is presented. The movement of attention to a second target (T2) is most difficult at about 200-500 msecs after detection or recognition of a first target (T1). This period is the blink, when there is little awareness of T2. We present a simulation that probes the control aspect of the movement of attention through the blink. We then show how the simulation can be extended by addition of an emotional bias, and how this can help ameliorate the blink for emotionally affective stimuli.

OBJECTIVE: Antidepressants that increase serotonin or norepinephrine in the brain are effective in treating depression, but there is no neuropsychological account of how these changes relieve depressive states. Cognitive theories suggest that biases in information processing lead depressed patients to make unrealistically negative judgments about themselves and the world. METHOD: A single dose of the noradrenergic antidepressant reboxetine or placebo was administered to 24 healthy volunteers. Effects on emotional processing were assessed through facial expression recognition, emotional categorization, and emotional memory. RESULTS: On the three measures, reboxetine biased perception toward positive, rather than negative, information in the absence of changes in nonemotional performance or mood. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that a single dose of an antidepressant can increase the processing of positively valenced material in nondepressed volunteers. Antidepressants may therefore work in a manner similar to that of psychological treatments that aim to redress negative biases in information processing.

In this article, we characterize the relationship between natural aging and risky decision making through an integration of cognitive, emotional, and neurobiological theories on the effects of natural aging. Based on the existing evidence, we propose that the positiv- ity emotional bias in elderly adults steers them away from taking high risks and toward more conservative approaches during decision making as part of their positive emotional regulatory strategies. However, aging is also associated with marked declines in cognitive functioning, such as attention and working memory, as well as impaired reinforcement-based associative learning, which arises from anatomical and functional declines in the dopaminergic transmission systems and in distinct brain regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. In consequence, elderly adults may deviate from their usual conservative stance and toward more risk-taking tendencies, as observed in a subset of studies, if the demands of the risk-taking task exceed their cognitive and learning capacities. More empirical investigations are needed to determine the key factors that influence elderly individuals' decision making and behavior in risky situations. Research in this field is likely to have important practical implications for the financial and medical decision making of elderly adults, as well as promoting designated help targeting the elderly population in making important life decisions.

There is a large set of cognitive abilities involved in the understanding and regulation of emotions, known collectively as emotional intelligence. This chapter aims to address some of the major developments in this domain. It commences with a discussion on early concept formation, including children's understanding of the link between situation and emotion. Then, the chapter discusses the development of emotional knowledge within the more general context of the development of a theory of mind. It shows how children's increasing abilities to analyse cognitively emotional situations result in the understanding of more complex emotions such as guilt, shame and pride. After a note on emotion regulation, the chapter addresses the reciprocal relation between cognition and emotion, discussing examples of a so-called emotional bias. It suggests that problematic development may be countered by early interventions along the lines of cognitive behaviour therapy.

Sixteen right-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) and 16 left-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) were presented with cartoon faces expressing emotions ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative. A forced-choice paradigm was used in which the participants were asked to rate the faces as either positive or negative. Compared to men, women rated faces more positively, especially in response to right visual field presentations. Women rated neutral and mildly positive faces more positively in the right than in the left visual field, whereas men rated these faces consistently across visual fields. Handedness did not affect the ratings of emotion. The data suggest a positive emotional bias of the left hemisphere in women. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

With so much research into the biological causes of depression, it might seem tempting to ignore the relevance of other theoretical perspectives. However, that would be shortsighted. The more traditional psychological theories, despite their many theoretical and methodological flaws, must also be considered. Because of the emotional bias so strongly associated with depression, psychological theories provide the basis for therapy and are profoundly influential in that regard. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate some of the more traditional and widespread theories as to the causes of depression. However, before introducing these therapies, I argue that it is more illuminating to group together some of the major theoretical limitations shared by these psychological explanations of depression.

Introduction Deficits in decoding emotion facial expressions have been reported in depressed patients and in subclinical depression. These deficits would be related to an attentional bias towards negative vs. positive expressions in the late stages of face processing. Such emotional bias would be a vulnerability factor for depression. Vulnerability to depressed mood has also been related to specific personality patterns (namely: high harm avoidance and low selfdirectedness) and it was advanced that personality-related differences in emotional stimulus processing might mediate this vulnerability. Objectives Therefore, the present study aims to precise the role of personality in emotion facial expression perception deficits in subclinical depression, by the mean of event-related potentials (ERPs). Methods ERPs were recorded in 21 subclinically depressed participants and 18 not-depressed ones, while they were presented neutral and emotional faces (happy, sad, fearful). Results The results show that in subclinically depressed participants only, happy faces elicited smaller P300 and LPP amplitudes than both negative and neutral faces, while earlier processing stages were not modulated by depressed mood. Covariance analysis indicated that these modulations are related to the decreased selfdirectedness reported in subclinically depressed participants, but not to increased harm avoidance. Conclusions These results suggest that harm avoidance would be independent from the specific bias of emotional face processing related to depressed mood, whereas selfdirectedness would be involved in this phenomenon. The results will be discussed regarding clinical implications.

University students in either an optimistic or pessimistic mood state read brief stories of daily life events as event-related brain potentials were collected during the final word of each story. For subjects in a pessimistic mood, a bias to expect negative outcomes was seen as an N400/P300 effect over posterior scalp regions. For subjects in an optimistic mood, a differentiation between good and bad outcomes was also observed, but it was specific to medial frontal areas. Analysis of single-trial P300 latencies suggested that semantically incongruent and mood-incongruent outcome words resulted in increased median latency of the late positive complex (LPC) and resulted in increased variability of LPC latency across trials.

Introduction The normothymic phase in bipolar disorders is generally considered to be symptom-free, which is controversial. Many authors emphasize that residual symptoms, such as emotional reactivity disturbance, are under-evaluated. Aims The aim of this study was to compare emotional reactivity between normothymic bipolar patients and healthy controls. Methods We evaluated emotional reactivity in 26 normothymic bipolar patients and 30 controls, using an emotional induction method based on the viewing of a set of 36 pictures (12 negative, 12 neutral, 12 positive) extracted from the International Affective Picture System. We evaluated subjective emotional reactivity (valence and arousal) with the Self-Assessment of Manikin and physiological reactivity measuring the pupil response with an eye-tracking material. Results No difference was found between normothymic bipolar patients and controls regarding the subjective emotional reactivity. However, the dilatation of the pupil was significantly lower in normothymic bipolar patients during the viewing of positive pictures (p Conclusions Compared to controls, normothymic bipolar patients had less emotional reactivity to positive valence. This result is in coherence with the more frequent negative emotional bias (sadness, anxiety and anger) observed usually in bipolar patients. These preliminary results need to be replicated.

Imaging studies have revealed a putative neural account of emotional bias in decision making. However, it has been difficult in previous studies to identify the causal role of the different sub-regions involved in decision making. The Ultimatum Game (UG) is a game to study the punishment of norm-violating behavior. In a previous influential paper on UG it was suggested that frontal insular cortex has a pivotal role in the rejection response. This view has not been reconciled with a vast literature that attributes a crucial role in emotional decision making to a subcortical structure (i.e., amygdala). In this study we propose an anatomy-informed model that may join these views. We also present a design that detects the functional anatomical response to unfair proposals in a subcortical network that mediates rapid reactive responses. We used a functional MRI paradigm to study the early components of decision making and challenged our paradigm with the introduction of a pharmacological intervention to perturb the elicited behavioral and neural response. Benzodiazepine treatment decreased the rejection rate (from 37.6% to 19.0%) concomitantly with a diminished amygdala response to unfair proposals, and this in spite of an unchanged feeling of unfairness and unchanged insular response. In the control group, rejection was directly linked to an increase in amygdala activity. These results allow a functional anatomical detection of the early neural components of rejection associated with the initial reactive emotional response. Thus, the act of immediate rejection seems to be mediated by the limbic system and is not solely driven by cortical processes, as previously suggested. Our results also prompt an ethical discussion as we demonstrated that a commonly used drug influences core functions in the human brain that underlie individual autonomy and economic decision making., Author Summary It is well-established that emotions influence decision making. One way of studying this relationship is the Ultimatum Game, which has revealed that subjects punish unfair behavior in others in spite of receiving a concomitant economic loss. Previous brain imaging studies have suggested that this decision to punish involves complex cortical processing. However, punishment also involves an instant aggressive emotional response, a behavior often linked to subcortical structures such as the amygdala. In this study, we present a model that joins these views. We designed a paradigm that allows us to measure the activity of subcortical brain regions during decision making in the Ultimatum Game, while at the same time using a pharmacological approach that can suppress emotional responses and amygdala activity. The pharmacological treatment made subjects punish unfair behavior less, and decreased brain activity in the amygdala in response to unfair proposals, without changing the subjects' feeling of unfairness. In the control group, punishment was directly linked to an increase in amygdala activity. Thus, immediate punishment of unfair behavior involves the amygdala and is not solely driven by cortical processes, as previously suggested. Our results show that a commonly used drug influences autonomy and decision making, which may have ethical implications for its use.