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L’approche incarnee de la cognition postule que toute activite cognitive s’ancre dans une experience perceptivo-sensori-motrice. De plus en plus presente dans le cadre des etudes en psychologie cognitive, cette approche se propage tout juste dans le champ du vieillissement cognitif normal et n’a jamais essaime les travaux relatifs aux modifications du traitement de l’information emotionnelle avec l’avancee en âge. A notre connaissance, aucune etude n’a tente de mettre en relation les modifications corporelles liees au vieillissement avec les changements emotionnels pour comprendre ces derniers a la lumiere de l’approche incarnee. Dans cette revue de la litterature, nous proposons une synthese des etudes abordant le vieillissement cognitif dans une perspective incarnee et presentons des donnees empiriques suggerant une deconnexion du lien entre l’experience corporelle et les sentiments eprouves. Ce dernier constat suggerant l’avenement d’une cognition moins incarnee avec l’âge est discute a la lumiere du cadre theorique de l’embodiment et mis en perspective avec la presentation de pistes d’investigation visant a mieux comprendre la nature des modifications a l’œuvre au cours du vieillissement.

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Ce chapitre porte sur la sagesse, abordée comme étant le fruit d’un apprentissage émotionnel tout au long de la vie. Il aborde ce que recouvre le concept de sagesse dans la littérature contemporaine en psychologie en décrivant les construits mentaux qui lui sont le plus souvent associés, tels et les liens existants entre la sagesse, l’âge de l’individu et les modifications émotionnelles qui associées à l’âge.

International audience; Studies on aging and hedonic judgment of odors have never been addressed within the empirical frameworks of age-related changes in emotion which state that advancing age is associated with a reduced negativity bias and a less pronounced differentiation between hedonic valence and emotional intensity judgments. Our aim was to examine and extend these age-related effects into the field of odors. Thirty-eight younger adults and 40 older adults were asked to evaluate the hedonic valence, emotional intensity, and familiarity of 50 odors controlled for their pleasantness. Compared to younger adults, older adults rated unpleasant odorants as less unpleasant and showed an increased relationship between hedonic valence and emotional intensity ratings. This yields evidence of reduced negativity bias and emotional dedifferentiation in response to odors. Such data suggest that when faced with odors, older people exhibit a reduction of emotional dimensionality leading them to distort emotional processing in a less negative direction.

Resume La notion de paradoxe de l’âge, c’est-a-dire l’idee qu’en depit des pertes vecues au plan physique, cognitif et social, le vieillissement serait synonyme d’un accroissement du niveau de bien-etre, est devenue centrale dans la litterature sur le vieillissement. Plusieurs contributions scientifiques ont debouche sur le concept d’« effet de positivite » faisant la part belle a l’hypothese que l’avancee en âge serait associee a une meilleure regulation emotionnelle. Cette representation du vieillissement comme synonyme d’une periode de la vie tournee vers la recherche d’un biais favorable par lequel on peut voir toute chose est progressivement venue remplacer celle, plus privative, de la vieillesse. Cette conception participe a promouvoir la notion du « bien vieillir » devenu un enjeu social et politique majeur dans nos societes occidentales. Elle souleve neanmoins multiple questions sur les causes, la nature et les conditions d’emergence des modifications du traitement de l’information avec l’âge. La presente note theorique a pour objectif de dresser un inventaire critique de deux categories distinctes de modeles theoriques, l’une issue du paradigme psychosocial, l’autre des recherches sur le vieillissement cerebral, afin d’offrir une analyse de leurs fondements, de leurs points communs et de leurs limites respectives dans un contexte empirique en pleine effervescence.

Emotion regulation is defined as an important mechanism for human adaptation. fMRI studies have recently highlighted its neural bases but most research uses visual stimulation to induce emotion, none of them using odorant stimulations. Nevertheless, olfaction is intimately linked to emotional processes, sharing some same neural bases and thus constitutes a valuable emotion-inducer in experimental conditions. The present study aims to determine the cerebral areas which might be involved in down-regulation, using pleasant and unpleasant odours as emotion-inducers. Eighteen subjects were scanned during 2 sequences of 12 stimulations, each with either a pleasant or an unpleasant odour. For one sequence, subjects were instructed to naturally experience their emotion induced by odour inhalation and for the other one, to decrease the intensity of their emotion. Consistent with previous work using emotion-inducers, emotion regulation resulted in higher activations of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula, but in lower activation of the amygdala. However, some areas (the posterior cerebellum and the orbitofrontal cortex) are less activated during regulation compared to maintain and thus appear to be specific to odorant stimulations. Finally the hedonic valence of the odour determines activations in different brain areas such as the supplementary motor area and the posterior cingulum. Thus, this study suggests abilities to regulate emotion in response to odours, involving brain areas usually described in the literature for other emotional stimuli, but also specific areas depending partly of the hedonic valence of the odour.

International audience; Many studies have examined the effect of aging on the ability to regulate negative emotions but less is known about the way the elderly people control their positive affects. Thirty-eight younger and 38 older adults were compared on their affective, expressive, physiological, and behavioral spontaneous responses to and in expressive regulation of mirth elicited by humorous cartoons. Compared to younger adults, older adults were equally amused and aroused but showed lower expressivity in their spontaneous reaction. They were similarly successful in implementing expressive regulation but they had lower physiological activation under amplification condition and more gaze avoidance from the key areas of the cartoons under suppression condition. This indicates that in older, amplification skills are disjointed from the physiological responses and suppression skills seem supplanted by a less costly strategy of attention redeployment. This also suggests that older adults’ behavior is not driven by a greater preference for positive information.

International audience; Previous studies yielded evidence for an interaction between age and valence in numerous cognitive processes. But, to date, no research has been conducted in the field of motor skills. In this study, we examined the age-related differences in the organization of an emotionally goal-directed locomotion task. Faced with a pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral picture displayed to the side of a stop button, younger and older adults were instructed to walk toward the button (intermediate goal) and push it to turn-off the picture (final goal). Kinematic and ground reaction forces were recorded. The main findings indicated that older adults' response times (RTs) did not differ across the valence picture. The fastest RTs were found in younger adults when faced with pleasant pictures, suggesting that older people may focus either on intermediate or final goals, depending on their value of pleasantness, and prioritize positive goals. We also found that the spatial coding of locomotion (trajectory and final body position) was affected in the same way by the valence of the intermediate goal in both age groups. Taken together, these findings provide new perspectives regarding the potential role of the emotional valence of the intermediate and final goals on the cognitive processes involved in action coding, such as in mental representations of action in older adults.

It has been suggested that intrinsic abilities for regulating emotions remain stable or improve with ageing, but, to date, no studies have examined age-related differences in extrinsic emotion regulation. Since humour has been found to be an effective form of emotion regulation, we used a paradigm similar to that of Strick and colleagues (2009) with two objectives: to compare extrinsic humorous emotion regulation in young and older adults and to test whether the potential beneficial effect of humour on negative emotion is better explained by the cognitive distraction hypothesis or by the positive affect elicitation hypothesis. To this end, neutral, moderately, and strongly negative pictures followed by humorous, simply positive, or weird cartoons, controlled for both their funniness and cognitive demands, were presented to 26 young and 25 older adults with the instruction to report their negative feelings. When induced to feel moderately negative emotions, both young and older adults reported a lower negative feeling after viewing the humorous cartoons than after the other ones. This indicates that the extrinsic humorous emotion regulation skill remains stable with ageing and suggests that the beneficial effect of humour on emotional feeling cannot be seen as a purely cognitive distraction.

When they have to memorize a picture, people usually build a memory trace including more extensive boundaries than the original picture, a phenomenon known as boundary extension or BE. This article looks at whether the emotion category expressed (i.e., happiness, pleasure, irritation, or anger) by actors in short films could have an influence on the BE effect. The results showed that positively valenced emotions (happiness, pleasure) led to an extension effect, while the negatively valenced ones (anger, irritation) did not produce any significant memory distortion. The arousal dimension of emotions had no significant effect on BE. The current results were discussed in the light of previous studies on the links between BE and emotions.

Do sexual words have high attentional priority? How does the ability to ignore sexual distractors evolve with age? To answer these questions, two experiments using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) were conducted. Experiment 1 showed that both younger and older participants were better at identifying a target (the name of a colour) when it was preceded by 336 ms by a sexual word rather than by a musical word. Strikingly, the sexual-word advantage was more pronounced for older adults than for younger adults. Experiment 2 showed that introducing a variable delay between the distractor and the target eliminated the sexual-word advantage. This finding suggests that the sexual-word advantage found in Experiment 1 was due to learning to utilize the sexual word as a temporal cue with a fixed duration between the distractor and the target. Contrary to previous research [Arnell et al., 2007, Emotion, 7, 465), neither experiment showed that sexual words produce an attentional blink.

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: To date, little is known about how advancing age may impact perception of emotions in music. This study was designed to test whether there are age-related changes in emotional judgments and psychological structure for musical emotions.Twenty-five older (64-81 years) and 25 younger (18-30 years) listeners performed emotional judgments and free categorization tasks on happy, peaceful, sad, and threatening musical excerpts. Correlations, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), and multidimensional scaling analyses were conducted to examine the effect of age on emotional judgments and categorization performances.Compared with younger adults, older adults did not discriminate the arousal difference between peaceful and threatening excerpts and showed higher association between arousal and valence judgments. The multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that the emotional space showed by older listeners did not fit younger listeners' bidimensional valence-arousal structure. There was also a better categorization for happy excerpts among the older group.Altogether, these data are consistent with the view that advancing age may result in the reduction of emotional complexity and a distortion of the emotional processing in a positive direction.

a b s t r a c t The current study examined the abilities of children (6 and 8 years of age) and adults to freely categorize and label dynamic bodily/ facial expressions designed to portray happiness, pleasure, anger, irritation, and neutrality and controlled for their level of valence, arousal, intensity, and authenticity. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses showed that children ( n = 52) and adults ( n = 33) structured expressions in systematic and broadly similar ways. Between 6 and 8 years of age, there was a quantitative, but not a qualitative, improvement in labeling. When exposed to rich and dynamic emotional cues, children as young as 6 years can successfully perceive differences between close expressions (e.g., happiness, pleasure), and can categorize them with clear boundaries between them, with the exception of irritation, which had fuzzier borders. Children’s classifications were not reliant on lexical semantic abilities and were consistent with a model of emotion categories based on their degree of valence and arousal.

Three experiments were conducted in order to validate 56 musical excerpts that conveyed four intended emotions (happiness, sadness, threat and peacefulness). In Experiment 1, the musical clips were rated in terms of how clearly the intended emotion was portrayed, and for valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, a gating paradigm was used to evaluate the course for emotion recognition. In Experiment 3, a dissimilarity judgement task and multidimensional scaling analysis were used to probe emotional content with no emotional labels. The results showed that emotions are easily recognised and discriminated on the basis of valence and arousal and with relative immediacy. Happy and sad excerpts were identified after the presentation of fewer than three musical events. With no labelling, emotion discrimination remained highly accurate and could be mapped on energetic and tense dimensions. The present study provides suitable musical material for research on emotions.

We examined liking for happy- and sad-sounding music as a function of exposure, which varied both in quantity (number of exposures) and in quality (focused or incidental listening). Liking ratings were higher for happy than for sad music after focused listening, but similar after incidental listening. In the incidental condition, liking ratings increased linearly as a function of exposure. In the focused condition, liking ratings were an inverted U-shaped function of exposure, with initial increases in liking (after 2 exposures) followed by decreases (after 8 or 32 exposures). The results documented that: (1) sad music is liked as much as happy music in some instances; (2) frequency of exposure causes both familiarity (positive) and over-familiarity (negative) effects; and (3) effects of exposure on liking differ for focused and incidental listening.

International audience; When presented with emotional visual scenes, older adults have been found to be equally capable to regulate emotion expression as younger adults, corroborating the view that emotion regulation skills are maintained or even improved in later adulthood. However, the possibility that gaze direction might help achieve an emotion control goal has not been taken into account, raising the question whether the effortful processing of expressive regulation is really spared from the general age-related decline. Since it does not allow perceptual attention to be redirected away from the emotional source, music provides a useful way to address this question. In the present study, affective, behavioral, and physiological consequences of free expression of emotion, expressive suppression and expressive enhancement were measured in 31 younger and 30 older adults while they listened to positive and negative musical excerpts. The main results indicated that compared to younger adults, older adults reported experiencing less emotional intensity in response to negative music during the free expression of emotion condition. No age difference was found in the ability to amplify or reduce emotional expressions. However, an age-related decline in the ability to reduce the intensity of emotional state and an age-related increase in physiological reactivity were found when participants were instructed to suppress negative expression. Taken together, the current data support previous findings suggesting an age-related change in response to music. They also corroborate the observation that older adults are as efficient as younger adults at controlling behavioral expression. But most importantly, they suggest that when faced with auditory sources of negative emotion, older age does not always confer a better ability to regulate emotions.

Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning (Experiment 1). The groupings were transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analysed through multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). A 3-dimensional space was found to provide a good fit of the data, with arousal and emotional valence as the primary dimensions. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the consistency of this 3-dimensional space using excerpts of only 1 second duration. The overall findings indicate that emotional responses to music are very stable within and between participants, and are weakly influenced by musical expertise and excerpt duration. These findings are discussed in light of a cognitive account of musical emotion.

Summary : Effect of an induced negative emotion on working memory task performance : the moderating effect of emotional state on storage and executive processes A shortage of cognitive resources is generally assumed to account for poor working memory (WM) performance in people experiencing a negative emotional state . However, no specifie hypothesis explains how this shortage is mediated. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of an experimentally induced negative emotion on WM storage and executive processes. A running span task of different complexity levels, according to the memory span and updating rate conditions, was completed by two groups of participants : a negative mood group and a neutral mood group. The results demonstrate an interaction effect between mood condition and complexity factors, showing the detrimental effect of a negative mood on WM performance. The discussion raises the question of whether the effect of negative mood impairs only WM executive functions or, in addition, the quality of memory traces, WM storage. Key words : working memory, running-span task, ressource allocation, mood induction., Résumé La détérioration des performances de mémoire de travail, observée chez des sujets faisant l'expérience d'un état émotionnel négatif, est le plus souvent interprétée comme la conséquence d'un déficit de ressources de traitement sans que les processus capables de la médiatiser soient toutefois spécifiés. Dans cette étude, une procédure expérimentale d'induction émotionnelle a été utilisée pour tester l'effet d'une émotion négative sur une tâche de Running Span dont le niveau de complexité a été contrôlé. Les résultats montrent une interaction entre le niveau de complexité et l'état émotionnel. Celle-ci se traduit, lorsque la complexité augmente, par une dégradation plus précoce des performances chez les sujets induits que chez les sujets témoins. La question de l'altération des processus exécutifs responsables de la mise à jour de l'information avec ou sans réduction de la qualité des traces stockées en MDT est discutée. Mots clés : mémoire de travail, tâche de Running Span, processus exécutifs, état émotionnel induit., Vieillard Sandrine, Bougeant Jean-Claude. Performances à un tâche de mémoire de travail sous induction émotionnelle négative : influence modulatrice de l'état émotionnel sur les processus exécutifs. In: L'année psychologique. 2005 vol. 105, n°1. pp. 63-104.

Older adults, compared to younger adults, are more likely to attend to pleasant situations and avoid unpleasant ones. Yet, it is unclear whether such a phenomenon may be generalized to musical emotions. In this study, we investigated whether there is an age-related difference in how musical emotions are experienced and how positive and negative music influences attention performances in a target identification task. Thirty-one young and twenty-eight older adults were presented with 40 musical excerpts conveying happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and threat. While listening to music, participants were asked to rate their feelings and monitor each excerpt for the occurrence of an auditory target. Compared to younger adults, older adults reported experiencing weaker emotional activation when listening to threatening music and showed higher level of liking for happy music. Correct reaction times (RTs) for target identification were longer for threatening than for happy music in older adults but not in younger adults. This suggests that older adults benefit from a positive musical context and can regulate emotion elicited by negative music by decreasing attention towards it (and therefore towards the auditory target).

International audience; There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music. In the present study, eighteen older (60–84 years) and eighteen younger (19–24 years) listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a) reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b) showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c) were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d) showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity.

This study was designed to investigate how emotion category, characterized by distinct musical structures (happiness, sadness, threat) and expressiveness (mechanical, expressive) may influence overt and covert behavioral judgments and physiological responses in musically trained and untrained listeners. Mechanical and expressive versions of happy, sad and scary excerpts were presented while physiological measures were recorded. Participants rated the intensity of the emotion they felt. In addition, they monitored excerpts for the presence of brief breaths. Results showed that the emotion categories were rated higher in the expressive than in the mechanical versions and that this effect was larger in musicians. Moreover, expressive excerpts were found to increase skin conductance level more than the mechanical ones, independently of their arousal value, and to slow down response times in the breath detection task relative to the mechanical versions, suggesting enhanced capture of attention by expressiveness. Altogether, the results support the key role of the performer’s expression in the listener’s emotional response to music.

Listeners responded continuously at the world and North American premiere concerts of The Angel of Death by Roger Reynolds using one of two rating scales: familiarity or resemblance of musical materials within the piece and emotional force. Two versions of the piece were tested in each concert in different presentation orders. Functional data analysis revealed the influence of large-scale musical form and context on recognition processes and emotional reactions during ongoing listening. The instantaneous resemblance to materials already heard up to that point in the piece demonstrates strong relations to the sectional structure of the music and suggests different memory dynamics for different kinds of musical structures. Emotional force ratings revealed the impact of computer-processed sounds and a diminution in emotional force with repetition of materials. Response profiles and global preferences across the two versions are discussed in terms of the multifaceted temporal shape of musical experience.

The present study investigates the effect of a change in instrumentation on the recognition of musical excerpts in Western contemporary and tonal music. The critical finding was a strong effect of timbre on the recognition of musical material that is modulated by both the extent of musical expertise and the musical style. Changing the instrumentation of musical excerpts from a piece by Reynolds considerably hampers recognition among musicians (Expts. 1 and 2), but not among nonmusicians, whose recognition was poor regardless of instrumentation. Both musicians and nonmusicians were affected by instrumentation change in excerpts from a symphonic poem by Liszt (Expt. 3). This finding suggests that timbre may contribute, along with pitch and rhythm, to the identity of musical materials. The difference found between musicians and nonmusicians with the Reynolds piece may be parsimoniously explained by the fact that the musicians were considerably more familiar with contemporary music than were the nonmusicians.

Free classification was used to explore similarity relations in contemporary musical materials. Thirty-four subsections from the five themes of The Angel of Death by Roger Reynolds were composed identically for piano (Expt. 1) and chamber orchestra (Expt. 2) in terms of pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. Listeners were asked to group together those judged to be musically similar and to describe the similarities between the subsections in each group. Listeners based their classifications on surface similarities related to tempo, rhythmic and melodic texture, pitch register, melodic contour, and articulation. They were to some extent also based on similarity of the mood evoked by the excerpts. This latter factor was more prominent in the verbalizations for the orchestral version. Instrumentation, timbre, and type of timbral change (smooth, disjunctive) also affected classifications in the orchestral version. Perceptual relations among thematic materials within the piece and the interaction of form-bearing dimensions in musical similarity perception are discussed.

cote interne IRCAM: Susini04b; None / None; National audience; The aim of the psychoacoustic study presented here was to characterize listeners' preferences for a set of sounds produced by different brands and models of indoor air-conditiong units. In addition, some synthetic sounds, created by interpolation between recorded sound samples, were integrated into the set. The multidimensional perceptual space and the corresponding physical space representative of the sound set were determined with multidimensional scaling (MDS). Then the preferences for different classes of listeners were related to the physical space. The best spatial model yielded by the MDS had three common dimensions and specifities. The three dimensions are correlated with the ratio of the noisy part of the spectrum to the harmonic part (NHR), with the spectral center of gravity (SC) and with loudness (N). Two classes of listeners can be distinguished in terms of preference. For one, preference varied primarily with loudness, whereas for the other it varied more with SC and NHR. However, for one class the preference grew with the parameter NHR, while it decreased for the other class. The results replicate under different laboratory conditions and indicate the usefulness of this sound quality assessment approach for characterizing appliance noises.

L’epilepsie du lobe temporal median est une epilepsie focale des plus courantes dont la pharmacoresistance elevee conduit frequemment a un recours chirurgical. Cet article a pour objectif de montrer, a travers quatre etudes de patients potentiellement candidats a la chirurgie, l’interet des bilans prechirurgicaux et notamment du bilan neuropsychologique contribuant a localiser le foyer epileptogene. Les trois premiers patients presentaient une sclerose hippocampique (SH), a gauche pour deux d’entre eux et a droite pour le dernier. Une dissociation a ete notee entre les performances en memoire verbale et visuelle, au detriment de la memoire verbale chez le patient ayant la SH gauche la plus marquee, et au detriment de la memoire visuelle chez le patient avec SH droite. Le quatrieme patient presentait une dysplasie corticale au niveau du noyau amygdalien droit. L’evaluation cognitive prechirurgicale a egalement permis de predire les risques cognitifs postchirurgicaux. Ce travail sera discute dans la perspective d’une validation d’une echelle de memoire verbale et visuelle a utiliser specifiquement dans ce cadre.