{"title":"Early identification of taboo words reveals a prominent role of semantic information in visual word recognition.","authors":"Simone Sulpizio, Michele Scaltritti","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2488986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2488986","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This research used the progressive demasking paradigm to investigate whether perceptual word identification is facilitated by semantic information. Experiment 1 revealed faster identification for taboo than neutral words. Experiment 2 revealed faster identification for taboo than emotionally-comparable non-taboo words, whereas the difference with respect to neutral words was possibly mitigated by list-wise factors related to list composition. Moreover, the facilitation for taboo words was impervious to habituation. The taboo connotation advantage seemingly originates from the attentional capture triggered by tabooness, a socio-culturally determined semantic feature that, under appropriate contextual conditions, modulates perceptual word identification. Our results suggest that (a) semantic processing is a pervasive component of any task involving word processing, and (b) when semantic information does not hinder the main task, it may influence even the earliest stages of word perceptual identification.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143812498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mike Doswell, Abbie N Abe, Christy Oi Ting Kwok, Lawrence M Ward
{"title":"Are emotional stimuli prioritised in visual awareness?","authors":"Mike Doswell, Abbie N Abe, Christy Oi Ting Kwok, Lawrence M Ward","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2483288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2483288","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although various features of visual stimuli have been shown to affect access to awareness, it is still unclear whether and to what extent emotional stimuli have privileged access to visual awareness. We conducted three online experiments, using a breaking Repeated Masked Suppression (bRMS) paradigm, to assess whether positively and negatively valenced/high-arousal photographs would emerge from masking (break out of forward/backward masking by image-unique masks) faster than would neutral/low-arousal photographs. Experiment 1 found that positively-valenced high-arousal pictures were faster to break out of repeated masked suppression. Experiment 2 showed that this was not because such pictures were substantially more memorable. Experiment 3 used a verbal rather than pictorial method to check for accuracy of breakout, and found similar results to Experiment 1. We also found that various pictorial qualities had either no effect, or only a minor effect, on our results. Importantly, images of people and animals consistently showed the shortest breakout times, indicating that such stimuli might be especially available to conscious access. However, a difference in the distribution of images of people (fastest) and scenes (slowest) images across the valence categories may have also contributed to the overall shorter breakout times of positively-valenced images.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143781393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Bettina Zengel, John J Skowronski
{"title":"Remembrance of things past: temporal change in the affective signature of nostalgic events.","authors":"Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Bettina Zengel, John J Skowronski","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2484646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2484646","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We examined, through retrospective reports, the affect and emotion changes over time (from event occurrence to event recall) that characterise nostalgic events, and how those changes differ from the affect and emotion changes that characterise ordinary (Experiment 1) or neutral (Experiment 2) control events. In both experiments, nostalgic (but not control) events were characterised by a combined fading of positive affect and intensification of negative affect over time. Yet, nostalgic events were associated with more positive affect than control events, particularly at occurrence, but also at recall. In Experiment 1, this positivity of nostalgic (compared to control) events was a plausible statistical mediator of nostalgia's psychological benefits. In Experiment 2, the fading of positive affect and intensification of negative affect associated with nostalgic events were plausibly mediated by, respectively, increases in the discrete emotions of regret and loneliness from event occurrence to event recall.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The closer you are, the more it hurts: the impact of proximity on moral decision-making.","authors":"Federica Alfeo, Antonietta Curci, Tiziana Lanciano","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2484358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2484358","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Moral dilemmas arise when individuals must navigate conflicts between competing moral principles. Sacrificial dilemmas are widely used to examine factors influencing decision-making (DM). This study explored how proximity affects moral DM using computer-based interactive videos depicting variations of the Footbridge Dilemma, aiming to clarify how contextual factors shape moral evaluations. In Study 1, scenarios required varying levels of physical proximity between the decision-maker and the victim, mirroring real-world behavioural patterns. Participants' choices (utilitarian vs. deontological), response times (RTs), and emotional responses (factual and counterfactual) were analysed. Study 2 controlled for action type while manipulating only the visual representation of distance, allowing for an isolated examination of perceived proximity's impact. The findings suggest that significant differences in physical perceived distance influence moral choices, whereas minor variations do not meaningfully affect decisions. Counterfactual emotions emerged as key drivers of moral judgment, shaping participants' responses to dilemmas. Future research should extend these findings to non-hypothetical contexts. The implications span clinical practice, legal systems, and artificial intelligence, offering insights for both theoretical advancements and practical applications.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The role of episodic retrieval in evaluative conditioning: evaluative conditioning effects differ depending on the temporal distance to the last stimulus pairing.","authors":"Jasmin Richter, Carina G Giesen","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2481108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2481108","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Liking of a previously neutral stimulus can change based on co-occurrences with positive or negative stimuli, a phenomenon denoted evaluative conditioning (EC). Prior research suggests that EC depends on information about previous stimulus pairings that is remembered when the neutral stimulus is evaluated. According to recent findings from contingency learning, the temporal distance to the last occurrence of a given stimulus determines which information about its previous occurrences is retrieved, favouring recent information after short temporal delays and frequent information after longer delays. In this research, we tested whether EC follows the same retrieval principles. Across three online experiments, we found that EC reflected the valence of the most recently paired valence, but not of the most frequently paired valence, when measured shortly after a pairing. Conversely, when measured after a longer temporal interval, EC reflected the most frequently paired valence, but not the most recently paired valence. These results support a role of episodic memory and retrieval in EC. Our research highlights parallels to contingency learning and suggests that episodic memory processes govern various types of learning resulting from stimulus contingencies.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143701855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aida Gutiérrez-García, Mario Del Líbano, Andrés Fernández-Martín, Manuel G Calvo
{"title":"A smile hampers encoding and memory for non-happy eyes in a face: temporal dynamics and importance of initial fixation.","authors":"Aida Gutiérrez-García, Mario Del Líbano, Andrés Fernández-Martín, Manuel G Calvo","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2479175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2479175","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Blended facial expressions with a smiling mouth but non-happy eyes (neutral, sad, etc.) are often (incorrectly) judged as \"happy\". We investigated the time course of this phenomenon, both forward and backward. To do this, we varied the <i>order of presentation</i> of a prime stimulus (upper half of a face) and a probe (lower half of a face) stimulus, and their <i>display durations</i>. The forward and the backward influence of the smile was assessed when the mouth was seen before or after the eyes. Participants categorised the eye expression when the mouth and the eyes were <i>congruent</i> or <i>incongruent</i>. Results showed that, as a forward prime, a smiling mouth biased the recognition of incongruent (non-happy) eyes as if they were happy. The effect started as early as 100 ms and dissipated by 1000 ms. As a backward prime, the smile also biased recognition of non-happy eye expressions as happy for at least the first 300 ms. These results suggest, respectively, that the presence of a smiling mouth impairs the accurate encoding and memory for non-happy eyes. Angry eyes are the least susceptible to this effect, probably due to their distinctiveness. An alternative response (rather than sensitivity) bias was partially ruled out.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143659161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ryan Lundell-Creagh, Maria Monroy, Joseph Ocampo, Dacher Keltner
{"title":"Blocking lower facial features reduces emotion identification accuracy in static faces and full body dynamic expressions.","authors":"Ryan Lundell-Creagh, Maria Monroy, Joseph Ocampo, Dacher Keltner","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2477745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2477745","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>During COVID, much of the world wore masks covering their lower faces to prevent the spread of disease. These masks cover lower facial features, but how vital are these lower facial features to the recognition of facial expressions of emotion? Going beyond the Ekman 6 emotions, in Study 1 (<i>N</i> = 372), we used a multilevel logistic regression to examine how artificially rendered masks influence emotion recognition from static photos of facial muscle configurations for many commonly experienced positive and negative emotions. On average, masks reduced emotion recognition accuracy by 17% percent for negative emotions and 23% for positive emotions. In Study 2 (<i>N</i> = 338), we asked whether these results generalised to multimodal full-body expressions of emotions, accompanied by vocal expressions. Participants viewed videos from a previously validated set, where the lower facial features were blurred from the nose down. Here, though the decreases in emotion recognition were noticeably less pronounced, highlighting the power of multimodal information, we did see important decreases for certain specific emotions and for positive emotions overall. Results are discussed in the context of the social and emotional consequences of compromised emotion recognition, as well as the unique facial features which accompany certain emotions.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143651427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Similarities in emotion perception from faces and voices: evidence from emotion sorting tasks.","authors":"Nadine Lavan, Aleena Ahmed, Chantelle Tyrene Oteng, Munira Aden, Luisa Nasciemento-Krüger, Zahra Raffiq, Isabelle Mareschal","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2478478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2478478","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Emotions are expressed via many features including facial displays, vocal intonation, and touch, and perceivers can often interpret emotional displays across the different modalities with high accuracy. Here, we examine how emotion perception from faces and voices relates to one another, probing individual differences in emotion recognition abilities across visual and auditory modalities. We developed a novel emotion sorting task, in which participants were tasked with freely grouping different stimuli into perceived emotional categories, without requiring pre-defined emotion labels. Participants completed two emotion sorting tasks, one using silent videos of facial expressions, the other with audio recordings of vocal expressions. We furthermore manipulated the emotional intensity, contrasting more subtle, lower intensity vs higher intensity emotion portrayals. We find that participants' performance on the emotion sorting task was similar for face and voice stimuli. As expected, performance was lower when stimuli were of low emotional intensity. Consistent with previous reports, we find that task performance was positively correlated across the two modalities. Our findings show that emotion perception in the visual and auditory modalities may be underpinned by similar and/or shared processes, highlighting that emotion sorting tasks are powerful paradigms to investigate emotion recognition from voices, cross-modal and multimodal emotion recognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143634698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chelsea A Reid, Jeffrey D Green, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Devin K McSween, Sophie Buchmaier
{"title":"Food nostalgia and food comfort: the role of social connectedness.","authors":"Chelsea A Reid, Jeffrey D Green, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Devin K McSween, Sophie Buchmaier","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2479170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2479170","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We were concerned with the link between nostalgia and comfort in food experiences. In Studies 1 and 2, participants visualised 12 foods (Study 1) or consumed 12 flavour samples (Study 2). Following each respective food experience, they rated each food's capacity to evoke nostalgia and comfort. In preregistered Studies 3 and 4, participants first visualised and wrote about eating either a personally nostalgic food or a regularly consumed food, and then indicated the extent to which the food experience increased nostalgia, social connectedness, and comfort. In cross-sectional Studies 1 and 2, nostalgia associated with food experiences was linked to more comfort, but this relation exhibited greater complexity in experimental Studies 3 and 4. In the latter two studies, nostalgia for food experiences elevated comfort by strengthening social connectedness.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143634689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The past that ties us together: nostalgia strengthens social networks.","authors":"Kuan-Ju Huang, Ya-Hui Chang","doi":"10.1080/02699931.2025.2451313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2451313","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Some people are more prone to experience and value nostalgia - an emotion that often reminds us of important relationships - than others. In this research, we propose that this propensity may not only influence how we remember our social ties, but also directly affect the structure of our social network. Across three studies involving undergraduate students, online panel participants, and a population-based longitudinal sample (<i>N</i> = 1,467), we found that trait-like nostalgia was associated with increased motivation to maintain social networks, which in turn predicted the number of close social ties. In other words, those who value nostalgia and experience it more frequently are more motivated to strengthen important relationships, which helps mitigate the loss of these bonds over the life span. These findings contribute to our understanding of the social nature of nostalgia and highlight its role in regulating our social networks.</p>","PeriodicalId":48412,"journal":{"name":"Cognition & Emotion","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143617656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}