The ability to detect and respond to chemosensory threat cues in the environment plays a vital role in survival across species. However, little is known about which chemical compounds can act as olfactory threat signals in humans. We hypothesized that brief exposure to putrescine, a chemical compound produced by the breakdown of fatty acids in the decaying tissue of dead bodies, can function as a chemosensory warning signal, activating threat management responses (e.g., heightened alertness, fight-or-flight responses). This hypothesis was tested (...) by gaging people’s responses to conscious and non-conscious exposure to putrescine. In Experiment 1, putrescine increased vigilance, as measured by a reaction time task. In Experiments 2 and 3, brief exposure to putrescine (vs. ammonia and a scentless control condition) prompted participants to walk away faster from the exposure site. Experiment 3 also showed that putrescine elicited implicit cognitions related to escape and threat. Experiment 4 found that exposure to putrescine, presented here below the threshold of conscious awareness, increased hostility toward an out-group member. Together, the results are the first to indicate that humans can process putrescine as a warning signal that mobilizes protective responses to deal with relevant threats. The implications of these results are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousness is, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.

Emotion plays an important role in securing social stability. But while emotions like fear, anger, and guilt have received much attention in this context, little work has been done to understand the role that anxiety plays. That’s unfortunate. I argue that a particular form of anxiety—what I call ‘practical anxiety’—plays an important, but as of yet unrecognized, role in norm-based social regulation. More specifically, it provides a valuable form of metacognition, one that contributes to social stability by helping individuals negotiate (...) the challenges that come from having to act in the face of unclear norms. (shrink)

The last 25 years have seen advances in our understanding of the neuroscience and neuropsychiatry of fear. From the basic brain mechanisms of fear to new evidence-based treatments for the pathologies of fear, the field has experienced progress towards an understanding of the underpinnings of fear in the brain and its influence on behaviors. Yet, to date, there has been less than ideal incorporation of these new findings, insights and models into the public policy and economic domains. Even when notions (...) of risk, uncertainty, and emotional decision-making are discussed, these discussions may not access insights from the latest contemporary neuroscience of fear, or clinical techniques in changing pathological fear responses. This paper will explore how a more complete incorporation of these advances may contribute to our understanding of fear and its management. Applying these advances in specific amenable policy areas may lead to new, more effective approaches to public and economic policies. (shrink)

Countless studies have reported that individuals detect threatening/angry faces faster than happy/neutral faces. Two classic views have been used to explain this phenomenon—that negative valence drives the effect, or conversely, that low-level perceptual characteristics of the stimuli are responsible for their rapid detection. In the current review, I question whether dichotomous perspectives are the most parsimonious way to explain a large and inconsistent literature. Further, I argue that nondichotomous, multicomponent accounts for the detection of emotionally valenced stimuli might help take (...) us beyond traditional approaches to visual detection research, and I suggest various ways in which future research can use these newer approaches to more effectively elucidate the mechanisms underlying the rapid detection of emotionally valenced stimuli. (shrink)

Diagnosing emotion disturbances should be informed by current knowledge about normal emotion processes. I identify four major functions of emotion as well as sources for potential dysfunctions and suggest that emotions should only be diagnosed as pathological when they are clearly dysfunctional, which requires considering eliciting events, realistic person-specific appraisal patterns, and adaptive responses or action tendencies. Evidence from actuarial research on the reported length of naturally occurring emotion episodes (including potential determinants) illustrates appropriateness criteria for the clinical evaluation of (...) emotion duration—an essential element in the DSM-5 symptom catalogue for major depression episodes, especially in bereavement. The need for more actuarial evidence on normal emotion responses and its consideration by the clinical community is highlighted. (shrink)

What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, (...) serving the 'somatic nervous system[. For this system, consciousness serves as a frame that constrains and directs skeletal muscle output, thereby yielding adaptive behavior. The mechanism by which consciousness achieves this is more counterintuitive, passive, and “low level” than the kinds of functions that theorists have previously attributed to consciousness. Passive frame theory begins to illuminate (a) what consciousness contributes to nervous function, (b) how consciousness achieves this function, and (c) the neuroanatomical substrates of conscious processes. Our untraditional, action-based perspective focuses on olfaction instead of on vision and is 'descriptive' (describing the products of nature as they evolved to be) rather than 'normative' (construing processes in terms of how they should function). Passive frame theory begins to isolate the neuroanatomical, cognitive-mechanistic, and representational (e.g., conscious contents) processes associated with consciousness. (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

Processing information in the context of personal survival scenarios elicits a memory advantage, relative to other rich encoding conditions such as self-referencing. However, previous research is unable to distinguish between the influence of survival and self-reference because personal survival is a self-referent encoding context. To resolve this issue, participants in the current study processed items in the context of their own survival and a familiar other person’s survival, as well as in a semantic context. Recognition memory for the items revealed (...) that personal survival elicited a memory advantage relative to semantic encoding, whereas other-survival did not. These findings reinforce suggestions that the survival effect is closely tied with self-referential encoding, ensuring that fitness information of potential importance to self is successfully retained in memory. (shrink)

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings , with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale , through which participants categorize “raw” visual experience, and post-decision wagering , which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR (...) measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives. (shrink)

The ability to rapidly detect facial expressions of anger and threat over other salient expressions has adaptive value across the lifespan. Although studies have demonstrated this threat superiority effect in adults, surprisingly little research has examined the development of this process over the childhood period. In this study, we examined the efficiency of children's facial processing in visual search tasks. In Experiment 1, children (N=49) aged 8 to 11 years were faster and more accurate in detecting angry target faces embedded (...) in neutral backgrounds than vice versa, and they were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face among angry than among neutral faces. This search pattern was unaffected by an increase in matrix size. Faster detection of angry than neutral deviants may reflect that angry faces stand out more among neutral faces than vice versa, or that detection of neutral faces is slowed by the presence of surrounding angry distracters. When keeping the background constant in Experiment 2, children (N=35) aged 8 to 11 years were faster and more accurate in detecting angry than sad or happy target faces among neutral background faces. Moreover, children with higher levels of anxiety were quicker to find both angry and sad faces whereas low anxious children showed an advantage for angry faces only. Results suggest a threat superiority effect in processing facial expressions in young children as in adults and that increased sensitivity for negative faces may be characteristic of children with anxiety problems. (shrink)

Appraisal and constructivist theories of emotion both emphasize that emotions are not modular phenomena, but are constructed from more basic psychological parts. In the scientific debate, differences between the two approaches are sometimes overplayed, by classifying appraisal theories as “natural kinds” models, and sometimes underplayed, by basically merging them into constructivist accounts. The aim of this contribution is to illustrate some similarities and some differences between contemporary appraisal and constructivist approaches, and to highlight the fact that appraisal theory has indeed (...) already confronted the idea of construction in the elicitation of emotion. In doing so, I want to argue that, while there is a distinction between appraisal and constructivist camps, it is not as stark as one might think, even though the names of the “ingredients” of emotions may differ. (shrink)

Research on emotion and emotion regulation is expected to improve our understanding of psychopathology. However, achieving this understanding requires overcoming several obstacles, including the paucity of objective markers of specific emotions or psychiatric diagnoses, and the fact that emotion regulation is a concept that can be difficult to operationalize. We review affective neuroscience research that has addressed these issues by focusing on psychological and neural mechanisms implicated in approach and avoidance behaviors, as revealed by studies of fear, anxiety, and reward (...) processing. Dysfunction in these mechanisms may serve as risk markers for psychopathology, while emotion regulation research demonstrates that some of them are susceptible to volitional control. The conclusion acknowledges limitations of affective neuroscience and highlights goals for future work. (shrink)

We agree with Archer that human sex differences in aggression are well explained by sexual selection, but note that explanations of human behaviors are not logically mutually exclusive from explanations and therefore should not be framed as such. We discuss why this type of framing hinders the development of both social learning and evolutionary theories of human behavior.

Mendelovici (forthcoming) has recently argued that (1) tracking theories of mental representation (including teleosemantics) are incompatible with the possibility of reliable misrepresentation and that (2) this is an important difficulty for them. Furthermore, she argues that this problem commits teleosemantics to an unjustified a priori rejection of color eliminativism. In this paper I argue that (1) teleosemantics can accommodate most cases of reliable misrepresentation, (2) those cases the theory fails to account for are not objectionable and (3) teleosemantics is not (...) committed to any problematic view on the color realism-antirealism debate. (shrink)

Today, certain rule-violating behaviours, such as doping, are considered to be an issue of concern for the sport community. This paper underlines and examines the affective dimensions involved in moral responses to, and attitudes towards, rule-violating behaviours in sport. The key role played by affective processes underlying individual-level moral judgement has already been implicated by recent developments in moral psychological theories, and by neurophysiological studies. However, we propose and discuss the possibility of affective processes operating on a social level which (...) may influence athletes' individual-level attitudes. We conclude that one-sided focus on individual rule-violating behaviour and individual sanctions may prove to be ineffective in coming to terms with the issue. In this regard we recommend a twofold approach by addressing underlying social dimensions, along with preventive measures through affect-oriented education. (shrink)

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

In this introduction, we give a brief overview of the main concepts of modularity that have been offered in recent literature. After this, we turn to a summary of the papers collected in this volume. Our primary aim is to explain how the modularity of emotion question relates to traditional debates in emotion theory.

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the mechanism for emotion induction, a (...) cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of numeracy and the emotion of fear on the decision-making process. While previous research demonstrated that these factors are independently related to search effort, search policy and choice in a decision from experience task, less is known about how their interaction contributes to processing information under uncertainty. We attempted to address this problem and to fill this gap. In the present study, we hypothesized that more numerate people would sample more (...) information about a decision problem and that the effect of fear would depend on the source of this emotion: whether it is integral (i.e., relevant) or incidental (i.e., irrelevant) to a decision problem. Additionally, we tested how these factors predict choices. We addressed these hypotheses in a series of two experiments. In each experiment, we used a sampling paradigm to measure search effort, search policy and choice in nine binary problems included in a decision from experience task. In Experiment 1, before the sampling task we elicited incidental fear by asking participants to recall fearful events from their life. In Experiment 2, integral fear was elicited by asking participants to make choices concerning medical treatment. Decision problems and their payoff distributions were the same in the two experiments and across each condition. In both experiments, we assessed objective statistical numeracy and controlled for a change in the current emotional state. We found that more numerate people sampled more information about a decision problem and switched less frequently between alternatives. Incidental fear marginally predicted search effort. Integral fear led to larger sample sizes, but only among more numerate people. Neither numeracy nor fear were related to the number of choices that maximized expected values. However, across two experiments sample sizes predicted the number of choices that maximized experienced mean returns. The findings suggest that people with higher numeracy may be more sensitive to integral emotions; this may result in more effortful sampling of relevant information leading to choices maximizing experienced returns. (shrink)

The interocular suppression technique termed continuous flash suppression (CFS) has become an immensely popular tool for investigating visual processing outside of awareness. The emerging picture from studies using CFS is that extensive processing of a visual stimulus, including its semantic and affective content, occurs despite suppression from awareness of that stimulus by CFS. However, the current implementation of CFS in many studies examining processing outside of awareness has several drawbacks that may be improved upon for future studies using CFS. In (...) this paper, we address some of those shortcomings, particularly ones that affect the assessment of unawareness during CFS, and ones to do with the use of ‘visible’ conditions that are often included as a comparison to a CFS condition. We also discuss potential biases in stimulus processing as a result of spatial attention and feature-selective suppression. We suggest practical guidelines that minimize the effects of those limitations in using CFS to study visual processing outside of awareness. (shrink)

Although nascent research has begun to examine the consequences of perfectionism in organizations, the understanding of whether perfectionism may incur ethical costs in the workplace remains limited. This paper enhances knowledge about the potential ethical consequences of perfectionism by focusing on an important yet previously ignored behavior—workplace cheating. Across two multi-wave, multi-industry survey studies and a preregistered experiment (Ntotal = 1005), the results show that the relationship between employee perfectionism and workplace cheating depends on the dimension of perfectionism. We find (...) that employees with a high level of perfectionistic concerns (as opposed to perfectionistic strivings) may cheat in the workplace due to elevated fear of performance failure. In addition, supervisor bottom-line mentality exacerbates concern perfectionists’ fear of performance failure, leading to more cheating. Our findings hold even when several alternative explanations are accounted for, suggesting the robustness of our results. Theoretical and practical implications and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the concept of attentional scaffolds and show the resemblance between social media platforms and slot machines, both functioning as hostile attentional scaffolds. The first section establishes the groundwork for the concept of attentional scaffolds and draws parallels to the mechanics of slot machines, to argue that social media platforms aim to capture users’ attention to maximize engagement through a system of intermittent rewards. The second section shifts focus to the interplay between emotions and attention, revealing (...) how online attentional capture through emotionally triggering stimuli leads to distraction. The final section elucidates the collective implications of scaffolding attention through social media platforms. The examination of phenomena such as emotional contagion and the emergence of group emotions underscores the transition from individual experiences to shared collective outcomes. Employing online moral outrage as a case study, we illustrate how negative emotions serve as scaffolds for individuals’ attention, propagate within social groups, and give rise to collective attitudes. (shrink)

Interactionism holds that explanatory and interpretive projects are mutually enriching. If so, then the evolutionary and cognitive science of religions’ explanatory theories should aid interpretive projects concerning religious meaning. Although interpretive accounts typically focus on the local and the particular, interpreters over the past century have construed Freud and Marx as offering general interpretive theories. So, precedent for general interpretive theorizing exists. 4E cognitive science, which champions how cognition is embedded in natural and cultural settings, extended into external structures, enacted (...) via motor routines, and embodied via representations rooted in human bodily form, has encouraged interpretive researchers. Theories of embodied cognition especially have embraced a sweeping view of meaning that attends to the emotions’ role and to their evolutionary origins. That inspires a 6E cognitive science that attends to the emotional and evolved dimensions of cognition too and opens up the possibility of general interpretive theories of broadly Darwinian character. Evolved cognitive systems qualify as maturationally natural cognition, which exhibits a distinctive constellation of features. The by-product theory holds that religious representations’ engagement of maturationally natural cognition fosters religions’ success. Representations with some minimal violation of intuitive expectations concerning some ontological category grab attention, stick in memory, and preserve the many automatic inferences accompanying the category. The empirical evidence for this and other elaborations of the by-product view suggests that it discloses dynamics of evolved cognition and associated emotions that tend to guide the pursuit of religious meanings systematically toward well-worn grooves in the semantic landscape. (shrink)

The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficulties. We illustrate how shifting the (...) emphasis from false belief to recalcitrant fear can supplement a number of different non‐doxastic models of AN. (shrink)

Angry faces have been shown to be detected more efficiently in a crowd of distractors compared to happy faces, known as the anger superiority effect (ASE). The present study investigated whether the ASE could be modified by top-down manipulation of working memory (WM), in central and peripheral visual fields. In central vision, participants held a colour in WM for a final memory test while simultaneously performing a visual search task that required them to determine whether a face showed a different (...) expression from other coloured faces. The colour held in WM matched either the colour of the target face (target-matching), the colour of a distractor face (distractor-matching), or neither (non-matching). Results showed that the ASE was observed when the probability of target-matching trials was low. However, when the top-down WM effect was strengthened by raising the probability of target-matching trials, the ASE in the target-matching condition was completely eliminated. Intriguingly, when the visual search task was substituted by a peripheral crowding task, similar results to central vision were found in the target-matching condition. Taken together, our findings indicate that the ASE is subject to the top-down WM effect, regardless of the visual field. (shrink)

According to the pragmatic hypothesis testing theory, how much evidence we require before we believe something varies depending on the expected costs of falsely believing and disbelieving it. This theory has been used in the self-deception debate to explain our tendencies towards self-deceptive belief formation. This article argues that the application of this theory in the self-deception debate has overlooked the distinction between belief and acceptance, and that the theory in all likelihood models acceptance rather than belief, in which case (...) it is probably not relevant to the explanation of self-deception. It is suggested, however, that doxastic error costs might be relevant to explaining some types of self-deception, though they feature in an evolutionary explanation of it rather than a psychological one. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have developed indirect measurement procedures to predict suicidal behavior. A prominent example is the Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (DS-IAT). In this paper, I argue that there is something special about the DS-IAT which distinguishes it from different IAT measures. I argue that the DS-IAT does not measure weak or strong associations between the implicit self-concept and the abstract concept of death. In contrast, assuming a goal-system approach, I suggest that sorting death-related to self-related words takes effort because death-related (...) words trigger avoidance-impulses, which suicide ideation weakens. The DS-IAT taps into weakened automatic responses from the self-preservation system. Additionally, the suggested cognitive structure, illuminated with the selfish-goal theory, explains predictable suicidal behavior. (shrink)

Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...) for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people? -/- In the course of exploring these questions, the book also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research. (shrink)

The ability to learn cause–effect relations from experience is critical for humans to behave adaptively — to choose causes that bring about desired effects. However, traditional experiments on experience-based learning involve events that are artificially compressed in time so that all learning occurs over the course of minutes. These paradigms therefore exclusively rely upon working memory. In contrast, in real-world situations we need to be able to learn cause–effect relations over days and weeks, which necessitates long-term memory. 413 participants completed (...) a smartphone study, which compared learning a cause–effect relation one trial per day for 24 days versus the traditional paradigm of 24 trials back- to- back. Surprisingly, we found few differences between the short versus long timeframes. Subjects were able to accurately detect generative and preventive causal relations, and they exhibited illusory correlations in both the short and long timeframe tasks. These results provide initial evidence that experience-based learning over long timeframes exhibits similar strengths and weaknesses as in short timeframes. However, learning over long timeframes may become more impaired with more complex tasks. (shrink)