ABSTRACTIn earlier work we showed that individuals learn the spatial regularities within contexts and use this knowledge to guide detection of threatening targets embedded in these contexts. While it is highly adaptive for humans to use contextual learning to detect threats, it is equally adaptive for individuals to flexibly readjust behaviour when contexts once associated with threatening stimuli begin to be associated with benign stimuli, and vice versa. Here, we presented face targets varying in salience in new or old spatial (...) configurations and changed the target salience halfway through the experiment to examine if contextual learning changes with the change in target salience. Detection of threatening targets was faster in old than new configurations and this learning persisted even after the target changed to non-threatening. However, the same pattern was not seen when the targets changed from non-threatening... (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)

Conscious access to fear-relevant information is mediated by threshold The present report proposed a model of access consciousness to fear-relevant information according to which there is a threshold for emotional perception beyond that the subject makes hits with no false alarm. The model was examined by having the participants performed a confidence-ratings masking task with fearful faces. Measures of the thresholds for conscious access were taken by looking at the receiver operating characteristics curves generated from a three-state low- and high-threshold (...) model by Krantz. Indeed, the analysis of the masking data revealed that the ROCs had threshold-like-nature rather continuous challenging in this fashion the classical signal-detection view on perceptual processing. Moreover, the threshold ROC curve exhibited the specific y-intercepts relevant to conscious access performance. The study suggests that the threshold can be an intrinsic property of conscious access, mediating emotional contents between perceptual states and consciousness. (shrink)

The paper presents state of art in the area of emotion studies. It is stressed that emotions are multicomponent processes including neural, expression, subjective and social elements. We have tried to show that synchronization and coordination of these elements from elementary through intermediate to the most complex level may be understood in terms of emergent processes. Manifestations of emergence may be observed both in social aspects of emotions, as well as subjective and expression ones. Although the idea of emergent processes (...) was not explicitly used by contributors of this volume, the traces of it are present in their papers. (shrink)

Previous studies suggest that ancient threats capture attention because human beings possess an inborn module shaped by evolution and dedicated to their detection. An alternative account proposes that a key feature predicting whether a stimulus will capture attention is its relevance rather than its ontology. Within this framework, the present research deals with the attentional capture by threats commonly encountered in our urban environment. In two experiments, we investigate the attentional capture by modern threats. In Experiment 1, participants responded to (...) a target preceded by a cue, which was a weapon or a non-threatening stimulus. We found a larger cuing effect with weapons as compared with non-threatening cues. In Experiment 2, modern and ancient threats were pitted against one another as cues to determine which ones preferentially capture attention. Crucially, participants were faster to detect a target preceded by a modern as opposed to an ancient threat, providing initial evidence for a superiority of modern threat. Overall, the present findings appear more consistent with a relevance-based explanation rather than an evolutionary-based explanation of threat detection. (shrink)

The present report examined the hypothesis that two distinct visual routes contribute in processing low and high spatial frequencies of fearful facial expressions. Having the participants presented with a backwardly masked task, we analyzed conscious processing of spatial frequency contents of emotional faces according to both objective and subjective taskrelevant criteria. It was shown that fear perception in the presence of the low-frequency faces can be supported by stronger automaticity leading to less false positives. In contrary, the detection of high-frequency (...) fearful faces was more likely supported by conscious awareness leading to more true positives. (shrink)

This experiment compared the effects of exposure to masked phobic stimuli at a very brief stimulus-onset asynchrony on spider-phobic and non-phobic individuals. Participants were identified through a widely used questionnaire and a Behavioral Avoidance Test with a live, caged tarantula to establish baseline levels of avoidance. One week later, they were individually administered one of two continuous series of masked images: spiders or flowers. Preliminary masking experiments showed that independent samples of participants from the same populations failed to recognize these (...) stimuli. Participants in the main experiment reported ratings of subjective distress immediately before and after the exposure manipulation. Then they engaged in the BAT once again. Very brief exposure to images of spiders reduced phobic participants’ avoidance of the tarantula. No effects were evidenced on subjective distress, or on non-phobic participants. Theoretical implications for the non-conscious basis of fear are discussed. (shrink)

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...) in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism. (shrink)

It has long been suggested that emotion, especially threatening emotion, facilitates early visual perception to promote adaptive responses to potential threats in the environment. Here, we tested whether and how fearful emotion affects the basic visual ability of visual acuity. An adapted Posner’s spatial cueing task was employed, with fearful and neutral faces as cues and a Vernier discrimination task as the probe. The time course of the emotional attention effect was examined by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony of the (...) cue and probe. Two independent experiments consistently demonstrated that the brief presentation of a fearful face increased visual acuity at its location. The facilitation of perceptual sensitivity was detected at an SOA around 300 ms when the face cues were presented for both 250 ms and 150 ms. This effect cannot be explained by physical differences between the fearful and neutral faces because no improvement was found when the faces were presented inverted. In the last experiment, the face cues were flashed very briefly, and we did not find any improvement induced by the fearful face. Overall, we provide evidence that emotion interacts with attention to affect basic visual functions. (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 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)

Risk perception is important in determining health-protective behavior. During the rise of the COVID-19 epidemic, we tested a comprehensive structural equation model of risk perception to explain adherence to protective behaviors in a crisis context using a survey of 572 Italian citizens. We identified two categories of protective behaviors, labeled promoting hygiene and cleaning, and avoiding social closeness. Social norms and risk perceptions were the more proximal antecedents of both categories. Cultural worldviews, affect, and experience of COVID-19 were the more (...) distal predictors. Promoting hygiene and cleaning was triggered by the negative affective attitude toward coronavirus and mediated by an affective appraisal of risk. The deliberate dimension of risk perception predicted only avoiding social closeness. Social norms predicted both types of behaviors and mediated the relations of cultural worldviews. Individualism, more than hierarchy, shaped the affective evaluation of coronavirus. The model was an acceptable fit to the data and accounted for 20% and 29% of the variance in promoting hygiene and cleaning, and avoiding social closeness, respectively. The findings were robust to the effect of sociodemographic factors. Taken together, our findings confirmed the empirical distinction between affective and deliberate processes in risk perception, supported the validity of the affect heuristic, and highlighted the role of social norms as an account for why individualistic people were less likely to follow the prescribed health-protective behaviors. Implications for risk communication are discussed. (shrink)

This article suggests that methodological and conceptual advancements in affective sciences militate in favor of adopting an appraisal-driven componential approach to further investigate the emotional brain. Here we propose to operationalize this approach by distinguishing five functional networks of the emotional brain: the elicitation network, the expression network, the autonomic reaction network, the action tendency network, and the feeling network, and discuss these networks in the context of the affective neuroscience literature. We also propose that further investigating the “appraising brain” (...) is the royal road to better understand the elicitation network, and may be key to revealing the neural causal mechanisms underlying the emotion process as a whole. (shrink)

We investigate two questions, the relevance of memory for evaluative conditioning effects based on smell-taste pairings, and the potential preparedness of smell-taste combinations for...

Research on cognition and emotion during the past 30 years has made reasonable progress in theory, methods and empirical research. New theories of the cognition–emotion relation have been proposed, emotion research has become more interdisciplinary, and improved methods of emotion measurement have been developed. On the empirical side, the main achievement of the past 30 years is seen to consist in the reduction of the set of serious contenders for a theory of emotions. Still, several important issues are not fully (...) resolved, including the computational implementation of appraisal processes, the nature of emotions, and the link between emotions and actions. Also, quantitative theories of the cognition–emotion relation need to be refined and tested, and improved theories of the link between emotions and bodily and facial expressions need to be developed. To counter the dangers of theoretical fragmentation and knowledge loss, more efforts should be devoted to the analysis, reconstruction, comparison and integration of important theories and hypotheses in the field of emotion, as well as to the systematization of arguments in favor and against these theories and hypotheses. (shrink)

Although emotion is closely associated with motivation, and interacts with perception, cognition, and action, many conceptualizations still treat emotion as separate from these domains. Here, a comparative/evolutionary anatomy framework is presented to motivate the idea that long-range, distributed circuits involving the midbrain, thalamus, and forebrain are central to emotional processing. It is proposed that emotion can be understood in terms of large-scale network interactions spanning the neuroaxis that form “functionally integrated systems.” At the broadest level, the argument is made that (...) we need to move beyond a Newtonian view of causation to one involving complex systems where bidirectional influences and nonlinearities abound. Therefore, understanding interactions between subsystems and signal integration becomes central to unraveling the organization of the emotional brain. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the contrasting predictions of the evolutionary and decision-theoretic approaches to deontic reasoning. Two experiments embedded a hazard management (HM) rule in a social contract scenario that should lead to competition between innate modules. A 3rd experiment used a pure HM task. Threatening material was also introduced into the antecedent, p, of a deontic rule, if p then must q. According to the evolutionary approach, more HM responses (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) are predicted when p is threatening, whereas (...) decision theory predicts fewer. All 3 experiments were consistent with decision theory. Other theories are discussed, and it is concluded that they cannot account for the behavior observed in these experiments. (shrink)

A series of experiments tested the hypothesis that very brief exposure to feared stimuli can have positive effects on avoidance of the corresponding feared object. Participants identified themselves as fearful of spiders through a widely used questionnaire. A preliminary experiment showed that they were unable to identify the stimuli used in the main experiments. Experiment 2 compared the effects of exposure to masked feared stimuli at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies . Participants were individually administered one of three continuous (...) series of backwards masked or non-masked stimuli: unreportable images of spiders , clearly visible images of spiders , or unreportable images of trees . Immediately thereafter, they engaged in a Behavioral Avoidance Test with a live, caged tarantula. Exposure to unreportable images of spiders resulted in greater approach towards the tarantula than unreportable neutral images. A post-hoc comparison with clearly visible exposure to these same images approached significance. These effects were maintained at a 1-week follow-up . In Experiment 3 , participants engaged in the BAT 1 week prior to the exposure manipulation in order to provide a baseline measurement of their avoidant behavior, and again immediately after the exposure manipulation. Exposure to unreportable images of spiders reduced avoidance of the tarantula. Similar exposure to trees did not. Implications for the non-conscious basis of fear are discussed. (shrink)

This article shows how descriptive imagery can be used to hijack evolved psychological instincts and prejudice the judgment of others, particularly in the legal and political domains. By mimicking the cues that represented threats to our ancestors, those wishing to color the perception of others can subtly trigger the affective responses that evolved to help navigate ancestral threats. When this happens, logic may be unseated in favor of deep-seated instinctual responses, often to a problematic degree. In this way, lawyers, politicians, (...) and activists, taking a page out of the playbook of novelists and other storytellers, can weaponize words, images, descriptions, and narratives to, often improperly, sway the opinions of others. (shrink)

Mitchell et al. propose that associative learning in humans and other animals requires the formation of propositions by means of conscious and controlled reasoning. This approach neglects important aspects of current thinking in evolutionary biology and neuroscience that support the claim that learning, here exemplified by fear learning, neither needs to be conscious nor controlled.

Evaluative processes have their roots in early evolutionary history, as survival is dependent on an organism’s ability to identify and respond appropriately to positive, rewarding or otherwise salubrious stimuli as well as to negative, noxious, or injurious stimuli. Consequently, evaluative processes are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and are represented at multiple levels of the nervous system, including the lowest levels of the neuraxis. While evolution has sculpted higher level evaluative systems into complex and sophisticated information-processing networks, they do not (...) come to replace, but rather to interact with more primitive lower level representations. Indeed, there are basic features of the underlying neuroarchitectural plan for evaluative processes that are common across levels of organization—including that of evaluative bivalence. (shrink)