Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2024-01-15
Abstract： Prior research on facial attractiveness judgments has predominantly focused on visual information, overlooking the role of non-visual cues. Current studies have confirmed the existence of cross-modal interaction in facial attractiveness judgments, emphasizing cross-modal integration. Building on this foundation, this study integrates Face-space model and Bayesian causal inference models to propose that during the cross-modal integration process of facial attractiveness judgments, individuals naturally amalgamate various sensory inputs in the brain, forming a unified representation of the target face when inferring that different sensory information emanates from the same facial source. Future research may extend facial investigations into broader environmental contexts, examining cross-modal integration of diverse sensory information and further exploring the boundary conditions of cross-modal integration, particularly in the context of social interactions, to construct a more systematic model for cross-modal integration in facial attractiveness judgments.
Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology submitted time 2023-11-15
Abstract： Emotions surface during interaction between individuals. Thus, an accurate recognition of facial expressions is essential in the realm of social interactions. In recent years, numerous studies have revealed that individuals not only depend on facial configuration information for identifying facial expressions but also place considerable emphasis on contextual information extracted from external cues beyond the face. People’s behavior frequently unfolds within intricate social group dynamics, wherein individuals often perceive and interpret the facial expressions of their fellow group members during interaction. However, the impact of group information on facial expression recognition, being an essential social contextual factor, remains somewhat unclear. Hence, three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence exerted by group information on the recognition of facial expressions.
The stimuli used in the study were happy, fearful, and neutral face images selected from the NimStim set, including 15 pictures (seven females) of each of the aforementioned emotions. Group information was manipulated following the presentation of a fixation cross through perceptual cues. Subsequently, during the facial expression recognition phase, participants were instructed to recognize the facial expressions exhibited by target individuals. In the first experiment, participants were instructed to rate the intensity of target facial expressions on a six-emotion scale, and the surrounding facial expressions were always congruent with the target facial expressions. A total of 29 college students (16 females, mean age 20.00 ± 1.80 years) were recruited to participate in this experiment. In Experiments 2 and 3, we manipulated the emotional congruency between the surrounding faces and the target faces during the facial expression recognition phase. Additionally, we controlled for variations in physical characteristics across different experimental conditions. The task requirement of Experiment 2 was the same as those of Experiment 1. However, in Experiment 3, participants were instructed to judge the target facial expressions by pressing corresponding keys on the keyboard as quickly and accurately as possible. A total of 26 college students (14 females, mean age 21.15 ± 1.99 years) participated in Experiment 2, and 32 college students (15 females, mean age 21.20 ± 1.60 years) participated in Experiment 3.
Results revealed the following: (1) Compared with emotion-incongruent conditions, emotional congruency between target faces and surrounding faces resulted in shorter RTs and higher accuracy. (2) Group information regulated the influence of surrounding facial expressions on target facial expression recognition. Specifically, under group conditions, participants tended to recognize target facial expressions according to the emotional state of the surrounding faces. When the target facial expressions in line with the expectations established by the participants that group members have congruent emotional state, the recognition of target facial expressions was faster and more accurate than incongruent conditions. However, under nongroup conditions, participants recognized target facial expressions without reference to the emotional states of the surrounding faces. (3) Participants exhibited a faster and more accurate recognition of happy faces, indicating the recognition advantage effect for happy facial expressions.
Results revealed that group information influenced facial expression recognition, individuals recognized facial expressions based on the social relationship between the interactions, and understanding social interaction plays an important role in the process of emotion perception.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Delay discounting occurs when, compared to current or recent benefits (or losses), people give future benefits (or losses) less weight and choose current or recent benefits (or losses). Delay discounting is an important research direction in the field of decision-making. Based on the Appraisal-Tendency Framework, the present study aimed to examine how anger influences an individual’s delay discounting and then explore the underlying mechanism of the effect of anger on delay discounting.The key hypotheses--that anger would influence delay discounting and that certainty and control appraisal tendencies would drive this effect--were tested across three experiments. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of anger on delay gratification. In Experiments 2a and 2b, an experimental-causal-chain design was used to test (a) whether anger increases certainty-control relative to fear and neutral feelings, and (b) whether experiencing certainty-control increases one’s delay gratification. In Experiment 3, a measurement-of-mediation design was used to test whether feelings of certainty-control stemming from anger predicted delay gratification. Simultaneously, we explored whether positive emotions associated with certainty-control produced increases in delay gratification. The focus was on pleasure as a positive, certainty-control-associated emotion.In Experiment 1, the results showed that compared with fear and neutral participants, angry participants were more likely to choose large and delayed rewards. In Experiment 2a, the results showed that compared with fear and neural participants, angry participants were more likely to experience certainty-control feelings. Then, in Experiment 2b, the results showed that compared with low certainty-control participants, high certainty-control participants were more likely to choose large and delayed rewards. In Experiment 3, the results showed that compared with fear and neutral participants, angry and pleasant participants experienced more certainty-control feelings and were more likely to choose large and delayed rewards. Furthermore, the mediation analysis showed that certainty-control feelings played a complete mediating role in the effect of anger and pleasure on delay discounting. Converging evidence from the three experiments indicated that incidental anger can influence delay discounting. Compared with fear and neutral feelings, those experiencing anger were more likely to choose larger and delayed rewards (Experiment 1). Importantly, these two experiments provide direct process evidence by showing that the certainty and control appraisal tendencies triggered by anger may underlie its delay gratification-enhancing effects (Experiments 2 and Experiment 3). Furthermore, experiencing certainty- control-associated emotions (i.e., anger and pleasure), regardless of valence, increased to the likelihood that individuals would choose larger and delayed rewards (Experiment 3). The current research supports the hypotheses that anger increases delay gratification and that certainty and control appraisal tendencies drive this effect. These findings have important implications for understanding the mechanism underlying the effect of specific negative emotions on intertemporal choice.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-14
Abstract： The positivity effect in facial trustworthiness evaluation is that older adults are more positive in trustworthiness evaluation of unfamiliar faces than younger adults. Socioemotional selectivity theory and dynamic integration theory explain its mechanisms from the perspective of cognitive control and cognitive decline respectively, but a unified model has yet been established. Existing studies have found that under the condition of sufficient and insufficient cognitive resources, older adults would improve the trustworthiness evaluation of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces respectively. Neuroimaging studies have found that the decline of the amygdala and anterior insula may reduce the sensitivity of older adults to untrustworthy faces, while the hyperactivation of the caudate may enhance their sensitivity to trustworthy faces. In light of previous studies, a dual-process model of the positivity effect in facial trustworthiness evaluation was proposed. Future studies should attempt to construct a more comprehensive theoretical explanation framework, investigate the age difference of facial trustworthiness processing and clarify the neural mechanism by using a variety of analysis methods. Furthermore, mindfulness practices as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation can be introduced to help reduce older adults' vulnerability to fraud in the initial interpersonal interactions.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2022-11-22
Abstract：
How do humans learn to trust unfamiliar others? Decisions in the absence of direct knowledge rely on our ability to generalize from past experiences and are often shaped by the degree of similarity between prior experience and novel situations. A previous study suggested that people prefer to trust toward strangers who resemble the original player they previously learned was trustworthy and avoid trusting toward strangers resembling the untrustworthy player. However, it is still unclear whether this stimulus generalization effect exists across different situations, and the role of intention perception in this effect. Here, we leverage a stimulus generalization framework to examine how perceptual similarity between known individuals and unfamiliar strangers across different interactive situations shapes people’s trust toward strangers. Given that the strong adaptability of the stimulus generalization mechanism, we assume that the faces associated with different degrees of unfairness will affect the individual's trust towards similar unfamiliar faces, and intention perception modulates this process.
Three experiments were conducted to examine the above hypothesis. In Experiment 1a and Experiment 1b, participants play or observe an iterative ultimatum game with three partners who exhibit highly unfair, medium unfair, or highly fair behavior. After learning who was the fair/unfair allocator, participants select new partners for a trust game. Unbeknownst to participants, each potential new partner was parametrically morphed with one of the three original players. In Experiment 2, participants play a similar iterative ultimatum game with three partners, nevertheless the allocations were generated by a computer algorithm which excludes the intention of the allocator.
A mixed linear regression was conducted, with both (un)fairness type (whether faces were morphed with the original fair, medium unfair, unfair allocator’ face) and perceptual similarity (increasing similarity to the original face, 23%, 34%, 45%, 56%, 67%, 78%) were entered as predictors of choosing to play with the morphed face. The result of Experiment 1a and Experiment 1b show that compared with the medium unfair condition, as the perceptual similarity between the morphed trustee’s face and the face of the fair (unfair) allocator in the previous interaction increases, the degree of trust (distrust) towards the trustee gradually increases. In addition, this effect is asymmetrical, participants preferentially avoided more the unfair morphs in comparison with the fair morphs. This suggests an asymmetric overgeneralization toward individuals perceived to be morally aversive. Using Drift-Diffusion Modeling (DDM), we found that the drift rate ν under unfair condition is significantly smaller than that under medium unfair or fair conditions, and most of them are in the range of less than 0. This suggests that individuals are more likely to accumulate evidence of distrust when making trust decisions about unfamiliar faces that are similar to the allocator who was unfair in previous interactions. In Experiment 2, under an unintentional situation, the above-mentioned cross-situational generalization effect disappeared.
Together, our results demonstrate that the individuals use the associative learning mechanism to capture the moral information of the interactive objects from the past experience, and then guides subsequent trust decision-making. This mechanism draws on prior learning to reduce the uncertainty associated with strangers, ultimately facilitating potentially adaptive decisions to trust, or withhold trust from unfamiliar others.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Statistics in Psychology submitted time 2022-07-30
Abstract： Meta-analysis is a crucial tool for accumulating evidence in basic and applied research. In the open science era, meta-analysis becomes an important way for integrating open data from different sources. Meanwhile, because of the great researchers’ degree introduced by multiple-step and multiple-choices in each step of meta-analysis, the openness and transparency are crucial for reproducing results of meta-analysis. To (1) understand the transparency and openness of meta-analysis reports published in Chinese journals and (2) improve the transparency and openness of future meta-analysis by Chinese researchers, we developed a Chinese version of checklist for meta-analysis, which was based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis protocols (PRISMA) and the principle of openness and transparency, and then surveyed the methods and results of 68 meta-analysis papers in mainstream Chinese psychological journals in last five years. Our results revealed that openness and transparency of Chinese meta-analysis reports need to be improved, especially in the following aspects: the date/time and limitation of literature search, the details of screening and data collection, the flow chart of article screening, the details of effect size transformation, and the evaluation of individual research bias. The checklist we present, which lists almost all aspects that an open meta-analysis should include, can be used as a guide for future meta-analysis.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-09-07
Abstract： Facial expressions are an important medium for understanding the emotional feelings of others. However, individual factors such as gender, age, and personality traits can influence the perception of facial expressions. For instance, individuals with elevated level of trait anxiety, which is measure of frequency and intensity of occurrence of anxiety related symptoms, show attentional bias towards emotional stimuli, that is, higher attention to emotional information such as facial expressions. These studies mostly focused on attentional processing stage, and it remains unclear whether trait anxiety affects the pre-attentive processing stage of facial expression perception. Pre-attentive processing is an automatic evaluation of whether attention is needed for the stimulus, thereby filtering out irrelevant information to conserve cognitive resources and improve the efficiency of information processing. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the pre-attentive processing of facial expressions and the bias to emotional stimuli of trait anxious individuals to emotional stimuli during the pre-attentive processing stage. According to the scores of Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety inventory (STAI), 20 participants who scored in the top 27% were assigned to the high trait anxiety group (13 women; mean age=19.02 ± 0.63 years) and 20 participants who scored in the bottom 27% were assigned to the low trait anxiety group (11 women; mean age=19.63 ± 0.88 years). The stimuli used in the experiment were happy, sad and neutral face pictures selected from the Chinese Facial Affective Picture System (CAFPS; Gong et al., 2011) including 10 pictures (5 females and 5 males) of each kind of emotion. The deviant-standard-reverse oddball paradigm included 4 types of facial expression sequences: neutral standard stimuli/happy deviant stimuli, happy standard stimuli/neutral deviant stimuli; neutral standard stimuli/sad deviant stimuli, and sad standard stimuli/neutral deviant stimuli. The standard stimuli mean that this type of stimuli were appeared about 80% of the time in the sequence, and the deviant stimuli were about 20%. Participants were instructed to detect unpredictable changes in the size of fixation cross in the center of visual field and press a corresponding button as fast and as accurate as possible, and ignored facial expressions. The results revealed that, the amplitudes of N170 elicited by deviant faces were significantly larger than standard faces. Importantly, in the early EMMN, the mean amplitude elicited by sad facial expressions was significantly larger than happy facial expressions in low trait anxiety group, but there was no significant difference between happy and sad facial expressions in high trait anxiety group. Moreover, the early EMMN amplitude of happy faces was significantly larger in the high trait anxiety group than in the low trait anxiety group. These results suggest that the high trait anxiety group has similar amplification of EMMN amplitude for both happy and sad expressions. Our results show that there is a difference between high and low trait anxiety in the pre-attentive processing of facial expression. This suggests that personality traits are important factors influencing the pre-attentive processing of facial expressions, and high trait anxiety individuals may have difficulty in effectively distinguishing between happy and sad emotional faces during the pre-attentive processing stage and have similar processing patterns for them.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2021-01-21
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2018-11-15
Abstract： A large body of research has examined the relationship between guilt and prosocial behavior – yet the findings are inconclusive. A meta-analysis was conducted to explore the effect of trait and state guilt on prosocial behavior, as well as potential moderators of this effect. A literature search yielded 46 qualified papers with 92 effect sizes and 17248 participants. Results showed that trait guilt was significantly associated with prosocial behavior (r = 0.36, p < 0.001), and this relationship was moderated by the type of prosocial behavior. The induction of state guilt also significantly impacted prosocial behavior, with a small effect size (d = 0.24, p < 0.001) – and this relationship was moderated by whether the recipient of the prosocial behavior was also the victim of the guilt-evoking act. No other moderators were found. The p-curve analysis showed that the p-curves of the two meta-analyzes were right skewed, indicating that the relationship between the guilt proneness and prosocial behavior and the effect of state guilt on the prosocial behavior had a real effect, not caused by publication bias or p hacking. "
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