Psychology Research Digest
Emotion - Vol 26, Iss 3
Emotion publishes significant contributions to the study of emotion from a wide range of theoretical traditions and research domains. Emotion includes articles that advance knowledge and theory about all aspects of emotional processes, including reports of substantial empirical studies, scholarly reviews, and major theoretical articles.
Haunted attraction: The effects of recreational fear on interpersonal bonding.
Recreational fear experiences, such as haunted attractions, paradoxically attract millions of patrons annually; despite fear being a generally negative emotion, people will pay money to experience it. Some have stipulated that part of the appeal is interpersonal—anecdotally, such experiences appear to bring people closer together. We put this idea to the test in five studies conducted at three commercial haunted attractions. In Studies 1–4, feeling more fear and making physical contact with other attraction guests were strong predictors of perceiving that the experience brought participants closer together. However, we consistently observed tiny or null results when measuring pre-to-post changes in participants’ interpersonal closeness ratings (Studies 2 and 4), highlighting the nuanced nature of these relational dynamics. To further investigate these complexities, we employed a final qualitative interview study (Study 5), which found that postexperience processing (time to talk about the experience before quantifying one’s feelings) may be critical to bonding. These findings suggest that while fear reliably fosters a subjective sense of connection, its relational impact may depend on how the experience is processed and contextualized. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Negative emotion reduces autobiographical memory’s susceptibility to change.
Autobiographical memories, the memories we have of our personal past, change over time as content is forgotten or added to the original memory trace. While decades of research has demonstrated the augmenting effect emotion can have on memory, even memories for very negative experiences seem to be susceptible to change. However, it is unclear whether or not negative emotion in day-to-day life might protect everyday memories from distortion. Here, we examined whether the consistency with which everyday experiences are recalled differs as a function of the emotionality of the event. Participants (N = 513) recalled negative and neutral events from their past at two time points, 8 weeks apart. Using human scoring and large language modeling approaches to quantify the consistency of narrative recalls, we found that, although both negative and neutral memories showed moderate consistency between recalls, memories for negative events were more consistent than memories for neutral events. While emotional memories are not perfect records of the past, this work suggests that emotion reduces a memory’s vulnerability to changing over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The role of specific affects in the psychopathology of dementia family caregivers.
Caregiving for a person with dementia is a highly emotional experience and can evoke numerous negative and positive affects. Not surprisingly, dementia caregivers are vulnerable to mood and anxiety disorders. In this study, 95 caregiver–person with dementia dyads had a 10-min, unrehearsed conversation about a relationship conflict in the laboratory between 2013 and 2019. After the conversation, caregivers reported the extent to which they experienced six negative and five positive affects during the conversation. Caregivers also completed self-report measures of their depression and anxiety symptoms. Analyses of caregivers’ affect during the conversation revealed that greater sadness was correlated with higher depression, greater fear was correlated with higher anxiety, and greater anger and lower calm were each correlated with both higher depression and anxiety. In two multiple regressions that included the specific affect variables that were significantly correlated with caregiver depression or anxiety, respectively, we found that greater sadness and lower calm (but not anger) remained significantly associated with higher depression and lower calm (but not anger or fear) remained significantly associated with higher anxiety. Finally, when accounting for relevant caregiver demographic factors and person with dementia clinical characteristics, greater sadness and lower calm remained significantly associated with higher depression and lower calm remained significantly associated with higher anxiety. None of the associations between specific affects and depression or anxiety were moderated by caregiver sex or age. The specific affects found to be associated with psychopathology may help identify caregivers at heightened risk for mental health problems and inform selection of potential intervention targets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Developmental changes in youth affect: A within-person approach.
The transition from childhood to adolescence is a period of social–emotional reorganization involving changes in affect. Most research has examined developmental changes in between-person affect. Few studies have investigated developmental changes in associations between individual emotions and the structure of affective experience in youth across developmental age. This study used exploratory graph analysis to assess developmental changes in emotional complexity using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule administered at three time points from 2007 to 2013 in a three-cohort, accelerated longitudinal design spanning Grades 3 through 12 (N = 682): late childhood, Mage = 9.39, SD = 0.53; early adolescence, Mage = 11.80, SD = 0.67; and middle adolescence, Mage = 14.60, SD = 0.60. Decreases in edge density and entropy and increases in R² were identified across development. In contrast, nonlinear shifts were found for the number of negative edges between affective dimensions and mean absolute error and possible shifts in dimensionality. Results suggest that global network metrics support decreases in emotional complexity from childhood through adolescence, though other indices suggest distinct patterns of change. Implications for research and study limitations are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The resolution of affective reactivity to stressful events.
Repeated assessments in everyday life allow for ecologically valid data on dynamic, within-person stress processes. However, typical designs offer little information on the immediate shape of affective responses following daily stressors, including the influence of situational and person-level variables. In a combined clinical and community sample (N = 248; recruited between 2016 and 2018), we employed a high-density intensive-longitudinal protocol (observations N = 1,442) to capture the temporal dynamics of affect in response to daily stressful events using a microburst design. Specifically, we implemented an adaptive signal-contingent schedule, where an initial stressor report triggered an intense burst of prompts in 15-min increments over the course of 1 hr inquiring about momentary affect. To model affective microtrajectories, we used multilevel structural equation modeling. A piecewise linear growth model consistently showed the best fit across all indices for both negative and positive affect. Affective responses to momentarily experienced stressors were best captured by a model that allowed for changes in affect trajectories over time (an initial steep decline/increase followed by gradual change), with more stressful situations amplifying these trajectories. Moreover, extraversion significantly influenced the initial rise in positive affect, leading to more pronounced early changes in those with higher levels of extraversion. In contrast, neuroticism had an opposite effect on positive affect, dampening these early changes. Results offer a detailed understanding of daily stress dynamics by providing insights into the immediate and evolving nature of affective responses to stress, with implications for personalized stress management strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Two facets of emotional awareness and psychological distress: A meta-analysis.
Emotional awareness, consisting of two facets—attention to emotion and emotional clarity—plays a crucial role in psychological distress. This meta-analysis examined the distinct relationships between the two facets of emotional awareness and distress across 307 studies involving 100,612 participants. Results showed that attention to emotion was not significantly associated with distress; however, the association became significant and positive after controlling for emotional clarity. Emotional clarity showed a moderate negative correlation with distress, which remained consistent even after accounting for attention to emotion. These findings suggest that emotional clarity may be essential in reducing psychological distress, while excessive attention to emotion, when not accompanied by emotional clarity, may exacerbate psychological distress. These findings underscore the importance of fostering emotional clarity in interventions aimed at reducing psychological distress by enhancing emotional awareness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Associations of emotion regulation and distress with altruistic and egoistic prosociality during COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique context to explore prosociality during times of distress. Indicative of social proficiency and adaptive functioning, prosociality refers to dispositions to allocate one’s attention and energy to the needs of others. Emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, may have affected how individuals responded to their distress during the pandemic through varying forms of prosociality. In two samples, we examined how pandemic distress was associated with altruistic (i.e., goals of increasing another’s welfare) and egoistic (i.e., goals of increasing one’s welfare) prosociality, and whether emotion regulation strategies moderated these associations. Study 1 included 326 adults (Mage = 38.66 years, SD = 14.29; 72.91% White) who responded to an online survey in the first month of the pandemic and showed that pandemic distress was positively associated with egoistic prosociality, and cognitive reappraisal was positively associated with both egoistic and altruistic prosociality. Study 2 included 1,489 undergraduate students (Mage = 19.92 years, SD = 2.28; 53.6% Asian, 33.7% White, 2.0% Native/Indigenous American, 1.8% Black, 5.7% multiracial) who completed the same measures 5–12 months after the start of the pandemic. In addition to direct associations of both pandemic distress and regulation with prosociality, moderation analyses demonstrated that individuals who used more cognitive reappraisal were more likely to engage in egoistic prosociality when experiencing greater pandemic distress. These results demonstrate that pandemic distress is associated with certain forms of prosociality, depending on which emotion regulation strategies are employed during these times of distress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Age differences in rapid attention to emotional stimuli are driven more by valence than by discrete emotions.
In a pattern known as the positivity effect, older adults tend to prioritize positive over negative information in attention and memory compared to younger adults. Traditional theories attribute this effect to age-related shifts toward positive emotions, and it is typically operationalized as a two-by-two interaction between age (younger vs. older) and valence (negative vs. positive). Alternative accounts, however, suggest that discrete emotions within valence categories may differentially drive the effect. To test this, from June to July 2023, younger adults (n = 101) and older adults (n = 108) completed an emotion-induced blindness task online. In each task trial, an emotional distractor image appeared shortly before a task-relevant target in a rapid stream of images. Emotional distractors depicted scenes of fear, disgust, excitement, contentment, or were emotionally neutral. We measured distraction from the emotional images and found minimal age-related differences between trials with different discrete emotion categories, but the positivity effect was evident when we compared across negative and positive valence categories. These findings suggest that valence, rather than discrete emotions, drives the positivity effect in attention. We discuss insights gained, limitations of our approach, and generalizability of our results to understand age-related changes in emotional prioritization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Violence exposure moderates stress-elicited neurobehavioral function in young people.
Violence exposure has deleterious effects on emotional well-being, including higher rates of future mental illness. Adolescence is an important period of neural development within brain regions (e.g., prefrontal cortex) that support emotional processes. The relationship between brain activity and emotion may vary with violence exposure. Thus, this study investigated the relationship between violence exposure, stress-elicited brain activity, and emotion in young people. Violence exposure was measured four times from 11 to 19 years of age. Participants (n = 301) returned 1 year later (age = 20) to complete mental health (i.e., anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress) questionnaires and the Montreal Imaging Stress Task during behavioral (e.g., skin conductance response and cortisol) and neuroimaging data collection. Data were collected from 2004 to 2018. Violence exposure was positively associated with mental health symptoms. Further, violence exposure moderated the relationship between stress-elicited dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity and depression, cortisol, and skin conductance response. These findings suggest that violence exposure moderates the relationship between stress-elicited brain function and emotion-related behavior in young people. These findings provide novel insight into neural processes that may underlie the relationship between prior violence exposure and emotional function, which may have important implications for mental health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Latent profiles of intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation in Chinese children: Links to psychological adjustment.
Children use interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) with parents and friends to manage their emotions, which impacts their psychological adjustment. However, the distinct patterns of IER with parents and friends and their effects on children’s psychological adjustment are not well understood. The present study employs latent profile analysis to identify unique patterns of intrinsic IER with parents and friends among a cohort of Chinese children (N = 1,678, Mage = 10.42 years; SD = 1.2 years; 50.9% boys) and explores the associations of those subgroups with children’s psychological adjustment (including depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, general self-worth, and life satisfaction). The findings revealed six distinct intrinsic IER profiles: extremely low IER (2.5%), low IER (16.2%), average IER (40.2%), high parent-low friend IER (4.2%), low parent-high friend IER (3.9%), and high IER (33.0%). Children in higher grades and girls were more likely to belong to the low parent-high friend IER profile compared to their counterparts. Children in high IER with both parents and friends reported the best psychological adjustment. In contrast, children categorized in the extremely low IER, low IER, and low parent-high friend IER profiles displayed poorer psychological adjustment relative to average IER and high IER profiles. These findings highlight the importance of examining the diversity of intrinsic IER patterns with parents and friends to gain a comprehensive understanding of children’s psychological adjustment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Seeking positive connection: Is inflammation associated with anticipated and experienced shared positive affect with close versus non-close others?
Emerging evidence suggests inflammation may enhance social approach toward close others. Yet, little is known about how inflammation relates to positive affective experiences with different social targets. To address this, we examined associations between inflammation and perceptions of anticipated and experienced shared, kind-hearted positive affect (i.e., perceived positivity resonance) with close versus non-close others. Participants (N = 55; 67% female; 43% White; Mage = 20.06) provided blood samples on two consecutive days, once before and once after receiving the annual influenza vaccine, which were assayed for levels of the inflammatory marker interleukin-6. They also completed an in-lab writing task about anticipated positivity resonance in social interactions and completed eight momentary assessments of experienced positivity resonance. A divergence emerged between anticipated and experienced positivity resonance, specifically with non-close others: Higher interleukin-6 levels were associated with greater anticipated, but lower experienced, positivity resonance during interactions with non-close others. However, these effects did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and are considered preliminary. Additionally, higher levels of interleukin-6 were related to significantly greater ease imagining interacting with a close other, and a larger quantity of interactions with different close others. These findings provide preliminary evidence that associations between inflammation and positive emotions during social interactions vary as a function of anticipated versus experienced interactions, and as a function of target (close vs. non-close others). Future work is needed to test whether results replicate and generalize to older adults and those with chronically elevated inflammation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Relieve or aggravate? Impact of interpersonal and place attachment security priming on intrusive symptoms.
Attachment security has the potential to be a protective factor against intrusive symptoms. However, its impact on intrusive symptoms across different types of trauma is not well understood. To address this, we explored how priming interpersonal and place attachment security affects intrusive symptoms in the context of man-made and natural traumatic events. One hundred sixty-five adult participants were randomly assigned to interpersonal or place attachment security priming or a control condition and subsequently watched man-made war or natural disaster films in a lab setting. For the following 7 days, they completed an intrusion diary each day. The results showed that although neither type of attachment security priming immediately alleviated distress following traumatic stimuli, both exerted mitigating effects during the subsequent week: Interpersonal attachment security reduced daily intrusion counts, and place attachment security decreased both intrusion counts and vividness. However, the interaction between man-made trauma and place attachment security priming was associated with worsened daily intrusion-related distress. Under natural disaster conditions, postpriming state attachment security and posttrauma reappraisal mediated the effects of attachment priming on intrusive and traumatic symptoms. This study reveals the varying effects of interpersonal or place attachment priming on intrusive memories in man-made war and natural disaster, demonstrating the impact of attachment security priming in the immediate and short term after viewing trauma films. These findings offer the potential for developing attachment-based interventions tailored to specific trauma types. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>State and trait late positive potential predict maternal mental health.
Neural processes of emotional reactivity are putative mechanisms of risk for psychopathology in children and adults. Individual differences in neural processes of emotion in adults are linked to poor adult mental health and to developing emotion in offspring. At the level of observed and self-reported behavior, both state and trait-level variations in emotional reactivity are associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, whether state and trait-level variations are visible at the level of neural activity remains unknown. Pregnancy is a time of heightened state-level variability in maternal emotion and a sensitive period of risk for psychopathology in mothers and infants. As such, pregnancy may be a particularly useful period for understanding independent links between state and trait-level processing and mother and infant outcomes. Using a longitudinal design, we measured the late positive potential (LPP), a neural marker of emotional reactivity, and symptoms of anxiety and depression in 92 (Mage = 30.49) women between 2015 and 2017 during laboratory visits in the second trimester of pregnancy and at 4-month postpartum. Infant temperamental negativity was observed at 4-month postpartum. Lower trait-level LPP predicted greater maternal depressive symptoms, while higher state-level LPP predicted both maternal anxiety and depressive symptoms. Neither trait nor state-level LPP predicted infant negative emotional reactivity. Findings suggest that trait and state level of maternal emotion reactivity may be differentially related to specific maternal health outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Now you see it, now you don’t: The age-related positivity effect to faces disappears in naturalistic settings.
There is an age-related positivity effect in attention to emotional faces. However, all of these studies have relied on computer tasks where people are directed to look at faces on a screen. The primary aim of this study was to test whether the age-related positivity effect to emotional faces emerges under more naturalistic settings. The secondary aim was to test whether an own-age bias exists in attention to emotional faces and whether task ecological validity moderates any observed effect. Younger and older adults completed a naturalistic positivity effect task where they sat in a waiting room with emotional faces on the walls while their eye-gaze behavior was monitored with a mobile eye-tracker. They also completed a computer-based task that involved viewing pairs of emotional faces on a screen while wearing a mobile eye-tracker. As predicted, a positivity effect emerged in the computer-based task where older adults looked less at negative faces compared to younger adults, but no age-related positivity bias emerged in the naturalistic task. In addition, younger adults showed an own-age bias in attention to faces, and this was strongest in the naturalistic task. There was no evidence of an own-age bias in older adults for either task. These findings highlight the importance of considering ecological validity in studies of attention and emotional aging. Implications and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Daily loneliness deconstructed: Examining patterns of within- and between-person variation.
There is growing interest in examining loneliness using intensive repeated assessment methods in daily life; however, much remains unknown regarding variation in loneliness at the within- and between-person level. Better characterizing dynamic daily experiences of loneliness will help clarify the nature of loneliness experiences that may be indicative of current and future risk for chronic loneliness and provide information to inform future study designs. We characterized daily loneliness among an online sample of 98 adults (23–78 years, 55% women, generally healthy) who completed daily surveys for 14 consecutive days (Nobservations = 1,330). Participants were systematically recruited in 2024 based on loneliness status categories (41 chronically lonely, 27 acutely lonely, and 30 nonlonely) derived from Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System measure scores and self-reported duration. We compared the following for each group: (a) average levels of daily loneliness, (b) the proportion of within- versus between-person variance in daily loneliness, and (c) indicators of within- and between-person daily loneliness variability. Analyses revealed that lonely individuals overall (both chronic and acute) reported higher levels of average daily loneliness than nonlonely individuals. Furthermore, despite self-reporting similar levels of traitlike loneliness (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System measure) and average daily loneliness as acutely lonely individuals, chronically lonely individuals had a higher proportion of within-person variance and greater within-person variability in daily loneliness. Findings offer a starting point to disentangle how within-person variability of loneliness in daily life may play a role in the development and maintenance of chronic loneliness over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Human psychophysiology is influenced by physical touch with a “breathing” robot.
People often physically cling to others when afraid and doing so can downregulate negative emotional experiences (e.g., Coan et al., 2006). However, in some situations, physical touch may fail to downregulate emotional experiences—such as when an individual being touched is physiologically aroused themselves. To test this hypothesis, we built plush robots with motorized plastic ribcages that were manipulated to contract and expand to simulate human breathing patterns. Participants held these robots while we measured their heart rate before, during, and after watching a fear-eliciting stimulus. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants who interacted with robots that exhibited accelerated-breathing patterns experienced a pronounced increase in their own heart rate, compared to participants who held stable-breathing and nonbreathing robots. These results indicate that holding or clinging to others engaged in accelerated breathing may be ineffective or detrimental for downregulating one’s own physiological arousal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Not just for tough times: The efficacy and mechanisms of positive goal reappraisal in negative, neutral, and positive contexts.
Reappraisal is a common emotion regulation strategy that involves adjusting how a situation is appraised. While much is known about its use to reduce negative affect in negative situations, less is known about its use across negative, neutral, and positive contexts to increase positive affect (i.e., positive goal reappraisal). To fill this gap, we investigated the efficacy and mechanisms of positive goal reappraisal across three valence categories in two complementary studies. In Study 1, 158 participants rated their subjective affect and reported how they appraised depicted situations on key appraisal dimensions with and without using reappraisal. In Study 2, 70 participants completed the same task, while their electromyographic and electroencephalographic responses were recorded. We found that reappraisal was effective across all valence categories, as it increased subjective positive affect and decreased subjective negative affect in response to negative, neutral, and positive pictures. Reappraisal also increased zygomaticus major reactivity for neutral and positive pictures and decreased corrugator supercilii reactivity for negative and neutral pictures. Regarding cognitive mechanisms, we found that the effects of reappraisal were related to appraisal shifts, particularly changes in congruence and relevance. A broader range of appraisal shifts were involved in neutral and positive contexts than in negative ones, suggesting that reappraisal mechanisms may be context-dependent. Finally, reappraisal amplified the late positive potential across all picture types within a relatively early time window (263–1,013 ms), indicating sustained attentional engagement. We conclude that positive goal reappraisal may be effective irrespective of stimulus valence by producing appraisal shifts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Aggregating emotional sequences amplifies the perception of women as more emotional than men.
The stereotype that women are more emotional than men is pervasive in Western culture, but little research has directly examined how this stereotype translates into judgments of emotionality. We propose that one way gender stereotypes shape judgments of emotionality is through the aggregation of emotional expressions, in which perceivers preferentially remember stereotype–congruent emotional stimuli and consequently overweight these stimuli when forming judgments. To test this, we conducted five studies (N = 772) during 2021–2025 among men participants. In Study 1, we validated the persistence of gender-emotion stereotypes. For Studies 2–5, we selected emotional expression stimuli that elicited no gender difference in ratings of emotionality at the single face level. Men participants saw sequences of male and female faces displaying emotional expressions ranging from neutral-to-angry (Study 2), neutral-to-happy (Study 3), and neutral-to-sad (Study 4) and were asked to indicate whether they considered the person in the sequence to be emotional or not. When men perceivers aggregated these stimuli (which exhibited no gender difference at the single face level), they were more likely to rate sequences of female faces as emotional. Furthermore, using a memory test we show that participants better remembered angry female faces within a sequence compared with angry male faces (Study 5), supporting the idea that aggregation of emotional information enables stereotypes to influence judgments via memory. This study reveals an important mechanism by which stereotypes are translated into emotionality judgments. We used only White stimuli faces and recruited only men participants, limiting generalizability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Visual attention to emotional pictures: Striking parallels with neutral stimuli challenge emotion-specific accounts of influences on attentional biases.
Converging evidence suggests that visual spatial attention is preferentially allocated to emotional over neutral stimuli, referred to as an attentional bias to emotional information. Intriguing questions emerged about whether this attentional bias is facilitated by an assumed right hemispheric dominance of emotion processing and by converging cross-modal information (Gerdes et al., 2021). However, we argue that a critical condition that would allow an interpretation in terms of an influence on an emotional attention bias is missing from the experimental design testing these effects: namely, a condition presenting only neutral pictures. To corroborate our argument, we conducted a replication and extension of the eye-tracking study by Gerdes et al. (2021), including this control condition. Specifically, we presented pairs of pictures and lateralized sounds in a free-viewing paradigm and tested the effect of picture position, sound position, and sound valence on an attentional bias score (BS), a difference value for the number of first fixations to unpleasant pictures compared to neutral ones. Importantly, we included a neutral–neutral condition and computed a corresponding BS for an arbitrary set of neutral pictures. Both the supposed leftward bias of emotional attention (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if they are presented on the left) and its supposed guidance by sounds (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if a sound was heard on the same side as the unpleasant picture) emerged in striking parallelism for both unpleasant–neutral and neutral–neutral picture pairs. Thus, the paradigm gives no evidence for emotion specificity of results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>