The influence of origin and valence of words on the social judgments of unknown people.

When we assess unknown people, we tend to be positively biased: we give them rather good assessments. However, can this positivity bias be limited or moderated? How would emotions of different origins (i.e.

Database of Expressionist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist paintings: Affective norms for 60 art pieces.

Modern painters' art is not only different from canvas created earlier, but also shows high internal variability. Being aware of the conditions arising from art history, we used paintings from three art movements-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism, to see if we are able to respond to claims made by art theorists by using methods specific to social sciences, and validate the paintings as stimuli which might evoke different emotional reaction based on the movement they were created in. We wanted to conduct an exploratory analysis comparing the mean assessment of valence, arousal, and dominance among the three art movements.

Emotional regulation strategies in daily life: the intensity of emotions and regulation choice.

Objective: Emotion regulation is an adaptive ability affecting people's physical and mental health, quality of life and functioning. In the present study we focused on the influence of the intensity of experienced emotions on emotion regulation strategies (ERS) that are applied in everyday life.

Methods: For 7 days the participants kept an online diary where every day they described the situation which had aroused their strongest negative emotions.

Cognitive Load and Deception Detection Performance.

The ability to detect deception is one of the most intriguing features of our minds. Cognitive load can surprisingly increase the accuracy of detection when there is a substantial load compared to when the detection is performed without cognitive load. This effect was tested in two experiments.

How emotional are words ambiguous on the spaces of valence, origin and activation?

Not all of the stimuli that we encounter are unequivocal; some of them may be ambiguous. In a series of two experiments, we investigated how people perceive and assess the emotionality of the words ambiguous on three emotional spaces: valence (dimensions of positivity and negativity), origin (automaticity and reflectiveness), and activation (arousal and subjective significance). Using two types of measurement - behavioural and webcam-based eye tracking - we compared words of moderate and high ambiguity on each of those spaces with control (uniequivocal) words.

Predictors of Feeling of Threat Caused by COVID-19 Pandemic, the Distinctive Effects of Automatic vs. Reflective Emotions.

The worldwide pandemic that started in December 2019 was a cause of a great rise in the feeling of threat in society. A feeling of threat and distress can be influenced by the span of emotions experienced by a person, and as it is rather clear, that the situation of pandemic evokes negative emotions, they can range from fear to depression, to even disgust. In this study, we wanted to verify the influence of the negative emotions of automatic origin, related to the well-being and homeostasis of the organism and the negative emotions of reflective origin, which are related to social constructs, on the feeling of threat caused by the pandemic outbreak.

The role of subjective significance, valence and arousal in the explicit processing of emotion-laden words.

Emotional categorisation (deciding whether a word is emotional or not) is a task that employs the explicit analysis of the emotional meaning of words. Therefore, it allows for assessing the role of emotional factors, ., valence, arousal, and subjective significance, in emotional word processing.

Anyone but Me: Unrealistic Optimism, Emotions and Anxiety in the Face of COVID-19 Pandemic.

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic (and its consequences, such as lockdown and public health regimes) was a novel and stressful situation for most of people, and, as such, it significantly affected both cognitive and emotional functioning of individuals. In our study, we explored unrealistic optimism bias (the cognitive error giving people a feeling of invulnerability) and any declared preventive behaviours undertaken in order to minimise the risk of contagion. We also measured twelve specific emotions (differing in valence and origin) and the feeling of the anxiety caused by the coronavirus.

The Affect Misattribution in the Interpretation of Ambiguous Stimuli in Terms of Warmth vs. Competence: Behavioral Phenomenon and Its Neural Correlates.

Warmth and competence are fundamental dimensions of social cognition. This also applies to the interpretation of ambiguous symbolic stimuli in terms of their relation to warmth or competence. The affective state of an individual may affect the way people interpret the neutral stimuli in the environment.

Inhibitory control effectiveness can be improved: The role of arousal, subjective significance and origin of words in modified Emotional Stroop Test.

The interference control measured in the Emotional Stroop Task is the phenomenon that gives us an insight into mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions. Especially the role of dimensions of affect can be easily studied with this paradigm. In the current study, we were interested in the role of the complexity of emotional stimuli (origin).

Affective norms for emotional ambiguity in valence, origin, and activation spaces.

We introduce the first tool to measure the emotional ambiguity on three bivariate spaces: valence (dimensions of positivity and negativity); origin (automaticity and reflectiveness); and activation (subjective significance and arousal). Our database consists of 2650 word stimuli, assessed by 1380 participants in total with the usage of Self-Assessment Manikin scales for each dimension. We show that the ambiguity of valence, origin, and activation may be successfully perceived and reported in a behavioral procedure.

Arousal, subjective significance and the origin of valence aligned words in the processing of an emotional categorisation task.

An emotional categorisation task allows us to study how emotionality is understood and how emotional factors influence decisions. As emotionality is not only the valence but is also composed of activation (arousal and subjective significance) and the type of process needed to produce emotion (origin), we wanted to test the influence of these emotional factors on with a group of stimuli not differing in valence. We predicted that increasing activation levels should lead to increased classification of stimuli as emotional, with a focus on the late processing stages, when explicit word processing occurs, which on the electrophysiological level corresponds to P300, N450 and LPC components.

Electrophysiological correlates of interference control in the modified emotional Stroop task with emotional stimuli differing in valence, arousal, and subjective significance.

The role of emotional factors in maintaining cognitive control is one of the most intriguing issues in understanding emotion-cognition interactions. In the current experiment, we assessed the role of emotional factors (valence, arousal, and subjective significance) in perceptual and conceptual inhibition processes. We operationalised both processes with the classical cognitive paradigms, i.

Valence and arousal of words in visual and conceptual interference control efficiency.

Cognitive control efficiency is susceptible to the emotional state of an individual. The aim of the current experiment was to search for the role of valence and arousal of emotion-laden words in a performance efficiency of a modified emotional Stroop task (EST) combined with the flanker task. Both paradigms allow for the measurement of the interference control, but interference appears on different stages of stimulus processing.

Can Emotional Awareness of Liars Influence Deception Detection Effectiveness?

Emotional awareness is defined as the ability to cognitively process emotional arousal and the expression thereof. When telling a lie, emotional awareness comes into play: the most important objective is to conceal one's true emotions and fabricate false ones; simultaneously, however, one must control for the affective state of those who are to believe the falsehood; via such efforts, one can assess the potential for success in the deceit. With this in mind, we hypothesized that emotional awareness may play a vital role in the process of creating a convincing lie.