Perceived duration of emotional events: evidence for a positivity effect in older adults.

Unlabelled: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Arousal and negative affect modulate the effect of emotion on the subjective experience of the passage of time. Given that older adults are less aroused by negative emotional stimuli, and report lower levels of negative affect, compared with younger adults, the present study examined whether the effect of emotion on time perception differed in older and younger adults.

Methods: Participants performed a temporal bisection task for emotional (i.

Emotion-specific modulation of early visual perception.

Exposure to fearful facial expressions enhances vision at low spatial-frequencies and impairs vision at high spatial-frequencies. This perceptual trade-off is thought to be a consequence of a fear-related activation of the magnocellular visual pathway to the amygdala. In this study we examined the generality of the effect of emotion on low-level visual perception by assessing participants' orientation sensitivity to low and high spatial-frequency targets following exposure to disgust, fear, and neutral facial expressions.

Peer victimization, depressive symptoms, and high salivary cortisol predict poorer memory in children.

The predictive relations of peer victimization, depressive symptoms, and salivary cortisol on memory in 168 children aged 12 at Time 1 (T1) were examined using a longitudinal design in which data were collected on four occasions over a 2-year period. Results indicated that: (1) peer victimization, depressive symptoms, and evening cortisol were stable over time, (2) peer victimization and elevated symptoms of depression were concurrently linked at each time, (3) T1 peer victimization predicted elevated symptoms of depression at T2 which in turn predicted lower cortisol levels at T3, and (4) controlling for earlier associations, T3 peer victimization, depressive symptoms, and higher morning and evening cortisol levels uniquely predicted memory deficits at T4. The links between elevated cortisol, symptoms of depression, and poor memory are consistent with published research on depressed adults and extend the findings to children exposed to peer victimization.

Perceptual grouping impairs temporal resolution.

Performance on multisensory temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks is enhanced when the sensory stimuli are presented at different locations rather than the same location. In our first experiment, we replicated this result for spatially separated stimuli within the visual modality. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of perceptual grouping on this spatial effect.