Painful Experiences in Social Contexts Facilitate Sensitivity to Emotional Signals of Pain from Conspecifics in Laboratory Rats.

Previous studies demonstrated that laboratory rats could visually receive emotional pain signals from conspecifics through pictorial stimuli. The present study examined whether a prior painful emotional experience of the receiver influenced the sensitivity of emotional expression recognition in laboratory rats. The experiment comprised four phases: the baseline preference test, pain manipulation test, post-manipulation preference test, and state anxiety test.

The Role of Temperature in Moral Decision-Making: Limited Reproducibility.

Temperature is one of the major environmental factors that people are exposed to on a daily basis, often in conditions that do not afford control. It is known that heat and cold can influence a person's productivity and performance in simple tasks. With respect to social cognition, it has also been suggested that temperature impacts on relatively high-level forms of decision-making.

Learning of efficient behaviour in spatial exploration through observation of behaviour of conspecific in laboratory rats.

Recent studies have suggested that rodent behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of surrounding conspecifics (e.g. emotional contagion and prosocial behaviour).

Emotion words: Adding face value.

Despite a growing number of studies suggesting that emotion words affect perceptual judgments of emotional stimuli, little is known about how emotion words affect perceptual memory for emotional faces. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tested how emotion words (compared with control words) affected participants' abilities to select a target emotional face from among distractor faces. Participants were generally more likely to false alarm to distractor emotional faces when primed with an emotion word congruent with the face (compared with a control word).

Receiving of emotional signal of pain from conspecifics in laboratory rats.

Though recent studies have shown that rodents express emotions with their face, whether emotional expression in rodents has a communicative function between conspecifics is still unclear. Here, we demonstrate the ability of visual recognition of emotional expressions in laboratory rats. We found that Long-Evans rats avoid images of pain expressions of conspecifics but not those of neutral expressions.

The combination of perception of other individuals and exogenous manipulation of arousal enhances social facilitation as an aftereffect: re-examination of Zajonc's drive theory.

Zajonc's drive theory postulates that arousal enhanced through the perception of the presence of other individuals plays a crucial role in social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965). Here, we conducted two experiments to examine whether the elevation of arousal through a stepping exercise performed in front of others as an exogenous factor causes social facilitation of a cognitive task in a condition where the presence of others does not elevate the arousal level. In the main experiment, as an "aftereffect of social stimulus," we manipulated the presence or absence of others and arousal enhancement before participants conducted the primary cognitive task.

Faces in the dark: interactive effects of darkness and anxiety on the memory for threatening faces.

In the current research, we extend past work on the effects of ambient darkness and threat to the domain of memory for expressive faces. In one study, we examined the effects of ambient darkness and individual differences in state anxiety on memory of unfamiliar expressive faces. Here, participants were seated in either a dark or light room and encoded a set of unfamiliar faces with angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions.

The effect of facial expression and gaze direction on memory for unfamiliar faces.

We report data from an experiment that investigated the influence of gaze direction and facial expression on face memory. Participants were shown a set of unfamiliar faces with either happy or angry facial expressions, which were either gazing straight ahead or had their gaze averted to one side. Memory for faces that were initially shown with angry expressions was found to be poorer when these faces had averted as opposed to direct gaze, whereas memory for individuals shown with happy faces was unaffected by gaze direction.