The hippocampus dissociates present from past and future goals.

Our brain adeptly navigates goals across time frames, distinguishing between urgent needs and those of the past or future. The hippocampus is a region known for supporting mental time travel and organizing information along its longitudinal axis, transitioning from detailed posterior representations to generalized anterior ones. This study investigates the role of the hippocampus in distinguishing goals over time: whether the hippocampus encodes time regardless of detail or abstraction, and whether the hippocampus preferentially activates its anterior region for temporally distant goals (past and future) and its posterior region for immediate goals.

Claiming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction?

Eco-anxiety, grief and despair are increasing, yet these emotions tend to remain private, rarely expressed in public. Why is it important and necessary to grieve for ecological loss? Why are we not-as individuals and societies-coming together to express and share our grief for ecological destruction? I address these questions from three angles. Firstly, I draw on recent literature on ecological grief and prior work on grief for human lives, to argue for the importance and urgency of grieving publicly for ecological loss.

Humans recognize affective cues in primate vocalizations: acoustic and phylogenetic perspectives.

Humans are adept at extracting affective information from vocalizations of humans and other animals. However, the extent to which human recognition of vocal affective cues of other species is due to cross-taxa similarities in acoustic parameters or the phylogenetic closeness between species is currently unclear. To address this, we first analyzed acoustic variation in 96 affective vocalizations, taken from agonistic and affiliative contexts, of humans and three other primates-rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), chimpanzees and bonobos (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus).

Tackling childbirth-related intrusive memories with a single-session behavioural intervention involving a visuospatial task: protocol for a single-blind, waitlist-controlled randomised trial.

Introduction: Approximately 12.3% of mothers experience childbirth-related post-traumatic stress symptoms (CB-PTSS). However, evidence-based interventions to treat CB-PTSS are lacking.

Adult age differences in the psychophysiological response to acute stress.

Age-related differences in the psychophysiology of the acute stress response are poorly understood given the limited number of studies and the high heterogeneity of findings. The present study contributes by investigating age differences in both the psychological and physiological responses to acute stress in a sample of healthy younger (N = 50; 18-30; M = 23.06; SD = 2.

A shared brain system forming confidence judgment across cognitive domains.

Confidence is typically defined as a subjective judgment about whether a decision is right. Decisions are based on sources of information that come from various cognitive domains and are processed in different brain systems. An unsettled question is whether the brain computes confidence in a similar manner whatever the domain or in a manner that would be idiosyncratic to each domain.

Temporal Unfolding of Micro-valences in Facial Expression Evoked by Visual, Auditory, and Olfactory Stimuli.

Appraisal theories suggest that valence appraisal should be differentiated into micro-valences, such as intrinsic pleasantness and goal-/need-related appraisals. In contrast to a macro-valence approach, this dissociation explains, among other things, the emergence of mixed or blended emotions. Here, we extend earlier research that showed that these valence types can be empirically dissociated.

Effect of Background Music on Attentional Control in Older and Young Adults.

Healthy aging may be accompanied by cognitive decline that includes diminished attentional control, an executive function that allows us to focus our attention while inhibiting distractors. Previous studies have demonstrated that background music can enhance some executive functions in both young and older adults. According to the , the beneficial influence of background music on cognitive performance would be related to its ability to increase the arousal level of the listeners and to improve their mood.

Are concepts of achievement-related emotions universal across cultures? A semantic profiling approach.

Verifying that conceptualisations of emotions are consistent across languages and cultures is a critical precondition for meaningful cross-cultural research on emotional experience. For achievement-related emotions tied to successes or failures, such evidence is virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we compared Canadian, German, Colombian, and Chinese university students' ( = 126) perceptions of affective, cognitive, motivational, physiological, and expressive characteristics of 16 achievement-related emotions using a psycholinguistic tool for profiling emotion concepts (Achievement Emotions CoreGRID).

Effects of achievement contexts on the meaning structure of emotion words.

Little is known about the impact of context on the meaning of emotion words. In the present study, we used a semantic profiling instrument (GRID) to investigate features representing five emotion components (appraisal, bodily reaction, expression, action tendencies, and feeling) of 11 emotion words in situational contexts involving success or failure. We compared these to the data from an earlier study in which participants evaluated the typicality of features out of context.

Theodor Waitz's theory of feelings and the rise of affective sciences in the mid-19th century.

The German psychologist Theodor Waitz (1821-1864) was an important theorist of affectivity in the mid-19th century. This article aims to revisit Waitz's contribution to affective psychology at a crucial moment of its history. First, I elaborate the context in which Waitz's ideas were carried out by showing how affective sciences emerged as an autonomous field of investigation between about 1770 and 1910.

Temporal dynamics and potential neural sources of goal conduciveness, control, and power appraisal.

A major emotion theory, the Component Process Model, predicts that emotion-antecedent appraisal proceeds sequentially (e.g., goal conduciveness>control>power appraisal).

Appraisals Generate Specific Configurations of Facial Muscle Movements in a Gambling Task: Evidence for the Component Process Model of Emotion.

Scherer's Component Process Model provides a theoretical framework for research on the production mechanism of emotion and facial emotional expression. The model predicts that appraisal results drive facial expressions, which unfold sequentially and cumulatively over time. In two experiments, we examined facial muscle activity changes (via facial electromyography recordings over the corrugator, cheek, and frontalis regions) in response to events in a gambling task.

Coherence explored between emotion components: evidence from event-related potentials and facial electromyography.

Componential theories assume that emotion episodes consist of emergent and dynamic response changes to relevant events in different components, such as appraisal, physiology, motivation, expression, and subjective feeling. In particular, Scherer's Component Process Model hypothesizes that subjective feeling emerges when the synchronization (or coherence) of appraisal-driven changes between emotion components has reached a critical threshold. We examined the prerequisite of this synchronization hypothesis for appraisal-driven response changes in facial expression.

Effects of emotional contexts on cerebello-thalamo-cortical activity during action observation.

Several studies investigated the neural and functional mechanisms underlying action observation in contexts with objects. However, actions seen in everyday life are often embedded in emotional contexts. The neural systems integrating emotion cues in action observation are still poorly understood.

Temporal dynamics of event-related potentials related to goal conduciveness and power appraisals.

The Component Process Model hypothesizes that appraisal--the mechanism that elicits and differentiates emotion--is processed sequentially. It predicts that the goal conduciveness check (motivational valence evaluation) is evaluated before the power check (evaluation of the degree of power to act on events). To test this prediction, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during a gambling task in response to feedback that simultaneously presented the goal conduciveness (outcome: win, loss, or break-even) and the power check (options to act on the outcome) information.

Mapping emotions into acoustic space: the role of voice production.

Research on the vocal expression of emotion has long since used a "fishing expedition" approach to find acoustic markers for emotion categories and dimensions. Although partially successful, the underlying mechanisms have not yet been elucidated. To illustrate that this research can profit from considering the underlying voice production mechanism, we specifically analyzed short affect bursts (sustained/a/vowels produced by 10 professional actors for five emotions) according to physiological variations in phonation (using acoustic parameters derived from the acoustic signal and the inverse filter estimated voice source waveform).