Caution Follows Fear: Evidence from Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling

Fearful expressions are thought to warn of potential threat (Davis et al., 2011; Whalen, 1998) and therefore, one response to seeing fear might be to react cautiously. Although previous studies have tested for an effect of seeing fear on visual perception, they have not tested for increased decision making caution. Here, I applied Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling (Vandekerckhove, Tuerlinckx, & Lee, 2011a; Wiecki, Sofer, & Frank, 2013) to the results of 4 experiments designed to test the idea that seeing facial expressions both impairs visual perception (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009a) and leads to changes in decision making caution. Standard statistical analyses showed that reaction times were slower following fearful compared to neutral expressions. Diffusion Modelling showed that the data were best described by increased caution and not impaired perception. Further experiments showed that: 1) happy expressions did not lead to increased caution (Experiment 3) and 2) people were less cautious after seeing sad compared to neutral expressions (Experiment 4). Overall, the results point to a new direction for research in this area – testing for differences in decision making caution following facial expressions and other emotion cues

Rapid temporal accumulation in spider fear: Evidence from hierarchical drift diffusion modelling

Fear can distort our sense of time – making time seem slow or even stand still. Here, I used Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling (HDDM; Vandekerckhove, Tuerlinckx, & Lee, 2008, 2011; Wiecki, Sofer, & Frank, 2013) to test the idea that temporal accumulation speeds up during fear. Eighteen high fearful and twenty-three low fearful participants judged the duration of both feared stimuli (spiders) and non-feared stimuli (birds) in a temporal bisection task. The drift diffusion modelling results support the main hypothesis. In high but not low fearful individuals evidence accumulated more rapidly toward a long duration decision - drift rates were higher – for spiders compared to birds. This result and further insights into how fear affects time perception would not have been possible based on analyses of choice proportion data alone. Further results were interpreted in the context of a recent two-stage model of time perception (Balci & Simen, 2014). The results highlight the usefulness of diffusion modelling to test process-based explanations of disordered cognition in emotional disorders

Neural bases for individual differences in the subjective experience of short durations (less than 2 seconds).

The current research was designed to establish whether individual differences in timing performance predict neural activation in the areas that subserve the perception of short durations ranging between 400 and 1600 milliseconds. Seventeen participants completed both a temporal bisection task and a control task, in a mixed fMRI design. In keeping with previous research, there was increased activation in a network of regions typically active during time perception including the right supplementary motor area (SMA) and right pre-SMA and basal ganglia (including the putamen and right pallidum). Furthermore, correlations between neural activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus and SMA and timing performance corroborate the results of a recent meta-analysis and are further evidence that the SMA forms part of a neural clock that is responsible for the accumulation of temporal information. Specifically, subjective lengthening of the perceived duration were associated with increased activation in both the right SMA (and right pre-SMA) and right inferior frontal gyrus

Dairying and Employment in the Amuri: 1983 to 2002

The dairy industry is currently experiencing a staff shortage, as are many other industries. It has experienced rapid expansion, and the situation is made worse by the poor image of the industry. This expansion has often occurred in areas with little prior dairying. The Amuri region, North Canterbury, is one such area. The conversion of farms to dairying began in I983, following the commissioning of the 17000-hectare Waiau Plains Irrigation Scheme in 1980. There are now 49 herds in the area. Some of the initial dairy farming experiences were very bad, giving all dairying in the region a poor reputation. The Amuri region is 'geographically isolated basin', and situated approximately 90 minutes from Christchurch, with limited social opportunities for the farm staff This resulted in extreme difficulties attracting and retaining good staff in the area. In response to this situation, the dairy farmers in the area formed the Amuri Dairy Employers Group, in March 2000. This group established a constitution including: Mandatory member employer training; Agreeing to an independent annual audit of member employment practices; and Agreeing to a Code of Practice for employment standards. I have undertaken a two-year investigation of the effects of the Amuri Dairy Employers Group, on dairy farming employment and the wider social effects in the Amuri area. A case-study approach has been used to gather the information. This research was conducted as part of a Masters of Commerce (Agriculture)

Increased Frustration Predicts the Experience of Time Slowing-Down: Evidence from an Experience Sampling Study

© 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Recent experience sampling research supports the idea that our experience of time speeds up when we are happy and slows down when we feel sad. However, this research had only examined a single negative mood state namely, sadness. Here, I extend this research by testing whether the experience of time speeding-up and slowing down is associated with other thoughts and negative mood states. Thirty-nine participants aged from 18 to 29 completed an experience sampling procedure that lasted for five consecutive days. The experience sampling procedure included measures of time experience (passage of time judgements), mood, levels of activity and time orientation. Increased frustration predicted the experience of time slowing down more than sadness and increased activity, thinking about the future and to a lesser extent happiness, predicted time moving more quickly. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to laboratory-based studies of time perception

Analyzing facial expression decision times: Reaction time distribution matters.

People can decide whether a person appears either angry or happy in less than 1 second. Despite such speed, research shows that expression decisions are influenced by other facial attributes such as face sex. Nonetheless, specific patterns including participant sex differences remain unclear. Here, multiverse and distributional analyses clarify inconsistent results-participant sex differences for reaction time (RT) analyses were dependent on either an outlier removal method that effectively reduced the skew of the distribution or a specific distribution chosen to model the data. A further finding was that the patten of the Face Sex × Expression interaction effect for female participants differed markedly across the stimulus sets. The Diffusion Model, ex-Gaussian, ex-Wald, shifted Wald, and related distributions are recommended as replacements for analyses of mean RTs, rather than supplementary techniques. An extended analyses using the ex-Gaussian model is provided as an example. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

No need to collect more data: ex-Gaussian modelling of existing data (Craig & Lipp, 2018) reveals an interactive effect of face race and face sex on speeded expression recognition.

The results of a previous study (Craig & Lipp, 2018) into the effects of multiple social category cues (face race and face sex) on facial emotion recognition indicate that face sex dominates face race, and moreover, participant sex differences contribute little to the observed effects. Here, I modelled the same dataset (https://osf.io/rsmxb/) using the ex-Gaussian, a distribution that is 1) well suited to RT data and 2) separates slow from relatively fast influences. Corroborating recent results (Tipples, 2022) current results show larger effects of face sex (for the faces of White individuals) for female participants. Further novel interaction effects were revealed. For example, results support a different time course for the influence of face sex on expression for the faces of Black compared to White individuals

Asymmetric interference between sex and emotion in face perception

Previous research with speeded-response interference tasks modeled on the Garner paradigm has demonstrated that task-irrelevant variations in either emotional expression or facial speech do not interfere with identity judgments, but irrelevant variations in identity do interfere with expression and facial speech judgments. Sex, like identity, is a relatively invariant aspect of faces. Drawing on a recent model of face processing according to which invariant and changeable aspects of faces are represented in separate neurological systems, we predicted asymmetric interference between sex and emotion classification. The results of Experiment 1, in which the Garner paradigm was employed, confirmed this prediction: Emotion classifications were influenced by the sex of the faces, but sex classifications remained relatively unaffected by facial expression. A second experiment, in which the difficulty of the tasks was equated, corroborated these findings, indicating that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between facial emotion and sex processing. A third experiment revealed the same pattern of asymmetric interference through the use of a variant of the Simon paradigm. To the extent that Garner interference and Simon interference indicate interactions at perceptual and response-selection stages of processing, respectively, a challenge for face processing models is to show how the same asymmetric pattern of interference could occur at these different stages. The implications of these findings for the functional independence of the different components of face processing are discussed

A closer look at the size of the gaze-liking effect: a preregistered replication

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This study is a direct replication of gaze-liking effect using the same design, stimuli and procedure. The gaze-liking effect describes the tendency for people to rate objects as more likeable when they have recently seen a person repeatedly gaze toward rather than away from the object. However, as subsequent studies show considerable variability in the size of this effect, we sampled a larger number of participants (N = 98) than the original study (N = 24) to gain a more precise estimate of the gaze-liking effect size. Our results indicate a much smaller standardised effect size (d z  = 0.02) than that of the original study (d z  = 0.94). Our smaller effect size was not due to general insensitivity to eye-gaze effects because the same sample showed a clear (d z  = 1.09) gaze-cuing effect – faster reaction times when eyes looked toward vs away from target objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies wishing to study the gaze-liking effect

Speeding up time: Hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion modelling evidence for accelerating temporal accumulation

Time perception is malleable - it can be made to speed up and slow down by various experimental manipulations including the presentation of a sequence of auditory clicks and also angry facial expressions. Recent evidence supports the idea that auditory click trains increase accumulation of evidence across time. Here, we test this idea for both angry expressions and auditory clicks by modelling response times (and choice responses) using Bayesian Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling. Two separate groups of participants (Experiment 1; n = 29; Experiment 2; n = 38) judged the duration of angry and neutral facial expressions preceded by either a 3-s sequence of auditory clicks or silence. In both experiments, standard psychophysical analyses showed that both clicks and angry expressions lengthened the perception of time. The original finding came from the analyses of the Drift Diffusion Modelling parameter that represents the speed of information accumulation - the drift rate parameter. Drift rates grew in magnitude with the duration of the face and moreover this effect was larger when the faces were either preceded by clicks or appeared angry - evidence for accelerating temporal accumulation. This novel insight would not have been possible from traditional psychophysical analyses and therefore, the results highlight the potential value of Bayesian Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modelling as a tool for understanding how we perceive time