How German and Italian Laypeople Reason about Distributive Shortages during COVID-19

(1) Background: The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to investigate how moral reasoning is influenced by individuals’ exposure to a crisis and by personal, societal and temporal proximity. We examined how Italians and Germans judged different behaviors that arose because of the pandemic, which affected health and societal matters. (2) Methods: Over the course of four months and three assessment periods, we used an observational online survey to assess participants’ judgments regarding seven scenarios that addressed distributive shortages during the pandemic. (3) Results: Overall, there was no clear answering pattern across all scenarios. For a variation of triage and pandemic restrictions, most participants selected a mean value, which can be interpreted as deferring the choice. For the other scenarios, most participants used the extremes of the scale, thereby reflecting a clear opinion of the public regarding the moral issue. In addition, moral reasoning varied across the two countries, assessment periods, fear, and age. (4) Conclusions: By using scenarios that were taken from real-life experiences, the current study addresses criticism that moral research mostly relies on unrealistic scenarios that lack in external validity, plausibility, and proximity to everyday situations. In addition, it shows how lay people regard measures of public health and societal decision-making.the German Research Foundation (DFG)Peer Reviewe

How Is Sentence Processing Affected by External Semantic and Syntactic Information? Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

BACKGROUND: A crucial question for understanding sentence comprehension is the openness of syntactic and semantic processes for other sources of information. Using event-related potentials in a dual task paradigm, we had previously found that sentence processing takes into consideration task relevant sentence-external semantic but not syntactic information. In that study, internal and external information both varied within the same linguistic domain-either semantic or syntactic. Here we investigated whether across-domain sentence-external information would impact within-sentence processing. METHODOLOGY: In one condition, adjectives within visually presented sentences of the structure [Det]-[Noun]-[Adjective]-[Verb] were semantically correct or incorrect. Simultaneously with the noun, auditory adjectives were presented that morphosyntactically matched or mismatched the visual adjectives with respect to gender. FINDINGS: As expected, semantic violations within the sentence elicited N400 and P600 components in the ERP. However, these components were not modulated by syntactic matching of the sentence-external auditory adjective. In a second condition, syntactic within-sentence correctness-variations were combined with semantic matching variations between the auditory and the visual adjective. Here, syntactic within-sentence violations elicited a LAN and a P600 that did not interact with semantic matching of the auditory adjective. However, semantic mismatching of the latter elicited a frontocentral positivity, presumably related to an increase in discourse level complexity. CONCLUSION: The current findings underscore the open versus algorithmic nature of semantic and syntactic processing, respectively, during sentence comprehension

How the Emotional Content of Discourse Affects Language Comprehension

Emotion effects on cognition have often been reported. However, only few studies investigated emotional effects on subsequent language processing, and in most cases these effects were induced by non-linguistic stimuli such as films, faces, or pictures. Here, we investigated how a paragraph of positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence affects the processing of a subsequent emotionally neutral sentence, which contained either semantic, syntactic, or no violation, respectively, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Behavioral data revealed strong effects of emotion; error rates and reaction times increased significantly in sentences preceded by a positive paragraph relative to negative and neutral ones. In ERPs, the N400 to semantic violations was not affected by emotion. In the syntactic experiment, however, clear emotion effects were observed on ERPs. The left anterior negativity (LAN) to syntactic violations, which was not visible in the neutral condition, was present in the negative and positive conditions. This is interpreted as reflecting modulatory effects of prior emotions on syntactic processing, which is discussed in the light of three alternative or complementary explanations based on emotion-induced cognitive styles, working memory, and arousal models. The present effects of emotion on the LAN are especially remarkable considering that syntactic processing has often been regarded as encapsulated and autonomous

Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders, and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners' and speakers' gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers' gender had a significant impact on how listeners' judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers' gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners' and speakers' gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody

Emotions in visual word processing

Die Einflüsse von Emotionen auf Informationsverarbeitungsprozesse zählen zu einem der zentralen Aspekte kognitionspsychologischer und neurowissenschaftlicher Forschung. Studien zur Prozessierung affektiver Bilder und emotionaler Gesichtsausdrücke haben gezeigt, daß emotionale Stimuli – vermutlich aufgrund ihrer starken intrinsischen Relevanz für den Organismus – in besonderem Maße Aufmerksamkeit binden und hierdurch einer präferierten und elaborierteren Weiterverarbeitung zugeführt werden. Evidenz zur Aktivierung und Verarbeitung emotionaler Valenz in der visuellen Wortverarbeitung ist hingegen gering und größtenteils inkonsistent. In einer Serie von Experimenten, die in der vorliegenden Arbeit zusammenfassend beschrieben und diskutiert werden, wurde mit Hilfe Ereigniskorrelierter Potentiale (EKPs) versucht, die Effekte emotionaler Valenz von deutschsprachigen Verben innerhalb des Wortverarbeitungsprozesses zu lokalisieren. In den EKPs zeigen sich – hinsichtlich ihrer Latenz und Topographie – dissoziierbare emotionsrelatierte Komponenten, die mit unterschiedlichen Stufen der Verarbeitungsprozesse in Verbindung gebracht werden können. Die Befunde legen nahe, daß die emotionale Valenz von Verben auf einer (post-) lexikalischen Verarbeitungsstufe aktiviert wird. Dieser frühen Registrierung liegen wahrscheinlich domänenunspezifische neuronale Mechanismen zugrunde, die weitestgehend ressourcen- und aufgabenunabhängig wirken. Auf späteren Stufen hingegen scheinen emotions-relatierte Prozesse durch zahlreiche weitere Faktoren beeinflußt zu werden. Die Modulation der Dynamik früher, nicht aber später Emotionsprozessierung durch nicht-valente Kontextinformation sowie in Abhängigkeit der Stimulusdomäne legt einen zeitlich variablen Verarbeitungsprozeß emotionaler Information nahe, der mit streng seriellen Modellen der Informationsverarbeitung nicht vereinbar ist, und möglicherweise der flexiblen Verhaltensanpassung an verschiedene Umweltbedingungen dient.In recent cognitive and neuroscientific research the influences of emotion on information processing are of special interest. As has been shown in several studies on affective picture as well as facial emotional expression processing, emotional stimuli tend to involuntarily draw attentional resources and preferential and sustained processing, possibly caused by their high intrinsic relevance. However, evidence for emotion effects in visual word processing is scant and heterogeneous. As yet, little is known about at which stage and under what conditions the specific emotional content of a word is activated. A series of experiments which will be summarized and discussed in the following section aimed to localize the effects of emotion in visual word processing by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Distinct effects of emotional valence on ERPs were found which were distinguishable with regard to their temporal and spatial distribution and might be therefore related to different stages within the processing stream. As a main result, the present findings indicate that the activation of emotional valence of verbs occurs on a (post-) lexical stage. The underlying neural mechanisms of this early registration appear to be domain-unspecific, and further, largely independent of processing resources and task demands. On later stages, emotional processes are modulated by several different factors. Further, the findings of an acceleration of early but not late emotion effects caused by neutral context information as well as by domain-specifity indicate a flexible dynamic of emotional processes which would be hard to account for by strictly serial processing models

Hot Speech and Exploding Bombs: Autonomic Arousal During Emotion Classification of Prosodic Utterances and Affective Sounds

Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. Although speech provides one of the most important channels for human communication, its physiological correlates, such as activations of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) while listening to spoken utterances, have received far less attention than in other domains of emotion processing. Our study aimed at filling this gap by investigating autonomic activation in response to spoken utterances that were embedded into larger semantic contexts. Emotional salience was manipulated by providing information on alleged speaker similarity. We compared these autonomic responses to activations triggered by affective sounds, such as exploding bombs, and applause. These sounds had been rated and validated as being either positive, negative, or neutral. As physiological markers of ANS activity, we recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) and changes of pupil size while participants classified both prosodic and sound stimuli according to their hedonic valence. As expected, affective sounds elicited increased arousal in the receiver, as reflected in increased SCR and pupil size. In contrast, SCRs to angry and joyful prosodic expressions did not differ from responses to neutral ones. Pupil size, however, was modulated by affective prosodic utterances, with increased dilations for angry and joyful compared to neutral prosody, although the similarity manipulation had no effect. These results indicate that cues provided by emotional prosody in spoken semantically neutral utterances might be too subtle to trigger SCR, although variation in pupil size indicated the salience of stimulus variation. Our findings further demonstrate a functional dissociation between pupil dilation and skin conductance that presumably origins from their differential innervation

The appraisal of facial beauty is rapid but not mandatory

Schacht A, Werheid K, Sommer W. The appraisal of facial beauty is rapid but not mandatory. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. 2008;8(2):132-142.Facial attractiveness is an important source of social affective information. Here, we studied the time course and task dependence of evaluating attractive faces from a viewer's perspective. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants classified color portraits of unfamiliar persons according to gender and facial attractiveness. During attractiveness classification, enhanced ERP amplitudes for attractive and nonattractive faces relative to faces of intermediate attractiveness were found for an early component around 150 msec and for the late positive complex (LPC). Whereas LPC enhancement conforms to previous studies employing various types of affective stimuli, the finding of an early effect extends earlier research on rapid emotion processing to the dimension of facial attractiveness. Dipole source localization of this early ERP effect revealed a scalp distribution suggesting activation of posterior extrastriate areas. Importantly, attractiveness-related modulations of brain responses were only marginal during the gender decision task, arguing against the automaticity of attractiveness appraisal

Font size matters--emotion and attention in cortical responses to written words.

For emotional pictures with fear-, disgust-, or sex-related contents, stimulus size has been shown to increase emotion effects in attention-related event-related potentials (ERPs), presumably reflecting the enhanced biological impact of larger emotion-inducing pictures. If this is true, size should not enhance emotion effects for written words with symbolic and acquired meaning. Here, we investigated ERP effects of font size for emotional and neutral words. While P1 and N1 amplitudes were not affected by emotion, the early posterior negativity started earlier and lasted longer for large relative to small words. These results suggest that emotion-driven facilitation of attention is not necessarily based on biological relevance, but might generalize to stimuli with arbitrary perceptual features. This finding points to the high relevance of written language in today's society as an important source of emotional meaning