In order to investigate the effects of physical discomfort (i.e., pain) on the induction of mood, 139 participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: sad, sad with physical discomfort, happy, and happy with physical discomfort. Consistent with our hypotheses, the addition of physical discomfort resulted in a significantly stronger induction of self-reported depression, with these...

Research suggests that people initially take their subjective experience of an object as an accurate reflection of the object's properties, and only subsequently, occasionally, and effortfully consider the possibility that their experience was influenced by extraneous factors. The two studies reported here demonstrate that this is true even when the extraneous factors are the person's own dispo...

Crying is a powerful solicitation of caregiving, yet little is known about the cognitive processes underpinning caring responses to crying others. This study examined (1) whether crying (compared to sad and happy) faces differentially elicited semantic activation of caregiving, and (2) whether individual differences in cognitive and emotional empathy moderated this activation. Ninety participan...

Experiments using schematic faces developed by Öhman (Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) seem to document an anger-superiority effect, although we have come to question these experiments. Our work shows that the low-level features of these schematic faces interact with the face's surround to produce effects that have been attributed to facial affect. Using relatively neutral faces that preserve...

Although the birth of a child is typically considered a very happy time for parents, surrogacy is often unchartered territory that can become very stressful for all parties involved. Part of the stress stems from the fact that different states and countries have varying laws and regulations overseeing surrogacy. This article provides insight regarding surrogacy around the world, including profe...

An extensive literature credits the right hemisphere with dominance for processing emotion. Conflicting literature finds left hemisphere dominance for positive emotions. This conflict may be resolved by attending to processing stage. A divided output (bimanual) reaction time paradigm in which response hand was varied for emotion (angry; happy) in Experiments 1 and 2 and for gender (male; female...

This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self-report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6-12 years. The results showed an interference of colour ma...

The present work represents the first study to investigate the relationship between adult attachment avoidance and anxiety and automatic affective responses to basic facial emotions. Subliminal affective priming methods allowed for the assessment of unconscious affective reactions. An affective priming task using masked sad and happy faces, both of which are approachrelated facial expressions, ...