The appraisal process consists of the subjective evaluation that occurs during an individual's encounter with significant events in the environment, determining the nature of the emotional reaction and experience. Placed in the context of appraisal theories of emotion-elicitation and differentiation, the aim of the present research was to test empirically the hypothesis that the intrinsic pleas...

This study explored the role of trait emotional intelligence (EI) in emotion regulation and performance under pressure. Twenty-eight tennis players performed two series of 35 serves, separated by a pressure manipulation. Reaction to pressure was assessed using both subjective (self-report emotion questionnaire) and objective (cortisol secretion, tennis serve success) measures. The pressure mani...

Individuals with schizophrenia show deficits both in facial emotion recognition and context processing (Kohler, C.G., Walker, J.B., Martin, E.A., Healey, K.M., Moberg, P.J., 2010. Facial emotion perception in schizophrenia: a meta-analytic review. Schizophr. Bull. 36, 1009-1019). Recent evidence suggests context information can affect facial emotion recognition (Aviezer, H., Bentin, S., Hassin,...

Our brain is unable to fully process all the sensory signals we encounter. Attention is the process that helps selecting input from all available information for detailed processing and it is largely influenced by the affective value of the stimuli. This study examined if attentional bias toward emotional stimuli can be modulated by cognitively changing their emotional value. Participants were ...

UNLABELLED Following childbirth, 16% of women may have anxiety disorders and 2% develop PTSD. It is important to identify factors that influence women's emotional reactions to birth. This study investigated how stressful events and support from hospital staff during birth each affects women's anxiety and perceived control. METHODS A between-subjects experimental design used birth stories to m...

The inclusion of emotional aspects into speech can improve the naturalness of speech synthesis system. The different emotions sadness, angry, happiness are manifested in speech as prosodic elements like time duration, pitch and intensity. The prosodic values corresponding to different emotions are analyzed at word as well as phonemic level, using speech analysis and manipulation tool PRAAT. Thi...

As a classic neuromodulator, dopamine has long been thought to modulate, rather than trigger, synaptic plasticity. In contrast, our present results demonstrate that within the parallel projections of dopaminergic and GABAergic terminals from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens core (NAcCo), action-potential-activated release of dopamine heterosynaptically triggers LTD at GABAerg...

This study examined the effects of emotional suppression and acceptance in a depressed sample. Sixty participants with diagnoses of unipolar depression completed a questionnaire packet and participated in an experiment. The experiment utilized two conditions to explore correlates of the spontaneous use of emotion regulation strategies and the effects of an experimental manipulation of acceptanc...

We investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results ...

Machiavellianism comprises several distinct aspects (Rauthmann & Will, 2011), but it is unclear what Machiavellianism scales measure. The current study exemplarily investigates for a German Machiavellianism Scale (Henning & Six, 2008) (a) item content, (b) factorial structure, and (c) factor correlations with other scales (Big Five, narcissism, psychopathy, emotional manipulation, socio-emotion...