Anne-Laure Gilet

Inducing changes in arousal and valence: Comparison of two mood induction procedures

This research examined the relative effectiveness of two mood induction procedures (MIPs) for inducing four specific moods varying along the dimensions of both valence and arousal. Participants were randomly assigned either to an autobiographical recall or to a music and guided imagery MIP and underwent a happiness, serenity, anger, or sadness mood induction. The findings confirmed the effectiveness of the two MIPs in producing changes on both the valence and arousal dimensions of mood. The results also revealed an unexpected greater efficiency of the autobiographical recall than of the combined procedure.

Empathy for Pain from Adolescence through Adulthood: An Event-Related Brain Potential Study

Affective and cognitive empathy are traditionally differentiated, the affective component being concerned with resonating with another’s emotional state, whereas the cognitive component reflects regulation of the resulting distress and understanding of another’s mental states (see Decety and Jackson, 2004 for a review). Adolescence is a critical period for the development of cognitive control processes necessary to regulate affective processes: it is only in young adulthood that these control processes achieve maturity (Steinberg, 2005). Thus, one should expect adolescents to show greater automatic empathy than young adults. The present study aimed at exploring the neural correlates of affective (automatic) and cognitive empathy for pain from adolescence to young adulthood. With this aim, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 32 participants (aged 11–39) in a task designed to dissociate these components. ERPs results showed an early automatic fronto-central response to pain (that was not modulated by task demand) and a late parietal response to painful stimuli modulated by attention to pain cues. Adolescents exhibited earlier automatic responses to painful situations than young adults did and showed greater activity in the late cognitive component even when viewing neutral stimuli. Results are discussed in the context of the development of regulatory abilities during adolescence.

Valence, arousal and word associations

This study aimed at testing the relative effects of valence and arousal on the generation of unusual first associates in response to non-emotional inducers. To examine this question, four specific moods varying along both the valence and the arousal dimensions were induced: happiness (positive mood, high arousal), serenity (positive mood, low arousal), anger (negative mood, high arousal) and sadness (negative mood, low arousal). The results indicate that the uniqueness of word-associations is influenced by arousal levels rather than by the valence of mood. No matter what the valence, high-arousing moods enhanced the production of unusual associates in contrast to low-arousing moods.

Age-Relevance of Person Characteristics: Persons' Beliefs About Developmental Change Across the Lifespan

The authors investigated normative beliefs about personality development. Young, middle-aged, and older adults indicated the age-relevance of 835 French adjectives by specifying person characteristics as typical for any age decade from 0 to 99 years. With this paradigm, the authors determined age-relevance (How typical is a characteristic for a given age decade?). Most characteristics were ascribed to young adulthood. The pattern differed across the lifespan, however, for positive and negative person characteristics as well as for physical, cognitive, and personal/expressive characteristics. Whereas the total number of ascribed positive characteristics peaked in young adulthood and declined thereafter, the number of ascribed negative person characteristics peaked during adolescence, remained fairly low during middle adulthood, and increased slightly in old age (70+ years). As a consequence, the most positive profile was ascribed to young olds (60 to 69 years), whereas the most negative personality profiles were ascribed to the oldest age groups (70+ years) and to adolescence (10 to 19 years). The negative profiles are primarily due to more negative physical characteristics ascribed to older adults and more negative cognitive characteristics ascribed to adolescence.

Age-related differences in affective responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music: a cross-sectional study

There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music. In the present study, eighteen older (60–84 years) and eighteen younger (19–24 years) listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a) reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b) showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c) were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d) showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity.

False memories and normal aging: Links between inhibitory capacities and monitoring processes.

Empirical evidence suggests an increased production of false memories with advancing age. The activation-monitoring theory proposes that strategic monitoring processes influence the probability of false recall in the DRM paradigm. In the present study, we examined the hypothesis that a low level of inhibition may impair the efficient use of monitoring processes during information retrieval and thus increase the production of false memories in aging. Accordingly, we conducted a study in which older adults with low or high levels of inhibition performed a standard DRM task or an inclusion DRM task that disables monitoring processes. The results indicated that low inhibitory capacities were associated with fewer correct recalls and increased production of critical lures (false memories), suggesting difficulties in using monitoring processes at the time of retrieval. Our findings also showed that the relationship between Age and the production of critical lures in a standard DRM task is mediated by Inhibition. These results are interpreted as suggesting that inhibitory abilities may partly be linked to the impairment of monitoring processes in the elderly. (PsycINFO Database Record

Intact Semantic Priming of Critical Lures in Alzheimer’s Disease: Implications for False Memory

OBJECTIVES The present study examines the question of the activation of the critical lure (CL) in Alzheimers patients with a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM)-like task. More precisely, older adults and Alzheimers patients performed a lexical decision task in which they were asked to categorize strings of letters as words or nonwords. Contrary to the DRM paradigm in which the activation of the CL is inferred from its production at recall, such a lexical decision task does not require the joint use of intentional recovery strategies and source-monitoring processes that are known to be particularly impaired in Alzheimers patients. The performance at the lexical decision therefore reflects the activation of the CL without contamination from such strategic processes. METHOD Twenty-nine older adults and 25 Alzheimers patients performed a lexical decision task with DRM lists intermixed with neutral words and nonwords. RESULTS Analysis indicated that older adults as well as Alzheimers patients showed shorter lexical decision latencies for CLs than for other types of words. DISCUSSION Contrary to the existing literature, our results suggest that the activation of the CL is preserved in Alzheimers patients at mild to moderate stages of the disease.

Using individual data to characterize emotional user experience and its memorability: Focus on gender factor

Delivering the same digital image to several users is not necessarily providing them the same experience. In this study, we focused on how different affective experiences impact the memorability of an image. Forty-nine participants took part in an experiment in which they saw a stream of images conveying various emotions. One day later, they had to recognize the images displayed the day before and rate them according to the positivity/ negativity of the emotional experience the images induced. In order to better appreciate the underlying idiosyncratic factors that affect the experience under test, prior to the test session we collected not only personal information but also results of psychological tests to characterize individuals according to their dominant personality in terms of masculinity-femininity (Bem Sex Role Inventory) and to measure their emotional state. The results show that the way an emotional experience is rated depends on personality rather than biological sex, suggesting that personality could be a mediator in the well-established differences in how males and females experience emotional material. From the collected data, we derive a model including individual factors relevant to characterize the memorability of the images, in particular through the emotional experience they induced.

False Memories in Alzheimer’s Disease: Intact Semantic Priming But Impaired Production of Critical Lures

Objectives This study explores the activation of the critical lure (CL) and its production in Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) tasks in Alzheimers disease and aging. In a previous lexical decision task including DRM lists, we showed that the activation of the CL occurs normally in Alzheimers patients. Here, we reproduce this study and add a production (DRM) task in order to compare both processes in the same groups of participants. Method Eighteen older adults and 20 Alzheimers patients performed a conventional DRM task, followed by a lexical decision task with DRM lists intermixed with neutral words and nonwords. Results Analyses indicated that Alzheimers patients produced significantly fewer CLs than older participants in the DRM task, but that they showed, like older adults, shorter lexical decision latencies for CLs than for other types of words. Discussion This study provides evidence that the low production of CLs regularly documented in Alzheimers patients in the DRM paradigm is not necessarily explained by their nonactivation. The results are discussed in the light of the hypothesis of a rapid disappearance of the episodic mnemonic trace of the CLs in Alzheimers patients.

Now you make false memories; now you do not: the order of presentation of words in DRM lists influences the production of the critical lure in Alzheimer’s disease

Why do some Alzheimer’s patients produce fewer false memories than healthy older participants in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, which was especially designed for the study of false memories in a laboratory setting? Using a very simple methodology, this study examines a new explanatory factor inherent in the paradigm itself: the order of presentation of the words in the lists. A sample comprising 149 participants (36 younger, 40 middle-aged, 37 healthy older adults, and 36 Alzheimer’s patients) performed a DRM task with either a classic descending forward associative strength (FAS) presentation order of the words or an ascending FAS presentation order. The results showed that this simple manipulation influenced the production of false memories in Alzheimer’s patients only. Contrary to the other participants, Alzheimer’s patients produced significantly more critical lures in the ascending FAS condition than in the descending FAS condition. These new data, interpreted in the light of serial position effects, invite a reconsideration of the relevance of the DRM paradigm for comparing the production of false memories in Alzheimer’s patients and healthy older participants.