Kirsten I. Ruys

The Secret Life of Emotions [retracted]:

The following articles have been retracted from publication in Psychological Science: Ruys, K. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2008). The secret life of emotions. Psychological Science, 19, 385–391. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02097.x Ruys, K. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2008). Emotion elicitor or emotion messenger? Subliminal priming reveals two faces of facial expressions. Psychological Science, 19, 593–603. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02128.x The editors and publishers of Psychological Science have made the retractions following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel (https://www.commissielevelt.nl/). The Levelt Committee has determined that these articles contained data that were fabricated by author Stapel. His coauthor was unaware of his actions, was not in any way involved in the generation of the data, and agrees to the retraction of the articles. The following Psychological Science articles coauthored by Stapel have been cleared by the Levelt Committee, whose investigation into these articles found no evidence of fraudulent data or practices: Lammers, J., Stapel, D. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2010). Power increases hypocrisy: Moralizing in reasoning, immorality in behavior. Psychological Science, 21, 737–744. doi:10.1177/0956797610368810 Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., Jordan, J., Pollmann, M., & Stapel, D. A. (2011). Power increases infidelity among men and women. Psychological Science, 22, 1191–1197. doi:10.1177/0956797611416252 Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2009). Differentiating social and personal power: Opposite effects on stereotyping, but parallel effects on behavioral approach tendencies. Psychological Science, 20, 1543–1549. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02479.x The five articles noted above are the only ones published in Psychological Science on which Stapel is listed as an author.

Emotion Elicitor or Emotion Messenger

The following articles have been retracted from publication in Psychological Science: Ruys, K. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2008). The secret life of emotions. Psychological Science, 19, 385–391. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02097.x Ruys, K. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2008). Emotion elicitor or emotion messenger? Subliminal priming reveals two faces of facial expressions. Psychological Science, 19, 593–603. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02128.x The editors and publishers of Psychological Science have made the retractions following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel (https://www.commissielevelt.nl/). The Levelt Committee has determined that these articles contained data that were fabricated by author Stapel. His coauthor was unaware of his actions, was not in any way involved in the generation of the data, and agrees to the retraction of the articles. The following Psychological Science articles coauthored by Stapel have been cleared by the Levelt Committee, whose investigation into these articles found no evidence of fraudulent data or practices: Lammers, J., Stapel, D. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2010). Power increases hypocrisy: Moralizing in reasoning, immorality in behavior. Psychological Science, 21, 737–744. doi:10.1177/0956797610368810 Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., Jordan, J., Pollmann, M., & Stapel, D. A. (2011). Power increases infidelity among men and women. Psychological Science, 22, 1191–1197. doi:10.1177/0956797611416252 Lammers, J., Stoker, J. I., & Stapel, D. A. (2009). Differentiating social and personal power: Opposite effects on stereotyping, but parallel effects on behavioral approach tendencies. Psychological Science, 20, 1543–1549. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02479.x The five articles noted above are the only ones published in Psychological Science on which Stapel is listed as an author.

The Art of Anger Reward Context Turns Avoidance Responses to Anger-Related Objects Into Approach

Anger has a special status among the emotions in that it can elicit avoidance as well as approach motivation. This study tested the ignored role of reward context in potentiating approach rather than avoidance responses toward objects associated with anger. In Experiment 1, angry and neutral facial expressions were parafoveally paired with common objects, and responses to the objects were assessed by subjective reports of motivation to obtain them. In Experiment 2, objects were again paired with angry or neutral faces outside of participants’ awareness, and responses toward the objects were indexed by physical effort expended in attempting to win them. Results showed that approach motivation toward anger-related objects can be observed when responding is framed in terms of rewards that one can obtain, whereas avoidance motivation occurs in the absence of such a reward context. These findings point to the importance of a reward context in modulating people’s responses to anger.

Facing disapproval: Performance monitoring in a social context

Facial expressions are a potent source of information about how others evaluate our behavior. In the present study, we investigated how the internal performance-monitoring system, as reflected by error-related negativity (ERN), is affected by external cues of positive (happy faces) or negative evaluation (disgusted faces) of performance. We hypothesized that if the social context indeed impacts on how we evaluate our own performance, we would expect that the same performance error would result in larger ERN amplitudes in the context of negative evaluation than in a positive evaluation context. Our findings confirm our predictions: ERN amplitudes were largest when stimuli consisted of disgusted faces, compared to when stimuli consisted of happy faces. Importantly, ERN amplitudes in our control condition, in which sad faces were used as stimuli, were no different from the positive evaluation condition, ruling out the possibility that effects in the negative evaluation condition resulted from negative affect per se. We suggest that external social cues of approval or disapproval impact on how we evaluate our own performance at a very basic level: The brain processes errors that are associated with social disapproval as more motivationally salient, signaling the need for additional cognitive resources to prevent subsequent failures.

Reflecting on the action or its outcome: Behavior representation level modulates high level outcome priming effects on self-agency experiences

Recent research suggests that one can have the feeling of being the cause of an actions outcome, even in the absence of a prior intention to act. That is, experienced self-agency over behavior increases when outcome representations are primed outside of awareness, prior to executing the action and observing the resulting outcome. Based on the notion that behavior can be represented at different levels, we propose that priming outcome representations is more likely to augment self-agency experiences when the primed representation corresponds with a persons behavior representation level. Three experiments, using different priming and self-agency tasks, both measuring and manipulating the level of behavior representation, confirmed this idea. Priming high level outcome representations enhanced experienced self-agency over behavior more strongly when behavior was represented at a higher level, rather than a lower level. Thus, priming effects on self-agency experiences critically depend on behavior representation level.

A Matter of Matching: How Goals and Primes Affect Self-Agency Experiences

The sense of self-agency is a pervasive experience that people infer from their actions and the outcomes they produce. Recent research suggests that self-agency inferences arise from an explicit goal-directed process as well as an implicit outcome-priming process. Three experiments examined potential differences between these 2 processes. Participants had the goal to produce an outcome or were primed with the outcome. Next, they performed an action in an agency-ambiguous situation, followed by an outcome that matched or mismatched the goal or prime, and indicated experienced self-agency over the action-outcome. Results showed that goals reduce self-agency over mismatching outcomes. However, outcome-primes did not affect self-agency over mismatching outcomes but even enhanced self-agency over mismatching proximate outcomes. Goals and outcome-primes equally enhanced self-agency for matches. Our findings provide novel evidence that self-agency experiences result from 2 distinct inferential routes and that goals and primes differentially affect the perception of our own behavior.

Prime and probability: causal knowledge affects inferential and predictive effects on self-agency experiences.

Experiences of having caused a certain outcome may arise from motor predictions based on action-outcome probabilities and causal inferences based on pre-activated outcome representations. However, when and how both indicators combine to affect such self-agency experiences is still unclear. Based on previous research on prediction and inference effects on self-agency, we propose that their (combined) contribution crucially depends on whether people have knowledge about the causal relation between actions and outcomes that is relevant to subsequent self-agency experiences. Therefore, we manipulated causal knowledge that was either relevant or irrelevant by varying the probability of co-occurrence (50% or 80%) of specific actions and outcomes. Afterwards, we measured self-agency experiences in an action-outcome task where outcomes were primed or not. Results showed that motor prediction only affected self-agency when relevant actions and outcomes were learned to be causally related. Interestingly, however, inference effects also occurred when no relevant causal knowledge was acquired.

Anger as a Hidden Motivator: Associating Attainable Products With Anger Turns Them Into Rewards

The authors examined whether creating associations between products and anger, a negative but also approach-related emotion, motivates people to get or invest in these products when these products are considered attainable. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants spontaneously spent more physical effort to get anger-related (compared to neutral) products they could attain as gifts. Experiment 2 showed that participants paid more money for anger-related (compared to neutral) products and thus perceived them as more valuable, regardless of whether the anger–product association was established consciously or unconsciously. Importantly, Experiment 2 also revealed that anger-related products were only perceived as more valuable when they were considered in terms of attainability. The authors conclude that anger can be a hidden motivator: Anger-related products that are perceived in terms of attainability act as rewards that motivate people to obtain these products.

Perceiving an exclusive cause of affect prevents misattribution

Affect misattribution occurs when affective cues color subsequent unrelated evaluations. Research suggests that affect misattribution decreases when one is aware that affective cues are unrelated to the evaluation at hand. We propose that affect misattribution may even occur when one is aware that affective cues are irrelevant, as long as the source of these cues seems ambiguous. When source ambiguity exists, affective cues may freely influence upcoming unrelated evaluations. We examined this using an adapted affect misattribution procedure where pleasant and unpleasant responses served as affective cues that could influence later evaluations of unrelated targets. These affective cues were either perceived as reflecting a single source (i.e., a subliminal affective picture in Experiment 1; ones internal affective state in Experiment 2), or as reflecting two sources (i.e., both) suggesting source ambiguity. Results show that misattribution of affect decreased when participants perceived affective cues as representing one source rather than two.

The unconscious unfolding of emotions

How do emotional reactions arise? We argue that emotional information processing and the resulting responses unfold from being global to specific: Initial emotional responses are typically based on general, positive‐negative evaluations, whereas later emotional responses are based on more specific, fine-grained information processing. Global, positive‐negative reactions may influence people’s mood states, whereas detailed, fine-grained emotional reactions may cause specific emotions such as fear, disgust, or happiness to arise. Our view also entails that global and specific processing may both occur unconsciously. In this chapter we briefly discuss theories of emotion that inspired us, we provide empirical evidence for our global-to-specific unfolding view, and we explain consequences of our view for research on facial emotional expressions, imitation, and general mood states.