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A priming paradigm was used to investigate the automatic affective reaction triggered by perception of environmental scenes. Grayscale pictures of environmental scenes differing in the level of restorativeness and preference (low, medium, high) were presented as prime stimuli. The prime stimuli were followed by presentations of human facial expressions of happiness and anger as to-be-recognized target stimuli. The results showed that response times to angry faces were shorter after the presentation of negative scenes compared to positive. A reverse pattern of results was true for the response times to happy faces. As compared to the response times after baseline primers (scenes with medium restorativeness/preference), only negative scenes seemed to result in facilitation of responses to facial expressions of anger. No such facilitation was observed for expressions of happiness after positive environmental primers. The results provide preliminary support for the view that only negative environmental scenes elicit an automatic evaluative reaction.

We ask how state empathy, trait empathy, and role awareness influence dictator game giving in a monetarily incentivized experiment. We manipulated two factors: role awareness (role certainty vs. role uncertainty) and state empathy induction (no empathy induction vs. empathy induction). Under role uncertainty, participants did not know their role as a dictator or a recipient when making their choices. State empathy was induced by asking the dictators to consider what the recipient would feel when learning about the decision. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of the four conditions, and in each condition, participants were randomly assigned into dictator and receiver roles. The role assignment took place before or after decisions were made, depending on the condition. We also studied the direct influence of trait empathy on dictator game giving as well as its interaction with the experimental manipulations. Trait empathy was measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) before the experiment. Of our experimental manipulations, role awareness had an effect on dictator game giving; participants donated more under role uncertainty than under role certainty. Instead, we did not observe an effect of state empathy induction. Of trait empathy subscales, only affective empathy was positively associated with dictator game giving. Finally, role awareness did not influence all participants similarly but had a larger impact on those with low scores on trait empathic concern or trait affective empathy. Our results indicate that specific measures to induce altruistic sharing can be effective but their effect may vary depending on certain personal characteristics. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

The authors employed an affective priming paradigm to provide direct evidence for the rapid evaluation of natural and urban environments suggested in evolutionary models of environmental perception and restoration. Pictures classified as urban and nature environments differing in restorative and affective quality were presented as prime stimuli. They were followed by presentations of human vocal expressions of joy, anger, and emotional neutrality as target stimuli. The participants were required to judge the vocal one-word expressions and produce a forced-choice reaction between joy and anger. The reaction times to vocal expressions of anger were shorter after the presentation of urban scenes associated with low restorative potential and negative affect than after nature scenes associated with high restorative potential and positive affect. The reaction times to vocal expressions of joy were shorter after the presentation of a nature scene than of an urban environment. The results provide support for the rapid and automatic affective evaluations of environmental scenes.

AbstractDifferent basic emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise) are consistently associated with distinct bodily sensation maps, which may underlie subjectively felt emotions. Here we investigated the development of bodily sensations associated with basic emotions in 6‐ to 17‐year‐old children and adolescents (n = 331). Children as young as 6 years of age associated statistically discernible, discrete patterns of bodily sensations with happiness, fear, and surprise, as well as with emotional neutrality. The bodily sensation maps changed from less to more specific, adult‐like patterns as a function of age. We conclude that emotion‐related bodily sensations become increasingly discrete over child development. Developing awareness of their emotion‐related bodily sensations may shape the way children perceive, label, and interpret emotions.

Abstract The present study investigated whether facial expressions modulate visual attention in 7‐month‐old infants. First, infants' looking duration to individually presented fearful, happy, and novel facial expressions was compared to looking duration to a control stimulus (scrambled face). The face with a novel expression was included to examine the hypothesis that the earlier findings of greater allocation of attention to fearful as compared to happy faces could be due to the novelty of fearful faces in infants' rearing environment. The infants looked longer at the fearful face than at the control stimulus, whereas no such difference was found between the other expressions and the control stimulus. Second, a gap/overlap paradigm was used to determine whether facial expressions affect the infants' ability to disengage their fixation from a centrally presented face and shift attention to a peripheral target. It was found that infants disengaged their fixation significantly less frequently from fearful faces than from control stimuli and happy faces. Novel facial expressions did not have a similar effect on attention disengagement. Thus, it seems that adult‐like modulation of the disengagement of attention by threat‐related stimuli can be observed early in life, and that the influence of emotionally salient (fearful) faces on visual attention is not simply attributable to the novelty of these expressions in infants' rearing environment.

AbstractFacial emotion recognition (FER) is a fundamental element in human interaction. It begins to develop soon after birth and is important in achieving developmental tasks of middle childhood, such as developing mutual friendships and acquiring social rules of peer groups. Despite its importance, FER research during middle childhood continues to be rather limited. Moreover, research is ambiguous on how the quality of one's early social‐emotional environment shapes FER development, and longitudinal studies spanning from infancy to later development are scarce. In this study, we examine how the cohesive, authoritarian, disengaged and enmeshed family system types, assessed during pregnancy and infancy, predict children's FER accuracy and interpretative biases towards happiness, fear, anger and sadness at the age of 10 years (N = 79). The results demonstrated that children from disengaged families (i.e., highly distressed relationships) show superior FER accuracy to those from cohesive families (i.e., harmonious and stable relationships). Regarding interpretative biases, children from cohesive families showed a greater fear bias compared to children from disengaged families. Our findings suggest that even in a relatively low‐risk population, variation in the quality of children's early family relationships may shape children's subsequent FER development, perhaps as an evolution‐based adaptation to their social‐emotional environment.