Schizophrenia appears quite similar across a range of cultures. However, variability has been noted, and understanding the variant and invariant features of the disorder is necessary for elucidating its biological and environmental basis. Evidence of prominent emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia, including perceptual and experiential aspects, led us to extend the paradigm of standardiz...

The recent separation of non-eating disordered obesity into a subtype that is high in negative affect and a subtype that is low in negative affect led to the hypothesis that the two subtypes would show opposite eating responses to typical triggers of overeating. Overweight/obese and normal weight participants, clustered into high and low negative affect subtypes, took part in an experiment usin...

Previous research has made significant progress elucidating the nature of cognitive biases in emotional disorders. However, less work has focused on the relation among cognitive biases and emotional responding in clinical samples. This study uses eye-tracking to examine difficulties disengaging attention from emotional material in depressed participants and to test its relation with mood reacti...

Writing about emotionally salient topics to influence a participant’s mood is a common experimental technique in emotion research. This study attempted to begin the biological characterization of this research paradigm. Thirtyeight participants were: 1) administered the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and asked to provide a saliva sample, 2) assigned to either an emotionally posit...

Previous theories and research show clear divergences on the roles of the behavioral activation system (BAS) and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) in depression. Across four studies, we examined the effects of a sad mood on the motivational pattern of sensitivity to reward and punishment. Psychological variables associated with such changes and implications for vulnerability to depression ...

The majority of mood-congruent memory research has confirmed the existence of a memory bias for affectively toned words or phrases. However, the current study investigated a memory bias for emotional facial expressions, in induced and naturally occurring mood states. In experiment 1 twenty-five dysphoric participants and twenty non-dysphoric participants were presented with a set of emotional f...

OBJECTIVE Lower subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) consistently shows associations with poorer health with the strongest relationships emerging with global self-rated health. Though often interpreted as reflecting the impact of low SSS on health, the association could also arise from confounding SSS with negative affect. In this research we sought to determine if negative affect confounds, o...

Does temporary mood inXuence people’s tendency to engage in self-handicapping behaviors? Based on past research on self-handicapping and recent work on aVect and social behaviors, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood signiWcantly increased the tendency to engage in two kinds of self-handicapping strategies. Participants (ND 94) Wrst received contingent or non-contingent positi...

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to targe...

The present study investigated Mood Dependent Memory for selfgenerated words using a Musical mood induction procedure. 75 participants (25 males, 50 females) took part in this study. Testing took place over two sessions, two days apart. During the first session participants were induced into a positive or negative mood before generating a list of 16 words in a word-association task. Two days la...