Individuals differ in the extent to which they emphasize feelings of pleasure or displeasure in their verbal reports of emotional experience, an individual difference termed valence focus (VF). This multimethod study indicates that VF is linked to heightened efficiency in perceptual processing of affective stimuli. Individuals higher in VF (i.e., who emphasized feelings of pleasure/displeasure ...

OBJECTIVE The present study investigated the influence of neuroticism (NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI)) and psychological symptoms (Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI)) on pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) ratings of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). METHODS The subjects (N=131) were presented with images from the IAPS (30 images) and new images (30 images). The influence ...

This paper posits that significant changes in 19 century British recreational travel patterns resulted from a change in the manner in which tourists used entertaining stimuli in order to attain pleasure. Consumers no longer merely viewed arousing stimuli, but attempted to use them to produce emotional states of being which they could partially modify to intensify pleasurable feelings (Damasio 2...

Two studies examined intergroup schadenfreude--malicious pleasure at an out-group's misfortune. Study 1 showed that schadenfreude regarding a German loss in soccer was increased by interest in soccer and threats of Dutch inferiority. The effect of inferiority threat was especially strong for participants less interested in soccer; the more interested showed relatively high schadenfreude. Study ...

Unlike previous emotional studies using functional neuroimaging that have focused on either locating discrete emotions in the brain or linking emotional response to an external behavior, this study investigated brain regions in order to validate a three-dimensional construct--namely pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) of emotion induced by marketing communication. Emotional responses to five...

Based on the marketing theory of hedonic consumption, this study examines the effects of six types of imaginal and emotional experiences on using pleasure-oriented IT. Associated hypotheses are tested using questionnaire responses from 443 online game players. The results provide strong support for the major hypotheses and indicate that the determinants of behavior may differ in using pleasure-...

Recent findings suggest that pain and pleasure share common neurochemical circuits, and studies in animals and humans show that opioid-mediated descending pathways can inhibit or facilitate pain. We explored the role of endogenous opioid neurotransmission in pleasure-related analgesia. μ-Opioidergic activity was blocked with 0.2 mg/kg naloxone to assess its effects on hedonic responses to pleas...

The present study investigated gender differences in both emotional experience and expressivity. Heart rate (HR) was recorded as an indicator of emotional experience while the participants watched 16 video clips that induced eight types of emotion (sadness, anger, horror, disgust, neutrality, amusement, surprise, and pleasure). We also asked the participants to report valence, arousal, and moti...

Research into the comorbidity between emotional psychopathology and cigarette smoking has often focused upon anxiety and depression's manifest symptoms and syndromes, with limited theoretical and clinical advancement. This article presents a novel framework to understanding emotion-smoking comorbidity. We propose that transdiagnostic emotional vulnerabilities-core biobehavioral traits reflectin...

This work presents the design and implementation of the DocEmoX system for the automated typography-derived emotional extraction and annotation of printed and electronic documents. The DocEmoX system targets the Design-for-All based multimodal accessibility of documents. The methodology is based on the results derived from a number of readers’ emotional state response experiments that model the...