Using an improved Sternberg working memory paradigm and affective pictures of different valences, this study investigates the emotional experience capability of 22 first-onset and untreated major depressive disorder patients (MDD) compared with the matching 22 healthy control participants (HC) and whether there is a moodcongruent working memory effect. We employed a general linear model analysi...

Increasing evidence suggests that emotions affect cognitive processes. Recent approaches have also considered the opposite: that cognitive processes might affect people's mood. Here we show that performing and, to a lesser degree, preparing for a creative thinking task induce systematic mood swings: Divergent thinking led to a more positive mood, whereas convergent thinking had the opposite eff...

Psychiatry faces an internal contradiction in that it regards mild sadness and low mood as normal emotions, yet when these emotions are directed toward a new infant, it regards them as abnormal. We apply parental investment theory, a widely used framework from evolutionary biology, to maternal perinatal emotions, arguing that negative emotions directed toward a new infant could serve an importa...

Here we introduce a new assessment of emotion regulation called the Mentalized Affectivity Scale (MAS). A large online adult sample (N = 2,840) completed the 60-item MAS along with a battery of psychological measures. Results revealed a robust three-component structure underlying mentalized affectivity, which we labeled: Identifying emotions (the ability to identify emotions and to reflect on t...

Music is one of the most expressive media to show and manipulate emotions, but there have been few studies on how to generate music connected to emotions. Such studies have always been shunned upon by musicians affirming that a machine cannot create expressive music, as it’s the composer’s and player’s experiences and emotions that get poured into the piece. At the same time another problem is ...

The paper presents a new dataset that captures the effect of mood on visual and auditory perception of music. With an online survey, we have collected a dataset of over 6600 responses capturing users’ mood, emotions evoked and expressed by music and the perception of color with regard to emotions and music. We describe the methodology of gathering the responses and present two new models for ca...

Mood and emotion detection can play an important role in (music) entertainment applications. There are a lot of methods for mood and emotion detection in music through acoustical feature analysis. Some perform better depending on the situation. Differences in either music or emotions or precision of a method play a role in the application of a method. This paper presents a comparison of differe...