Intergenerational Transmission of Valence Bias Is Moderated by Attachment.

There are individual differences in how people respond to emotionally ambiguous cues (i.e., valence bias), which have important consequences for mental health, development, and social functioning, yet how these differences develop in childhood and adolescence is unknown.

Resting-state functional network segregation of the default mode network predicts valence bias across the lifespan.

The brain is organized into intrinsically connected functional networks that can be reliably identified during resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Healthy aging is marked by decreased network segregation, which is linked to worse cognitive functioning, but aging-related changes in emotion are less well characterized. Valence bias, which represents the tendency to interpret emotionally ambiguous information as positive or negative, is more positive in older than younger adults and is associated with differences in task-based fMRI activation in the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and a cingulo-opercular (CO) network.

Segregation of three resting-state brain networks predicts reappraisal success across the lifespan.

Cognitive reappraisal is a form of emotion regulation that involves the reinterpretation of stimuli to change one's emotional state, often to reduce negative affect. Emotion regulation functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks generally yield increased activation in prefrontal cortex and, less consistently, decreased amygdala activation. Only a few studies, however, have examined how intrinsic brain organization, characterized via resting-state fMRI, relates to reappraisal, typically focusing on the same task-derived brain regions.

Chronic Stress May Amplify Gender/Sex Differences in Amygdala Reactivity to Ambiguous Emotional Stimuli.

Heightened reactivity to ambiguous emotional stimuli, such as surprized faces, is a transdiagnostic psychopathology risk factor. Women show elevated amygdala activation to ambiguous emotional stimuli relative to men, which may underlie their significantly higher risk for mood disorders. Moreover, there are sex/gender differences in the effects of stress on both emotion processing and emotion regulation, with greater impact of stress on negative emotionality in females.

Self-reported concussion history is not related to cortical volume in college athletes.

The long-term consequences of concussion are still being uncovered but have been linked to disruptions in cognition and psychological well-being. Previous studies focusing on the association between concussion history and structural changes in the brain have reported inconsistent results. We sought to examine the effect of concussion history on cortical volume with a focus on functional networks.

A More Connected Future: How Social Connection, Interdisciplinary Approaches, and New Technology Will Shape the Affective Science of Loneliness, a Commentary on the Special Issue.

The recent Special Issue of considered "The Future of Affective Science," offering new directions for the field. One recurring theme was the need to consider the social nature of emotional experiences. In this article, we take an interdisciplinary approach toward studies of social connection that builds upon current theoretical foundations to address an important public health issue - loneliness.

Associations of state and chronic loneliness with interpretation bias: The role of internalizing symptoms.

Loneliness is common and, while generally transient, persists in up to 22% of the population. The rising prevalence and adverse impacts of chronic loneliness highlight the need to understand its underlying mechanisms. Evolutionary models of loneliness suggest that chronically lonely individuals demonstrate negative interpretation biases towards social information.

Two common and distinct forms of variation in human functional brain networks.

The cortex has a characteristic layout with specialized functional areas forming distributed large-scale networks. However, substantial work shows striking variation in this organization across people, which relates to differences in behavior. While most previous work treats individual differences as linked to boundary shifts between the borders of regions, here we show that cortical 'variants' also occur at a distance from their typical position, forming ectopic intrusions.

In the face of ambiguity: intrinsic brain organization in development predicts one's bias toward positivity or negativity.

Exacerbated negativity bias, including in responses to ambiguity, represents a common phenotype of internalizing disorders. Individuals differ in their propensity toward positive or negative appraisals of ambiguity. This variability constitutes one's valence bias, a stable construct linked to mental health.

Proposing a model whereby negative valence bias increases the risk for more severe dysphoric posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptomology.

Experiencing trauma increases risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, and individuals who experience psychopathology after a traumatic event often experience symptoms from both disorders. Because a tendency to view events in a more negative light and a propensity toward threat appraisals are risk factors for both PTSD and depression, negative valence bias-a tendency to appraise emotional ambiguity as having a more negative (less positive) meaning-may be a transdiagnostic risk factor. In other words, we expect individuals with a negative valence bias experience greater PTSD and depression symptoms.

Concussion-Related Disruptions to Hub Connectivity in the Default Mode Network Are Related to Symptoms and Cognition.

Concussions present with a myriad of symptomatic and cognitive concerns; however, the relationship between these functional disruptions and the underlying changes in the brain are not yet well understood. Hubs, or brain regions that are connected to many different functional networks, may be specifically disrupted after concussion. Given the implications in concussion research, we quantified hub disruption within the default mode network (DMN) and between the DMN and other brain networks.

The role of trait reappraisal in response to emotional ambiguity: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Individuals exhibit a systematic valence bias-a specific form of interpretation bias-in response to emotional ambiguity. Accumulating evidence suggests most people initially respond to emotional ambiguity negatively and differ only in subsequent responses. We hypothesized that trait-level cognitive reappraisal-an emotion regulation strategy involving the reinterpretation of affective meaning of stimuli-might explain individual differences in valence bias.

Specialized late cingulo-opercular network activation elucidates the mechanisms underlying decisions about ambiguity.

Cortical task control networks, including the cingulo-opercular (CO) network play a key role in decision-making across a variety of functional domains. In particular, the CO network functions in a performance reporting capacity that supports successful task performance, especially in response to errors and ambiguity. In two studies testing the contribution of the CO network to ambiguity processing, we presented a valence bias task in which masked clearly and ambiguously valenced emotional expressions were slowly revealed over several seconds.

Face coverings differentially alter valence judgments of emotional expressions.

Face masks that prevent disease transmission obscure facial expressions, impairing nonverbal communication. We assessed the impact of lower (masks) and upper (sunglasses) face coverings on emotional valence judgments of clearly valenced (fearful, happy) and ambiguously valenced (surprised) expressions, the latter of which have both positive and negative meaning. Masks, but not sunglasses, impaired judgments of clearly valenced expressions compared to faces without coverings.

Tendency to Share Positive Emotions Buffers Loneliness-Related Negativity in the Context of Shared Adversity.

Loneliness is associated with adverse outcomes, and the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to increase loneliness. How loneliness-related outcomes unfold, though, varies across individuals. Individuals' sense of social connectedness and engagement with others to regulate emotional experiences (interpersonal emotion regulation; IER) may modulate loneliness-related outcomes.

Negative interpretation bias connects to real-world daily affect: A multistudy approach.

Negative interpretation bias, the tendency to appraise ambiguous stimuli as threatening, shapes our emotional lives. Various laboratory tasks, which differ in stimuli features and task procedures, can quantify negative interpretation bias. However, it is unknown whether these tasks globally predict individual differences in real-world negative (NA) and positive (PA) affect.

Think again: the role of reappraisal in reducing negative valence bias.

Stimuli such as surprised faces are ambiguous in that they are associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Interestingly, people differ reliably in whether they evaluate these and other ambiguous stimuli as positive or negative, and we have argued that a positive evaluation relies in part on a biasing of the appraisal processes via reappraisal. To further test this idea, we conducted two studies to evaluate whether increasing the cognitive accessibility of reappraisal through a brief emotion regulation task would lead to an increase in positive evaluations of ambiguity.

Task-irrelevant emotional faces impact BOLD responses more for prosaccades than antisaccades in a mixed saccade fMRI task.

Cognitive control allows individuals to flexibly and efficiently perform tasks by attending to relevant stimuli while inhibiting distraction from irrelevant stimuli. The antisaccade task assesses cognitive control by requiring participants to inhibit a prepotent glance towards a peripheral stimulus and generate an eye movement to the mirror image location. This task can be administered with various contextual manipulations to investigate how factors such as trial timing or emotional content interact with cognitive control.

Surprise as an Emotion: A Response to Ortony.

We write in response to an article published in this journal by Andrew Ortony titled "Are All 'Basic Emotions' Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct." The author claimed that "for all its elevated status as a basic emotion, surprise fails to satisfy the minimal requirements that [he] proposed for something to be an emotion, and if it is not an emotion, it cannot possibly be a basic emotion." Although we acknowledge the concerns brought forth by Ortony, we respectfully disagree with his conclusion about surprise.

Affective flexibility as a developmental building block of cognitive reappraisal: An fMRI study.

Cognitive reappraisal is a form of emotion regulation that involves reinterpreting the meaning of a stimulus, often to downregulate one's negative affect. Reappraisal typically recruits distributed regions of prefrontal and parietal cortex to generate new appraisals and downregulate the emotional response in the amygdala. In the current study, we compared reappraisal ability in an fMRI task with affective flexibility in a sample of children and adolescents (ages 6-17, N = 76).

Interpersonal emotion regulation mitigates the link between trait neuroticism and a more negative valence bias.

Emerging research suggests that trait neuroticism is associated with enhanced attention to and perception of negative emotional stimuli, increasing the risk for multiple forms of psychopathology including depression and anxiety. However, modifiable factors such as certain forms of emotion regulation have the potential to weaken this association. In a large sample ( = 1252), we investigated the link between neuroticism and valence bias in response to stimuli that have the potential for both positive and negative interpretations and examined the moderating role of interpersonal emotion regulation.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction triggers a long-term shift toward more positive appraisals of emotional ambiguity.

Reducing negative impacts of stress, for example through mindfulness training, benefits physical and psychological well-being and is becoming ever more crucial owing to large-scale societal uncertainties (e.g., COVID-19).

Reappraisal-related downregulation of amygdala BOLD activation occurs only during the late trial window.

During cognitive reappraisal, an individual reinterprets the meaning of an emotional stimulus to regulate the intensity of their emotional response. Prefrontal cortex activity has been found to support reappraisal and is putatively thought to downregulate the amygdala response to these stimuli. The timing of these regulation-related responses during the course of a trial, however, remains poorly understood.

Spring Break or Heart Break? Extending Valence Bias to Emotional Words.

Ambiguous stimuli are useful for assessing emotional bias. For example, surprised faces could convey a positive or negative meaning, and the degree to which an individual interprets these expressions as positive or negative represents their "valence bias." Currently, the most well-validated ambiguous stimuli for assessing valence bias include nonverbal signals (faces and scenes), overlooking an inherent ambiguity in verbal signals.