Andrei Miu | Babes-Bolyai University (original) (raw)
Papers by Andrei Miu
Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
Emotional responses to art have long been subject of debate, but only recently have they started ... more Emotional responses to art have long been subject of debate, but only recently have they started to be investigated in affective science. The aim of this study was to compare perceptions regarding frequency of aesthetic emotions, contributing factors, and motivation which characterize the experiences of looking at painting and listening to music. Parallel surveys were filled in online by participants (N = 971) interested in music and painting. By comparing self-reported characteristics of these experiences, this study found that compared to listening to music, looking at painting was associated with increased frequency of wonder and decreased frequencies of joyful activation and power. In addition to increased vitality, as reflected by the latter two emotions, listening to music was also more frequently associated with emotions such as tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, and sadness. Compared to painting-related emotions, music-related emotions were perceived as more similar to emotions in other everyday life situations. Participants reported that stimulus features and previous knowledge made more important contributions to emotional responses to painting, whereas prior mood, physical context and the presence of other people were considered more important in relation to emotional responses to music. Self-education motivation was more frequently associated with looking at painting, whereas mood repair and keeping company motivations were reported more frequently in relation to listening to music. Participants with visual arts education reported increased vitality-related emotions in their experience of looking at painting. In contrast, no relation was found between music education and emotional responses to music. These findings offer a more general perspective on aesthetic emotions and encourage integrative research linking different types of aesthetic experience.
Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2006
Recent theories have argued that emotions play a central role in moral decision-making and sugges... more Recent theories have argued that emotions play a central role in moral decision-making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in reducing emotion-linked biases. The present studies focused on the influence of emotional experience and individual differences in emotion regulation on moral choice in dilemmas that pit harming another person against social welfare. During these "harm to save" moral dilemmas, participants experienced mostly fear and sadness but also other emotions such as compassion, guilt, anger, disgust, regret and contempt (Study 1). Fear and disgust were more frequently reported when participants made deontological choices, whereas regret was more frequently reported when participants made utilitarian choices. In addition, habitual reappraisal negatively predicted deontological choices, and this effect was significantly carried through emotional arousal (Study 2). Individual differences in the habitual use of other emotion regulation strategies (i.e., acceptance, rumination and catastrophising) did not influence moral choice. The results of the present studies indicate that negative emotions are commonly experienced during "harm to save" moral dilemmas, and they are associated with a deontological bias. By efficiently reducing emotional arousal, reappraisal can attenuate the emotion-linked deontological bias in moral choice.
In the last decades, the involvement of emotions in moral decision making was investigated using ... more In the last decades, the involvement of emotions in moral decision making was investigated using moral dilemmas in healthy volunteers, neuropsychological and psychiatric patients. Recent research characterized emotional experience in moral dilemmas and its association with deontological decisions. Moreover, theories debated the roles of emotion and reasoning in moral decision making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in overriding emotion-driven deontological biases. After briefly introducing the reader to moral dilemma research and current perspectives on emotion and emotion-cognition interactions in this area, the present chapter reviews emerging evidence for emotion regulation in moral decision making. Inspired by recent advances in the field of emotion regulation, this chapter also highlights several avenues for future research on emotion regulation in moral psychology.
Journal of Alzheimer S Disease Jad, Jul 1, 2004
The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pat... more The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has resulted in a wealth of researches detailing the biological toxicity of this metal. However, to date, there have been few accounts of the interference of Al with aging and its relevance to the pathogenesis of AD. We investigated the behavioral and the ultrastructural signatures of Al in the hippocampus on young and aging rats which were exposed for three months to aluminium gluconate. The aging animals displayed decreased scores of activity and emotionality, and the Alexposed aging males had altered emotional reactivity behaviors. The electron-microscopic analysis indicated that Al promoted in the aging hippocampus a variety of cellular and ultrastructural degenerative signs, such as granulo-vacuolar degenerations, deposition of lipofuscin and amyloid in the cytoplasm of neurons and astrocytes, and in extracellular compartments, Hirano bodies, demyelination and the atrophy of the mitochondria. Moreover, the quantitation of myelin sheath width and the diameter of mitochondria measured on randomly selected samples confirmed that myelin and mitochondria are primary targets of Al's toxicity. Demyelination and mitochondrial atrophy seemed more advanced in the hippocampus of Al-exposed aging males, supporting the effect of sex suggested by the behavioral results. These findings and other collateral results also reported here are discussed in the context of a possible involvement of Al in AD, mediated by aging and catalyzed by hepatic morphopathology.
Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2016
Recent research indicates that subclinical social anxiety is associated with dysfunctions at mult... more Recent research indicates that subclinical social anxiety is associated with dysfunctions at multiple psychological and biological levels, in a manner that seems reminiscent of social anxiety disorder (SAD). This study aimed to describe multidimensional responses to laboratory-induced social stress in an analog sample selected for social anxiety symptoms. State anxiety, cognitive biases related to negative social evaluation, speech anxiety behaviors, and cortisol reactivity were assessed in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Results showed that social anxiety symptoms were associated with increased state anxiety, biased appraisals related to the probability and cost of negative social evaluations, behavioral changes in facial expression that were consistent with speech anxiety, and lower cortisol reactivity. In addition, multiple interrelations between responses in the TSST were found, with positive associations between subjective experience, cognitive appraisals, and observable behavior, as well as negative associations between each of the former two types of response and cortisol reactivity. These results show that in response to social stressors, subclinical social anxiety is associated with significant changes in emotional experience, cognitive appraisals, behaviors, and physiology that could parallel those previously found in SAD samples.
This study investigated genetic and environmental factors that may influence emotion and decision... more This study investigated genetic and environmental factors that may influence emotion and decisions in moral dilemmas. Main findings indicated that the intensity of early traumatic events was associated with abstract moral judgment only in carriers of the low-expressing Met allele of BDNF Val66Met. No such effects were found for personal moral choice. Other genetic polymorphisms (5-HTTLPR, COMT Val158Met) were not associated with either abstract moral judgment or personal moral choice.
This study investigated the influence of child abuse and its interactions with several motion-lin... more This study investigated the influence of child abuse and its interactions with several motion-linked genetic polymorphisms on reappraisal ability. The results indicated that reappraisal ability decreased with increasing levels of child abuse only in carriers of the low-expressing allele of a polymorphism (Val66Met) in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene.
PLOS ONE, 2015
Rooted in people's preoccupation ... more Rooted in people's preoccupation with how they are perceived and evaluated, shame and guilt are self-conscious emotions that play adaptive roles in social behavior, but can also contribute to psychopathology when dysregulated. Shame and guilt-proneness develop during childhood and adolescence, and are influenced by genetic and environmental factors that are little known to date. This study investigated the effects of early traumatic events and functional polymorphisms in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene and the serotonin transporter gene promoter (5-HTTLPR) on shame and guilt in adolescents. A sample of N = 271 healthy adolescents between 14 and 17 years of age filled in measures of early traumatic events and proneness to shame and guilt, and were genotyped for the BDNF Val66Met and 5-HTTLPR polymorphisms. Results of moderator analyses indicated that trauma intensity was positively associated with guilt-proneness only in carriers of the low-expressing Met allele of BDNF Val66Met. This is the first study that identifies a gene-environment interaction that significantly contributes to guilt proneness in adolescents, with potential implications for developmental psychopathology.
Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2006
Despite the circumstantial and sometimes equivocal support, the hypothetic involvement of aluminu... more Despite the circumstantial and sometimes equivocal support, the hypothetic involvement of aluminum (Al) in the etiology and pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has subsisted in neuroscience. There are very few other examples of scientific hypotheses on the pathogenesis of a disease that have been revisited so many times, once a new method that would allow a test of Al's accumulations in the brain of AD patients or a comparison between Al-induced and AD neuropathological signs has become available. Although objects of methodological controversies for scientists and oversimplification for lay spectators, several lines of evidence have strongly supported the involvement of Al as a secondary aggravating factor or risk factor in the pathogenesis of AD. We review evidence on the similarities and dissimilarities between Al-induced neurofibrillary degeneration and paired helical filaments from AD, the accumulation of Al in neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques from AD, the...
Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 2014
Process theories have argued that empathy and visual imagery are important mechanisms underlying ... more Process theories have argued that empathy and visual imagery are important mechanisms underlying emotional reactivity to music. Transient affective states such as mood may also influence music-induced emotions. The present study describes the emotional experience of participants who attended a live opera performance of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," and its links with individual differences in empathy, visual imagery, and mood. The opera performance induced blends of emotions characterized by high sublimity, low vitality, and unease on the Geneva Emotional Music Scale. Higher dispositional empathy and visual imagery were associated with increased sublimity and unease, respectively. Positive mood was related to increased sublimity and vitality, as well as decreased unease. These results are in line with recent laboratory research on the mechanisms of music-induced emotions and illustrate once again the feasibility of psychological research during live musical performance.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2004
The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the... more The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has resulted in a wealth of researches detailing the biological toxicity of this metal. However, to date, there have been few accounts of the interference of Al with aging and its relevance to the pathogenesis of AD. We investigated the behavioral and the ultrastructural signatures of Al in the hippocampus on young and aging rats which were exposed for three months to aluminium gluconate. The aging animals displayed decreased scores of activity and emotionality, and the Al-exposed aging males had altered emotional reactivity behaviors. The electron-microscopic analysis indicated that Al promoted in the aging hippocampus a variety of cellular and ultrastructural degenerative signs, such as granulo-vacuolar degenerations, deposition of lipofuscin and amyloid in the cytoplasm of neurons and astrocytes, and in extracellular compartments, Hirano b...
The present study investigated the affective space of the entire twelve movements of Vivaldi's Fo... more The present study investigated the affective space of the entire twelve movements of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and compared music-induced affect between musicians and non-musicians. The participants listened to each of the movements of the concertos, in shuffled order, and rated the emotional arousal and valence of each movement immediately after listening to it. We controlled for the affective mood before the experiment, and the familiarity with each movement of the concertos. All the movements of the concertos were perceived as pleasant, but with varying degrees of emotional activation. Emotional valence varied between the peaceful Adagio Molto Autumn and the joyful Allegro Spring 1. The movements with slow tempos were perceived as the least activating, whereas the most emotionally activating was the Tempo Impetuoso D'Estate. The comparison between musicians and non-musicians indicated that the former perceived the Adagio Molto Autumn as more activating and the Allegro Non Molto Summer as less pleasant than the latter. We suggest that these differences may be related to the increased focus of musicians' aesthetic judgments on the originality and novelty of musical structures. These results support the view that there are only discrete differences in musicinduced affect between musicians and non-musicians.
PLoS ONE, 2012
This study investigated the effects of voluntarily empathizing with a musical performer (i.e., co... more This study investigated the effects of voluntarily empathizing with a musical performer (i.e., cognitive empathy) on musicinduced emotions and their underlying physiological activity. N = 56 participants watched video-clips of two operatic compositions performed in concerts, with low or high empathy instructions. Heart rate and heart rate variability, skin conductance level (SCL), and respiration rate (RR) were measured during music listening, and music-induced emotions were quantified using the Geneva Emotional Music Scale immediately after music listening. Listening to the aria with sad content in a high empathy condition facilitated the emotion of nostalgia and decreased SCL, in comparison to the low empathy condition. Listening to the song with happy content in a high empathy condition also facilitated the emotion of power and increased RR, in comparison to the low empathy condition. To our knowledge, this study offers the first experimental evidence that cognitive empathy influences emotion psychophysiology during music listening.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2015
Early life stress (ELS) has been recently associated with blunted cortisol reactivity and emotion... more Early life stress (ELS) has been recently associated with blunted cortisol reactivity and emotion dysregulation, but no study until now examined whether these characteristics are related. The main goal of this study was to examine the potential mediator role of emotion dysregulation in the relation between ELS and cortisol reactivity to social threat. Only women who were free of psychiatric and endocrine disorders, had regular menstrual cycle and did not use oral contraceptives were selected for this study (N = 62). After filling in ELS and multidimensional emotion dysregulation measures, participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test during which cortisol and autonomic responses were assessed. Most participants (85.5%) reported one or more major stressful events (i.e., physical abuse, sexual abuse, major parental conflicts, death of a family or close friend, severe illness) experienced before age 17. ELS was negatively associated with cortisol reactivity and positively associated with skin conductance level (SCL) reactivity, but it did not influence heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. In addition, ELS was positively related to emotional non-acceptance (i.e., a tendency to develop secondary emotional responses to one's negative emotions), and the latter was negatively related to cortisol responses and positively related to SCL responses. Bootstrapping analyses indicated that emotional non-acceptance was a significant mediator in the relationships between ELS and both cortisol and SCL responses. Emotional non-acceptance is thus one of the psychological mechanisms underlying blunted cortisol and increased sympathetic reactivity in young healthy volunteers with a history of ELS.
Psychiatry Research, 2012
The present study investigated emotional face processing in neurotypicals selected for autistic t... more The present study investigated emotional face processing in neurotypicals selected for autistic traits (AT). Participants (N = 81), who obtained scores one standard deviation above or below average on the Autism Spectrum Quotient, were tested using observational fear conditioning (FC), a face version of the attention probe task, and the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test. The results indicated that high AT participants displayed enhanced observational FC, no attentional bias to fearful faces, and increased latency (but normal accuracy) to recognizing the mental state of another. To a certain extent, this pattern resembles the socialemotional phenotype that was previously described in autism spectrum disorders. Therefore, these results may contribute to the broad autism phenotype perspective.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
Emotional responses to art have long been subject of debate, but only recently have they started ... more Emotional responses to art have long been subject of debate, but only recently have they started to be investigated in affective science. The aim of this study was to compare perceptions regarding frequency of aesthetic emotions, contributing factors, and motivation which characterize the experiences of looking at painting and listening to music. Parallel surveys were filled in online by participants (N = 971) interested in music and painting. By comparing self-reported characteristics of these experiences, this study found that compared to listening to music, looking at painting was associated with increased frequency of wonder and decreased frequencies of joyful activation and power. In addition to increased vitality, as reflected by the latter two emotions, listening to music was also more frequently associated with emotions such as tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, and sadness. Compared to painting-related emotions, music-related emotions were perceived as more similar to emotions in other everyday life situations. Participants reported that stimulus features and previous knowledge made more important contributions to emotional responses to painting, whereas prior mood, physical context and the presence of other people were considered more important in relation to emotional responses to music. Self-education motivation was more frequently associated with looking at painting, whereas mood repair and keeping company motivations were reported more frequently in relation to listening to music. Participants with visual arts education reported increased vitality-related emotions in their experience of looking at painting. In contrast, no relation was found between music education and emotional responses to music. These findings offer a more general perspective on aesthetic emotions and encourage integrative research linking different types of aesthetic experience.
Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2006
Recent theories have argued that emotions play a central role in moral decision-making and sugges... more Recent theories have argued that emotions play a central role in moral decision-making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in reducing emotion-linked biases. The present studies focused on the influence of emotional experience and individual differences in emotion regulation on moral choice in dilemmas that pit harming another person against social welfare. During these "harm to save" moral dilemmas, participants experienced mostly fear and sadness but also other emotions such as compassion, guilt, anger, disgust, regret and contempt (Study 1). Fear and disgust were more frequently reported when participants made deontological choices, whereas regret was more frequently reported when participants made utilitarian choices. In addition, habitual reappraisal negatively predicted deontological choices, and this effect was significantly carried through emotional arousal (Study 2). Individual differences in the habitual use of other emotion regulation strategies (i.e., acceptance, rumination and catastrophising) did not influence moral choice. The results of the present studies indicate that negative emotions are commonly experienced during "harm to save" moral dilemmas, and they are associated with a deontological bias. By efficiently reducing emotional arousal, reappraisal can attenuate the emotion-linked deontological bias in moral choice.
In the last decades, the involvement of emotions in moral decision making was investigated using ... more In the last decades, the involvement of emotions in moral decision making was investigated using moral dilemmas in healthy volunteers, neuropsychological and psychiatric patients. Recent research characterized emotional experience in moral dilemmas and its association with deontological decisions. Moreover, theories debated the roles of emotion and reasoning in moral decision making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in overriding emotion-driven deontological biases. After briefly introducing the reader to moral dilemma research and current perspectives on emotion and emotion-cognition interactions in this area, the present chapter reviews emerging evidence for emotion regulation in moral decision making. Inspired by recent advances in the field of emotion regulation, this chapter also highlights several avenues for future research on emotion regulation in moral psychology.
Journal of Alzheimer S Disease Jad, Jul 1, 2004
The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pat... more The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has resulted in a wealth of researches detailing the biological toxicity of this metal. However, to date, there have been few accounts of the interference of Al with aging and its relevance to the pathogenesis of AD. We investigated the behavioral and the ultrastructural signatures of Al in the hippocampus on young and aging rats which were exposed for three months to aluminium gluconate. The aging animals displayed decreased scores of activity and emotionality, and the Alexposed aging males had altered emotional reactivity behaviors. The electron-microscopic analysis indicated that Al promoted in the aging hippocampus a variety of cellular and ultrastructural degenerative signs, such as granulo-vacuolar degenerations, deposition of lipofuscin and amyloid in the cytoplasm of neurons and astrocytes, and in extracellular compartments, Hirano bodies, demyelination and the atrophy of the mitochondria. Moreover, the quantitation of myelin sheath width and the diameter of mitochondria measured on randomly selected samples confirmed that myelin and mitochondria are primary targets of Al's toxicity. Demyelination and mitochondrial atrophy seemed more advanced in the hippocampus of Al-exposed aging males, supporting the effect of sex suggested by the behavioral results. These findings and other collateral results also reported here are discussed in the context of a possible involvement of Al in AD, mediated by aging and catalyzed by hepatic morphopathology.
Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2016
Recent research indicates that subclinical social anxiety is associated with dysfunctions at mult... more Recent research indicates that subclinical social anxiety is associated with dysfunctions at multiple psychological and biological levels, in a manner that seems reminiscent of social anxiety disorder (SAD). This study aimed to describe multidimensional responses to laboratory-induced social stress in an analog sample selected for social anxiety symptoms. State anxiety, cognitive biases related to negative social evaluation, speech anxiety behaviors, and cortisol reactivity were assessed in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Results showed that social anxiety symptoms were associated with increased state anxiety, biased appraisals related to the probability and cost of negative social evaluations, behavioral changes in facial expression that were consistent with speech anxiety, and lower cortisol reactivity. In addition, multiple interrelations between responses in the TSST were found, with positive associations between subjective experience, cognitive appraisals, and observable behavior, as well as negative associations between each of the former two types of response and cortisol reactivity. These results show that in response to social stressors, subclinical social anxiety is associated with significant changes in emotional experience, cognitive appraisals, behaviors, and physiology that could parallel those previously found in SAD samples.
This study investigated genetic and environmental factors that may influence emotion and decision... more This study investigated genetic and environmental factors that may influence emotion and decisions in moral dilemmas. Main findings indicated that the intensity of early traumatic events was associated with abstract moral judgment only in carriers of the low-expressing Met allele of BDNF Val66Met. No such effects were found for personal moral choice. Other genetic polymorphisms (5-HTTLPR, COMT Val158Met) were not associated with either abstract moral judgment or personal moral choice.
This study investigated the influence of child abuse and its interactions with several motion-lin... more This study investigated the influence of child abuse and its interactions with several motion-linked genetic polymorphisms on reappraisal ability. The results indicated that reappraisal ability decreased with increasing levels of child abuse only in carriers of the low-expressing allele of a polymorphism (Val66Met) in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene.
PLOS ONE, 2015
Rooted in people's preoccupation ... more Rooted in people's preoccupation with how they are perceived and evaluated, shame and guilt are self-conscious emotions that play adaptive roles in social behavior, but can also contribute to psychopathology when dysregulated. Shame and guilt-proneness develop during childhood and adolescence, and are influenced by genetic and environmental factors that are little known to date. This study investigated the effects of early traumatic events and functional polymorphisms in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene and the serotonin transporter gene promoter (5-HTTLPR) on shame and guilt in adolescents. A sample of N = 271 healthy adolescents between 14 and 17 years of age filled in measures of early traumatic events and proneness to shame and guilt, and were genotyped for the BDNF Val66Met and 5-HTTLPR polymorphisms. Results of moderator analyses indicated that trauma intensity was positively associated with guilt-proneness only in carriers of the low-expressing Met allele of BDNF Val66Met. This is the first study that identifies a gene-environment interaction that significantly contributes to guilt proneness in adolescents, with potential implications for developmental psychopathology.
Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2006
Despite the circumstantial and sometimes equivocal support, the hypothetic involvement of aluminu... more Despite the circumstantial and sometimes equivocal support, the hypothetic involvement of aluminum (Al) in the etiology and pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has subsisted in neuroscience. There are very few other examples of scientific hypotheses on the pathogenesis of a disease that have been revisited so many times, once a new method that would allow a test of Al's accumulations in the brain of AD patients or a comparison between Al-induced and AD neuropathological signs has become available. Although objects of methodological controversies for scientists and oversimplification for lay spectators, several lines of evidence have strongly supported the involvement of Al as a secondary aggravating factor or risk factor in the pathogenesis of AD. We review evidence on the similarities and dissimilarities between Al-induced neurofibrillary degeneration and paired helical filaments from AD, the accumulation of Al in neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques from AD, the...
Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 2014
Process theories have argued that empathy and visual imagery are important mechanisms underlying ... more Process theories have argued that empathy and visual imagery are important mechanisms underlying emotional reactivity to music. Transient affective states such as mood may also influence music-induced emotions. The present study describes the emotional experience of participants who attended a live opera performance of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," and its links with individual differences in empathy, visual imagery, and mood. The opera performance induced blends of emotions characterized by high sublimity, low vitality, and unease on the Geneva Emotional Music Scale. Higher dispositional empathy and visual imagery were associated with increased sublimity and unease, respectively. Positive mood was related to increased sublimity and vitality, as well as decreased unease. These results are in line with recent laboratory research on the mechanisms of music-induced emotions and illustrate once again the feasibility of psychological research during live musical performance.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2004
The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the... more The persistence of neuroscientists in exploring aluminium's (Al) possible contribution to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has resulted in a wealth of researches detailing the biological toxicity of this metal. However, to date, there have been few accounts of the interference of Al with aging and its relevance to the pathogenesis of AD. We investigated the behavioral and the ultrastructural signatures of Al in the hippocampus on young and aging rats which were exposed for three months to aluminium gluconate. The aging animals displayed decreased scores of activity and emotionality, and the Al-exposed aging males had altered emotional reactivity behaviors. The electron-microscopic analysis indicated that Al promoted in the aging hippocampus a variety of cellular and ultrastructural degenerative signs, such as granulo-vacuolar degenerations, deposition of lipofuscin and amyloid in the cytoplasm of neurons and astrocytes, and in extracellular compartments, Hirano b...
The present study investigated the affective space of the entire twelve movements of Vivaldi's Fo... more The present study investigated the affective space of the entire twelve movements of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and compared music-induced affect between musicians and non-musicians. The participants listened to each of the movements of the concertos, in shuffled order, and rated the emotional arousal and valence of each movement immediately after listening to it. We controlled for the affective mood before the experiment, and the familiarity with each movement of the concertos. All the movements of the concertos were perceived as pleasant, but with varying degrees of emotional activation. Emotional valence varied between the peaceful Adagio Molto Autumn and the joyful Allegro Spring 1. The movements with slow tempos were perceived as the least activating, whereas the most emotionally activating was the Tempo Impetuoso D'Estate. The comparison between musicians and non-musicians indicated that the former perceived the Adagio Molto Autumn as more activating and the Allegro Non Molto Summer as less pleasant than the latter. We suggest that these differences may be related to the increased focus of musicians' aesthetic judgments on the originality and novelty of musical structures. These results support the view that there are only discrete differences in musicinduced affect between musicians and non-musicians.
PLoS ONE, 2012
This study investigated the effects of voluntarily empathizing with a musical performer (i.e., co... more This study investigated the effects of voluntarily empathizing with a musical performer (i.e., cognitive empathy) on musicinduced emotions and their underlying physiological activity. N = 56 participants watched video-clips of two operatic compositions performed in concerts, with low or high empathy instructions. Heart rate and heart rate variability, skin conductance level (SCL), and respiration rate (RR) were measured during music listening, and music-induced emotions were quantified using the Geneva Emotional Music Scale immediately after music listening. Listening to the aria with sad content in a high empathy condition facilitated the emotion of nostalgia and decreased SCL, in comparison to the low empathy condition. Listening to the song with happy content in a high empathy condition also facilitated the emotion of power and increased RR, in comparison to the low empathy condition. To our knowledge, this study offers the first experimental evidence that cognitive empathy influences emotion psychophysiology during music listening.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2015
Early life stress (ELS) has been recently associated with blunted cortisol reactivity and emotion... more Early life stress (ELS) has been recently associated with blunted cortisol reactivity and emotion dysregulation, but no study until now examined whether these characteristics are related. The main goal of this study was to examine the potential mediator role of emotion dysregulation in the relation between ELS and cortisol reactivity to social threat. Only women who were free of psychiatric and endocrine disorders, had regular menstrual cycle and did not use oral contraceptives were selected for this study (N = 62). After filling in ELS and multidimensional emotion dysregulation measures, participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test during which cortisol and autonomic responses were assessed. Most participants (85.5%) reported one or more major stressful events (i.e., physical abuse, sexual abuse, major parental conflicts, death of a family or close friend, severe illness) experienced before age 17. ELS was negatively associated with cortisol reactivity and positively associated with skin conductance level (SCL) reactivity, but it did not influence heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. In addition, ELS was positively related to emotional non-acceptance (i.e., a tendency to develop secondary emotional responses to one's negative emotions), and the latter was negatively related to cortisol responses and positively related to SCL responses. Bootstrapping analyses indicated that emotional non-acceptance was a significant mediator in the relationships between ELS and both cortisol and SCL responses. Emotional non-acceptance is thus one of the psychological mechanisms underlying blunted cortisol and increased sympathetic reactivity in young healthy volunteers with a history of ELS.
Psychiatry Research, 2012
The present study investigated emotional face processing in neurotypicals selected for autistic t... more The present study investigated emotional face processing in neurotypicals selected for autistic traits (AT). Participants (N = 81), who obtained scores one standard deviation above or below average on the Autism Spectrum Quotient, were tested using observational fear conditioning (FC), a face version of the attention probe task, and the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test. The results indicated that high AT participants displayed enhanced observational FC, no attentional bias to fearful faces, and increased latency (but normal accuracy) to recognizing the mental state of another. To a certain extent, this pattern resembles the socialemotional phenotype that was previously described in autism spectrum disorders. Therefore, these results may contribute to the broad autism phenotype perspective.