Publications

@article{Stussi2020,
title = {Learning biases to angry and happy faces during Pavlovian aversive conditioning},
author = {Yoann Stussi and Gilles Pourtois and Andreas Olsson and David Sander},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Stussi-et-al.-2020-Learning-biases-to-angry-and-happy-faces-during-Pavlovian-aversive-conditioning.pdf, Manuscript (PDF)
http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Stussi-et-al.-2020-Supplementary.pdf, Supplementary (PDF)
https://osf.io/dk2np/, Materials},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-01-23},
journal = {Emotion},
abstract = {Learning biases in Pavlovian aversive conditioning have been found in response to specific categories of threat-relevant stimuli, such as snakes or angry faces. This has been suggested to reflect a selective predisposition to preferentially learn to associate stimuli that provided threats to survival across evolution with aversive outcomes. Here, we contrast with this perspective by highlighting that both threatening (angry faces) and rewarding (happy faces) social stimuli can produce learning biases during Pavlovian aversive conditioning. Using a differential aversive conditioning paradigm, the present study (N = 107) showed that the conditioned response to angry and happy faces was more readily acquired and more resistant to extinction than the conditioned response to neutral faces. Strikingly, whereas the effects for angry faces were of moderate size, the conditioned response persistence to happy faces was of relatively small size and influenced by inter-individual differences in their affective evaluation, as indexed by a Go/No-go Association Task. Computational reinforcement learning analyses further suggested that angry faces were associated with a lower inhibitory learning rate than happy faces, thereby inducing a greater decrease in the impact of negative prediction errors signals that contributed to weakening extinction learning. Altogether, these findings provide further evidence that the occurrence of learning biases in Pavlovian aversive conditioning is not specific to threat-related stimuli and depends on the stimulus' affective relevance to the organism.},
keywords = {Angry faces, Emotion, Happy faces, Learning, Pavlovian conditioning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Olsson2016,
title = {Vicarious fear learning depends on empathic appraisals and trait empathy},
author = {A Olsson and K McMahon and G Papenberg and J Zaki and N Bolger and K N Ochsner},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Olsson2016.pdf},
doi = {10.1177/0956797615604124},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
journal = {Psychological Science},
volume = {27},
number = {1},
pages = {25-33},
abstract = {Empathy and vicarious learning of fear are increasingly understood as separate phenomena, but the interaction between the two remains poorly understood. We investigated how social (vicarious) fear learning is affected by empathic appraisals by asking participants to either enhance or decrease their empathic responses to another individual (the demonstrator), who received electric shocks paired with a predictive conditioned stimulus. A third group of participants received no appraisal instructions and responded naturally to the demonstrator. During a later test, participants who had enhanced their empathy evinced the strongest vicarious fear learning as measured by skin conductance responses to the conditioned stimulus in the absence of the demonstrator. Moreover, this effect was augmented in observers high in trait empathy. Our results suggest that a demonstrator’s expression can serve as a “social” unconditioned stimulus (US), similar to a personally experienced US in Pavlovian fear conditioning, and that learning from a social US depends on both empathic appraisals and the observers’ stable traits.},
note = {PMID: 26637357},
keywords = {Emotion, Expressions, Observational aversive learning, Obsfear procedure, Open data, Skin conductance, Social conditioning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Lindstr\"{o}m2014,
title = {Racial bias shapes social reinforcement learning},
author = {B Lindstr\"{o}m and I Selbing and T Molapour and A Olsson},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Lindstrom-et-al.-2014-Racial-Bias-Shapes-Social-Reinforcement-Learning.pdf},
doi = {10.1177/0956797613514093},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-23},
journal = {Psychological science},
volume = {25},
number = {3},
pages = {711-719},
abstract = {Both emotional facial expressions and markers of racial-group belonging are ubiquitous signals in social interaction, but little is known about how these signals together affect future behavior through learning. To address this issue, we investigated how emotional (threatening or friendly) in-group and out-group faces reinforced behavior in a reinforcement-learning task. We asked whether reinforcement learning would be modulated by intergroup attitudes (i.e., racial bias). The results showed that individual differences in racial bias critically modulated reinforcement learning. As predicted, racial bias was associated with more efficiently learned avoidance of threatening out-group individuals. We used computational modeling analysis to quantitatively delimit the underlying processes affected by social reinforcement. These analyses showed that racial bias modulates the rate at which exposure to threatening out-group individuals is transformed into future avoidance behavior. In concert, these results shed new light on the learning processes underlying social interaction with racial-in-group and out-group individuals.},
keywords = {Emotion, Learning, Racial and ethnic attitudes, Social influences},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Golkar2013,
title = {Other people as means to a safe end},
author = {A Golkar and I Selbing and O Flygare and A \"{O}hman and A Olsson},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Golkar2013.pdf},
doi = {10.1177/0956797613489890},
year = {2013},
date = {2013-09-10},
journal = {Psychological Science},
volume = {24},
number = {11},
pages = {2182-2190},
abstract = {Information about what is dangerous and safe in the environment is often transferred from other individuals through social forms of learning, such as observation. Past research has focused on the observational, or vicarious, acquisition of fears, but little is known about how social information can promote safety learning. To address this issue, we studied the effects of vicarious-extinction learning on the recovery of conditioned fear. Compared with a standard extinction procedure, vicarious extinction promoted better extinction and effectively blocked the return of previously learned fear. We confirmed that these effects could not be attributed to the presence of a learning model per se but were specifically driven by the model’s experience of safety. Our results confirm that vicarious and direct emotional learning share important characteristics but that social-safety information promotes superior down-regulation of learned fear. These findings have implications for emotional learning, social-affective processes, and clinical practice.},
keywords = {Emotion, Extinction, Fear, Learning, Observational learning, Obsfear procedure, Reinstatement, Social cognition, Vicarious learning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Lindstrom2011,
title = {Emotion processing facilitates working memory performance},
author = {B R Lindstr\"{o}m and G Bohlin},
doi = {10.1080/02699931.2010.527703},
issn = {0269-9931},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-11-01},
journal = {Cognition & Emotion},
volume = {25},
number = {7},
pages = {1196--1204},
abstract = {The effect of emotional stimulus content on working memory performance has been investigated with conflicting results, as both emotion-dependent facilitation and impairments are reported in the literature. To clarify this issue, 52 adult participants performed a modified visual 2-back task with highly arousing positive stimuli (sexual scenes), highly arousing negative stimuli (violent death) and low-arousal neutral stimuli. Emotional stimulus processing was found to facilitate task performance relative to that of neutral stimuli, both in regards to response accuracy and reaction times. No emotion-dependent differences in false-alarm rates were found. These results indicate that emotional information can have a facilitating effect on working memory maintenance and processing of information.},
keywords = {Emotion, Executive attention, n-back task, Working memory},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Peira2010,
title = {What you fear will appear: Detection of schematic spiders in spider fear},
author = {N Peira and A Golkar and M Larsson and S Wiens},
doi = {10.1027/1618-3169/a000058},
issn = {1618-3169},
year = {2010},
date = {2010-01-01},
journal = {Experimental Psychology},
volume = {57},
number = {6},
pages = {470--475},
abstract = {Various experimental tasks suggest that fear guides attention. However, because these tasks often lack ecological validity, it is unclear to what extent results from these tasks can be generalized to real-life situations. In change detection tasks, a brief interruption of the visual input (i.e., a blank interval or a scene cut) often results in undetected changes in the scene. This setup resembles real-life viewing behavior and is used here to increase ecological validity of the attentional task without compromising control over the stimuli presented. Spider-fearful and nonfearful women detected schematic spiders and flowers that were added to one of two identical background pictures that alternated with a brief blank in between them (i.e., flicker paradigm). Results showed that spider-fearful women detected spiders (but not flowers) faster than did nonfearful women. Because spiders and flowers had similar low-level features, these findings suggest that fear guides attention on the basis of object features rather than simple low-level features.},
keywords = {Attention, Change detection, Emotion, Fear},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Kompus2009,
title = {Distinct control networks for cognition and emotion in the prefrontal cortex},
author = {K Kompus and K Hugdahl and A \"{O}hman and P Marklund and L Nyberg},
doi = {10.1016/j.neulet.2009.10.005},
issn = {03043940},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-12-01},
journal = {Neuroscience Letters},
volume = {467},
number = {2},
pages = {76-80},
abstract = {The activation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) has been suggested to reflect the engagement of a control mechanism for top-down biasing of context processing in resource-demanding memory tasks. Here we tested the hypothesis that the dlPFC subserves a similar function also in attention and emotion tasks. 18 healthy young adults were tested in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study where the demands for context processing were manipulated in three different cognitive domains: auditory attention, episodic retrieval, and emotion regulation. We found that the right dlPFC was jointly sensitive to increased cognitive demands in the attention and memory tasks. By contrast, increased demands in the emotion task (reappraisal) were associated with increased activity in ventromedial PFC along with decreased amygdala activity. Our findings of divergent prefrontal control networks for cognitive and emotional control extend previous separations of cognition and emotion in the anterior cingulate cortex.},
keywords = {Attention, Cognitive control, Emotion, Memory},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Delgado2006,
title = {Extending animal models of fear conditioning to humans},
author = {M R Delgado and A Olsson and E A Phelps},
doi = {10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.01.006},
issn = {03010511},
year = {2006},
date = {2006-07-01},
journal = {Biological Psychology},
volume = {73},
number = {1},
pages = {39--48},
abstract = {A goal of fear and anxiety research is to understand how to treat the potentially devastating effects of anxiety disorders in humans. Much of this research utilizes classical fear conditioning, a simple paradigm that has been extensively investigated in animals, helping outline a brain circuitry thought to be responsible for the acquisition, expression and extinction of fear. The findings from non-human animal research have more recently been substantiated and extended in humans, using neuropsychological and neuroimaging methodologies. Research across species concur that the neural correlates of fear conditioning include involvement of the amygdala during all stages of fear learning, and prefrontal areas during the extinction phase. This manuscript reviews how animal models of fear are translated to human behavior, and how some fears are more easily acquired in humans (i.e., social\textendashcultural). Finally, using the knowledge provided by a rich animal literature, we attempt to extend these findings to human models targeted to helping facilitate extinction or abolishment of fears, a trademark of anxiety disorders, by discussing efficacy in modulating the brain circuitry involved in fear conditioning via pharmacological treatments or emotion regulation cognitive strategies.},
keywords = {Acquisition, Amygdala, Anxiety disorders, Emotion, Emotion regulation, Extinction, Infralimbic, Learning, Prefrontal cortex, Prelimbic},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Stussi2020,
title = {Learning biases to angry and happy faces during Pavlovian aversive conditioning},
author = {Yoann Stussi and Gilles Pourtois and Andreas Olsson and David Sander},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Stussi-et-al.-2020-Learning-biases-to-angry-and-happy-faces-during-Pavlovian-aversive-conditioning.pdf, Manuscript (PDF)
http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Stussi-et-al.-2020-Supplementary.pdf, Supplementary (PDF)
https://osf.io/dk2np/, Materials},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-01-23},
journal = {Emotion},
abstract = {Learning biases in Pavlovian aversive conditioning have been found in response to specific categories of threat-relevant stimuli, such as snakes or angry faces. This has been suggested to reflect a selective predisposition to preferentially learn to associate stimuli that provided threats to survival across evolution with aversive outcomes. Here, we contrast with this perspective by highlighting that both threatening (angry faces) and rewarding (happy faces) social stimuli can produce learning biases during Pavlovian aversive conditioning. Using a differential aversive conditioning paradigm, the present study (N = 107) showed that the conditioned response to angry and happy faces was more readily acquired and more resistant to extinction than the conditioned response to neutral faces. Strikingly, whereas the effects for angry faces were of moderate size, the conditioned response persistence to happy faces was of relatively small size and influenced by inter-individual differences in their affective evaluation, as indexed by a Go/No-go Association Task. Computational reinforcement learning analyses further suggested that angry faces were associated with a lower inhibitory learning rate than happy faces, thereby inducing a greater decrease in the impact of negative prediction errors signals that contributed to weakening extinction learning. Altogether, these findings provide further evidence that the occurrence of learning biases in Pavlovian aversive conditioning is not specific to threat-related stimuli and depends on the stimulus' affective relevance to the organism.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Olsson2016,
title = {Vicarious fear learning depends on empathic appraisals and trait empathy},
author = {A Olsson and K McMahon and G Papenberg and J Zaki and N Bolger and K N Ochsner},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Olsson2016.pdf},
doi = {10.1177/0956797615604124},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
journal = {Psychological Science},
volume = {27},
number = {1},
pages = {25-33},
abstract = {Empathy and vicarious learning of fear are increasingly understood as separate phenomena, but the interaction between the two remains poorly understood. We investigated how social (vicarious) fear learning is affected by empathic appraisals by asking participants to either enhance or decrease their empathic responses to another individual (the demonstrator), who received electric shocks paired with a predictive conditioned stimulus. A third group of participants received no appraisal instructions and responded naturally to the demonstrator. During a later test, participants who had enhanced their empathy evinced the strongest vicarious fear learning as measured by skin conductance responses to the conditioned stimulus in the absence of the demonstrator. Moreover, this effect was augmented in observers high in trait empathy. Our results suggest that a demonstrator’s expression can serve as a “social” unconditioned stimulus (US), similar to a personally experienced US in Pavlovian fear conditioning, and that learning from a social US depends on both empathic appraisals and the observers’ stable traits.},
note = {PMID: 26637357},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Lindstr\"{o}m2014,
title = {Racial bias shapes social reinforcement learning},
author = {B Lindstr\"{o}m and I Selbing and T Molapour and A Olsson},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Lindstrom-et-al.-2014-Racial-Bias-Shapes-Social-Reinforcement-Learning.pdf},
doi = {10.1177/0956797613514093},
year = {2014},
date = {2014-01-23},
journal = {Psychological science},
volume = {25},
number = {3},
pages = {711-719},
abstract = {Both emotional facial expressions and markers of racial-group belonging are ubiquitous signals in social interaction, but little is known about how these signals together affect future behavior through learning. To address this issue, we investigated how emotional (threatening or friendly) in-group and out-group faces reinforced behavior in a reinforcement-learning task. We asked whether reinforcement learning would be modulated by intergroup attitudes (i.e., racial bias). The results showed that individual differences in racial bias critically modulated reinforcement learning. As predicted, racial bias was associated with more efficiently learned avoidance of threatening out-group individuals. We used computational modeling analysis to quantitatively delimit the underlying processes affected by social reinforcement. These analyses showed that racial bias modulates the rate at which exposure to threatening out-group individuals is transformed into future avoidance behavior. In concert, these results shed new light on the learning processes underlying social interaction with racial-in-group and out-group individuals.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Golkar2013,
title = {Other people as means to a safe end},
author = {A Golkar and I Selbing and O Flygare and A \"{O}hman and A Olsson},
url = {http://www.emotionlab.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Golkar2013.pdf},
doi = {10.1177/0956797613489890},
year = {2013},
date = {2013-09-10},
journal = {Psychological Science},
volume = {24},
number = {11},
pages = {2182-2190},
abstract = {Information about what is dangerous and safe in the environment is often transferred from other individuals through social forms of learning, such as observation. Past research has focused on the observational, or vicarious, acquisition of fears, but little is known about how social information can promote safety learning. To address this issue, we studied the effects of vicarious-extinction learning on the recovery of conditioned fear. Compared with a standard extinction procedure, vicarious extinction promoted better extinction and effectively blocked the return of previously learned fear. We confirmed that these effects could not be attributed to the presence of a learning model per se but were specifically driven by the model’s experience of safety. Our results confirm that vicarious and direct emotional learning share important characteristics but that social-safety information promotes superior down-regulation of learned fear. These findings have implications for emotional learning, social-affective processes, and clinical practice.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Lindstrom2011,
title = {Emotion processing facilitates working memory performance},
author = {B R Lindstr\"{o}m and G Bohlin},
doi = {10.1080/02699931.2010.527703},
issn = {0269-9931},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-11-01},
journal = {Cognition & Emotion},
volume = {25},
number = {7},
pages = {1196--1204},
abstract = {The effect of emotional stimulus content on working memory performance has been investigated with conflicting results, as both emotion-dependent facilitation and impairments are reported in the literature. To clarify this issue, 52 adult participants performed a modified visual 2-back task with highly arousing positive stimuli (sexual scenes), highly arousing negative stimuli (violent death) and low-arousal neutral stimuli. Emotional stimulus processing was found to facilitate task performance relative to that of neutral stimuli, both in regards to response accuracy and reaction times. No emotion-dependent differences in false-alarm rates were found. These results indicate that emotional information can have a facilitating effect on working memory maintenance and processing of information.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Peira2010,
title = {What you fear will appear: Detection of schematic spiders in spider fear},
author = {N Peira and A Golkar and M Larsson and S Wiens},
doi = {10.1027/1618-3169/a000058},
issn = {1618-3169},
year = {2010},
date = {2010-01-01},
journal = {Experimental Psychology},
volume = {57},
number = {6},
pages = {470--475},
abstract = {Various experimental tasks suggest that fear guides attention. However, because these tasks often lack ecological validity, it is unclear to what extent results from these tasks can be generalized to real-life situations. In change detection tasks, a brief interruption of the visual input (i.e., a blank interval or a scene cut) often results in undetected changes in the scene. This setup resembles real-life viewing behavior and is used here to increase ecological validity of the attentional task without compromising control over the stimuli presented. Spider-fearful and nonfearful women detected schematic spiders and flowers that were added to one of two identical background pictures that alternated with a brief blank in between them (i.e., flicker paradigm). Results showed that spider-fearful women detected spiders (but not flowers) faster than did nonfearful women. Because spiders and flowers had similar low-level features, these findings suggest that fear guides attention on the basis of object features rather than simple low-level features.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Kompus2009,
title = {Distinct control networks for cognition and emotion in the prefrontal cortex},
author = {K Kompus and K Hugdahl and A \"{O}hman and P Marklund and L Nyberg},
doi = {10.1016/j.neulet.2009.10.005},
issn = {03043940},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-12-01},
journal = {Neuroscience Letters},
volume = {467},
number = {2},
pages = {76-80},
abstract = {The activation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) has been suggested to reflect the engagement of a control mechanism for top-down biasing of context processing in resource-demanding memory tasks. Here we tested the hypothesis that the dlPFC subserves a similar function also in attention and emotion tasks. 18 healthy young adults were tested in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study where the demands for context processing were manipulated in three different cognitive domains: auditory attention, episodic retrieval, and emotion regulation. We found that the right dlPFC was jointly sensitive to increased cognitive demands in the attention and memory tasks. By contrast, increased demands in the emotion task (reappraisal) were associated with increased activity in ventromedial PFC along with decreased amygdala activity. Our findings of divergent prefrontal control networks for cognitive and emotional control extend previous separations of cognition and emotion in the anterior cingulate cortex.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}

@article{Delgado2006,
title = {Extending animal models of fear conditioning to humans},
author = {M R Delgado and A Olsson and E A Phelps},
doi = {10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.01.006},
issn = {03010511},
year = {2006},
date = {2006-07-01},
journal = {Biological Psychology},
volume = {73},
number = {1},
pages = {39--48},
abstract = {A goal of fear and anxiety research is to understand how to treat the potentially devastating effects of anxiety disorders in humans. Much of this research utilizes classical fear conditioning, a simple paradigm that has been extensively investigated in animals, helping outline a brain circuitry thought to be responsible for the acquisition, expression and extinction of fear. The findings from non-human animal research have more recently been substantiated and extended in humans, using neuropsychological and neuroimaging methodologies. Research across species concur that the neural correlates of fear conditioning include involvement of the amygdala during all stages of fear learning, and prefrontal areas during the extinction phase. This manuscript reviews how animal models of fear are translated to human behavior, and how some fears are more easily acquired in humans (i.e., social\textendashcultural). Finally, using the knowledge provided by a rich animal literature, we attempt to extend these findings to human models targeted to helping facilitate extinction or abolishment of fears, a trademark of anxiety disorders, by discussing efficacy in modulating the brain circuitry involved in fear conditioning via pharmacological treatments or emotion regulation cognitive strategies.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}