Emotion

This study examines how children learn emotional information and management from their primary caretakers during interactions with positive and negative narratives. Fifty-six preschoolers and their parents participated in a storytelling and discussion task, where each parent presented a happy and a sad story. Preschoolers were coded for their involvement, emotional comprehension, and concern, while parents were rated on their support, scaffolding, and expressiveness. Findings reveal that warm responsive and expressive parental behaviors contribute significantly to children’s cognitive and emotional skills during both positive and negative narrative interactions. Parents high in support and expressiveness (both during the task and within the home) had children who showed higher total expression, in addition to being more positively expressive, more involved, and more understanding of emotional concepts. These results reinforce previously established beliefs on the importance of emotionally open, positively expressive, and cognitively stimulating parent-child interactions on emotional, social, and regulatory competence.

Individuals are constantly being exposed to new information and new situations, but memory for these events is not always equal; understanding the factors that affect an individual’s ability to remember the details surrounding these events is extremely important. The purpose of the current study was to examine the potential effects of emotion and source characteristics, such as age and gender, on memory for factual information (i.e., trivia facts) and source identity (i.e., the sources of the information). One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduate students viewed a total of 120 videos depicting eight different sources (two young adult males, two young adult females, two older adult males, and two older adult females) presenting neutral and emotional (positive, negative) trivia facts; participants were then asked to complete a fill-in-thevi blank test on memory for trivia facts and a multiple-choice test on memory for the source of each fact. Results indicated that positively valenced trivia facts were remembered more often than both neutral and negatively valenced facts; emotion was not found to affect memory for the sources of trivia facts or memory for the relationship between trivia fact and source. Results indicated that trivia facts presented by female sources were remembered better than facts presented by male sources; source gender also affected memory for the sources of each fact, such that sources of facts presented by females were remembered better than the source identity for a fact presented by a male source. When the identity of the source was forgotten, participants were more likely to falsely attribute the fact to someone of the same age as the original source. If the original source was female, participants were also more likely to falsely attribute that fact to another female source compared to a male source, but if the original source was male, participants were equally likely to misattribute the source of either gender. The findings from the current study add to the current understanding of the complex effects of emotion on memory and suggest the importance

Diminished affective behavior is a frequently observed concomitant of cognitive dysfunction in the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), yet little is known about their relationship. A neuropsychological battery and electroencephalogram (EEG) recording was conducted on 29 HIV+ (Mage = 35.6 years, SD =5.36) and 30 HIV- (Mage =32.9 years, SD =6.39) women recruited from a family AIDS care program in South Florida. Using an emotion regulation paradigm, we compared event-related potentials (ERPs) following cues to view-neutral, view-negative and reappraise-negative images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). A group X instruction interaction was found for the P200 and early (400-1000 ms) late positive potential (LPP). Executive function, i.e., frequent task-switching predicted the attenuation of the early and late LPP following cues to up-regulate negative emotions. Greater response inhibition predicted attenuation of the LPP during the down-regulation of negative emotions. These findings suggest limited cognitive resources for the reappraisal of emotions in women with HIV.