Effect of Emotions on Visuospatial abilities
Saba NasirPathan* Post-Graduate Student, School of Humanities, Lovely Professional University, India: [email protected]
Divya SrivastavaAssistant Professor, School of Humanities, Lovely Professional University, India: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Social relationships play an essential role where in recognizing expressions and judging body language of an individual is the key for a smooth interaction. The current study examines the effect of positive and negative emotions on visuospatial abilities inhealthy adults. To assess visuospatial ability Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices was employed. Emotional states were induced amongst participants and then post test scores of SPM were analysed. The results show that there is a significant difference in the effect positive and negative emotions have on visuospatial abilities. The visuospatial performance declines when an individual is experiencing negative emotions and it improves when the individual is experiencing positive emotions. The study has key implications over how affect can modulate ordinary spatial behaviour of a person.
Keywords
Emotional valence, positive emotion, negative emotion, visuospatial abilities, affect induction, IAPS, Raven’s SPM
Introduction
Emotions play an indispensable role in social interactions (Russell et al., 2003; Scherer, 2003), perform important regulatory functions within human body and brain, and facilitate logical decision making and perception (Damasio, 1994). In this context, the human brain has developed mechanisms to identify emotional faces more quickly and accurately than other types of objects (Ro et al., 2001). However, emotional recognition is not the only important factor, as cognitive regulation in response to others’ emotional expressions is also necessary to generate appropriate decisions that lead to adaptive behaviour. A typical emotional response combines appraisal, physiological change, experience, expression, and action (Oatley and Johnson-Laird, 2014). An essential characteristic shared between emotions, affect and mood is that all can be characterized into dimensions like valence and arousal as described by the dimensionality model (Scholesberg, 1954).
An important social skill for an efficient interaction is paying attention to people’s gestures, expressions and body language. And a crucial cognitive skill is the brain’s visuospatial mechanism, which is the ability to remember images as set of parts, and being able to recall the image from a combination of these parts.Visual-Spatial skills are important for everyday tasks likemaking a bed, buttoning shirts, estimating distance and depth like judging when to cross the road, mental calculation, drawing, constructing models, ability to read maps, giving and taking directions, driving vehicles, recognising objects and basically anything that involves motor
Literature Review
Despite increasing research in this area, it remains undecided whether emotional information benefits, hampers or has no effect on visuo-spatial memory (Bannerman, 2012). Evidence supports segregation of visuo-spatial memory for two systems. One system is for memory for stimulus appearance and the other for spatial location (Darling et al., 2009).
A study by Albert et al., (2010) used a Go/NoGo paradigm to examine the effect of positive, negative and neutral emotions to examine its impact of motor cognition. The study found that the NoGo-P3 frontal amplitude was larger in the positive context than in the negative one and was related to Anterior Cingulate Cortex activation.Another fMRI study by LaBrar et al., (1998) showed better amygdala activation for fearful stimuli as compared to positive stimuli. Morawetz et al., (2011) examined the role of visuospatial location of the facial stimuli and highlighted its relevance in the emotional response using fMRI. They showed that stimuli with low spatial frequency in the peripheral vision produces higher amygdala activation.
Studies have shown evidence of disruption of visuo-spatial network in disorders related to emotion regulation. In a 2006 study Shackman et al., researchers found evidence for threat- induced anxiety selectively disrupting accuracy of visuospatial memory performance but not verbal memory. A second experiment revealed that individuals with high levels of behavioural inhibition exhibited more intense anxiety and relatively worse spatial memory performance even in the absence of negative stimuli. However, a study by Borg et al (2011) showed the opposite results in their study of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), healthy older participants and young adults. There was no significant difference between results of either groups which indicated that visuospatial memory was better for negative stimuli as compared to neutral stimuli.
On the other hand, recognition of the same images using only spatial location was found to be significantly poorer in AD and Healthy ageing group indicating the role of emotions play on cognition especially during ageing.
A study by Bannerman (2012) used a modified version of Corsi-blocks task to suggest that there is no impact of emotional stimuli on visuo-spatial abilities. The study showed that valence or the form (non-facial) of stimuli did not alter the performance of the participants.
Some literature indicates that, high arousing stimuli directs spatial attention to global elements of a stimuli (Adolfs, 2005). A study by Corson and Verrier (2007) characterized emotional stimuli as avoidance (fear, anger) or approach (joy, serenity). Avoidance-based emotional stimuli were found to have a more local focus as compared to approach-based stimuli. However, overall visuospatial memory performance was not significantly different in different states of emotional stimuli.
The literature indicates that the discrepancy in effects of emotion on visuospatial abilities mainly take place during information processing, which implies that there is a systematic association between specific affects (e.g., negative emotion) and certain cognitive processes (e.g., visuospatial processing).Evidence also suggests that visuospatial abilities are heavily dependent on brain structures which exhibit a particular vulnerability to ageing (Shackman et al., 2006;
Borg et al., 2011).
The current study aimed at examining the effect of positive or negative affect on visuospatial abilities as measured by Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) in healthy individualsa.
Methodology
The present study was conducted to examine the relationship between emotional states of an individual and their visuospatial abilities in an emotionally-inducted setting. The aim was to find out whether emotions (positive or negative) have an effect on visuospatial abilities.
The independent variable of emotion was divided by valence into Positive and Negative affect.
Positive affect includes pleasant or desirable situational responses, ranging from interest and contentment to love and joy. Negative affect includes any unhappy or unpleasant emotion which is evoked to express an undesirable feeling towards an event or a person. This includes feelings of hatred, sadness, anger, jealousy, disgust, etc.
Sample
60 healthy, young adults; in the age group of 18-25 were evaluated in a college setting. The sample was divided into three groups; two experimental groups (Positive emotions and Negative emotions) and one control group using systematic sampling. Every third participant was a part of the control group. The first two participants were a part of the experimental group. They were assigned to either negative or positive group using simple random sampling by methods of picking chits kept randomly in a bowl. There were no exclusion criteria based on social, economic or cultural as the experiment primarily made use of materials visual in nature.
Participants with neurological or psychiatric history were excluded from the sample.
Procedure
Each participant was evaluated in a group according to their valence group. They were randomly assigned to either of the three groups, i.e., negative, positive or control group. All participants were first exposed together to Raven’s SPM to measure their baseline abilities. This was done a week prior to the task of emotional induction. A week later, the participants in the experimental group were exposed to IAPS and inducted with either positive or negative emotional state. Each group viewed 50 images chosen for one minute each. Participants then reported their emotional state on the PANAS X self-rated scale. Next, the visuospatial ability of the participant was again checked post task using the Raven’s SPM. The experiment was conducted in a controlled setting with minimum noise and distractions. There was a research assistant who assisted with the materials of the conduction.
Materials
Raven’s SPM:
The Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) measures an individual’s perceptual skills which are reasoned by analogy. The test is free of language and is abstract in nature thus eliminating cultural and educational biases. The task is to identify the missing piece of the bigger picture out of the options given. Each set has 12 questions and there are 5 sets each and items are arranged in increasing order of difficulty. The test is a well-regarded measure of visuospatial abilities ((Colom et al., 2004; Lynn et al., 2004; Mackintosh and Bennett, 2005; Waschl et al., 2017a;
The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is developed to provide ratings of affect for a large set of emotionally-evocative, internationally-accessible, colour photographs that includes contents across a wide range of semantic categories. There are two primary dimensions; one of affective valence (pleasant and unpleasant) and the other of arousal (calm to excited). There is a third dimension of ‘dominance’ or ‘control’.
The battery was used to induct affective valence (negative and positive emotional state) amongst participants. The emotional classification of the pictures was based on the standard scores for valence and arousal provided by the IAPS (Lang, Bradley and Cuthbert, 1999).
PANAS X:
The Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scheduleis a 60-item scale used to measure the participant’s emotional state. The participants were asked to read the list of words describing feelings and emotions and rate it on a 5-point liker scale ranging from very slightly or not at all.
(Watson and Clark, 1999).
Data Analysis
The statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) and Microsoft Excel 2016. The data set consisted of two experimental groups (positive and negative affect) and one control group (No induction). ANOVAwas carried out to calculate the compare the difference between means for all variables. To compare the difference between pre- task and post-task SPM scores, a T-test was implemented. The tables were prepared using Microsoft Excel 2016.
Results
The current study investigated whether emotions (positive or negative) have an effect on the visuospatial abilities of healthy individuals. The results show that positive and negative affect had a significant effect on visuospatial abilities as compared to the control group.
The study was a mixed factorial design with one independent variable being within-participants (Pre and Post Scores) and the other being between participants (Affect). Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for pre-task and post-task SPM scores for Positive, Negative and Neutral Group.
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics
Induction (n=20) Mean SD
Positive Pre-test 43.3000 11.32812
Post-test 50.3000 8.55385
Negative Pre-test 45.7500 6.18040
Post-test 39.3500 6.21776
Neutral 44.6500 10.16327
A mixed factorial, repeated-measures ANOVA revealed the interaction effect between Induction and Pre-post SPM scores. The analysis showed a significant interaction effect at [F=(96.47), p=0.05] indicating that the effect of levels of induction varies over groups of pre and post task scores. This means that the effect of induction differed in positive and negative affect groups, as expected.
To find out which parts of the interaction are significant, aone-way ANOVA with Induction (Positive, Negative and Neutral) as the between-group factor was conducted. Analysis in Table 2 shows that there was a significant difference in mean Post-task SPM scores of Positive, negative and neutral affects [F=(8.363), p=0.05] with an effect size was 0.227. There was no difference between baseline pre-task scores for positive, negative and neutral groups [F=(0.721), p=0.05]
indicating that the difference was due to experimental induction of affect.
Table 2. One-way ANOVA
A t-test was conducted to test the individual difference between pre and post scores of Positive and Negative affect groups. There was a significant difference between pre and post-task SPM scores for positive affect group [t=(2.02), p=0.05] and for negative affect group [t=(2.024), p=0.05]. Table 3 shows the results.
Table 3. t-test Analysis
Discussion
The current study aimed at finding an association between emotions and visuospatial abilities.
The results suggest that both positive and negative emotions significantly impact a healthy individual’s visuospatial abilities.
Theresults indicate that the effect of inducing affect differed over the three groups providing evidence that positive and negative emotions do not have the same effect. Further analysis using one-way ANOVA showed that positive affect led to an improvement in visuospatial abilities while negative affect led to a decline in scores. There was a significant difference between the pre
F Sig. Effect size
Pre-task SPM 0.721 0.401 0.019
Post-task SPM 8.363* 0.001 0.227
t statistic Sig.
Positive affect 2.02* 0.03
Negative affect 2.024* 0.002
preferred over a task like Block design because it facilitates in group testing. There is some evidence suggesting depressed individuals (Miller et al., 1995) or those reporting high levels of negative affect (Tucker et al., 1999) have impairments in spatial localisation tasks.The previous studies have focused only on how emotional stimuli capture spatial attention more effectively than neutral stimuli and have not examined it in relation to positive stimuli (Bannerman et al., 2010; Fox et al., 2000; Koster et al., 2007; Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001).
The results and literature review show us that though there is a significant effect observed for negative emotions, the study would be more reliable if more confounding factors like fatigue are controlled. More work needs to be focused on devising methods to measure only effect of emotion and balance other cognitive variables such as attention.
Limitations and Future Studies
The observations made during the experiment showed that SPM caused severe fatigue in the participants.This could have been avoided by using an odd-even testing pattern as SPM boasts good odd-even reliability.
The results achieved in the studycould also arise due to factors such as attentional mechanisms of the individuals. Better attentional capacities lead to better encoding of the IAPS images (Rosler et al, 2004). This was a limitation in the design of the experiment which though not controlled, could have been manipulated by other factors.
In contrast to the IAPS images, the events and images participants are exposed to in daily life are dynamic and continuous, comprised of known and unknown persons, can last for extended durations, and carry high self-relevance and have large and sometimes devastating consequences.
Therefore, future work should consider relatively naturalistic emotional state induction effects on visuospatial abilities.
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge my family and close friends for their unconditional love and support. Special thanks to Shaheen, for her assistance in the collection of data.
References
[1] Albert, J., López-Martín, S., &Carretié, L. (2010). Emotional context modulates response inhibition: Neural and behavioral data. Neuroimage, 49(1), 914-921.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.08.045
[2] Bannerman, R. L., Milders, M., &Sahraie, A. (2010). Attentional bias to brief threat-related faces revealed by saccadic eye movements. Emotion, 10(5), 733.
[3] Bannerman, R. L., Temminck, E. V., &Sahraie, A. (2012). Emotional stimuli capture spatial attention but do not modulate spatial memory. Vision research, 65, 12-20.
[4] Borg, C., Leroy, N., Favre, E., Laurent, B., & Thomas-Antérion, C. (2011). How emotional pictures influence visuospatial binding in short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease?. Brain and cognition, 76(1), 20-25.
[5] Colom, R., Escorial, S., &Rebollo, I. (2004). Sex differences on the Progressive Matrices are influenced by sex differences on spatial ability. Personality and Individual Differences, 37(6), 1289-1293.
[6] Corson, Y., & Verrier, N. (2007). Emotions and false memories valence or arousal?. Psychological Science, 18(3), 208-211.
[7] Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, rationality and the human brain.
[8] Darling, S., Sala, S. D., &Logie, R. H. (2009). Dissociation between appearance and location within visuo-spatial working memory. The quarterly Journal of experimental Psychology, 62(3), 417-425.
[9] Fox, E., Lester, V., Russo, R., Bowles, R. J., Pichler, A., & Dutton, K. (2000). Facial expressions of emotion: Are angry faces detected more efficiently? Cognition and Emotion, 14, 61–92.
[10] Fox, E., Russo, R., Bowles, R., & Dutton, K. (2001). Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety? Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 130, 681–700.
[11] Koster, E. H. W., Crombez, G., Verschuere, B., Vanvolsem, P., & De Houwer, J. (2007). A time course analysis of attentional cueing by threatening scenes. Experimental Psychology, 54, 161–171.
[12] LaBar, K. S., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C., LeDoux, J. E., & Phelps, E. A. (1998). Human Amygdala Activation during Conditioned Fear Acquisition and Extinction: a Mixed-Trial fMRI Study. Neuron, 20, 937-945.
[13] Lynn, R., Allik, J., &Irwing, P. (2004). Sex differences on three factors identified in Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. Intelligence, 32(4), 411-424.
[14] Mackintosh, N. J., & Bennett, E. S. (2005). What do Raven's Matrices measure? An analysis in terms of sex differences. Intelligence, 33(6), 663-674.
[15] Morawetz, C., Baudewig, J., Treue, S., &Dechent, P. (2011). Effects of spatial frequency and location of fearful faces on human amygdala activity. Brain research, 1371, 87-99.
[16] Oatley, K. and Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2014). Cognitive approaches to emotions. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(3), 134-140.
[17] Öhman, A., Flykt, A., & Esteves, F. (2001). Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 130, 466–478.
[18] Raven, J., Raven, J.C., & Court, J.H. (2003, updated 2004) Manual for Raven's Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales. San Antonio, TX: Harcourt Assessment.
[19] Ro, T., Russell, C., &Lavie, N. (2001). Changing faces: A detection advantage in the flicker paradigm. Psychological science, 12(1), 94-99.
[20] Russell, J. A., Bachorowski, J. A., & Fernández-Dols, J. M. (2003). Facial and vocal expressions of emotion. Annu. Rev. Psychol, 54, 329-49
[21] Scherer, K. R., Johnstone, T., &Klasmeyer, G. (2003). Vocal expression of emotion. Handbook of affective sciences, 433-456
[22] Scholesberg, H. (1954). Three Dimensions of Emotions. Psychological review.
[23] Shackman, A. J., Sarinopoulos, I., Maxwell, J. S., Pizzagalli, D. A., Lavric, A., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Anxiety selectively disrupts visuospatial working memory. Emotion, 6(1), 40.
[24] Tucker, D. M., Hartry-Speiser, A., McDougal, L., &Luu, P. (1999). Mood and spatial memory: emotion and right hemisphere contribution to spatial cognition. Biological psychology, 50(2), 103-125
[25] Waschl, N. A. (2017). Seeing reason: Visuospatial ability, sex differences and the raven’s progressive matrices (Doctoral dissertation).
[26] Waschl, N. A., Nettelbeck, T., & Burns, N. R. (2017). The role of visuospatial ability in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Journal of Individual Differences.
[27] Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1999). The PANAS-X: Manual for the positive and negative
