Cognitive appraisal contributes to feeling generation through emotional evidence accumulation rate: Evidence from instructed fictional reappraisal.

Abstract

How do (reportable) emotional feelings come to be? Following William James and many others, Givon et al. ( 2020) described the generation of feelings as evidence accumulation toward a boundary. In this work, we began clarifying the nature of "evidence". In two preregistered experiments, participants were presented with normed emotion-evoking negative/positive pictures that were described as reflecting either authentic or fictitious happenings ("fictional reappraisal"). In negative pictures (but contrary to our predictions, not in positive pictures), fictional reappraisal slowed feeling reports and reduced the rate of unpleasant feeling reports. An evidence accumulation model, the Hierarchical Linear Ballistic Accumulator model, was fit to the results from negative stimuli. This analysis indicated that fictional reappraisal selectively slowed the rate of evidence accumulation favoring (the normatively "correct") unpleasant feeling reports and speeded evidence accumulation favoring (the normatively "wrong") pleasant feeling reports. Fictional reappraisal did not change the response criterion, specifying the required amount of evidence for report. These results suggest that cognitive appraisals contribute to (and are a part of) emotional evidence, as operationalized in evidence accumulation models, and provide additional support for the usefulness of these models for the study of feeling reports.

Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do.

“…Likewise, when we become aware of our emotions, our consciousness apparatus collects neural evidence from the interoceptive apparatus, from our sensation of action tendencies, from cognitions, and so forth. As shown here, and following other works from our group (Givon et al, 2020, 2022; Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021), this evidence accumulation process is very well described by the LBA and, as shown here, roughly equally so for “usual” perception and for emotional feelings.…”

“…More information regarding the modeling of the circle task can be found in the online supplemental materials. We may add that the legitimacy of using the LBA to model emotion reports is additionally gained from other studies (Givon et al, 2020;Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021) where critical components of model validation were included, including comparison to alternative models and showing selective influence of manipulations on the predicted LBA parameters.…”

Can Feelings “Feel” Wrong? Similarities Between Counter-Normative Emotion Reports and Perceptual Errors

“…First, we previously found that reappraisal increased the rate of aberrant emotion reports (made in response to negative pictures; Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021) showing that the aberrations are emotion related. Second, both RT and aberrations were explained by joint modeling, in terms of evidence accumulation (Givon et al, 2020; Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021). In addition, our modeling provides an explanation for the heavier right RT-distribution tail in aberrant responses.…”

Bumpy ride ahead: Anticipated effort as emotional evidence?

“…This enabled them to further show that emotional feelings, thus measured, follow Weber’s Law, which is the most basic law of sensation. Additional works show a selective influence of cognitive appraisals on the drift-rate (Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021 ) and selective influence of speed-accuracy emphasis on the boundary (Givon et al, 2022 ).…”

“…In a recent series of works (Berkovich & Meiran, 2023 ; Givon et al, 2020 , 2023 ; Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021 ), our lab used evidence accumulation modeling to describe the emergence of conscious reportable emotional feelings. Our paradigm involves asking participants to report, using a key press, if a stimulus makes them feel pleasant versus unpleasant.…”