Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2020-01-10
Abstract： Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) refers to a series of physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that occur periodically in women during the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. It peaks within a week before menses and improves or disappears after the onset of menses. PMS occurs in 30%~40% of females at reproductive-age and can have deleterious effects on the social functioning and interpersonal relationships for those with PMS during the late luteal phase. Therefore, the potential causes and mechanisms of PMS have attracted researchers' attention. Affect balance is an important basis for maintaining mental health and the imbalance of positive and negative affect might be one of the causes of PMS. However, previous studies on the mechanism of PMS mostly focused on the increase of negative affect. Only limited studies explored the decrease of positive affect. Built upon the strong link between positive emotions and reward processing, the present study aims to explore the causes of positive emotional deficiencies tied to the dysfunctional reward processing during PMS. Despite the lack of consensus on the diagnostic criteria of PMS, one of the most widely used diagnostic criteria for PMS are from John Bancroft’s recommendations, which have been translated into the PMS Scale in Chinese. Of the 259 women who were asked to self-assess using this scale, 45 right-handed females (23 with PMS and 22 without PMS) with regular menstrual cycle voluntarily participated in this study. After completing a series of questionnaires, a simple gambling task was used to elicit reward positivity (RewP, 250~350ms), an event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by feedback indicating gain versus loss. All participants completed this task twice, once in the late luteal and the other in the early follicular phase, respectively. In addition to ERP analysis, we also conducted time-frequency analysis to examine the neural oscillations underlying the reward processing. Questionnaire results showed that women with PMS reported lower levels of happiness and calmness than healthy women, and their affect balance was also lower than that of healthy women, independent of menstrual cycle. Electrophysiological results suggested that in the late luteal phase, compared with healthy women, women with PMS were characterized by reduced RewP responses towards monetary gains, but not towards monetary losses. Further correlational analysis showed that the amplitude of RewP to gain feedback and difference wave amplitude in women with PMS was related to the affect balance in the late luteal phase. Time-frequency analysis showed that the theta-band (4~7 Hz, 250~4000 ms) power to gain feedback in PMS group was lower than that of healthy group in the late luteal phase. Taken together, the amplitude of RewP and the theta-band power are related to reward processing. Results showed that in the late luteal phase, the amplitude of RewP and the theta-band power in women with PMS were lower than that in healthy women, and the amplitude of RewP and the theta-band power were related to affect balance for women with PMS. These results suggest that the altered neurophysiological response in reward processing of women with PMS may be one of the causes of their low positive affect and affect imbalance in the late luteal phase. Our findings provide a basis for PMS intervention from the perspective of increasing positive affect, which supplements and enriches previous interventions mostly based on reducing negative affect.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2019-02-03
Abstract： " The social intuition model suggests that moral reasoning occurs after moral intuitive judgment. The question of how people make intuitive moral judgments, and whether the process is influenced by reasoning and emotion, remains to be answered. The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of moral relativism and disgust on moral intuitive judgment. According to the unimodal of human judgment, intuitive and deliberate judgments are based on similar rules. The hypotheses are as follows: moral relativism increases moral intuitive judgment (H1) and disgust increases moral intuitive judgment (H2). We conducted three experiments to test these hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined whether moral intuitive judgment exists. A total of 39 undergraduates were selected and asked to answer “yes” or “no” randomly, like tossing a coin, to 20 moral behaviors, 20 immoral behaviors, and 40 fillers. The accuracy of moral judgment is compared to random level (i.e., 0.5). Accuracy greater than 0.5 was considered indicative of moral intuitive judgment. Single-sample t-test showed that the accuracy of the participants’ random responses was significantly greater than random (i.e., 0.5), indicating the existence of moral intuitions. In Experiment 2, a total of 77 undergraduates were randomly assigned to two different conditions, i.e., moral relativism and moral absolutism. Participants were first primed moral absolutism or moral relativism by scrambling in a sentence, e.g., the scrambled sentence “as to rightness” “cannot” “different types of morality” “be compared” may be recomposed as “Different types of morality cannot be compared as to rightness” , then randomly answer “yes” or “no” to moral judgments. Independent-samples t-test showed that participants were more inclined to make moral intuitive judgments under the conditions of moral absolutism than moral relativism, which suggests that moral relativism weakens participants’ moral intuitive judgment, while moral absolutism promotes participants’ moral intuitive judgment. In Experiment 3, a total of 80 undergraduates were randomly assigned to two different emotional conditions, i.e., disgust and neutral emotion. Participants’ disgust (or neutral emotion) were primed by eight pictures of disgusting facial expressions (or eight pictures of neutral facial expressions) before randomly answering “yes” or “no” to moral judgments. Independent-sample t-test showed that participants were more inclined to make moral intuitive judgments under the conditions of disgust emotion than neutral emotion, which suggests that moral intuition judgments are affected by emotion, and disgust increases individuals’ moral intuitive judgments. In sum, the present research investigated the influence of moral relativism and disgust emotion on moral intuitive judgment, which helps to further understand the mechanism of moral intuitive judgment. In addition, it also provides some guidance for the daily moral judgment. The limitations and further research are also discussed.
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