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Cognitively reappraising a stressful situation—reinterpreting it to alter its emotional impact—is effective for regulating negative emotions. When reappraising, English speakers spontaneously engage in linguistic distancing, using fewer first-person singular pronouns and present-tense verbs. We investigated whether this pattern generalizes to Spanish, a language proposed to offer unique distancing tools. Spanish and English bilinguals and English monolinguals (N = 163) transcribed their thoughts while responding naturally to negative images or reappraising them (for bilinguals, in both languages). We found that reappraisal increased standard markers of linguistic distancing similarly in English and Spanish. Moreover, stronger linguistic distancing when reappraising in either language was associated with greater reduction in self-reported negative affect. Notably, bilinguals did not utilize Spanish-specific distancing words (e.g., &quot;estar&quot; and diminutives) when reappraising. In showing that English-derived linguistic signatures of emotion regulation extend to Spanish, our findings offer initial evidence that linguistic distancing reflects emotional well-being across languages.

CogSci 2023

Linguistic Distancing and Emotion Regulation in English and Spanish

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Cognitively reappraising a stressful situation—reinterpreting it to alter its emotional impact—is effective for regulating negative emotions. When reappraising, English speakers spontaneously engage in linguistic distancing, using fewer first-person singular pronouns and present-tense verbs. We investigated whether this pattern generalizes to Spanish, a language proposed to offer unique distancing tools. Spanish and English bilinguals and English monolinguals (N = 163) transcribed their thoughts while responding naturally to negative images or reappraising them (for bilinguals, in both languages). We found that reappraisal increased standard markers of linguistic distancing similarly in English and Spanish. Moreover, stronger linguistic distancing when reappraising in either language was associated with greater reduction in self-reported negative affect. Notably, bilinguals did not utilize Spanish-specific distancing words (e.g., "estar" and diminutives) when reappraising. In showing that English-derived linguistic signatures of emotion regulation extend to Spanish, our findings offer initial evidence that linguistic distancing reflects emotional well-being across languages.

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

The current study examined the influence of emoji-conveyed positivity on lexical processing. Two separate online lexical decision tasks (LDT) were conducted, in which neutral words were primed by positive or negative emojis. The results revealed a significant positivity facilitation effect on the lexical processing of the following neutral words, demonstrating that the integration of affective information from the prime (e.g. positive emoji) can impact the processing of the unrelated target (e.g. neutral word). These findings suggest that emoji-induced positivity bias in lexical processing occurs independently of the emoji's visual appearance (i.e. whether or not it is a face), suggesting that the positivity bias results from the emotional processing and interaction between lexical and affective processes, rather than the semantic richness of emotional stimuli. The practical implications of these results indicate the potential effectiveness of emoji-conveyed positivity in reading and highlight the importance of controlling for emotional content in similar reading studies. Future research should investigate the effects of emojis on sentence and discourse processing.

More Than Mere Words: Emoji-Induced Positivity Bias in Lexical Processing

Prior literature provides contradictory claims on the differences in preferential processing among different emotional stimuli. While some studies have indicated that happy faces
are processed more effectively than others, Simione et al. (2014) demonstrated that when processing resources are limited, there is threat superiority in VSTM. Given the contrasting claims about angry vs. happy faces, we did a modified replication of the same study using real faces instead of schematic faces. We hypothesized that happy emotional expression would show better performance and conducted two experiments manipulating display times in experiment 1 and set sizes in experiment 2. We found a general "emotional superiority" effect and a ”happiness superiority” effect in both experiments, which contrasts with Simione et al. (2014)’s results. These findings indicate that a happy face gets attentional priority for storage in the VSTM. Theories of consolidation and processing in visual short-term memory need to incorporate such stimulus saliency-based processing differences.

Preference for Happy Faces in Emotion-based Attentional Priority in Visual Short Term Memory

Video gaming and competitive eSports have garnered increased empirical attention, although a knowledge gap persists concerning the cognitive underpinnings of performance in individual gaming genres. Like traditional sports players, eSports players require genre-specific skillsets that depend upon distinct cognitive constructs to perform well in their genre. We examined the relations between high-level expertise in different eSports and performance on several cognitive assessments to isolate the processes that most directly support top-level competitive gaming performance. Top-level experts of Fighting and Rhythm game genres outperformed Non-video-game-players on measures of reaction time, paced motor timing, and sustained attention. Fighting Game Experts performed particularly well with sustained attention, and Rhythm Game Experts performed particularly well at paced motor timing. Expert groups did not dramatically differ from one another, suggesting relations with more general gaming expertise rather than game-specific expertise. This research provides preliminary explanation for how genre-specific video game expertise interacts with cognition.

Associations Between Cognitive Performance and Extreme Expertise in Different Competitive eSports

Selective avoidance of uncongenial facts to users’ preexisting false belief is a biased click tendency that detracts the utility of fact-checking websites. This study examined the strength of this avoidance tendency and whether it can be reduced with interventions. In a preregistered experiment with 1,203 participants, we compared two different types of interventions: An intervention with instruction that directly calls for reflection via text (instruction intervention); An intervention with a ranking-biased order that induces users to click on what they easily see and vice versa (ranking-biased intervention). The results showed no significant effect of the instruction intervention. However, the ranking-biased intervention showed preventive outcomes regarding the selective avoidance behaviors of users and promoted their clicking on links to uncongenial facts. The ranking-biased intervention was effective for users with high reflexiveness as well as for users with low reflexiveness. We discuss implications for designing fact-checking websites based on user understanding.

Fight Bias with Bias: Two Interventions for Mitigating the Selective Avoidance of Clicking Uncongenial Facts

Interaction plays an essential role in language acquisition, but the specific ways in which its underlying mechanisms contribute are unclear. To investigate this question, we conducted a study in which participants learnt an artificial language through interaction with a computer program, in a modified director-matcher paradigm. We manipulated the level of task interactivity and tracked learning progress. We found that participants in the interactive condition learnt the language faster and were more accurate by the end of their training, and that the difference persisted a day later. However, the manipulation did not affect grammatical or wordform accuracy. The results suggest that small changes in interactivity can have a sustained impact on language learning, particularly on word learning. Our study also has implications for the development of digital language learning materials, and it highlights the potential of this paradigm for exploring language learning in an interactive manner in an online environment.

A small increase in interactivity boosts language learning in a virtual environment

Language input is potentially ambiguous in a number of ways. In order to process language effectively, language users need to resolve these ambiguities quickly and efficiently. Many sources of information are recruited to complete this process including contextual constraints, prosody, and verb biases. The current work focuses on the development of verb biases given children’s overreliance on them. To explore this issue, I examined the effect of syntactic priming on the interpretation of PP-attachment ambiguities by 5-year-old children. Three priming experiments utilized three different but related prime types: globally ambiguous PP-attachments, unambiguous attachments disambiguated by syntax, and unambiguous attachments disambiguated by pragmatics. Results demonstrated priming in all three experiments, although it was strongest when the primes themselves were ambiguous. This finding provides further evidence for comprehension priming in children, and suggests that their verb biases can be overcome given the appropriate resources.

Priming Children's Interpretation of Globally Ambiguous Sentences

Verb learning is a difficult, important task for young learners (e.g., Childers & Tomasello, 2002). Children often see different events while hearing new verbs and have to deduce which event is relevant for learning that verb’s meaning. We simulated this experience by showing 3 ½- and 4 ½-year-olds (n= 28) 3 events on each trial and presenting a new verb. Across 3 trials, 4-year-olds were able to focus on the repeated action and extend the verb (p=.02); 3-year-olds performed at chance. In Study 2, the same-aged children (n=26 to date) were shown a repeated agent across trials (facilitating structural alignment), six learning trials (more instances for statistical learning), or both a repeated agent and six learning trials. Analyses of the first two conditions suggest a difference between conditions (p<.10); data collection in progress. These studies are important for understanding cognitive processes that may underlie a key task, verb learning.

The Key is Comparison: How Children Learn Verbs When Confronted with Referential Ambiguity

Modelling of early language acquisition aims to understand how infants bootstrap their language skills. The modelling encompasses properties of the input data used for training the models, the cognitive hypotheses and their algorithmic implementations being tested, and the evaluation methodologies to compare models to human data. Recent developments have enabled the use of more naturalistic training data for computational models. This also motivates development of more naturalistic tests of model behaviour. A crucial step towards such an aim is to develop representative speech datasets consisting of speech heard by infants in their natural environments. However, a major drawback of such recordings is that they are typically noisy, and it is currently unclear how the sound quality could affect analyses and modelling experiments conducted on such data. In this paper, we explore this aspect for the case of infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) analysis. First, we manually and automatically annotated audio quality of utterances extracted from two corpora of child-centred long-form recordings (in English and French). We then compared acoustic features of IDS and ADS in an in-lab dataset and across different audio quality subsets of naturalistic data. Finally, we assessed how the audio quality and recording environment may change the conclusions of a modelling analysis using a recent self-supervised learning model. Our results show that the use of modest and high audio quality naturalistic speech data result in largely similar conclusions on IDS and ADS in terms of acoustic analyses and modelling experiments. We also found that an automatic sound quality assessment tool can be used to screen out useful parts of long-form recordings for a closer analysis with comparable results to that of manual quality annotation.

Analysing the Impact of Audio Quality on the use of Naturalistic Long-Form Recordings for Infant-Directed Speech Research

We investigate the interpretation of disjunction in child and adult Romanian via a replication of Tieu et al. (2017). Specifically, we target the simple disjunction sau ‘or’ (with two intonation patterns: neutral and marked), and the complex disjunction markers sau…sau and fie…fie ‘either…or’. In a predictive Truth Value Judgment Task, participants evaluated a puppet’s disjunctive guesses (The hen pushed the bus or the plane) after seeing the outcome. Adults assigned predominantly exclusive interpretations to both simple and complex disjunctions (The hen pushed only one). Children, however, generally interpreted sau (with both intonational patterns) and sau…sau inclusively (The hen pushed one and possibly both), while they interpreted fie…fie conjunctively (The hen pushed both). It would appear that at an initial developmental stage, morphological/prosodic markedness does not affect children’s interpretation of disjunction. We discuss several possible accounts for the observed variation among complex disjunctions in child Romanian.

Not all complex disjunctions are alike: On inclusive and conjunctive interpretations in child Romanian

The link between language and cognition is evident in the first months of life. As early as three months of age, a parent labeling an object that the infant is looking at, influences the infants’ thoughts about those objects (Ferry et al., 2010). Prior research investigating this question has been conducted using face-to-face methodologies (Fulkerson & Waxman, 2007). Due to COVID, we sought to validate an online counterpart of the categorization task using preferential-looking paradigms. In Experiment 1, we found that language labels facilitated object categorization for 10- to 12-month-old infants. In contrast, a control condition that presented the same labeling phrases played in reverse did not facilitate categorization. In Experiment 2, we found that labels did not facilitate object categorization among 6-month-old infants. In sum, the advantage of online infant testing may be restricted to older ages.

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