TY  - JOUR
A1  - Madan, Christopher R.
A1  - Bayer, Janine
A1  - Gamer, Matthias
A1  - Lonsdorf, Tina B.
A1  - Sommer, Tobias
T1  - Visual Complexity and Affect: Ratings Reflect More Than Meets the Eye
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - Pictorial stimuli can vary on many dimensions, several aspects of which are captured by the term ‘visual complexity.’ Visual complexity can be described as, “a picture of a few objects, colors, or structures would be less complex than a very colorful picture of many objects that is composed of several components.” Prior studies have reported a relationship between affect and visual complexity, where complex pictures are rated as more pleasant and arousing. However, a relationship in the opposite direction, an effect of affect on visual complexity, is also possible; emotional arousal and valence are known to influence selective attention and visual processing. In a series of experiments, we found that ratings of visual complexity correlated with affective ratings, and independently also with computational measures of visual complexity. These computational measures did not correlate with affect, suggesting that complexity ratings are separately related to distinct factors. We investigated the relationship between affect and ratings of visual complexity, finding an ‘arousal-complexity bias’ to be a robust phenomenon. Moreover, we found this bias could be attenuated when explicitly indicated but did not correlate with inter-individual difference measures of affective processing, and was largely unrelated to cognitive and eyetracking measures. Taken together, the arousal-complexity bias seems to be caused by a relationship between arousal and visual processing as it has been described for the greater vividness of arousing pictures. The described arousal-complexity bias is also of relevance from an experimental perspective because visual complexity is often considered a variable to control for when using pictorial stimuli.
KW  - visual complexity
KW  - affect
KW  - arousal
KW  - valence
KW  - eyetracking
KW  - emotion
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-190015
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 8
IS  - 2368
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kuhn, Manuel
A1  - Scharfenort, Robert
A1  - Schümann, Dirk
A1  - Schiele, Miriam A.
A1  - Münsterkötter, Anna L.
A1  - Deckert, Jürgen
A1  - Domschke, Katharina
A1  - Haaker, Jan
A1  - Kalisch, Raffael
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Reif, Andreas
A1  - Romanos, Marcel
A1  - Zwanzger, Peter
A1  - Lonsdorf, Tina B.
T1  - Mismatch or allostatic load? Timing of life adversity differentially shapes gray matter volume and anxious temperament
JF  - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
N2  - Traditionally, adversity was defined as the accumulation of environmental events (allostatic load). Recently however, a mismatch between the early and the later (adult) environment (mismatch) has been hypothesized to be critical for disease development, a hypothesis that has not yet been tested explicitly in humans. We explored the impact of timing of life adversity (childhood and past year) on anxiety and depression levels (N = 833) and brain morphology (N = 129). Both remote (childhood) and proximal (recent) adversities were differentially mirrored in morphometric changes in areas critically involved in emotional processing (i.e. amygdala/hippocampus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, respectively). The effect of adversity on affect acted in an additive way with no evidence for interactions (mismatch). Structural equation modeling demonstrated a direct effect of adversity on morphometric estimates and anxiety/depression without evidence of brain morphology functioning as a mediator. Our results highlight that adversity manifests as pronounced changes in brain morphometric and affective temperament even though these seem to represent distinct mechanistic pathways. A major goal of future studies should be to define critical time periods for the impact of adversity and strategies for intervening to prevent or reverse the effects of adverse childhood life experiences.
KW  - VBM
KW  - childhood maltreatment
KW  - adversity
KW  - stressful life events
KW  - mismatch
KW  - allostatic load
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189645
VL  - 11
IS  - 4
ER  -