ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2018
Individual differences in valence bias: fMRI evidence of the initial negativity hypothesis.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Annual Research Review: What processes are dysregulated among emotionally dysregulated youth? - a systematic review.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Pooled it
- The role of trait reappraisal in response to emotional ambiguity: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Pooled it
- Positive Interpretation of Emotional Ambiguity Across Development: LC-dlPFC Circuitry.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Preliminary evidence of kinematic overlap in posed, but not spontaneous, facial expressions of fear and surprise.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Facing ambiguity: What we do in the space between stimulus and response.Current directions in psychological science · 2026Article
- Valence bias arises from both positive and negative responses to ambiguous stimuli.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal dynamics of multispectral oscillatory activity underlying the processing of negative and positive emotional images.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Intergenerational Transmission of Valence Bias Is Moderated by Attachment.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Oscillatory brain dynamics underlying affective face processing.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Chronic Stress May Amplify Gender/Sex Differences in Amygdala Reactivity to Ambiguous Emotional Stimuli.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2025Article
- Segregation of three resting-state brain networks predicts reappraisal success across the lifespan.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Enhanced neural sensitivity to brief changes of happy over angry facial expressions in preschoolers: A fast periodic visual stimulation study.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Relevance of pre-stimulus oscillatory activity for the perceived valence of emotional facial expressions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Proposing a model whereby negative valence bias increases the risk for more severe dysphoric posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptomology.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Shift in Valence Bias Associated with Decrease in Trait Anxiety and Depression Symptoms.Cognitive therapy and research · 2024Article
- Information-based TMS to mid-lateral prefrontal cortex disrupts action goals during emotional processing.Nature communications · 2024Article
- In the face of ambiguity: intrinsic brain organization in development predicts one's bias toward positivity or negativity.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Resting-state functional network segregation of the default mode network predicts valence bias across the lifespan.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Specialized late cingulo-opercular network activation elucidates the mechanisms underlying decisions about ambiguity.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- Attributional negativity bias and acute stress disorder symptoms mediate the association between trauma history and future posttraumatic stress disorder.Journal of traumatic stress · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Facial expressions offer an ecologically valid model for examining individual differences in affective decision-making. They convey an emotional signal from a social agent and provide important predictive information about one's environment (presence of potential rewards or threats). Although some expressions provide clear predictive information (angry, happy), others (surprised) are ambiguous in that they predict both positive and negative outcomes. Thus, surprised faces can delineate an individual's valence bias, or the tendency to interpret ambiguity as positive or negative. Our initial negativity hypothesis suggests that the initial response to ambiguity is negative, and that positivity relies on emotion regulation. We tested this hypothesis by comparing brain activity during explicit emotion regulation (reappraisal) and while freely viewing facial expressions, and measuring the relationship between brain activity and valence bias. Brain regions recruited during reappraisal showed greater activity for surprise in individuals with an increasingly positive valence bias. Additionally, we linked amygdala activity with an initial negativity, revealing a pattern similarity in individuals with negative bias between viewing surprised faces and maintaining negativity. Finally, these individuals failed to show normal habituation to clear negativity. These results support the initial negativity hypothesis, and are consistent with emotion research in both children and adult populations.
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