ABSTRACTPerception of emotion in the face is a key component of human social cognition and is considered vital for many domains of life; however, little is known about how this ability differs across the lifespan for men and women. We addressed this question with a large community sample of persons ranging from younger than 15 to older than 60 years of age. Participants were viewers of the television show “Tout le Monde Joue”, and the task was presented on television, with (...) participants responding via their mobile devices. Applying latent variable modeling, and establishing measurement invariance between males and females and across age, we found that, for both males and females, emotion perception abilities peak between the ages of 15 and 30, with poorer performance by younger adults and declining performance after the age of 30. In addition, we show a consistent advantage by females across the lifespan, which decreases in magnitude with increasing age. This large scale study with a wide ran... (shrink)

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance (...) predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel . Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future. (shrink)

This study provides evidence that personality traits associated with responsiveness to conscious reward cues also influence responsiveness to unconscious reward cues. Participants with low and high levels of Novelty Seeking performed updating tasks in which they could either gain 1 euro or 5 cents. Gains were presented either supraliminally or subliminally at the beginning of each trial. Results showed that low NS participants performed better in the high-reward than in the low-reward condition, whereas high NS participants’ performance did not differ (...) between reward conditions. Interestingly, we found that low NS participants performed significantly better when rewards were presented unconsciously, whereas high NS participants’ performance did not differ whether reward cues were presented subliminally or supraliminally. Our findings highlight the necessity of taking personality into account in unconscious cognition research. They also suggest that individual differences might determine whether implicit and explicit motives have similar or complementary influences. (shrink)