What I Do

Okay, Lisa asked for a thesis synopsis but it was getting way too long for a comment, so I'm posting it here. I hope this makes sense - it's hard to explain to people.

It is pretty obvious that emotional things attract attention - if you see someone suddenly look terrified, you will pay attention to them. However, it turns out that the opposite is also true - ignoring something (taking away attention) can lead to negative emotional responses as well.

I'm looking at an effect (called inhibitory devaluation) where it turns out that ignoring something makes you later dislike it. So if you're looking for a red target and ignoring yellow distractors, when you're later asked you will rate the red target as high as something you've never seen before (for example, 3.5 on a scale from 1 to 4), but rate the yellow distractors way lower (e.g. 1.5 on the scale). This effect has consistently been found, even using faces - so when you are asked to ignore certain faces, you actually later rate them as less trustworthy even though there was nothing initially different about them!


This picture shows the target (circled) and distractor, as well as the emotional response to each.

Turns out this also works when you have to inhibit a response to something. For example, if your task is to press spacebar when you see Dave and not press when you see Harry, you will like Dave better than Harry because the initial tendency is always to press the spacebar, and you have to work hard to inhibit that response when you see Harry.

We think this is because when you ignore or inhibit something, a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate (ACC) detects a conflict. Its job is to monitor incoming info (eg. from the visual system) and detect when something doesn't seem right or there is a conflict between two responses. So it detects that you are trying to ignore or inhibit something even though your NORMAL response would be to pay attention/not inhibit the thing.



This shows the visual input coming in to the anterior cingulate, which detects a conflict and influences the parts of your brain that deal with attention.

The anterior cingulate is hooked up to the emotional parts of your brain (amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex), and it seems like this "conflict" between your normal response and what you know you should do according to the instructions you've been given is interpreted by these areas as a "bad thing" - so you get a negative emotional response. This is then stored with the representation of the image you just saw, so next time you see it, you still dislike it (but you don't know why).


This shows the above conflict detected by the anterior cingulate being translated into an emotional response

This is all totally unconscious. We think it is a side effect of how the brain organizes information. It's important to be able to code things as important (e.g. attach positive emotions) or troublesome (e.g. attach negative emotions), and the emotion system is what helps to code things and people in our environment. So if you're searching for something and ignoring everything else, attaching a negative emotional response to it helps you avoid it next time you see it.

So basically - when mom told me to "just ignore" my brothers, she was setting me up for a life of research! Attention is way more powerful than we ever knew.

ANYWAY... I am going to try using this effect with people who are addicted to drugs. They have a very, very strong emotional response to drug cues (e.g. seeing a needle or whatever). When they see drug cues, they tend to start getting cravings, which makes it hard to stay off drugs. We are wondering if we can harness this inhibitory devaluation effect to cut right through that positive response to drug cues, instead getting people to associate drug cues with disliking/negative emotions in the same way as above. If we can cut down on positive emotions to these cues, we might be able to cut down on cravings and therefore on relapse (craving is associated with increased relapse in the literature).

Sorry that was so long. I don't know if you would ever want to tell anyone about all that, but I guess you could always just say I study attention-emotion interactions and leave it at that!

Just to be complete - here are some references in case you're interested/very, very bored.
Devaluation papers:
Raymond, J. E., Fenske, M. J, & Tavassoli, N. T. (2003). Selective attention determines emotional responses to novel visual stimuli. Psychological Science, 14, 537-542.

Fenske, M. J., & Raymond, J. E. (2006). Affective influences of selective attention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15,(6), 312- 316.

Why cravings = emotional response in drug users:

Franken, I. H. A. (2003).Drug craving and addiction: integrating psychological and neuropsychopharmacological approaches. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 27(4), 563-579.