Piotr Winkielman - US grants

A program of research investigates the hypothesis that affective responses reflect the ease of mental operations involved in stimulus processing. This hypothesis promises to integrate a variety of apparently unrelated preference phenomena under a common theoretical framework. It is proposed that a single process -- enhancement of processing fluency -- underlies the following phenomena: (i) the mere-exposure effect (repetition increases liking for objects), (ii) beauty-in-averages effect (prototypical objects are liked more then nonprototypical ones), (iii) preferences for objects presented with higher clarity or higher figure-ground contrast, (iv) preference for objects presented at longer durations, and (v) preference for objects when mental processing of their attributes has been facilitated with perceptual or semantic primes.

This research offers a systematic analysis of the relation between processing fluency, affective responses, and evaluative judgments. The studies employ a variety of preference tasks (liking for pictures, persons, words, categories of objects, abstract shapes) and a variety of manipulations (semantic priming, visual priming, repetition, clarity). Specific psychological mechanisms underlying the fluency-affect-judgment connection are explored and the nature of the underlying affective reactions are examined with psychophysiological measures.

This research project will advance our understanding of the relation between affect and cognition. Specifically, it will: (i) identify a new source of affective reactions (processing dynamics), (ii) provide an account of classic phenomena, such as the mere-exposure effect and beauty-in-averages effect, (iii) predict new preference phenomena, such as the influence of priming on affective responses that are not mediated by the semantic interpretation of the target, and (iv) identify potential biases that may result from differential fluency during social perception tasks.

The present program of research examines the means by which individuals process emotional information. The guiding framework holds that emotion processing involves "embodiment", or the activation of emotion-relevant sensory-motor and somatic states in the individual. In that framework, embodiment occurs not only when an emotion-eliciting object is physically present to the perceiver, but also when the emotion object is referred to by internal symbols (thoughts) or external symbols (e.g., words). To understand the role of sensory-motor and somatic states in emotion processing, planned experiments will investigate classic phenomena in social psychology. These phenomena include the perception of and memory for facial expressions of emotion, the use of emotion concepts, and the influence of emotional states on judgment. The experiments will measure both behavioral and physiological indicators of embodiment to assess the mutual influence between the sensory-motor states and emotion processing. The expected findings should provide the basis of a coherent account of embodiment in the perception and manipulation of emotional information. By extension, this research can put our understanding of the processing of all social concepts on a novel theoretical footing. The research is also likely to have broader scientific impact. For instance, the embodiment framework suggests a new way to define emotional dysfunctions, and points to more effective treatments that target the sensory-motor and somatic components of the emotion process. It also suggests a scientifically productive way to conceptualize the acquisition and change of emotionally-charged beliefs and memories, including dysfunctional social attitudes, such as prejudice. Finally, the project has the potential to revise our understanding of learning in general by highlighting the critical role of imagery, gesture, and action. Once re-conceptualized in this way, new methods of teaching can be developed that explicitly involve sensory-motor experience in the building of both emotional and non-emotional knowledge and skills.

This grant is supporting the PI and his three graduate students to attend the 11th meeting of the European Social Cognition Network (ESCON) in Warsaw, Poland, on August 26-30, 2009. This conference provides an international forum for the exchange of the most recent scientific developments in the field of Social Cognition. The intellectual merits of this conference are extensive. First, the conference is innovative in its cross-national representation (some 16 countries will be represented, including the best European labs). The PI, as one of the invited plenary speakers, will also be afforded the opportunity to present his research to an international audience and to discuss his work more broadly and informally with attendees. This will allow the PI and his students to learn from, and present to, an audience that approaches social cognition questions from a different perspective, and get exposed to some of the most cutting-edge research being done these days in European countries. Further, the conference provides a platform for young researchers -- including the three graduate students whose travel would be supported on this grant -- to present their research ideas and to receive extensive feedback from a variety of experts in the field. This should greatly stimulate their professional development, not only conceptually, but also in terms of contacts with international colleagues. Finally, one of the broader goals of this meeting is to foster international research collaborations and to develop additional opportunities for young researchers to become integrated into the international scientific community.

Social and economic decisions cannot be fully explained by "rational" attempts to maximize monetary gain, even in very simple game-theoretic scenarios. Complex emotional processes such as anger, guilt or generosity act as hidden forces that lead to observable actions. Such "non-rational" motivations can drive our own decisions and they affect our beliefs about what motivates others' decisions as well. The goal of this project is to use automatic measurements of dynamic facial expressions, in combination with other measurements such as functional MRI (fMRI) and eye-tracking, to investigate the role of non-rational motivations in social decision making. The core of the approach is to use state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to extract facial actions from video in real-time while participants interact with a computer or with each other, in some cases viewing live video of each others' faces. The investigators will use powerful statistical machine learning techniques to make inferences about the participants' internal emotional states during the interactions. The goal is to use the inferences concerning emotional state (a) to predict participants' behavior; (b) to explain why a decision is made in terms of the hidden forces driving it; and (c) to build autonomous agents that can use this information to drive their interactions with humans.

This multidisciplinary project contributes to several fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and economics. First, it develops new methodologies to study decision processes. Second, it uses these methods to test hypotheses about social decision-making and to bridge the gap between observable actions and the internal states that generated them. Third, the investigators intend to make available a dataset and toolset that should be an extremely useful for other investigators analyzing facial expression in multiple contexts. Additionally, automatic and on-line decoding of internal motivational states lays the groundwork for "affectively-aware" interactive computers, or artificial systems that can make inferences about the emotions and intentions of their users. Through the development of these systems, this project will make a significant contribution to the growing field of human-machine interaction.

[Supported by Perception, Action and Cognition, Decision, Risk and Management Sciences, and Robust Intelligence]