Brian Knutson - US grants

The long-term objective of this research is to innovate affective neuroscience methods for eliciting drug craving and predicting drug consumption. The specific aims of the proposed research are to compare neural and affective responses of smokers versus nonsmokers to: (1) monetary incentive cues; (2) unavailable cigarette cues, and (3) available cigarette cues. We predict that smokers will show selectively enhanced ventral striatal activation and positive arousal to available drug cues only, and that this neural activation will predict subsequent smoking behavior. Once developed, these methods could be extended to samples who abuse other substances in order to track therapeutic efficacy and predict outcomes. Cigarette smoking and other addictions constitute key public health problems; a more complete understanding of neural mechanisms underlying addiction will inform future therapeutic treatments. Methods developed in this application may also provide a useful index of addiction and individual proclivity towards relapse.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Increased life expectancies create a need for greater financial decision making on the part of individuals. Yet little research has examined how financial decision making changes over the course of the lifespan. We propose to investigate behavioral and neural responses during anticipation of financial reward and risk in young, middle-aged, and old samples. We will also examine the influence of incidental affective cues and cognitive load on financial risk taking in these groups. The proposed studies are guided by a neuroeconomic model of how anticipatory affect can influence financial risk taking. Findings promise to elucidate not only how the brain anticipates reward and risk, but also how this may change with age. [unreadable] [unreadable] Since people are living longer than ever before, they must increasingly make important decisions about their financial future -- yet little research has examined financial risk- taking, or how this behavior changes with age. We propose to use cutting edge brain imaging technology to examine predictors of financial risk taking in young, middle-aged, and older adults. The findings promise to illuminate how individuals make both optimal and suboptimal financial decisions over the course of the lifespan. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Can emotion influence decision-making, and if so, how? Emotional appeals pervade advertising, marketing, and politics. While some of these appeals convey relevant information about associated products or messages, others feature apparently unrelated items (e.g., a fashion model near a sports car). From the viewpoint of a strictly rational actor, if these unrelated emotional stimuli provide no useful additional information, they should not influence decisions related to the product or message under consideration. Yet, particularly in situations involving minimal reflective processing, researchers have demonstrated that incidental emotional stimuli may influence attitudes and even behavior. However, little is known about the physiological underpinnings, the timecourse, the specificity, or the limits of this potential influence. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Brian Knutson and colleagues at Stanford University will investigate how emotions that occur during anticipation of outcomes (i.e., "anticipatory affect") influence financial risk taking. Using behavioral testing and brain imagining techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the investigators will test a model of anticipatory affect that predicts that: (1) positive arousal (e.g., "excitement") promotes risk seeking; (2) negative arousal (e.g., "anxiety") promotes risk aversion; and (3) anticipatory affect has a stronger influence on financial risk taking when cognitive reflection is minimal.

Findings from these studies will integrate cognitive and affective neuroscience, inform decision theory, and advance neuroimaging methods for testing causal models. By advancing scientific understanding of human decision making, the findings may eventually inform policy related to decision making in financial, health, and welfare domains. Understanding how emotions guide decisions is important for accurate models of consumer spending, understanding the phenomenon of popular fads, and has the potential to provide insight into compulsive shopping or gambling. The studies will engage a diverse group of interdisciplinary students ranging from undergraduates to postdoctoral fellows, providing them with skills that will promote their future research expertise and development.

As the US population grows more ethnically diverse, so does its workforce. Presently, individuals of non-European American backgrounds comprised approximately 36% of the American workforce, and by 2050, these workers will be responsible for 85% of its growth. There is a striking lack of ethnic diversity, however, among leaders in all sectors of the American economy. For example, although Asian Americans are the most highly represented minority group in academic settings (comprising 6.2% of faculty), and have the highest percentage of college degrees of any ethnic group, they hold only 2.4% of top administrative positions in higher education, compared to African Americans (9.4%) and Latino Americans (3.6%). This disparity, and similar ones observed in business and political settings, have been cited as evidence of a "bamboo ceiling," or limit to career advancement for Asian Americans. What factors might be responsible for the bamboo ceiling and other barriers to advancement for different ethnic minority groups?

Various scholars have argued that these barriers are due to racial discrimination and stereotyping. In the current project, Jeanne Tsai (Stanford University) and colleagues propose that European American employers may unknowingly engage in "affective discrimination," or discrimination based on a cultural mismatch between the emotional ideals ("ideal affect") of European American employers and their ethnic minority employees. Affective discrimination may be less obvious than other types of discrimination because people are often unaware of how their cultures shape their emotions, and because the emotion-based judgments that people make about others often occur quickly, automatically, and outside conscious awareness. In previous work, Tsai and colleagues found that whereas North American cultures value excitement, enthusiasm, and other "high arousal positive" states more, East Asian cultures value calm, peacefulness, and other "low arousal positive" states more. Thus, consistent with their ideals, European American employers may seek to promote excited and enthusiastic leaders, which may inadvertently disadvantage Asian Americans and other employees who value and therefore express other affective states.

The project will examine whether people's ideal affect influences their leadership judgments in different occupational settings (business and engineering) and under varying work conditions (periods of normality vs. periods of crisis), why biases occur (i.e., the underlying psychological mechanisms), and whether people can be taught to account for cultural and individual differences in ideal affect when judging others' potential for leadership. The project uniquely utilizes cross-cultural, experimental, and neuroimaging methods to capture these processes. Findings from this work will advance scientific understanding of how culture shapes the judgments people make about others based on emotional expression, and will advance methods for integrating neural, psychological, and cultural levels of analysis. This work also promises to identify ways of breaking down barriers to advancement for different ethnic groups in the U.S., and to develop methods of teaching members of all groups how to work together harmoniously in an increasingly multicultural society.

Social media platforms allow people around the world to express themselves and communicate with others more quickly than ever. While this convenience and speed has benefits, it also has psychological and societal costs. For instance, research on social media users in the United States (US) suggests that expressions of positive emotions (e.g., happiness) on social media can make other users feel depressed, anxious, and that they are "missing out," while expressions of negative emotions (e.g., disgust, fear, and anger) can increase the spread of misinformation and intensify political polarization. Combating these potential costs requires understanding the unique cultural and emotion-content signatures of social media use. In the US, users post more positive emotional content, and negative emotional content is strongly associated with misinformation and political polarization. This research tests the hypothesis that these emotional patterns reflect American cultural values in general and an American emphasis on positivity in particular. To test these culturally-embedded predictions, the research examines the prevalence and spread of emotional content on social media in the US and Japan. Research findings can inform the development and deployment of social media tools to combat the harmful effects of emotional content on users.<br/><br/>This research specifically examines the prevalence and spread of emotional content on social media and its association with the well-being of users, susceptibility to misinformation, and political polarization in the US and Japan. Study 1 uses computational methods to compare the spread of emotional news posts in US and Japanese social media. Studies 2a-b use survey and experimental methods to examine how users' cultural values influence the prevalence and spread of emotional content. Study 3 examines a potential remedy, testing whether a tool that allows users to control their exposure to emotion content on social media can increase their well-being, decrease their susceptibility to misinformation, and increase their empathy with political outgroups. These studies contribute to the development of defenses to protect against the negative effects of social media use.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.