In any crowded public place we can see people varying in race, gender, age, attractiveness, status, and demeanor. But, who grabs our attention? Who do we most remember, and how do our memories become distorted as time passes? Perhaps most important, do answers to these questions depend on whether we are currently thinking about getting along with coworkers, entertaining romantic goals, or protecting our health or safety? Few people would dispute the idea that emotions and motivations can introduce biases in our attention, memory, and interpretation of social signals. Psychological researchers studying social signal detection tend to focus on extreme values of signals. For example, psychologists wanting to study anger perception typically select a few very angry and very happy faces. Choosing levels at the endpoints like this may lead to important discoveries, but it can also obscure important processes that only act at the intermediary points of signal's range. Therefore it is important that we take a more psychophysical approach to social perception because, in some cases, studying only extreme values of social signals as is typically done can lead to erroneous conclusions about underlying psychological processes. This research program is designed to explore the ways in which self-protection, romance, and social rejection modulate individuals' experience of the world. The researchers will utilize strengths of morphing and computer animation software in order to create sets of faces in which goal-relevant information, such as facial expressions of anger and happiness, varies along a continuum. The research will involve the use of faces to examine attention, encoding and memory, using a number of established methods (e.g., signal detection and psychophysical scaling), as well as some novel methods, including the memory matching game "concentration." In addition, this will entail systematic manipulation of participants' emotional and motivational states with guided visualizations as a way of examining motivational effects across several stages of cognitive processing. How these motivational "primes" affect the functions that link the physical magnitude of a stimulus with the psychological experience to which it gives rise will be determined. This research program will advance knowledge of the processes of motivated social cognition by contributing to the development of a more nuanced model of motivated social cognition, and it will also extend psychophysical theory, and understanding of how these functions might be altered by fundamental motivations.
