Whether we are having an argument with a colleague, or laughing at the antics of a young child, our emotional reactions are likely to be elicited by events that contain a mixture of auditory and visual information.The overarching goal of the proposed research is to examine how affective and sensory processes interact during our initial processing of these multimodal events (Aim 1) and during our later memory for those events (Aim 2). The proposed research reaches beyond extant data in three primary ways. First, it uses psycho-autonomic interaction analyses (Farrow et al., 2013) to integrate neural data with self-report and physiological data to define those regions that track with emotional intensity. Second, it utilizes generalized psychophysiological interaction analyses (McLaren et al., 2012) and informational connectivity methdos that combine MVPA with functional connectivity (Coutanche & Thompson-Schill, 2013) to understand how affective and sensory processing interacts during the experience and recollection of emotional events. Third, it puts sensory processing front-and-center in models of emotional processing and emotional memory, examining how valence affects the way that auditory and visual processes cohere during event experience and recollection. Because the way we react to, and remember, emotional events can have substantial consequences for our reslience and wellbeing, the proposed research is likely to yield new insights into the processes that may be predisposing towards affective disorders and that may enhance wellbeing in those without such disorders.
Emotional reactions can be triggered both by ongoing events in our external world and by our thoughts and memories about those events, and the way we react to these events can have substantial consequences for our reslience and wellbeing. The present research will fill important voids in the literature by investigating how affective and sensory processes interact during the experience of multimodal positive and negative events and also in response to memories of those events. By shedding light on how emotional reactions can be elicited and maintained in memory, the proposed research is likely to advance our understanding of the emotion-processing and emotional memory biases that occur in many affective disorders.
