In the 1950s, """"""""New Look"""""""" researchers proposed that personality and emotion determine early stages of visual processing. Key hypotheses were that: (a) personality would influence how quickly object recognition was achieved; and (b) people would """"""""defend"""""""" against threats. Key to the personality hypotheses were vigilance, an emotional processing style that selects threatening information (for consciousness), and avoidance, an emotional processing style that rejects threatening information (from consciousness). Although initial results were promising, the research fell out of favor because of a nearly exclusive reliance on self-reports of visual identification. Because of this single criterion, researchers could not disentangle unconscious and conscious contributions to visual identification. Using a paradigm with successively less degraded pictures in combination with electrophysiological and behavioral methods, the authors of the current proposal will revisit the role that personality and affect play in earlier and later stages of visual processing. Unconscious object recognition will be operationalized in terms of a closure-related ERP component that peaks around 290 ms after object exposure and seems to reflect identification by the lateral-occipital (LO) complex. Conscious object recognition will be operationalized in terms of the P300 ERP component as well as self-reports of object recognition. Vigilance will be defined in terms of the quality of threat (vs. non-threat) picture necessary to support the closure-related ERP component. Avoidance will be defined in terms of the discrepancy (in picture quality) between the closure-related ERP component and the indices tapping more conscious object recognition processes. Normatively, the project will investigate the hypothesis that the visual processing of threatening images is characterized both by more vigilance and by more avoidance, a combination of tendencies that would support the perceptual defense hypothesis. Also central to the studies are individual differences in vigilance and avoidance and their correlates related to personality, coping, and well-being.
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