This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Objectives. Vigilance and avoidance are emotional processing styles that favor the intake (vigilance) versus rejection (avoidance) of threatening visual information. These constructs are at the heart of a number of health-related literatures, including the literatures of stress and coping, health-protective behavior, personality, and emotional disorders. Given the central importance of vigilance and avoidance to these diverse literatures, one would expect much more progress than has been achieved. There is some consensus that methodological issues are the problem. Vigilance and avoidance are conceptualized as visual processing styles, largely unconscious in nature, that unfold dynamically over time. Nevertheless, they have been measured primarily by self-report, often in the absence of emotionally evocative stimuli. Needless to say, this method is inadequate for characterizing the visual processing dynamics involved. Accordingly, an electrophysiological approach will be used to understand whether, when, and for whom threatening images are differentially processed. Approach. HD-EEG. In the 1950s, New Look researchers proposed that personality and motivation influence visual perception. The primary method involved brief tachistoscopic displays and verbal reports of object recognition. Key hypotheses were that: 1) personality would determine how quickly object recognition was achieved;and 2) people would """"""""defend"""""""" against threats, operationalized as higher visual identification thresholds. Although this research was both exciting and provocative, it eventually fell out of favor because of a near exclusive reliance on self-reports of visual identification. Using visual stimuli remarkably similar to those used by the New Look researchers, John Foxe and colleagues have recently isolated an ERP component, peaking around 290 ms after object exposure, which precedes correct identifications of stimuli. That is, the visual system achieves object recognition before conscious identification occurs. Furthermore, this ERP component builds gradually, indicating a continuous, rather than discrete, process of object recognition. This ERP approach offers striking opportunities for examining vigilance and avoidance in threat-related visual processing. With Project Mentor/Consultant John Foxe I will examine vigilance and avoidance through the use of the closure-related ERP in combination with self-reports of identification. Images will be successively degraded words and pictures that are threatening, neutral, and positive. Normatively, we expect vigilance (enhanced processing of threat) to characterize early visual processing, but avoidance of the same threats to characterize conscious recognition processes. This set of predictions is consistent with a vigilance-avoidance hypothesis that has been proposed, but not directly tested, in multiple literatures. The functional correlates of threat-related visual processing will be established by relating individual differences in ERP responses to independent measures of personality, emotion, coping, and health. Significance. The emotionality of an image arguably reflects its importance to biological organisms. We know that emotional stimuli tend to draw and hold spatial attention. However, we do not know if the emotionality of an image affects its processing by the visual cortex, at least prior to re-entrant projections (e.g., from the amygdala). Our understanding of the interface between emotion and visual processing would benefit from the basic research approach adopted here. Because vigilance and avoidance likely play a role in regulating the content and flow of attention and awareness, these dynamic styles of affect-related visual processing should have consequences for emotional experience, decision making, and behavior. Finally, altered emotional processing is thought to underlie a diversity of disorders (e.g., autism, depression, schizophrenia) and thus improved technologies should be of major utility in the wider health-related literatures in which emotional processing abnormalities have been implicated.
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