The goal of this project is to assess similarities and differences in affective and attentional responses to various types of media prompts-- pictures, sounds, texts, and films -- in the context of tasks involving either actual stimulus perception or memory retrieval. This investigation of attentional and affective responses in the processing of media prompts to emotional experience will determine 1) physiological, behavioral, and verbal indices of affect and attention, 2) their relationship to system strategic parameters of valence and intensity, 3) variations in reactivity with context-dependent tactical task requirements and stimulus attributes, 4) covariation among response systems, and 5) interaction/independence of attentional and affective influences on responses across and within each subsystem. The construction of this large, systematic data base will provide a foundation for understanding emotion in terms of both specific experimental inductions (i.e., using pictures, sounds, texts, moving images, etc.) and tasks (i.e., perception of memory), which can be utilized in future investigations that seek to address specific questions, populations, and issues in emotion research. In addition, understanding the mechanisms involved in emotional processing will be elucidated by this systematic, programmatic approach.
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