Many significant social decisions are made in situations of high uncertainty. One source of uncertainty is based on the fact that most of human communication is nonverbal. As a result, people are faced with the task of understanding nonverbal signals that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. As one example, a silent pause in conversation can communicate discomfort, anger, contentment, thoughtfulness, or empathy. Depending on the context (a job interview, a first date, meeting with a teacher, or a medical exam), one's ability to resolve such uncertainty can have profound consequences. Responses to uncertainty can also reveal important individual differences in emotion processing and coping strategies, and deficiencies in these skills can have widespread effects on mental and social functioning. The practical and financial costs to society, education, and employment are far-reaching. Yet, very little is known about the processes that allow us to cope with and respond to uncertainty. This CAREER project considers the ways in which different people respond to these situations of extreme uncertainty. In comparison to younger adults, older adults are more likely to be optimistic and to have more positive interpretations of uncertainty. By integrating social psychology with developmental science, cognitive neuroscience and network sciences, this project seeks to better understand responses to uncertainty throughout development. It focuses on how these situations are interpreted and on how brain function and connectivity may promote a certain response. The negative thoughts and feelings some individuals experience in response to uncertainty can have deleterious outcomes on health, work performance, and relationships. This project lays the foundation for developing interventions to disrupt these maladaptive processes in favor of more productive responses.
In this CAREER project, brain function and brain connectivity are measured in younger adults to characterize the source of individual differences in valence bias, or the extent to which someone interprets uncertainty as having a positive or negative emotional meaning. Network analytic tools are applied to establish a link between the basic functional organization of the brain and valence bias, and to provide information about variability in brain function as it relates to the bias. Because older adults have a natural bias to interpret ambiguous cues as positive, this research examines the same brain function and connectivity measures in older adults to determine the mechanisms underlying this enhanced positivity. The long-term goal is to explore the brain mechanisms that can explain what makes one person experience a positive emotion when another person, in response to the same event, experiences a negative emotion. The research considers how people can learn to "do it better" to increase well-being and resilience in response to potential threats. The findings will shed light on how individuals with a more optimistic view learn, over time, to override a fundamental default negativity and instead resolve uncertainty in a positive light.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
