Collaborative Proposal: The Dynamics of Affective Learning

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

Human interaction with the world is guided by a very primitive but pervasive system: affect. In technical terms, affect is defined as the ongoing, neurophysiological state that results from judging whether something is a reward or a threat. Affect causes people to feel moved, compelled, or generally emotional. In commonsense terms, affect is referred to as "gut feelings." Questions about the nature and function of affect are central to a host of psychological phenomena, including emotion, stereotyping and prejudice, negotiation strategies, judgment and decision-making, health and poverty, psychopathology and well-being, and personality. In recent years, there has been a growing appreciation that people differ from one another in the frequency and magitude of their affective reactions to the world. Some individuals live a life of drama. They swim in a tumultuous sea of agony and ecstasy, and are easily moved or perturbed by changes in their surroundings. They often react to things that others find devoid of emotional meaning. At the other end of the continuum, there are those who live a life of tranquility. They float in a lake that is relatively undisturbed, and they are generally unaffected by the vicissitudes of life. They often do not react to things that others find compelling or evocative. Accumulating scientific evidence confirm these individual differences. In humans, variations in affective reactivity can have great individual and social consequence. At the extremes, these individual differences are linked to forms of psychopathology. In particular, extreme reactivity can be thought of as a trans-disorder vulnerability that predisposes the person to develop mood and anxiety disorders, or even delusional thinking. Characterizing and explaining this variation is one of the most important puzzles for 21st century science. The proposed research explores the intriguing possibility that affective reactivity is linked to how people learn whether something is helpful or harmful (i.e., how they learn about the affective value of their surroundings). The main goal of this proposal is to investigate the dynamics of affective learning that underlie individual differences in affective reactivity. This work represents an interdisciplinary effort by a team of researchers representing social/personality psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, and psychophysiology and behavioral medicine, and represents the first stage of a broader research agenda that will explore the genetic, neural, and neurochemical underpinnings of individual variation in affective learning. A series of six experiments over three years is proposed will explore individual variation in the magnitude and speed of affective learning, and demonstrate that this variation is meaningful (i.e., that it cannot be dismissed as measurement error) by relating it to individual differences in affective reactivity. The ways in which elements of the learning environment influence the magnitude and speed of new affective learning will also be examined. Taken together, the proposed research will contribute directly to understanding a very basic form of learning in humans -- how people come to learn that something is threatening or rewarding, and how their behavior changes as a result. Understanding the dynamics of affective learning -- the optimal conditions for learning whether something is helpful or harmful, how quickly this new learning occurs, and how easily old learning is modified -- is central to understanding the mechanisms that underlie affective processing as it relates to the human condition.