Emotional Granularity: A View From Multiple Levels

Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by candidate): The PI's goal is to develop a multilevel model for understanding emotional experience. Because there are no unqualified indices of direct experience, the PI began studying representations of emotional experience by examining the structure of self-reports. She discovered individual differences in the precision with which emotional experiences are represented over time, which she named emotional granularity. She chose the affective circumplex as a methodological tool to model individual differences in emotional granularity because its dimensions (valence and arousal) represent the causal processes associated with granularity. The PI defined two constructs, valence focus and arousal focus, to represent individual differences in these processes as they apply to generating representations of emotional experience. The PI's research has developed construct validity for valence and arousal focus using procedures from varying levels of analysis (social/personality, cognitive science, and psychophysiology); she plans to continue this work during the K02 funding period. In addition, the PI proposes an experimental research program to investigate the mechanisms that produce emotional granularity. Her goal is to directly model the processes that valence focus and arousal focus represent (rather than just measuring the indices as she has done to date). The PI will begin with behaviorally oriented studies utilizing methods from the cognitive neuroscience literature that have well-established functional neuroanatomical correlates. The result will provide a strong test of her hypotheses and will provide her with a clear functional platform upon which to move to the next phase of her research program (involving fMRI research). Moreover, the PI has developed her conceptual analysis of valence focus and arousal focus into a theory of how emotional experience is actually computed. Specifically, she hypothesizes that discrete emotional experiences are generated and represented by applying declarative emotion knowledge (associated with arousal focus) to core affective feelings of valence (associated with valence focus) via working memory. On this view, valence focus and arousal focus contribute to the granularity of felt experience itself. This hypothesis will be tested using fMRI experiments (in large part because fMRI methods provide the only way to test her hypotheses about felt experience at the present time). If successful, this work will call into question the assumption that emotional experience is epiphenomenal to emotion itself. Emotional experiences will come to be viewed as fluid, emergent phenomena that are constructed and elaborated via mental representations. In the broadest context, it has the potential to impact research where emotion plays some role.