Collaborative Proposal: The Dynamics of Affective Learning

协作提案：情感学习的动力

• 批准号: 0527267
• 负责人: Christopher Wright
• 金额: $ 10.65万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts General Hospital
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-01 至 2009-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0527267&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Proposal; Dynamics; Affective; Learning

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.

人类与世界的互动是由一个非常原始但无处不在的系统引导的：情感。用专业术语来说，情感被定义为一种持续的神经生理状态，这种状态是由判断某件事是奖励还是威胁而产生的。情感使人们感到被感动、被强迫或情绪化。从常识上讲，情感被称为“直觉”。“情感的本质和功能是许多心理现象的核心问题，包括情感、刻板印象和偏见、谈判策略、判断和决策、健康和贫困、精神病理学和幸福感以及人格。近年来，人们越来越认识到，人们对世界的情感反应的频率和幅度各不相同。 有些人过着戏剧性的生活。他们在痛苦和狂喜的波涛汹涌的海洋中游泳，很容易被周围环境的变化所感动或扰乱。他们经常对别人认为没有情感意义的事情做出反应。在这个连续体的另一端，有些人过着平静的生活。它们漂浮在一个相对不受干扰的湖中，它们通常不受生活变迁的影响。他们通常不会对其他人认为引人注目或令人回味的事情做出反应。越来越多的科学证据证实了这些个体差异。在人类中，情感反应的变化可以产生巨大的个人和社会后果。在极端情况下，这些个体差异与精神病理学的形式有关。特别是，极端反应可以被认为是一种跨障碍的脆弱性，使人容易发展情绪和焦虑症，甚至妄想。表征和解释这种变异是21世纪世纪科学的重要难题之一。这项拟议的研究探讨了一种有趣的可能性，即情感反应与人们如何了解某件事是有益的还是有害的（即，他们如何了解周围环境的情感价值）。这个建议的主要目标是调查情感学习的动力学，情感反应的个体差异的基础。这项工作代表了一个跨学科的努力，由一组研究人员代表社会/人格心理学，认知神经科学，行为神经科学，心理生理学和行为医学，并代表了更广泛的研究议程的第一阶段，将探索遗传，神经和神经化学基础的个体差异在情感学习。一系列为期三年的六个实验将探索情感学习的幅度和速度的个体差异，并证明这种差异是有意义的（即，它不能作为测量误差而被忽略），将其与情感反应的个体差异联系起来。学习环境的元素影响新的情感学习的幅度和速度的方式也将被检查。总的来说，这项研究将直接有助于理解人类学习的一种非常基本的形式--人们是如何学会某件事是威胁性的或有益的，以及他们的行为如何因此而改变。理解情感学习的动力学--学习某些东西是有益的还是有害的最佳条件，这种新的学习发生的速度有多快，旧的学习有多容易被修改--是理解情感处理机制的核心，因为它与人类条件有关。