Collaborative Proposal: The Dynamics of Affective Learning

人类与世界的互动是由一个非常原始但普遍存在的系统指导的：情感。在专业术语中，情感被定义为通过判断某事是奖励还是威胁而产生的持续的神经生理状态。情感使人们感到感动、强迫或一般的情绪化。在常识性术语中，情感被称为“直觉”。关于情感的性质和功能的问题是一系列心理现象的核心，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个性。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广度是不同的。有些人过着戏剧性的生活。他们在痛苦和狂喜的混乱海洋中游泳，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里，它们一般不受沧桑的影响。他们通常不会对其他人认为令人信服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，情感反应性的变化可能会对个人和社会产生巨大的影响。在极端情况下，这些个体差异与各种形式的精神病理有关。特别是，极端的反应性可以被认为是一种跨性障碍的脆弱性，容易使人患上情绪和焦虑症，甚至是妄想症。描述和解释这种变异是21世纪科学最重要的难题之一。这项拟议的研究探索了一种有趣的可能性，即情感反应与人们如何了解某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)有关。这项建议的主要目的是调查情感学习的动态，这是情感反应的个体差异的基础。这项工作代表了一组代表社会/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的研究人员的跨学科努力，并代表了更广泛的研究议程的第一阶段，该研究议程将探索情感学习中个体差异的遗传、神经和神经化学基础。本研究拟在三年内进行一系列六个实验，以探索情感学习的大小和速度的个体差异，并证明这种差异是有意义的(即，它不能被视为测量误差)，因为它与情感反应的个体差异有关。学习环境的因素如何影响新的情感学习的大小和速度也将被研究。综上所述，这项拟议的研究将直接有助于理解人类学习的一种非常基本的形式--人们如何认识到某事具有威胁性或获得性，以及他们的行为因此发生了怎样的变化。了解情感学习的动态--学习某些东西是有益还是有害的最佳条件，这种新的学习发生的速度有多快，以及旧的学习有多容易被修改--对于理解情感处理的机制至关重要，因为它与人类的状况有关。

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.