The Affective Vision Hypothesis

很明显，你所看到的会影响你所感受到的。看到一张笑脸会让你感到高兴。 看到一张愁眉苦脸的脸会让你感到苦恼。 但如果相反的情况也成立呢？ 如果你的感受影响了你真正看到的东西，并且当你快乐时更容易看到笑脸，或者当你苦恼时更容易看到一张皱眉的脸，该怎么办？这被称为情感视觉效应。在最初的实验中，当前的研究人员证明，一个人的感受确实会影响他或她有意识地看到的东西。 在这里提出的研究中，他们将研究感受影响视力的机制。通过关注情感视觉效应的机制，这项研究将提供与人们冷静地看待周围世界的日常印象相矛盾的证据。根据一个人的感受，他或她对世界的看法确实会有所不同（这不仅仅是解释的问题）。 而且，如果一个人经常感到快乐，看到朋友或同事脸上短暂的微笑，而另一个人经常感到痛苦，看到短暂的皱眉和鬼脸，那么这两个人生活在体验不同的世界中，即使实际的物理世界是相同的。这项工作的结果将有助于确定某些类型的生活经历（例如，长期吸毒、生活在城市贫困中、或者在威胁或长期压力基本发生率较高的环境中）是否会让人们以不同的方式看待世界。 除了这种影响之外，这项研究还将通过为本科生、研究生和波士顿科学博物馆的赞助人提供科学教育来产生重大的教育影响。

It seems obvious that what you see influences what you feel. Seeing a smiling face can make you happy. Seeing a scowling face can make you distressed. But what if the opposite were also true? What if what you feel influences what you see literally, and it is easier to see a smiling face when you are happy, or to see a scowling face when you are distressed? This is known as the affective vision effect. In the initial experiments, the current researchers demonstrated that a person's feelings do influence what he or she is conscious of seeing. In the research proposed here, they will examine the mechanisms by which feelings influence vision. By focusing on the mechanisms of the affective vision effect, this research will provide evidence that contradicts the everyday impression that people dispassionately behold the world around them. Depending on how a person feels, he or she will literally see the world differently (it is not just a matter of interpretation). And, if one person routinely feels happy and sees brief smiles in the face of a friend or co-worker, whereas another person routinely feels distressed and sees brief frowns and grimaces, then those two people live in experientially different worlds, even if the actual physical world is the same. Findings from this work will make it possible to determine whether certain types of life experiences (e.g., prolonged drug use, living in urban poverty, or in environments with a high base rate of threat or chronic stress) wire people to see the world differently. In addition to this type of impact, this research will have significant educational impacts by providing science education for undergraduate students, graduate students, and patrons of the Boston Museum of Science.