The Affective Vision Hypothesis

很明显，你所看到的会影响你的感觉。看到笑脸会让你开心。看到一张愁眉苦脸会让你痛苦。但如果反过来也成立呢？如果你的感觉影响了你所看到的，当你快乐的时候更容易看到一张微笑的脸，或者当你痛苦的时候更容易看到一张愁眉苦脸呢？这就是所谓的情感视觉效应。在最初的实验中，目前的研究人员证明，一个人的感觉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，他们将研究感觉影响视觉的机制。通过关注情感视觉效应的机制，本研究将提供证据，反驳人们冷静地看待周围世界的日常印象。根据一个人的感受，他或她会以不同的方式看待世界（这不仅仅是解释的问题）。而且，如果一个人经常感到快乐，看到朋友或同事的脸上露出短暂的微笑，而另一个人经常感到痛苦，看到短暂的皱眉和鬼脸，那么这两个人就生活在体验不同的世界里，即使实际的物理世界是一样的。这项工作的发现将有可能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，或生活在具有高基本威胁率或慢性压力的环境中）是否会使人们以不同的方式看待世界。除了这种类型的影响之外，本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而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.