Cognitive and neural mechanisms for goal revision and emotional change

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My current and planned research is aimed at deepening understanding of emotional cognition by developing new models of goal revision, emotional change, and a kind of irrationality I call "gut overreaction". I plan to develop neural network models of the development and revision of goals, greatly expanding my previous accounts of their contributions to decision making. The first objective for understanding goal revision is to explain how goals such as get a grant might be represented by a pattern of firing in a population of neurons. The second objective is to explain how people come to adopt new goals. The third objective is to explain how people sometimes come to abandon goals. My fourth objective is to explain how people increase or decrease the estimated importance of goals to a problem or decision. The theory of goal revision will be part of a larger theory of emotional change. The first objective in modeling emotional change will be to develop an account of all the ways in which appraisals can be modified. The second objective is to model ways in which physiological changes can influence emotional change that occur through external perception of stimuli such as scary images and through interventions such as drugs, relaxation exercises, and meditation practices. The third objective is to put the cognitive appraisal and physiological perception together in the integrated fashion proposed by the previously developed EMOCON model. The fourth objective is to identify mechanisms for long-term emotional change. The fifth objective is to apply an improved understanding of emotional change to processes of conflict resolution. One kind of emotional change produces a pattern of irrationality that can lead both to excessively positive assessments and to excessively negative ones. Such overreactions occur in many spheres of human life, with undesirable effects on financial decisions, personal relationships, and medical behavior. In order to understand the influence of gut overreactions on inference, I plan to develop computer simulations of the effects of amplifying feedback loops on inferential dynamics.