Acquisition of Physiological Monitoring Equipment for Research on the stimuli in tactile, auditory, and visual domains that elicit emotional responses

在国家科学基金会主要研究仪器奖的支持下，克拉克大学将购买心理生理测量系统，用于研究激发情绪的图式刺激。这些系统，包括支持计算机硬件和软件，将被克拉克的社会、进化和文化心理学项目的研究人员用于一系列研究项目。首席研究员詹姆斯·莱尔德博士是一位社会心理学家，专门研究具身情绪。在莱尔德博士的合作PI中，还有克拉克心理学系的另外两名成员。尼古拉斯·汤普森(生物学系的行为学家和进化心理学家)和Jaan Valsiner博士(文化心理学家)，以及克拉克数学和计算机科学系的成员Lee Rudolph博士，他得到了美国国家科学基金会数学科学跨学科补助金的支持。与其他高级人员、研究生和本科生一起，PI和共同PI将使用由MRI奖资助的系统，找到跨感觉领域(声音/听觉、视觉和触觉领域)的情感刺激标志刺激的一般特征，并对这些特征的共同之处进行数学描述。情绪是将其世界的状况与紧急行动模式联系起来的有机体状态。足以产生情绪反应的条件通常是影响生物体的全部条件的示意性子样本：眨眼可以和点头一样好，任何一种情况(比如嘴唇的小抽动或眼睛的睁大)都可以表达或唤起与所涉及的精力极不相称的情绪。在被支持的研究中开发的一般方法是使用刺激来诱导和改变情绪反应，该刺激旨在仅复制适合于这些反应的符号刺激，而不是通常在自然界中引起情绪反应的全部条件；这种方法的基本原理类似于行为学中符号刺激演示背后的原理。要识别和量化情绪刺激，需要一种明确的方法来识别和量化情绪反应。任何对人类情绪刺激的明确研究都必须包括补充情绪自我报告的生理-行为措施。资助的工具将提供这些措施。这个项目之所以重要，有几个原因。它很可能提供具有超越学术心理学意义的经验结果--例如，对临床心理学的实践，或对警报装置的设计和工程；它是心理学中新型数学模型的试验场；它将在教育和培训中发挥重要作用。克拉克大学是美国最小的研究型大学之一。17%的克拉克大四学生毕业于心理学专业，该系对实证方法的长期承诺使其成为该校迄今为止最大的科学教育提供者。克拉克的学生(和心理学专业的学生)中女性比例不成比例，因此，该系为女性提供了不成比例的科学教育，由于克拉克大学本科生参与教职员工和各级研究生研究项目的传统，她们接受了大量培训，为她们从事心理学或其他科学职业做准备。这个项目将延续这一传统。

With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Award, Clark University will purchase psychophysiological measurement systems for studies of schematic stimuli that provoke emotions. These systems, including supporting computer hardware and software, will be used in a suite of research projects by researchers in Clark's Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology Program. Principal Investigator Dr. James Laird is a social psychologist with a research speciality in embodied emotion. Among Dr. Laird's co-PIs are two other members of Clark's psychology department-Dr. Nicholas Thompson (an ethologist and evolutionary psychologist with a joint appointment in Biology) and Dr. Jaan Valsiner (a cultural psychologist)-as well as a member of Clark's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Dr. Lee Rudolph, who is supported by an NSF Interdisciplinary Grant in the Mathematical Sciences. With other senior personnel, graduate students, and undergraduates, the PI and co-PIs will use the systems funded by the MRI award to find general features common to emotionally provocative sign stimuli across sensory domains (vocal/auditory, visual, and tactile domains) and to formulate mathematical descriptions of what these features have in common.Emotions are states of the organism that relate the conditions of its world with patterns of urgent action. Conditions sufficient to produce an emotional response often are a schematic subsample of the total conditions impinging on the organism: a wink can be as good as a nod, and either (like a small twitch of the lips or a widening of the eyes) can express or evoke emotion greatly disproportionate to the exertion involved. The general method being developed in the supported research is to elicit and vary emotional responses using stimuli designed to reproduce only the sign stimuli appropriate to those responses, not the full array of conditions that typically elicit them in nature; the rationale for this approach resembles that behind demonstrations of sign stimuli in ethology. To identify and quantify an emotional stimulus requires an unequivocal method to identify and quantify emotional responses. Any definitive study of human emotional stimuli must include physiological-behavioral measures to supplement emotion self reports. The funded instrumentation will provide these measures. This project is important for several reasons. It is likely to provide empirical results that have significance beyond academic psychology-for example, to the practice of clinical psychology, or to the design and engineering of warning devices; it is a testing ground for new kinds of mathematical models in psychology; and it will play a significant role in education and training. Clark University is one of the nation's smallest research universities. Seventeen percent of Clark seniors graduate as Psychology majors, and the Department's long commitment to empirical methods has made it by far the largest provider of scientific education within the university. Clark students (and psychology majors) are disproportionately female, and thus the Department is a disproportionate provider of science education to women, who-because of Clark's tradition of undergraduate participation in faculty and graduate research projects at all levels-receive a lot of training that prepares them for a psychological or other scientific career. This project will continue that tradition.