Project Details
Projekt
Representational Format of Emotional Stimuli
Applicant
Professor Dr. David Dignath
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381713393
Emotions are an essential part of human experience. While theoretical accounts converge on the idea that emotions involve both modal and amodal representations, it is currently not well understood when and how different representational formats contribute to emotional experience. One reason for this ambiguity is a practical limitation because in many situations both representational formats are merged. The proposed research project investigates how repetition modulates processing of emotional stimuli. It is hypothesized that stimulus repetition reduces the recruitment of modal representations needed to simulate ´hot´ emotional responding, while leaving amodal representations, storing ´cold´ evaluative knowledge, unaffected. Therefore, repeated stimulus presentation provides a window into the representational structure of emotional stimuli. The experiments will examine the processes implicated in this emotional habituation effect by manipulating factors that favor processing based on modal or amodal representations. These studies will test the effectiveness of habituation to emotional stimuli using different presentation contexts to understand the proposed shift in representational formats. Based on this, additional studies will harness the habituation procedure to understand how modal and amodal representations contribute to implicit measures of affect. Using the affective priming paradigm, the experiments will assess the evaluation of emotional stimuli before and after habituation. This line of work answers the question whether affective priming and the control thereof involves rather modal (i.e., ´hot´ emotional responses) or amodal (i.e., ´cold´ knowledge about emotions) representations. Together, the proposed project will enhance our understanding of the representational format of emotional stimuli and answer important questions of when emotional processing is based more on modal or more on amodal representations.
DFG Programme
Research Units
