I am interested in the relationship between emotion and cognition. During my master years, I looked into how emotional saliency might act as a cue to decrease false recognition rate. Then I am involved in several different projects investigating how emotion interacts with attentional process. In the future, I wish to look into how humans represent emotional information in our brain. In addition I would like to apply the findings from my research to help improve lives of those with emotional disorders.
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We used Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm to examine the effect of emotional distinctiveness on false recognition. Results from our study showed although participants were less likely to false recognize an emotional lure, it was still possible for participants to falsely recognize an emotional lure as an item they've seen before. This study is published in Cognition and Emotion, volume 20 issue 5, pages 646-670. Read the abstract in pdf format.
Another attempt is to investigate how emotional information is temporarily storaged in working memory system. The research is inspired by Joseph Mikels' study. He proposed an emotional subsystem in addition to the existing working memory model proposed by Baddeley & Hitch (1974). However, our few attempts failed to demonstrate the need of an extra subsystem for maintaining emotional information. Suggestions welcomed.A recent article by Wanatabe et al. (2007) also rejected the concept of "affective working memory". However, their arguments did not necessarily contradict that from Mikels' findings. There is a need for clarification for what is "affective working memory" and is it really a valid concept. It is still very uncelar.
I've used several different paradigms to investigate the relationship between emotion and attention. In one of the studies, we examined how task-irrelevant emotional features might affect visual search process. Across experiments, we found that both the goal-relevancy and the task difficulty modulated the effect of task-irrelevant emotional features on visual search efficiency. Participants were more inclined to process task-irrelevant emotional features when the task was difficult and when processing task-irrelevant emotional features was relevant to the goal. This work is currently under review.
The other approach I used is the attentional blink paradigm. This is part of my PhD work which is supervisied by Prof. Alan Baddeley and Prof. Andy Young. We manipulated different processing requirement to examine whether an emotional distractor would always capture attention under attentional blink settings. At first, we used colour to define targets and manipulated the emotionality of targets. Less attentional blink was observed for emotional T2 but emotional T1 and neutral T1 were no different in affecting T2 detection. This part of the work is presented at the "Workshop for time and short term memory" in Bristol in 2005. Read the poster in pdf format. We went on to investigate why emotional T1 did not cause more interference. After a series of experiments, we concluded that emotional T1 only captures more attention and affect target detection when semantic processing is required. Part of this work is reported at the "Second European Conference on Emotion" held in Belgium in 2006. Read the poster in pdf format. The manuscript for the entire work is published at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 34, 328-339.
I've involved in two projects that look into the relationship between mood and cognition. The first one is a fMRI study in which we use pictures from International Affective Pictorial Systems (IAPS) to induce participants into different mood. We then observe the change in blood flow when participants were performing a flanker task. This work is presented at "Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting" in San Diego, USA in 2004. Read the poster in pdf format.
The second project is originated by Prof. Alan Baddeley and Dr. Rainer Banse. This project aimed to establish a hedonic comparator to explain why people view things differently. Results from two pilot studies were promising and further studies are undergoing at the moment.