Faculty member Maital Neta in the Department of Psychology is conducting research examining individual differences in response to emotional uncertainty. We got in touch with Maital to learn more.
What interested you about doing this work?
I actually started out as an artist. As a kid/adolescent, I spent most of my time making art and taking as many art classes as I could fit into my schedule. I even applied to art schools in my last year of high school, but had a last minute change of heart… I was worried that I wouldn’t love art as much if I had to make a living on it. So neuroscience was the “obvious” second choice to me, as I was driven to understand how and why art speaks to people… and particularly, why does a certain work of art speak to some people and not others. Put another way, I was driven to understand the individual differences with which people respond emotionally to a given object in the world. Today, I still find this question really fascinating. The lab studies the individual differences that drive someone to respond positively to an image and drive another person to respond negatively to the same image. We call this a person’s valence bias, or the tendency to interpret an ambiguous image as having a positive or negative valence.
What are your primary research questions?
There are really two primary themes to the research we conduct in the lab. First, we are examining the mechanisms underlying the valence bias, and we do this across the lifespan. So we are trying to understand what drives one person to have a more positive interpretation to ambiguity, whereas another person is more negative? For example, we’re looking at effects related to brain function, brain connectivity, sleep, gender, depression, genetic markers, etc. on the bias. And we want to see how this bias naturally changes and evolves over the lifespan, studying people ages 6-85. Previous work has shown that children may have more negative interpretations of uncertainty, while older adults are more positive, so we’re trying to understand this natural trajectory toward greater positivity with age.
The second theme of our work is to look at the malleability of this bias… in other words, we have some evidence that the bias is fairly stable over short timescales (i.e., about one year), but can we change you? If we know you have a more negative bias, can we help you to see the more positive interpretations, and vice versa? So we have done a number of manipulations (an instruction to deliberate, a stress induction – conducted by Catie Brown, an exercise induction – conducted by Nick Harp, and many others) to see what sorts of acute and long-term effects these have on the valence bias.
What are the practical implications of your findings?
Many significant social decisions are made in situations of high uncertainty. One source of uncertainty is based on the fact that most of human communication is nonverbal. As a result, people are faced with the task of understanding nonverbal signals that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. As one example, a silent pause in conversation can communicate discomfort, anger, contentment, thoughtfulness, or empathy. Depending on the context (e.g., a job interview, first date, even a meeting in the White House Situation Room), one’s ability to resolve such uncertainty can have profound consequences. Responses to uncertainty can also reveal important individual differences in emotion processing and coping strategies, and deficiencies in these skills can have widespread effects on mental and social functioning. The practical and financial costs to society, education, and employment are far-reaching. Yet, very little is known about the processes that allow us to cope with and respond to uncertainty. Our research considers the ways in which different people respond to these situations of extreme uncertainty. By integrating social psychology with developmental science, cognitive neuroscience and network sciences, this work seeks to better understand responses to uncertainty throughout development. It focuses on how these situations are interpreted and on how brain function and connectivity may promote a certain response. The negative thoughts and feelings some individuals experience in response to uncertainty can have deleterious outcomes on health, work performance, and relationships. This project lays the foundation for developing interventions to disrupt these maladaptive processes in favor of more productive responses. The long-term goal is to determine the neuro-cognitive mechanisms underpinning negativity bias and its regulation. Doing so will provide insights for clinical approaches to relevant psychopathologies (e.g., depression, anxiety), including potential methods for ameliorating a chronic negativity bias.
Do you have any readings from your laboratory that you could recommend?
Sure!
Petro, N. M., Tong, T. T., Henley, D. J., & Neta, M. (2018). Individual differences in valence bias: fMRI evidence of the initial negativity hypothesis. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 13 (7), 687-698. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsy049.
Brown, C. C., Raio, C. M., & Neta, M. (2017). Cortisol response enhance negative valence perception for ambiguous facial expressions. Nature: Scientific Reports, 7, article number: 15107. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-14846-3
Neta, M., Cantelon, J., Mahoney, C. R., Taylor, H. A., & Davis, F. C. (2017). The impact of uncertain threat on affective bias: Individual differences in response to ambiguity. Emotion, 17(8):1137-1143. doi: 10.1037/emo0000349.
Neta, M. & Tong, T. T. (2016). Don't like what you see? Give it time: Longer reaction times associated with increased positive affect. Emotion, 16(5), 730-739. doi: 10.1037/emo0000181.
Neta, M., & Whalen, P. J. (2010). The primacy of negative interpretations when resolving the valence of ambiguous facial expressions. Psychological Science, 21(7), 901-907.