About the Project
The ability to recognise, process and respond appropriately to emotional communicative cues from other individuals is vital for effective social interaction. Ongoing social interactions also require attention and working memory (WM) in order to monitor and piece together information and events from moment to moment to form a coherent and cohesive representation of our environment. In our busy, modern world we are surrounded by many competing tasks and distractions, yet at the same time we ideally should be sensitive and accurately attuned to the emotions signalled by others, in order to avoid misunderstandings and social barriers.
However, attention and WM resources are limited, and we still have relatively little understanding of how the availability of such cognitive resources impact on our ability to accurately and efficiently decode emotion in others. It is also unclear to what degree cognitive resources and emotion processing resources are shared, and how the nature of the demands of one may impact the demands on the other.
Using verbal WM tasks, previous research suggests that higher WM load impairs recognition of non-verbal social cues (Phillips, Tunstall, & Channon, 2007), and causes difficulties in verbal emotion labelling (Phillips & Channon, 2008). However, the tasks we face in everyday life that require our attention and WM resources take many different forms (verbal, visual, spatial, emotional) and require varying degrees of monitoring, maintenance, and manipulation.
This project aims to examine the impact of attentional and WM resource availability on emotional expression processing, using a variety of visual, spatial, verbal, and emotional distraction paradigms concurrently with a range of facial emotion decoding tasks. It is important to understand the emotional signals that observers actually do interpret as well as what they do not, because misunderstandings can negatively impact human interaction. Therefore this project will also question whether the decoding of some emotions is impacted more than others by cognitive resource availability, and examine the specific nature of emotion recognition errors.
Knowledge of some aspects of attention, memory, and/or emotion would be an advantage. This project will combine these areas of Psychology in an integrative approach, so an ability to think about theories and empirical problems from both a narrow and broad perspective will be an advantage.
To be considered for funding you will need to be UK or EU students, with the equivalent to a 1st class Honours undergraduate degree or a 2.1 Honours undergraduate degree alongside a Masters with Merit or Distinction. International applicants who meet this condition and can pay the difference between the Home and International Fees would also be considered.
Applications must include: 1) An on-line form completed through the applicant portal. 2) a letter of support from the project supervisor. 3) Two academic references – please attach the references to the application or include full referee contact details. 4) A CV outlining your academic qualifications and research experience to date. 5) academic transcripts from previous degree(s).
Funding Notes
To be considered for the Elphinstone Scholarship (TUITION FEES ONLY) the applicant needs to have the equivalent to a 1st class Honours undergraduate degree or a 2.1 Honours undergraduate degree alongside a Masters with Commendation or Distinction. All offers issued will state that they are academic offers only and if you are awarded the Scholarship you will be advised separately. Further information about research in the School of Psychology is here: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/psychology/research/index.php
References
Phillips, L. H., Channon, S., Tunstall, M., Hedenstrom, A., & Lyons, K. (2008). The role of working memory in decoding emotions. Emotion, 8, 184-191.
Phillips, L., Tunstall, M., & Channon, S. (2007). Exploring the role of working memory in dynamic social cue decoding using dual task methodology. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 31, 137-152.