Elektroentsefalograafiline vaade emotsionaalse tähelepanu mehhanismidele

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsioone.Miks ilus inimene rahvasummas silma jääb? Või ka kauguses kostuv pidurikrigin liiklusmürast üle kostab? Tartu Ülikoolis valminud doktoritöö kohaselt võib põhjuseks olla emotsionaalse informatsiooni kiirendatud töötlus. Aju on varustatud tähelepanumehhanismidega, mis valivad meeleorganite vahendatud infotulvast välja kõige olulisema teabe. Näiteks tahtlik tähelepanu aitab keskenduda käesolevale ning tahtmatu tähelepanu märgata ootamatusi. Neile sekundeerib ka kolmas süsteem, mis tõstab esile emotsionaalse tähendusega infot. Just afektiivne tähelepanu viib fookuse potentsiaalsetele hüvedele nagu kaunis kaaslane ja ohtudele nagu liiklusõnnetus. Seni on aga lahendamata küsimus, mis täpselt toimub ajus siis, kui erinevad tähelepanusüsteemid omavahel konkureerivad. Näiteks kui veebiuudise lugeja silm haarab ühtaegu nii pooleliolevat teksti kui mahlakat kõmupealkirja külgribal. Mõnikord jääb võitjaks emotsionaalne tähelepanu ning kõmulugu saab oodatud kliki. Teinekord suudab aga tahtlik tähelepanu ebaolulise ahvatluse kõrvale tõrjuda ja loo lugemine võib jätkuda. Oma doktoritöös uuris Andero Uusberg lähemalt võimalust, et tähelepanulises võistluses toimub esimese sekundikolmandiku jooksul liidritevahetus. Emotsionaalne tähelepanu reageerib stardis kiiremini, kuid umbes 350 ms järel on tahtlik süsteem seisu viigistanud ning aju fookust juhitakse edaspidi koostöös. Mitmed selle mõttemudeli ennustused leidsid kinnitust emotsionaalse sisuga fotode vaatamise ajal mõõdetud aju elektrilise aktiivsuse analüüsimisel. Üldisemalt aitab tähelepanusüsteemide erinev stardikiirus seletada, miks tegelikkuses ohutud stiimulid nagu kauge pidurikrigin kipuvad siiski tähelepanu haarama – kulub hetk, ette kui konteksti arvestav tahtlik tähelepanu jõuab korrigeerida primitiivsema emotsionaalse süsteemi esialgset valikut. Doktoritööst leiab ka vihjeid igapäevaseks emotsioonide reguleerimiseks. Ebameeldiva raviprotseduuri või muu ärevust tekitava olukorraga toimetulemiseks soovitatakse vahel mõelda millestki muust. Uusbergi uurimistöö näitas aga, et selline strateegia on suurema tõenäosusega edukas siis, kui mõte juhitakse millelegi piisavalt keerukale. Näiteks kui katseisikutel paluti võimalikult detailirohkelt kujutleda jalutamist kodulinnas, vähenes samal ajal esitletud emotsionaalsete piltide sisusse süvemine ning neile reageerimise intensiivsus. Kui ülesandeks oli aga keskenduda emotsionaalsete piltide neutraalsetele omadustele, vähenes afektiivne tähelepanu vaid mõnevõrra.Why does a beautiful face stand out from a crowd? Or even a distant braking screech captures attention? A recent doctoral thesis suggests the reason may be faster processing of emotional information. The brain is equipped with various attention mechanisms for sorting out important information from potentially overwhelming sensory input. While top-down attention enables us to concentrate and bottom-up attention to remain vigilant for unexpected aspects of the environment, there is also a third system sensitive to emotional information. This affective attention is responsible for spotting opportunities such as a valuable mate or threats such as a traffic accident. Scientists do not fully comprehend however, how does competition between attention systems is resolved in the brain. As an example, consider a reader of an online news story whose eyes also capture a juicy headline at a sidebar. Sometimes affective attention succeeds in breaking the concentration on the story in favour of the emotional distraction. At other times however, top-down attention prevails and reading continues uninterrupted. In his thesis, Andero Uusberg investigated the idea that the competition between attentional systems changes across time. More specifically, affective attention may be faster off the mark while after about a third of a second however, top-down attention catches up and the subsequent focus is determined in co-operation. This framework explained several aspects of electrical brain activity measured while participants viewed emotionally evocative photographs. More broadly, different onsets can explain why safe stimuli such as a distant braking screech still captivates us – it takes a moment for the more context-aware top-down attention system to correct the early reaction of the more primitive affective attention. The thesis also has implications for everyday emotion regulation. To cope with unpleasant events such as medical procedures, people are sometimes advised to distract themselves by thinking of something else. In this regard, the present findings imply that this strategy requires the distractive mental activity to be reasonably difficult. For instance, when participants were asked to imagine their neighbourhoods with high level of detail, they indeed paid less attention to unpleasant photographs as well as experienced less intense emotional reactions. When they merely thought of nonaffective features of affective images however, emotional attention was attenuated only modestly

Liikumiskiiruse muutuse taju tingitud potentsiaalide analüüs ja kinemaatilise energia mudel : bakalaureusetöö

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Personality cannot be predicted from the power of resting state EEG

In the present study we asked whether it is possible to decode personality traits from resting state EEG data. EEG was recorded from a large sample of subjects (N = 309) who had answered questionnaires measuring personality trait scores of the 5 dimensions as well as the 10 subordinate aspects of the Big Five. Machine learning algorithms were used to build a classifier to predict each personality trait from power spectra of the resting state EEG data. The results indicate that the five dimensions as well as their subordinate aspects could not be predicted from the resting state EEG data. Finally, to demonstrate that this result is not due to systematic algorithmic or implementation mistakes the same methods were used to successfully classify whether the subject had eyes open or eyes closed and whether the subject was male or female. These results indicate that the extraction of personality traits from the power spectra of resting state EEG is extremely noisy, if possible at all.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

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Changing complex behaviours such as tax evasion may require several behavioural interventions, or nudges. We developed a tailored compound intervention approach to increase employers’ payroll tax compliance in Estonia’s construction industry. First, we used anthropological methods to gain insights into the decision processes of employers and employees in the industry (Study 1, N=16). These insights were combined with behavioural decision-making principles to design an intervention e-mail with the aim to strengthen perceived risks and weaken descriptive norms of non-compliance as well as to strengthen collaborative and weaken adversarial construal of tax authority. The compound intervention was tested using a three-armed non-blinded randomised controlled trial (Study 2, N=4770) involving all employers whose declared wages were below 70% of the industry’s average. The intervention significantly increased declared payroll taxes by 5.1% to 6.1% on average across the two treated groups over a 3-month follow-up period (p< .0001) and was therefore effective. It remains unclear which constituent nudges of our compound intervention were crucial for this effect. These findings suggest that the compound intervention approach may be a feasible avenue for designing effective interventions in under-studied contexts.Estonian Tax and Customs Board, Praxis Centre for Policy Studies, Estonian Research Council grant MOBTP-1

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The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world

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The dynamic updating and revising of appraisals affords a crucial measure of flexibility to emotion processing from emotion generation through emotion regulation. However, much remains to be understood about the specific computations underlying appraisal shifts in iterative cycles of emotion generation and emotion regulation. In this chapter, we argue that a predictive mind process model perspective, constituted by predictive coding and active inference accounts, can help to clarify when and how appraisals are updated and revised. We start with a brief overview of basic concepts underlying the extended process model of emotion regulation and the predictive mind perspective. Next, we recast the extended process model in predictive terms, yielding a novel framework for understanding appraisal as well as reappraisal. We finish by outlining implications of this framework for understanding temporal dynamics of emotion and emotion regulation as well as individual differences and clinical phenomena