Dr. Janelle and his students explore the interaction of emotion, attention, and movement as related to human performance and health issues.
Emotion and Attention
A primary mission of the Performance Psychology lab is to determine the influence of emotion on attentional processing, specifically with regard to the mechanisms underlying visual selective attention, automaticity, and self-regulation. Using a multimethod approach, we have contributed novel understanding of how process oriented behavioral and psychophysiological indices [heart rate, cortical activation levels, electrodermal activity, eye movements, EMG, force parameters] reveal an expert advantage among accomplished athletes, drivers, and military marksmen, among others. Our findings have elucidated how intense emotions alter visual search strategies, resulting in inefficient eye movements and a tendency to be distracted by irrelevant environmental cues. Though the same trends are noticed among relative expert performers, they are not as pronounced. Experts are more capable of regulating their emotions, allowing them to maintain or improve their performance in domain specific stressful situations. Paradoxically, the automaticity associated with attentional allocation to environmental cues can precipitate and perpetuate maladaptive attentional biases among individuals who have emotional problems. With funding from NIMH, we have explored the relationship between covert indices of attentional allocation (as indexed by electrocortical activity) and overt shifts in visual attention (as indexed by eye movements) among individuals with high and low anxiety levels. Our data suggest that these measures may be decoupled when presented with environmental cues that differ in emotional intensity and valence. The mere presence of affectively salient cues in the visual display alters the attentional capabilities of highly anxious individuals, thereby globally influencing motor responses even when overt visual attention is redirected elsewhere.
Emotion and Motor Function
The other primary arm of our research has focused on how emotional reactivity influences the motor parameters that underlie simple and complex functional behaviors. We have found that exposure to unpleasant emotional conditions leads to faster, more forceful ballistic upper extremity movements compared to pleasant and neutral conditions. Furthermore, our results indicate that the variability of low level force production increases under arousing conditions, and that greater emotional arousal increases force production and attenuates force decay of movements that are sustained at moderate force levels. Interestingly, these findings are qualified by individual differences (such as trait anxiety and depression). In addition to modulation of upper extremity movements, we have also recently demonstrated that emotions influence lower extremity function, particularly gait initiation. Our results indicate that highly arousing unpleasant emotional states accelerate initial motor responses, but pleasant emotional states facilitate the initiation of forward gait. Current projects are ongoing to delineate the impact of emotion on other lower extremity movement parameters in healthy individuals as well as those who suffer from movement complications associated with Parkinson disease.
Importance
Our work has led to a better understanding of how emotion impacts attention and motor function, while providing insight concerning the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral manifestations of mind-body interactions. We hope that continued work in this area will inform recommendations for improving the effectiveness of interventions for those who suffer from emotion and movement disorders, while holding performance enhancement implications for individuals such as firefighters, surgeons, athletes, military personnel, and others who are consistently challenged to perform under emotionally charged situations.