How do threatening locations alter people´s feelings and interactions with others in the surroundings? A psychophysiological study in the lab.

• Applicant: Dr. Christophe Blaison
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290085724

Our ability to map feelings on the environment is a crucial adaptation because it works like a compass that shows us which places to approach and which places to avoid. As places are interdependent of each other, however, affectively salient places color the the perception of the surroundings. How this coloring process occurs is important to understand the way people construct affective overviews of the environment. Previous research in our lab has shown that any locally salient place produces an effect on the surroundings such that it colors the surroundings in the same affective color nearby (i.e., affective assimilation), but in the complementary affective color farther away (i.e., affective contrast). The aim of the present research project is a) to investigate whether the affective seesaw effect produced by a threatening location is more than a methodological artifact and b) to investigate one possible collective consequence of this affective seesaw effect. Previous research in our lab asked participants to report their feelings about living at a given distance of an affectively salient place. Thus, it is unknown whether the affective seesaw effect is bound to the self-report data collection or whether it is genuine. In Experiment 1 we will therefore use psychophysiological measures of affect that are less reactive than self-report measures. To immerse the participants while keeping maximum experimental control, we will model a threatening location and its surroundings with the help of fear-conditioning technique applied to a computer generated 3d neighborhood. Experiment 2 will go beyond individual consequences to explore the collective consequences of the affective seesaw effect. Social warmth depends in part on emotional mimicry, which is a primitive way to share affective states without intention. When you spontaneously smile when I smile, or when you look sad when I look sad, then I will feel closer to you. We will investigate whether a dangerous location alters emotional mimicry in the surroundings. We predict that a dangerous location will impair emotional mimicry of affiliative emotions nearby, whereas it could facilitate it farther away. Thus, dangerous locations should facilitate social atomization processes nearby but, ironically, promote social cohesion farther away. Our project brings together social psychology, affective science and spatial cognition in order to fill an important gap in the theoretical as well as the applied thinking about how people represent the environment. In addition, the innovative methodology extends to humans a paradigm that was until now reserved to animal research. Finally, the project builds a bridge between micro and macro levels of social phenomena: the influence of the affective seesaw effect on emotional mimicry could complement sociological theories of neighborhood deterioration.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Australia
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Ursula Hess
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Ottmar Volker Lipp, Ph.D.