Maital Neta CAREER Award

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07/01/2018 Added

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As an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Maitel Neta researches how people's emotional responses to uncertainty change over a lifetime. Neta earned a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

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[00:00:00.840]My name is Maital Neta,
[00:00:02.010]and I am an assistant professor of psychology here at UNL.
[00:00:05.630]We study individual differences and emotion processing,
[00:00:08.400]specifically in situations of uncertainty.
[00:00:11.340]There are lots of situations that we encounter where
[00:00:13.630]we don't really know if something is good or bad.
[00:00:16.060]I think a great example is if you walk into a room
[00:00:19.580]and there are these two people
[00:00:20.570]kind of sitting and whispering to each other,
[00:00:22.920]and one of them sort of looks up and is laughing
[00:00:25.930]or smiling in your direction,
[00:00:27.950]you could think, "Oh, were they just talking about me,
[00:00:30.957]"or did somebody just notice that I walked in
[00:00:33.360]and happened to smile at me?"
[00:00:34.650]And so what we study is basically what happens
[00:00:37.460]when you give something to somebody that's totally uncertain
[00:00:40.790]and ambiguous and you ask them is this positive or negative.
[00:00:44.230]What we see is that there are people
[00:00:45.700]who tend to think that it's negative,
[00:00:47.590]and there are other people who,
[00:00:48.580]looking at the exact same item, they think it's positive.
[00:00:51.890]And so we wanna understand where that
[00:00:53.880]individual difference comes from.
[00:00:55.640]So we show people pictures of faces
[00:00:58.204]or scenes that are ambiguous.
[00:01:00.240]So for example, the surprised facial expression is unique
[00:01:03.930]in that it's the only facial expression
[00:01:05.530]that could be positive or negative.
[00:01:07.450]When people see surprised facial expressions
[00:01:09.760]and they don't have any kind of background or context,
[00:01:12.280]they could see it as something that is positive,
[00:01:14.940]like somebody got a surprise visit from a friend,
[00:01:18.180]or they could see it as something that's negative,
[00:01:19.960]like you're about to get hit by a car in the street.
[00:01:22.720]So there's a few different steps to the research.
[00:01:24.920]This first is just bringing people in,
[00:01:26.890]showing them these ambiguous images,
[00:01:29.230]but also some clear images,
[00:01:30.730]like happy and angry faces that have a really clear meaning,
[00:01:34.520]and we ask them to evaluate each of the images
[00:01:36.930]as positive or negative, and by doing that,
[00:01:39.110]we can get a sense for their bias
[00:01:41.320]to interpret the item as being positive or negative.
[00:01:44.380]And then the next step is we bring them in for an MRI
[00:01:47.980]and monitor their brain responses
[00:01:50.010]as they're looking at these images.
[00:01:52.370]Really, the goal of this work is to look at
[00:01:55.660]how people's responses to uncertainty change
[00:01:57.770]over the lifespan.
[00:01:59.100]So one of the things we're gonna be doing is
[00:02:00.620]in this research is comparing young adults
[00:02:02.393]who have very different interpretations
[00:02:04.644]of uncertainty to older adults who we know
[00:02:08.970]have more positive interpretations to uncertainty.
[00:02:12.410]It has enormous consequences on many aspects of our lives,
[00:02:16.370]aspects of our social relationships, of our work,
[00:02:19.413]our productivity, even our health, right?
[00:02:22.360]Because if we're somebody who tends to approach the world
[00:02:25.290]and see these things as having really negative meaning,
[00:02:28.270]it can have all kinds of adverse outcomes
[00:02:30.250]for our mental and physical health.

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