Neural and Cognitive Mechanism of Adaptive and Maladaptive Interplay Between Emotions in Behaviour in Naturalistic Tasks

Deciding what to do when for how long - self-organizing one's behaviour - is an important feature of daily life. Emotions arise providing short-cuts for the computational complexities. Yet, one still knows relatively little about the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. EMOBB will establish the computational, cognitive and neural underpinnings of the rich interplay between emotions and self-organized behaviour in naturalistic environments. Previous work has almost exclusively relied on tasks structured into experimenter determined trials - thus how people self-organized behaviour could not be measured. To overcome this, EMOBB will combine novel naturalistic tasks in which people have freedom what to do when for how long with subjective and objective measurements of emotions. This will be made possible through a computational modelling approach that allows dissecting and quantifying even complex behaviour-emotion interactions.

Specifically, EMOBB will use three cognitive tasks of emotion-behaviour interplay that participants will do while undergoing functional magnetic resonance brain imaging and monitoring of their facial expressions with an MRI-compatible camera.

The primary hypothesis of EMOBB is that both unique and shared neural networks will underpin the interplay between emotions and behaviour across our cognitive tasks.