Emotions
I started my research career in emotions (including motivational states) influence sensation/perception. The Chinese concept for "emotion" aptly captures two components: the phenomenological feeling (情), and the sensation/perception qualia (感).
Both emotions and sensation/perception are major fields in psychology, but there has not been much interaction between the two fields. Sensation/perception textbooks in psychology or medicine hardly mention how motivational states affect sensation/perception. Likewise, emotion books rarely touch on psychophysical phenomena. My purpose is to bridge these two disparate fields.
It was until the early 2000s that scholars began to pay attention to this interaction, which emerged under the general rubric "embodied cognition." I think embodied cognition is a useful perspective to study emotion-sensation, but this is not always the case. I have written about this in Chan et al. (2013).
Each sensory system has its unique way of representing the physical world, even though there might be some overlaps. For example, humans use their visual and auditory sense, but not the olfactory sense, to localize objects in the physical space, while the opposite is true for subterranean animals. In my research, I try to take into account the uniqueness of each sensory system, for example, "what can your eyes do that your nose cannot?", and then ask "how can this be impacted by emotional states?"
How do emotions tap into the unique functionalities of sensory system? During my PhD, I studied how disgust and fear lower olfactory threshold (Chan et al., 2016), irrespective of what odorant it may be. I argue that this is functional because the lowering of threshold allows early detection of potential threats, such as food spoilage and gas leaks, before they manifest as bigger threats.
While working in India, I realized how my research has public health implications. Namely, how do people living in abject poverty regulate their disgust systems? Do they not notice contaminants that make them feel disgusted, or do they not know that something is potentially contaminated? Do they feel disgust like most people but have to suppress their disgust because of the conditions they are in? The answers matter to public health practitioners doing interventions. I intend to answer these questions using eye-tracking technology in the future.
Other projects
With Zuojun Wang (Ningbo University, China), we are studying the experience of emotions in group settings. Currently we have developed a mathematical formulation of our model and using text mining, we are exploring whether our theories hold true in the virtual world.
Most recently, I have started to apply my training in psychology to address real-life social issues. One aspects I have been examining is how emotions influence social beliefs. People believe in all sorts of things, from UFOs to conspiracy theories to whether 2 + 2 = 4. However, not all things that are believe to be true, even if they sound logical, are actually true. I aim to show that people often do not know what to believe. Yet they like to convince themselves that whatever they believe in is a result of some intelligent rationalization, when it is actually a result of an unconscious motive to protect their own ignorance. This insight has implications on how society combats misinformation.