EJOP #2. Emotion Regulation via Attentional Deployment - Dr. Daniel Rojas Libano

Join us in this insightful episode as we dive into the world of emotion regulation and attentional deployment with Dr. Daniel Rojas Líbano of Universidad Diego Portales. Santiago, Chile. Discover how shifting focus can influence emotional responses and explore the implications of these findings in real-world applications. Perfect for psychology enthusiasts and anyone curious about the science behind our emotions. Don't miss out on this engaging conversation! 

Read the entire research paper here!

https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/15803/15803.html

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:41 Understanding Emotional Regulation
• 6:25 Importance of Replication in Research
• 13:55 The Research Study
• 20:22 Experimental Design and Methodology
• 33:22 Understanding Emotional Response
• 36:51 Impact of Age, the internet and other factors
• 42:04 Real world Applications of Emotion Regulation
• 46:53 Dream Research Study
• 53:33 Importance of replication research and wrap up

Transcript

0:04

Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Smooth Brain Society. uh Today we're going to be talking about emotion regulation and attentional deployment. uh This episode is part of a series which we are doing with Europe's Journal of Psychology. So the journal very graciously asked us to, or is letting us talk to some of the people who published uh articles with them and talk about the latest research coming out ah in their journal, which is being published in the journal. So today we'll be talking to Dr. Daniel Rojas-Líbano, who is the director of the diploma in human neuroscience and neuropsychology researcher at the Center of Studies in Human Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. I got all that right, right? There you go, perfect. So thank you so much, Daniel, for coming on. uh And so Danny was here to talk about his team's publication. I did mention it's about emotion regulation and attention to deployment. But the title of the publication is behavioral and neuropsychological correlates of emotion regulation via attention to deployment. And Europe's Journal of Psychology is an open access journal. So if anybody listens to this podcast and is like, OK, I want to actually read the scientific side of it, then the link will be in the description and you guys can go there and read it yourselves. So awesome. Thank you so much, Danny, for coming on. And thank you, Beth, for joining as well as co-host again. Perfect. Thanks for having me. Brilliant. So let's get started. think uh we need to start with some basic definitions eh then. you'll see that because those words are quite fancy. So could you tell us what you mean by emotion regulation to begin with in a science context? Yeah, yeah, of course. So this is, I think it can be expressed quite simply. It's the idea that we can and we always do try to change the emotions we experience, try to influence the emotions we experience. Sometimes to, so to speak, to turn up the volume, sometimes to turn it down. Sometimes you want to decrease some emotions you're having. Sometimes you want to sort of sustain them and increase them. And this ability to change, influence what is happening in your emotional side, that's emotion regulation in general. And I guess I should say... something about emotions themselves. There's a huge debate about what an emotion is. uh But I think we can sort of in about like saying a sort of package that happens in your body, in your experience, uh in your behavior as a response to some event that could be internal or external. uh And it has these sort of three dimensions that are not reducible to one another, like your experience, your physiology, your behavior. And specifically, in this research, we are sort of using ah as a reference a model that's been widely used in the field. ah And this model contains or describes the emotion as happening in a situation which triggers something, which within that situation you pay attention to something there. uh Within that thing you pay attention, there's an appraisal that you do. uh There's an appraisal in the sense that you sort of... just sort of implicitly or to decide if this is good or bad, and then the comes the response. And each one of these sort of sequential um states are susceptible to being regulated. That's like the general. But if I can add something, which is something that's implicit or... Not that implicit in the paper, but another important thing about the motivation of the research was the replication side. So since at least 2015, this science paper about replication in psychological sciences in crisis, et cetera, there's this sort of debate and discussion heated sometimes about how generalized... the findings in experimental psychological science, ah how can we generalize, to what extent we can generalize the results of ah previous, previously published uh experiments and findings. And it is a little more pressing in our side. I'm in Chile here. a uh lot of when you do... sort of systematic review of the literature, a lot of the findings have not even replicated at all in South America, for instance. And so we wanted to do this dual thing, investigate emotion regulation through attentional deployment, but also to sort of evaluate to what extent these findings would replicate here. This previous published finding, in this case where findings from a group in the US, um to what extent they would replicate in a different time, country, sample, participants, et cetera. yeah. m Yeah, you've touched on something really, I was going to ask maybe a bit later, but I think we can touch on it now a little bit about the almost Euro centricity of research. So it seems to, you know, majority be raised in Europe and the US, and especially emotional regulation is something that might be different across different cultures, maybe or different countries, dependent. So do you think it's mostly important for these psychology studies for us to kind of like, replicate those because we're psychologists neuroscientists we've all heard about the replication crisis even just within our own countries and regardless of looking across different countries which is nightmare. So do think it's important that we kind of carry on? We need to do like lots of different these studies and lots of kind of different settings and countries and cultures kind of understand it a little bit better. Yeah, think it's interesting and important because there's this thing that, you know, this work has been done. So people have thought about it, uh designed tasks, designed experiments. So I think if I'm coming to the field, I think it's reasonable to sort of use whatever it's been built already. and use it as a reference and use this replicability also as an opportunity to sort of evaluate to what extent these findings are context sensitive. um And that's why I think it's interesting because if it's, whether you find like you replicate it or you don't replicate, but what usually happens is something in between. You learn about the phenomenon. You learn about this psychological process. you learn about, uh once you have your replication, you can say, well, it didn't replicate as much or to what extent, so let's now try to figure out what are the... What are the other variables that are mediating this, that are influencing this lack of replication or this uh middle point replication or this total replication? um And most of these things, oh as you know, most of these concepts and ideas are intended to be applied to the human species, right? Not to... any particular group, especially general things like emotions or emotion regulation or some other processes that we study with our tasks. So I think it's very important. I think it's quite exciting. It's interesting. And I think we had a sort of heated debate a few years ago and I don't know, I'm not sure what we made of it. And so I think it's interesting to pursue it. Yeah, I'll probably go on to a bit more, but we can talk more about funding in kind of these different kind of countries where there's maybe not as much research, but we'll talk to that towards the end. I'll go back to the paper briefly. So you spoke about kind of emotions being maybe a response to an event, internal or external, and the kind of regulation is how we kind of control that. But with the attentional deployment, what do you mean by attentional deployment? Yeah, so one of these, within this model, that's the model that it's sort of the child of James Gross from Stanford University. There are five families of emotion regulation. And one of them is its attentional deployment, which is but something also very, very simple and very sort of, you can see it, a lot of examples in daily life, which is basically, you know, moving your attentional focus away from that ah sort of emotionally loaded uh or uh rousing part of the emotional stimuli. Say, when little kids are going to get vaccinated, you try to shift their attention away from the needle. You don't say, think about a big sharp needle. You don't say that. think of something else or let's not look at that or let's talk about something or even nurses sometimes they would... they would sort of move here and say, one, two, then do the thing, and then three. And so the kid will notice, uh which are, I mean, it's a pedestrian example, but it's a very common strategy that people use. Like move your attention away from... from that part of the emotional stimuli that you don't want to get more input about. Yes, that's what I said. My mum uh was a travel clinic nurse and m I went to go get my vaccines with her once and she's just talking to me and I think she probably got in trouble and just stabbed me really quickly and I didn't. So it works actually not just on children, it works on adults as well. So yeah, we can take these practices and put them back into adulthood. So now we've kind of got a definition of... m emotional regulation and attentional deployment. Do you think there's anything else we need to terms for Sahir or any questions? I think the other part is like you get into the problem of, if this is the case, if this happens, how do you study it in the laboratory? uh And that's going to be tricky, like no matter what. And in this case, we're talking about a task that was designed by a group in the US, which focuses uh on visual attention and the stimuli where uh these pictures, they're emotionally loaded pictures, um like very, very unpleasant pictures. Yeah, but it's specifically about visual attention in the context of an experimental task in which you see these artificial uh stimuli, which are pictures. specific task. oh Got you. so maybe we could have a quick elevator pitch before we go full on into the kind of the full kind of experimental design. Could you give us a quick elevator pitch or a quick kind of run through of the paper itself or the study now that we've kind of got those terms kind of understood a little bit more? for the scientific community of verbal abstract almost. Exactly, yes. Yeah, yeah, of course. So first, in terms of replication, our task, we found the results that we were expecting as replication, although with a lower effect size. So we found that people can regulate their emotions using attentional deployment with this task here in Chile with a sample of participants. They can do it. um And we... we come up with a score to sort of quantify this ability to use attentional deployment. And the final uh thing that we did was we tested for or we assessed people in terms of attentional capacities in general and see how they would correlate with this attentional deployment capacity. And they didn't correlate. So those were the three points. Wait, I'll pick on the third point first. you will, I guess we'll go into more detail as well. But so you were saying that your capacity for attention does not necessarily, is not necessarily correlated or associated with your ability to use sort of attention, attention or deployment to regulate your emotions. Is that? and with that specific uh attentional test, which is called the A &T, the Attentional Network Test, it's a very widely used attentional test, although not the only one. as assessed by that test, uh attentional capacities were not useful to predict attentional deployment abilities of people. were not related. We were expecting some relationship but we couldn't find one. There's another thing, now I'm talking about the first thing, which is that the first finding where you found, like your studies sort of replicates the things which you found in the US, but in a Chilean population, but to a lesser extent. And you said that you were expecting that to begin with. Can I? ask you why you were expecting it to be lesser. uh These are sort of like background, and since like perceptions you're going in with, or hypothesis you're going in with, and why were you thinking that they would be lesser to what the Americans found in their sample, or sort of things like that is what I was thinking. Like what sort of drove you to that idea to begin with, as opposed to thinking there would be more in sort of your population. um Yeah, okay, so this was not specifically related to their findings or our procedures, but like in general people find more and more that when you replicate, especially studies from, you know, a decade ago or something or before, m your effect sizes are lower. And that can be explained by a variety of reasons, but one of them is that There was before, at least, a lot of these practices that you of uh clean your data and sort of show or discard participants that did not really em complete the task. I'm sorry, that did not really, were kind of outliers in some of the task metrics. em for variety of reasons. so it's very common when you replicate, especially studies from a decade or so ago, that you find a lower effect size. Actually, this 2015 science paper, that's what they found, that in the studies that they were able to replicate, they found a lower effect size. And the literature has been discussing about this. It's due to a mixture of, you know, some questionable research practices, are not, literature has called them questionable research practices, which are not actual intents of deceiving or trying to actually removing data or something like this. It's just more like a cultural transmission of how to deal with data and. And we decided to show all our data, all our participants, even the outliers. And that's going to lower your effect pricing, like in general. There's, I don't know, all the previous tasks were done inside of a scanner, an FMRI scanner. We didn't do that. We used a regular experiment room. that could be something as well. don't know. But I was expecting that for sort of a general reason, not specifically for this study. Yeah, it makes sense with the scanner maybe doesn't it because I guess you're so focused on the task when you're in a scanner, like all you can look at is the specific task that you're doing. But yours is almost like a more of real life setting, isn't it? You're in a room where you know, you can look around, you know. So actually, that's it kind of, you know, it seems like, you know, an important, a really important part of study that you took out the scanner made a little bit more real life. And yeah, and the effect sizes. em For those who are maybe not scientists by effect size. We mean how much intervention works or how strong an association is independent of sample size. So it doesn't matter if you had 10 or 100 people with you, how much in general that intervention is working in this case, the attentional deployment. Yeah, like how big is your effect? uh The intervention that you did, how big? And in our case, was, well, I don't know if I can start talking about the task or let's see. let's start now. Let's go. Let's get into the task. on nicely. Yeah. So this is, a simple task. So you get an image. um We have two kinds of images, pictures. They are all pictures from the IAPS dataset, which is a dataset of emotional pictures that's been used widely worldwide. And we have neutral images. like landscapes or objects in the table or something like this, and unpleasant images, which have been graded for tons of people as emotionally very, very unpleasant. And we have those images in three versions, I would say, just the image, regular image, that's it, like the original image. Then that would be focus-free. without any, you know, uh attentional focus. Then you would have someone, uh some pictures with a circle in an arousing part of the image. And that we would call that, you know, arousing focus. And then you would have some images which you will have this circle, but in a non-arousing portion of the image. m And so after people looking at these images, they have to rate, they have to provide a rating and say, how intense was the emotion that these pictures made you feel first? And then how positive or negative were? We call that the intensity of the emotional experience and the valence of the emotional experience. And our reasoning was that following the previous group was if your intensity, emotional intensity experienced changes when you change your focus, then that's attentional deployment. Then there's evidence that the attentional deployment is sort of working because we don't really give instructions to people beyond look inside a circle or observe freely. We don't say, you know, try to regulate your emotions or something of the sort. We just say focus here, focus whatever the the whatever the focus is. Like if it's we don't say there's going to be focus in the erosing parts. We're going to say anything. observe your image freely if it doesn't have a circle and look inside circle. if it has one. um And that's basically the task. And we monitor uh eye movements uh to know where the gaze, where people are looking at in the image. But in our case, was basically to check that they were following instructions. um And then the core was to... sort of analyze the ratings depending on their focus. we found that when you shift, well, first I would say we found that neutral images were very low in intensity, like in general, and unpleasant images were higher intensity and lower in valence. So the stimuli seemed to work. with variability, but we show that it works in our hands with our sample. know, these are things that you gotta check because these images are kind of old sometimes, and times have changed, I don't know. But our emotional stimuli works. People, it's very clear, we show that in the paper. Like that's in preliminaries before the main result. It's very clear that people find unpleasant image weight more intense emotionally and with a lower balance than neutral images. um And then we constructed this score, which is the difference in rating of your intensity uh when you switch focus. from an arousing part or non-arousing part of the image. So these are all unpleasant, the ones we use to build the score, all unpleasant images. How much do you change your intensity? Do you decrease your intensity when you switch from an arousing focus to a non-arousing focus? And that's your scale, intensity-based scale. And then we do the same for valence. How much do you increase your valence when you switch your focus away? And uh with some variability, but it worked in general. Yeah, that's the basic result. Yeah, that makes sense. just to make sure, just so I understand, like a 20 second kind of paparazzi it, basically they were shown an unpleasant or neutral image. What was the attentional deployment? What was it shown to kind of look at it? that when they had like a, was there a circle on the side or what was it that was, they looking at to try and shift their attention? Yeah, so some pictures would not have anything, any circle, and those were like our sort of focus free condition. Then some others would have a circle, and some of those circles were in the non-arousing portion, and we will call that our non-arousing focus, which would be a sort of... uh which would direct your visual attention to a portion of the image that does not contain emotional content and so it would serve to regulate. And there are others which have a circle in an arousing part. And so after rating... So you see pictures of this, um very unpleasant pictures. with a focus on an arousing part. And then you rate them. It was how intense it was, how good, bad it was. And then you say, again, in some other trials, unpleasant images, but with the focus in a non-arousing portion of the image. And then you say, well, how intense it was. And so later, after task is done, because when people is performing the task, they're just looking at one spot on the image ah and then ask to provide a rating, then another image, another spot and so on and provide a rating. And then after we compare like how is the intensity, emotional intensity reported in the non-arousing focus versus the arousing focus conditions? I'm not sure if... What the? This might be slightly naive of me, but how long were the pictures up? Because I feel if a picture is up for a long time, be it arousing or not arousing, I might move around, look at the screen, or if you'd asked me to look at the circle first, I'd look at the circle, but then I would start looking elsewhere. So did you have time things as well? Or do people, when you tell them to focus on the circle, they only tend to focus on the circle? Okay, so regarding the time that the images were shown, of course we can discuss that, ah but in our case, we were again trying to be as faithful as possible as the original setup. And the setup was like you would watch... ah Let me check if it's four five or... Yeah, yeah, it was five images. four seconds each. Five images of the same category and the same focus condition, category meaning uh neutral or unpleasant, the five that were unpleasant or the five were neutral, and they will all have the same focus condition, m say if it's an erosing portion or non-erosing portion. And then after those five images, I watched each one for four seconds, then you provide the ratings. That's the way the original task was designed and we were following that. Yeah. do you provide ratings on each one of those five or do you give an overall rating for those five? overall rating. I think, yeah, the strategies sort of put a lot of stimuli, but of the same category, of the same type, and then asked to provide a rating. And the overall task was it took people 20 minutes or so, 22 minutes was fairly Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, so just like how bet loves to do just quick recap so you're like five images for four seconds each, then they rate it and then another five images. So if you had like pleasant first five times, then it could be neutral first. Sorry, it could be unpleasant for the next five. And then the next five could have a circle somewhere in the corner, but they could be unpleasant images. And then the next one could be unpleasant images with a focus on the arousing part. And that just keeps going for 20 minutes in random orders, essentially. Okay. have five big kinds of images, because you have the neutral, you could have neutral with or without focus. There's no arousing focus in a neutral image, like by definition. And then the unpleasant, you could have no focus or focus free, focus in an arousing portion, focus in a non-arousing. you have five types of trials and you would go for 20 trials each containing five images of the same kind. And the main finding from it was the fact that although the effect size was smaller, when you had the circle in a non-arousing area and the unpleasant image, they less they raised it less intensely. So this intentional deployment did work and does replicate. Yeah, exactly. we sort of, we were after like trying to sort of characterize that movement. In the original article, they sort of show that the mean intensity is lower, and that's it. They go on to try to see what are the brain areas that light up or something like this. We were trying to sort of move... go slower and try to characterize behaviorally our attention or get a sort of behavioral or decisional metric of attentional deployment. And so we constructed this intensity rating difference, like how different were the intensity ratings in one focus condition versus the other focus condition. Like the intensity ratings, how they would change as a function of the attentional focus. And we found that it worked. there's, of course, there's a distribution. And the distribution is centered around intensity decrease. But there are people that showed no, like, showed this difference to be around zero, which is they didn't change too much. And there are other people, like very few, but we have those people that the intensity goes up, which is something that you don't expect. But the distribution is centered around decrease of intensity when you switch to non-arousing portion of the image. Yeah. I mean, this question, guess, is just for a little bit of fun. But so you have I want to talk about the two arousing images, the one where you're focusing on the on the arousing part and then just generally having the arousing image without focus. Is there a difference between the two kind of like if I walk past and I see something unpleasant versus if somebody points out saying, look, this is unpleasant with the emotional reaction change that way if someone's forcing your attention towards something? think even when the attentional focus is in a non-arousing portion of the image, people are quite, you know, when you look at those images, you're quite sure that this is really unpleasant. I mean, it's not that by focusing there, you wouldn't notice the other thing. You wouldn't notice the unpleasant part. And people, you know, in general, they follow the instruction. like the ratings are around, I mean, the dual time of the gaze, it's around 70 % or something within the circle. But they do these quick saccades, these quick eye movements, and they know what's going on in the image. So images with an attentional focus that's... And unpleasant images with an attentional focus that's non-rousing are still rated worse than... neutral images. They do not compare. But yeah, I don't know if I'm answering what you were asking, but. I mean, to an extent you did, because it makes sense. was just asking the other way in the sense, was there any difference between, because you said there were three sets. One was uh unpleasant image without a circle. So just the unpleasant image and then unpleasant image with the circle on the arousing part. Was there a difference between those two categories? Yeah. sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in terms of ratings, they were equivalent. Yeah, they were the same. So it seems like when you don't have a sort of instruction about where to uh fix your attention, then you focus on the unpleasant portion, on the arousing portions for the most part. was very similar in terms of ratings. Yeah. Because I was just wondering if people look away the moment they see the arousing thing or something like that. If there's no... I've actually got a few questions here, so I don't want to dominate too much, but it's kind of more, I guess, because these are the main findings into the discussion. One I had was, first of all, what was the age range that you did this on? And was there any kind of, I don't know if you looked into this, correlations with age and the images, because it might be those who are older and maybe they've seen more, find the images less intense. and if the younger, maybe more intense, or maybe vice versa, because more younger people are going on the internet, or was it just the age ranges matched and it wasn't something to really look at? Maybe something for a future study. Yeah, that's a great question. We used as a regular sample of undergrad students, uh precisely because this was our first attempt at regular hand-to-hand which had been done before. And our idea in the long term, now we're sort of... Now we are repeating the task again with a large sample, but we're measuring some physiology that we didn't. And so our idea is to sort of do what you were suggesting, like uh study the same task in different populations. We're starting to study the task also in traumatic brain injury patients, because there are some... I do a collaboration with a colleague that studies traumatic brain injury in terms of neuropsychological rehabilitation. And there are a lot of research that suggests that motion regulation is a problem for these patients. And of course, another dimension, very important, is age. But we would like to sort of use the task and study it from different populations, maybe try different changes here and there, sort of know our instrument. And there's always, yeah, we're not trying to claim that what we found is gonna replicate for all ages or all other groups. um Yeah. But it makes sense actually, you write to do it in undergraduate population. It's a small age group. It means you've got less variability and then you can kind of expand that more, especially for kind of the first study. And I guess kind of linked to that was, so you said the last study was done in 2015, which was 10 years ago. And I think it would be, you know, the internet has played a huge role in the last 10 years. Do you... And we can see so much more, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, Reddit, 4chan, m where I'm very sure you can see some pretty horrific things if you want to, and it's popping up all the time. m Do you think that that will play a role in this kind of... m When you do these studies, you said there were some kind of differences if people are more exposed to some of these kind very unpleasant images? I know it's just a proxy, but... Do you think that will play role next at all? yes yes it could it could um And yeah, we will have to sort of design a study to sort of try to address what's the role of this new exposition to a lot of different, everybody's being exposed like all day long to, know, with long chains of random stimuli, visual stimuli. Although I would say that what we used in this in these images which are from the IE apps. Yeah, it's material that's quite... ah I'm sure you can find it in the internet, but it's not like your regular Instagram post or something like this. It's uh pictures of uh surgeries, or open hand surgeries, or a person um assassinated uh in the street, or a mob that just killed a man. It's caring, it remains. It's very disturbing. And I think it sets a little apart from the regular. um Although the fact that you're looking at pictures, could also affect in the sense that, well, is, yeah, it's a little gross, but it's more pictures. And that could have an effect as well. Yeah, that's true. makes sense. So I guess the natural thing I've spoken about, the results, what you found, what are the real world applications within doing this study? Yeah, that's a difficult question for me. you I think I can see that I can see it with maybe those who have experienced, you know, PTSD or going through or this is a visual, but m is there a way that I don't know if people are hallucinating, let's say, for example, trying to have like a visual cue that kind of gets them to kind look away from it. Maybe it's not as disturbing. m Yeah, I'm sure there is. Attentional deployment seems like there's there's there's there's uses there for maybe types of therapy in ways maybe. Yes, we said at the beginning that there were these five families of emotion regulation. And we decided to study attentional deployment because two of those families have been studied quite a bit. One of them is cognitive change, sometimes called cognitive reprisal. which is like a strategy in which you try to sort of give a new meaning to what's going on. Like if it's a very, very difficult picture, you would say, well, it's just a picture, remember that. It's not happening right now. Stuff like this, like reappraising. And there were less investigation, less research about attentional deployment comparatively. It seems like a very basic strategy. And we are looking at right now some of the physiological changes that accompany this. And it seems like when people regulate more or the people that regulate more, they enter into a sort of different regime of cardiorespiratory coupling. And so this strategy We don't know yet if cardio respiratory coupling, it's what's driving what. In our case, it's very clear that we are giving the instructions like look away from this. it might have, it's very, very simple, but it might have some consequences, important consequences for regulating your emotion, at least when sometimes there's no time to do something else or... You need something like a very quick tool. ah And it might be useful. I know it looks sort of like that's too simple. That's not going to get you, no. But it might help in some um early stages of dealing with this problem of regulation. And so as a strategy, our aim was to sort of um So throw more light on a family of strategies, attentional deployment, that's comparatively being neglected from the others. maybe some clinician can use these findings to put those findings in context or work with patients. Yeah. I'm actually a bit surprised that attention or attentional deployment as a strategy is not studied more because like you said at the very start, it's a thing with a lot of people use quite a bit in terms of, like you said, with the nurses or when you, if you're giving a child an injection or something, you say look away and then you rip a bandaid off or that sort of little thing. I know it's not the person self-regulating, but that idea of distracting or taking their attention away to, for in order to reduce like the emotional salience of a task, I would have thought that it would have been researched more. Yeah, sounds like a marketer's dream. know, it's probably not some big companies that's really need some sponsorships and big companies to look at attentional deploys to sounds like it's that's next year grant grant idea. I think the I think most companies want to get the attention right they don't want to divert the attention which is I think one of the we need to keep it and do it instead of on unpleasant, like super pleasant images instead. And that's where the money is, apparently. Okay. I might ask my favorite questions here. it time? So Daniel, you've been given a grant. It's, let's say, 20 million. don't know what the equivalent would be in Chilean. What's the currency in Chile? Pesos, right? chilean pesos like one dollar is a thousand pesos Uh, okay. You're not doing the math, Beth. Just say unlimited amount. uh You've been given two billion pesos and there's no such thing as ethics. They've temporarily gone on holiday for a week and you can do whatever you want. What would be a dream study of yours or experiment to run? I think... m I think most of what I struggle with is conceptual, it's not really practical. ah Although, yeah, the money can hurt a lot. But I would like to do a study in which we study these three dimensions, ah physiology, behavior, and experience. ah In the lab, a very structured environment. uh And also uh outside of the lab, in daily lives of people. I'm running a grant right now and we are sort of doing a little bit of that. uh So the parts are we replicate this task and then we're going to do now with physiology, same task, and with patients. with uh TBI patients, traumatic brain injury patients. And those are the three sort of parts that we're going to do inside the lab. That's the core of the project. But then we want to sort of uh try to find a way in which we can follow people through their daily lives with hopefully with some kind of physiology monitor and the experience monitor. through an app or something. uh And I would love to see, what happens with these variables in our daily lives, in our daily activities, and two, how those changes compare to the changes we get to produce in the laboratory. And sort of put that in context with a large sample. Do you expect that the emotional responses you might get in real life would be higher than what you get in the laboratory? I would think so, right? Because I feel labs are very controlled environment. the end of the day, like you said, emotional appraisal, everybody can just be like, it's just an experiment at the end of the day. oh So you are saying you think it's going to be larger in the laboratory? Yeah, so there are arguments for both because in real life you can have these large events, but you don't have this consistent repetition of really huge emotional stimuli that they're sort of designed to arouse you or designed to elicit. the emotional process. uh Whereas in Day of the Leaf, I would think that it's much more variable. Sometimes you're to have these huge moments, but ah we don't know how to deal with that because we don't have this repetition structure, the trial structure. We don't know what to do when you're outside the um it's tough. I think from what I'm hearing is you'd want new technology with this 2 billion pesos, you'd want a new, you want to build a new technology that combines the physiology. like heart rate and breathing with experience. And then you want the ethics where you can just flash and pleasant images, let's say in Times Square in New York. So, and then you can get everything you need out of that. That is your, m if you can do anything in the world, study. that's a great idea. That's a great idea. But I didn't thought about it. Yeah, that would be a very interesting idea. But I was thinking more of how to like tracking whatever is that the people report throughout the day. Like say you get an alarm and so you report about your emotions, your emotion regulation. And when you're reporting, we have those as sort of post throughout the day and we can look at what happens in the physiology around those times, something like this. intensities in people's own experience. Can you sort of use the Apple eye vision or whatever it is or Google glasses, whatever? Because then you can do eye tracking on them, can't you? Or you could develop something to do eye tracking and then they always have those glasses on and then they're always, you're tracking these things in the real world. And then you just pop a notification up to be like, now answer this. Yeah, yeah, there is technology now to sort of monitor what whatever is where people are looking at, like in real life. Yeah, there are like these very small glasses that you can use. So so definitely we have technology and people is looking at their phones anyway, all the time. So it shouldn't be difficult to. But what would be like a good, you know, what would you ask? and how often there's a field that's been doing this. uh is called ecological momentary assessment and there's studies about this. haven't really read deeply what they're doing but I know there's literature here to use as reference. But mixed that with physiology that... That's also a trick. uh You serve a device that we're trying to develop something. We're going to do probably a little pilot at the end of this project and maybe ask for something on those lines for the following grant. Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. So are you going to be doing any more replication studies or are you more going to continue on this kind of line of thinking and kind of carrying on within the emotional regulation m and the m attentional deployment? The attentional deployment is definitely a big project in one of my research lines, but yeah, I'm currently doing another two replication experiments. ah Some of them are like, we've already published some other replication experiments. So we were always doing some replication and trying to publish that. It's not easy to publish those things, even in journals. that explicitly say, your replications. And so you submit and they say, it's just a replication. not practicing what they preach. But that's what you're right, you've made a really fair point about why it's so important that we do replicate because emotions are different throughout, we can't just focus on certain areas. So, that's disappointing to hear, Daniel. We'll have to tell us the details after this. Definitely not, what was it, the European? Journal of Psychology. That's not, that's a good one. Yeah. They accepted our paper. mean replication studies even in animals are necessary when you do them on rats if you use a different strain of rat if it doesn't work. So why would this not be the same if across people with different histories, different backgrounds, different cultures, different ages, like you said, all make a big difference. right? If you find like the same results, that's good. If you don't, then you can start studying what other factors are important in this process, in this psychological phenomenon. And so we get to know more about the psychological process. think it's actually, you're right, it's even more important, isn't it? If we find out something, if it's not replicating, why is it not replicating? Bit more work, but in a good way. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Any final questions, Beth? No, I think I got to ask my my favorite question, so ah Daniel, is there anything which you'd like to cover which we haven't covered yet? Or do we think we ran through the paper and everything quite well? Yeah, yeah, we did. really, and she explained it really, really well. It's incredibly interesting. No, that was really good. uh The last couple questions then. um First, did you prepare a hot take for us? I read about it. didn't really prepare it, m I might be able So this was, I think there was two parts. One was an abstract, or sorry, and the other was like what I do. It was that. you prepared those. Okay, we can record those at the end of the podcast then. Brilliant. All right, in that case, uh then the final, just a final question for me then. ah If you had any piece of general advice to give for us, listeners, from yourself, what would it be? It doesn't need to be about science, anything from your life. ah Well, that's Yeah. But what do you mean advice for your listeners? uh For example, I think when I did one, said, em just in terms of Parkinson's disease, said, like, em really important, know, keep, you know, eating well, exercising, I think I said. And I think the other one I said was say yes to every opportunity that you get something like, you know, based in either the research or something I've done as a researcher, which I found has been useful. Yeah yeah. mean, for me, I would say that. I tried to do this because I found it very interesting, it made sense and it's important to do it. I would say that it's important to try to find whatever it is that you find important or you find it has some purpose, has some meaning and so pursue it. um Sometimes it's very difficult, it's discouraging, it's frustrating. ah But if it has an important meaning for you and you see that between the problems and difficulties, you start getting something and giving something, and then it's worth uh pursuing it. Something like that. I'm not very good with that. really good. That was exactly, basically just pursue what you love. That was perfect. was exactly, exactly, I was looking for. thank you. yeah. Thank you so much, Daniel, for uh coming. That was really, really interesting. uh And yeah, I hope we can see more replication papers from you in the future. uh looking to you. Awesome. And yeah, thank you everybody for listening. As I said, Daniel's paper will be in the description. So if you are interested, you can go read about the research he's doing. yeah, thank you, Europe's Journal of Psychology for sending Daniel our way. So yeah, until next time, take care, everybody. OK, bye. Thank you.