PRIMARY RESEARCH INTERESTS

My program of research focuses on the cognitive errors that people make when processing emotional information. All individuals occasionally make errors when encoding and retrieving information. However, some individuals, who otherwise do not demonstrate marked cognitive deficits, make errors when processing certain kinds of self-relevant information. I examine what person variables help predict when these errors occur, to what extent theories of cognitive and emotional information-processing can explain these errors, and what adaptations may be made to produce models of information-processing (and persons) that more accurately reflect the level of complexity that these systematic errors indicate.

Accuracy Paradigms

Much of the existing clinical research that attempts to examine underlying cognitive processes in psychopathology uses latency paradigms. Latency paradigms use response time as a dependent measure. Differences in response time (either between-person to the same stimuli or within-person to different stimuli) are interpreted as representing differences in the personal relevance of the stimuli to those processing them. Latency paradigms are very informative, but they do not allow one to examine cognitive errors, because the participant eventually gives the correct answer. Thus, motivational errors at the level of encoding have received only scant investigation. I investigate automatic cognitive errors instead through the use of accuracy paradigms, which are used more commonly in social and cognitive psychology (for review, see Winer & Newman, in press; see also Snodgrass & Winer, 2009; Snodgrass, Winer, & Kalaida, 2009). In accuracy paradigms, a participant is simply asked to give the correct answer to a presented stimulus. The task is only difficult when stimuli are presented very briefly, or degraded in some other way.

Subchance Perception

Subchance perception is the systematic misidentification of a class of subliminally-presented stimuli. In Winer, et al. (in press), highly anxious, non-defensive individuals (i.e., those scoring highly on a trait anxiety measure but lowly on a social desirability measure) systematically misidentify positive words. To be clear, it is not the case that they simply do not perform as well as others in identifying positive words, or as well at identifying positive words as they do negative words; they perform at below-chance levels when asked to identify positive words. As an example, if these individuals are shown the word “happy” and given a choice between two positive words “happy” and “hope,” they commit a response error by choosing the distractor word “hope.” This holds true despite the fact that these words are presented so briefly (at 6.4 milliseconds) that these individuals have no conscious experience of the words at all.

Unconscious Emotional Information Processing in Anxious, Depressed, and Defensive Persons

I have focused on how cognitive errors relate to anxiety, defensiveness, and depression, because persons who report these symptoms seem most likely to exhibit motivated cognitive errors that would cause them to perceive the world in a self-verified manner. Current models of anxiety and depression focus more on facilitatory factors in regard to emotional information processing. Subchance perception suggests that these models may benefit from incorporating cognitive errors, i.e., inhibitory factors, into a more important theoretical role.

Research Design and Theoretical Implication

Other works have examined the veridicality of theory underlying methods used to examine the self and unconscious processes (Winer & Newman, in press; see also Cervone & Winer, 2010; Najdowski & Winer, 2009; Snodgrass, Kalaida, & Winer, 2009; Snodgrass & Winer, 2009; Snodgrass, Winer, & Kalaida, 2009). These papers summarize commonly used designs and theoretical frameworks, highlight design challenges, and introduce methodological techniques that may aid future conceptualizations and investigations.