As part of her inaugural professorial lecture early next month, Professor Grimshaw will reflect on her own experiences studying mental processes such as thinking, memory, perception, attention, and especially emotion at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Psychological Sciences.
She will trace the shift from a time when cognitive psychologists ignored emotion to her current work, where she and her students have pioneered the use of virtual reality in laboratory settings to study the role of emotional states in mental processes.
And that’s where walking the plank comes in.
The exercise is part of a controlled study measuring participants emotional states using virtual reality to simulate the skyscraper scenario.
It all happens in a non-descript room on the Kelburn campus where participants enter a tall building in a virtual city.
“Then the elevator goes up 80 storeys and when the doors open, there's a plank extending from the building. And then you walk on it,” Professor Grimshaw says.
“We have lots of data that shows it's terrifying. The heart rate goes up at least 10 beats per minute, fear ratings are sky high, people sweat, we often have to wipe the sweat off them at the end of the experiment. But it's also a completely controlled environment, and because I am the experimenter, I control what's in the visual world.”
For Professor Grimshaw it’s a quantum leap from the previous ways of measuring emotions through experiments requiring the user to push buttons for different kinds of responses while looking at emotional pictures on a computer screen.
“Thousands of researchers do those types of studies, and they’ve been very useful. But there's nothing particularly emotional about sitting there. You're sitting in front of a computer screen. And your response is to press buttons.”
Virtual reality gave experimenters the opportunity to observe, and participants to experience “very intense emotional experiences,” she says.
“We do biosensing of heart rate and tracking sweating and skin temperature and eye movements and gait. These are the tools of my trade.”
Her central question has remained constant since the early 1990s: How does the mind work differently when we feel fear, connection, or awe? Early in her career, psychologists were only starting to move away from the idea that the mind was a “black box” that couldn’t be studied. What was termed the cognitive revolution then reframed decision-making, memory, and attention as measurable mental processes. But emotion was still excluded from this new field.
But by the 2000s, researchers began recognising that attention assigns emotional value to threats, rewards, and surprises. Emotional events are easier to remember than boring events. Our “gut feelings” turn out to be a good guide to decision-making. In virtual reality it is possible to study these mental processes while people experience emotional states.
What are her team learning? “Our findings challenge contemporary theories that suggest that fear impairs the ability to think. But we do find that the inverse is true—fear may not affect cognition, but engaging in cognitive tasks does reduce fear.”
“The big change,” she says, “is understanding that emotion is a form of thinking—part of cognition alongside language, memory, and attention.”
“It’s just one of the tools available to us as we navigate our world.”
Since moving to New Zealand from Canada in 2007, via an undergraduate teaching role in California, Professor Grimshaw has applied those tools in cross-disciplinary research at Te Herenga Waka with computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, engineering lecturers, and linguists.
“To come back into a more research-intensive type of institution after a teaching role reflects the nice balance that we have here,” she says.
Her record of postgraduate supervision is described as “remarkable” by senior colleagues, having supervised 15 PhD and 18 Master’s students since joining the University. In addition, she has developed strong networks as a mentor to Honours, Master’s and PhD students, including many who have gone on to accomplished careers in academia, government research, and industry.
“Many of them will be at my inaugural [professorial lecture], which is really lovely.”
Join Professor Grimshaw for her Inaugural Professorial Lecture at 5.30pm, on Thursday 5 March in the Hunter Council Chamber of the Hunter building.