Research

My remit at Sussex is to explicate the roles of emotion, expectation, and conscious awareness in addictive behaviour, to increase the effectiveness of treatment. I measure emotion, expectation, and awareness using skin conductance, self report, and subliminal presentation. I use associative-learning tasks such as Pavlovian-to-instrumental-transfer (PIT) to model addictive behaviour. I combine all these strands by manipulating participants’ conditioned emotional, expectancy and conscious responses to Pavlovian stimuli before engaging them in a PIT task where they can win money or cigarettes.