Seminar by Irene Cogliati Dezza 17/12/2024

Tuesday 17 December 2024 at 14:30, Salle Laurent Vinay

Irene Cogliati Dezza (Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Why we seek or avoid negative news: a computational cognitive neuroscience perspective”

Website – https://sites.google.com/site/irenecogliatidezza

In today’s digital age, people have unprecedented access to vast amounts of negative information such as news about wars, environmental disasters, or economic collapse. This constant exposure to negative information has given rise to two contrasting behaviors. On one hand, certain people tend to persistently seek negative information even at the expense of their well-being and mental health, as observed in the phenomena of doomscrolling and doomsurfing. On the other hand, other people tend to avoid or deliberatively ignore such negative information even when it may contain information critical for taking constructive actions (e.g., information about the climate crisis). Understanding the mechanisms underlying these behaviors is therefore crucial for developing targeted public policy interventions aimed at addressing them. Here, I combine psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling to uncover the mechanisms underlying the pursuit and avoidance of negative information.