This repository contains analyses and data for a research project investigating the effects of aging and culture on attention and emotion. Do we prefer to look at a visual stimulus because it is positive, or because it is personally meaningful? And how does this vary by age and cultural backgrounds? The study was conducted in Boston, US and Hong Kong. Participants were either induced to feel sad, or were let to maintain a neutral mood. They then viewed positive, neutral and negative pictures, some of which were more relevant to Western cultures, others to the Chinese culture. All participants were eye-tracked throughout the experiment. Additional information on hypotheses is available upon request.
The main analysis makes use of crossed-random effect model (linear mixed model), which has rarely been used in social-cognitive psychology research, but is increasingly popular in ecology, linguistics, etc., and is incredibly powerful and flexible. The data are analyzed at the stimulus/trial level, allowing for missing data due to eye-tracking calibration quality, and also incorportaing person-level predictors.
All the analysis files are under GRF1314_Rproj, which already includes an R project file for RStudio. The GRF1314analysisEYE.R and GRF1314MOODEYE.R should be run before GRF1314_modelling.R. Check if you have all the necessary packages before running (see the beginning of each script) - I use all the regular packages, nothing esoteric, so you most likely already have them :)