Ohio State researchers Stacie Powers and Zheng Joyce Wang are examining the way the brain works by conducting laboratory studies on students in the Communication and Psychophysiology Lab.

The CAP Lab, a $500,000 endeavor begun in 2007, is used to study emotion by looking at how the brain processes nonverbal cues.

The technology in the lab, which is located in the Journalism building, records brain waves in response to audio and video, using electrodes placed on a student’s face and head. The test examines changes in heart rate, skin conductance or sweat, as well as eye and facial movements.

Powers said the test differentiates between responses that are spontaneous and not spontaneous.

Part of the study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to record differences in the way men and women react to video clips.

The experiment has students guess if a person in the video is looking at something familiar, scenic, unpleasant or unusual.

Powers said women were more responsive to unpleasant clips and showed more brain activity in the areas associated with empathy for pain and distress.

While Wang examines brain responses to media clips, Powers focuses on how the brain processes interpersonal communication.

The researchers look “at how you control the content of the message, positive or negative, for making the content more persuasive and effective,” Wang said.

Some of the students participated as volunteers, while others were paid.

“Sometimes people interested in the research volunteer, but we will also be paying participants so that we can get people that would not otherwise come in,” Powers said.

Electrodes are used as part of EEG/ERP, the study of electrophysiology, to measure the firing of brain neurons, causing waves to fluctuate up and down on computers in a separate room.

The EEG/ERP study does not provide detailed information about where in the brain responses differ from each other, it does provide a precise record of when responses differ during stages of information processing.

Participants sit in leather reclining chairs while electrodes monitor their responses to video, audio and still images on a high-definition television screen.

The responses are monitored on a computer screen in a separate room.

“One of the objectives of this research is to reveal the underlying mechanisms of attention, emotion, attitudes, decision-making and other processes that can be used to improve communication strategies,” Powers said.

Jatin Srivastava, a doctoral student in communication at OSU, is studying the responses of students who multi-task while viewing media, such as using a cell phone and watching television at the same time.

“It looks at how deeply [technology] has it penetrated into the younger generation,” Srivastava said. “When people multi-task, the results change.”