Attention shortage resistance of negative stimuli in an implicit emotional task

Abstract

Considerable evidence from behavioral studies has indicated that people tend to pay attention to negative stimuli preferentially. The attentional bias can occur rapidly and automatically. In the current study, a ‘cue-target’ paradigm was utilized to manipulate the attention allocation. Seventeen healthy undergraduates participated in the experiment. The stimuli were emotional pictures (positive, neutral and negative), which were upper and lower adjacent patchworks of a normal scene and its inverted copy. The subjects should judge whether the normal scene (compared with the inverted scene) was located in the upper or lower part of the whole patchwork. We used this implicit emotional task to avoid the task relevance effect. It was found that the amplitude of P2 waves was enlarged by the negative pictures and there was a significant interaction between the cue effect and the emotional valence. We can conclude that the negative information exerts an attentional bias effect in the emotional perception, and that the negative contents suffer less in the insufficient attention condition compared with the positive and the neutral conditions.