Abstract
BackgroundExperimental research has shown that emotional stimuli can either enhance or impair attentional performance. However, the relative effects of specific emotional stimuli and the specific time course of these differential effects are unclear.Methodology/Principal FindingsIn the present study, participants (n = 50) searched for a single target within a rapid serial visual presentation of images. Irrelevant fear, disgust, erotic or neutral images preceded the target by two, four, six, or eight items. At lag 2, erotic images induced the greatest deficits in subsequent target processing compared to other images, consistent with a large emotional attentional blink. Fear and disgust images also produced a larger attentional blinks at lag 2 than neutral images. Erotic, fear, and disgust images continued to induce greater deficits than neutral images at lag 4 and 6. However, target processing deficits induced by erotic, fear, and disgust images at intermediate lags (lag 4 and 6) did not consistently differ from each other. In contrast to performance at lag 2, 4, and 6, enhancement in target processing for emotional stimuli was observed in comparison to neutral stimuli at lag 8.Conclusions/SignificanceThese findings suggest that task-irrelevant emotion information, particularly erotica, impairs intentional allocation of attention at early temporal stages, but at later temporal stages, emotional stimuli can have an enhancing effect on directed attention. These data suggest that the effects of emotional stimuli on attention can be both positive and negative depending upon temporal factors.
Highlights
Attention’s inextricable link to emotion is implied, but not necessarily stated in cognitive theories of emotion [1]
Bocanegra and Zeelenberg [2] manipulated the temporal distance between emotional cues and a subsequent neutral target by varying cuetarget inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs)
Disgust, and neutral pictures were partially drawn from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; [12]) and were supplemented with similar pictures found from publicly available sources
Summary
Attention’s inextricable link to emotion is implied, but not necessarily stated in cognitive theories of emotion [1]. In studies presenting a fearful face followed by a pause sufficient to allow disengagement of attention, improvements in perception (i.e. contrast sensitivity; [4]) and search efficiency [5] have been observed. These findings follow an evolutionary logic, as ‘emotion induced blindness’ may be adaptive in forcing us to register important stimuli, but would quickly become a liability if attention could not be reallocated towards other relevant information necessary for the execution of an appropriate response. The relative effects of specific emotional stimuli and the specific time course of these differential effects are unclear
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