Emotional Modulation of the Attentional Blink Is Awareness-Dependent

Wenli Qian,Ke Zhou,Qianli Meng,Lin Chen,Andreas Keil

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046394

Abstract

It is well known that emotion can modulate attentional processes. Previous studies have shown that even under restricted awareness, emotional facial expressions (especially threat-related) can guide the direction of spatial attention. However, it remains unclear whether emotional facial expressions under restricted awareness can affect temporal attention. To address this issue, we used a modified attentional blink (AB) paradigm in which masked (Experiment 1) or unmasked (Experiment 2) emotional faces (fearful or neutral) were presented before the AB sequence. We found that, in comparison with neutral faces, masked fearful faces significantly decreased the AB magnitude (Experiment 1), whereas unmasked fearful faces significantly increased the AB magnitude (Experiment 2). These results indicate that effects of emotional expression on the AB are modulated by the level of awareness.

Highlights

Emotional facial expressions are considered important for emotional response and social communication, and are important in guiding human motivation [1]
Previous studies have revealed that emotional faces, especially threat-related facial stimuli, even under restricted awareness, can guide and affect the direction of spatial attention [10,12]
It remains unknown whether emotional faces presented under restricted awareness can affect temporal attention

Summary

Introduction

Emotional facial expressions are considered important for emotional response and social communication, and are important in guiding human motivation [1]. Given the special status of the processing of emotional facial expressions, a larger number of studies have investigated the interaction between emotion and attention. These studies revealed a significant emotional modulation of attentional processing. Studies on the emotional modulation of spatial attention have shown that spatial cueing by emotional stimuli can guide the direction of spatial attention [4,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] This emotional modulation of spatial attention exists even when threat-related faces are presented under restricted awareness. In a dot-probe task, Mogg and Bradley (1999) found that angry faces presented under restricted awareness could guide preferential attention to their location [10]

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Conclusion