Threat But Not Arousal Narrows Attention: Evidence from Pupil Dilation and Saccade Control

Henk Van Steenbergen,Guido P H Band,Bernhard Hommel

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00281

Abstract

It has been shown that negative affect causes attentional narrowing. According to Easterbrook’s (1959) influential hypothesis this effect is driven by the withdrawal motivation inherent to negative emotions and might be related to increases in arousal. We investigated whether valence-unspecific increases in physiological arousal, as measured by pupil dilation, could account for attentional narrowing effects in a cognitive control task. Following the presentation of a negative, positive, or neutral picture, participants performed a saccade task with a pro-saccade versus an anti-saccade instruction. The reaction time difference between pro- and anti-saccades was used to index attentional selectivity, and while pupil diameter was used as an index of physiological arousal. Pupil dilation was observed for both negative and positive pictures, which indicates increased physiological arousal. However, increased attentional selectivity was only observed following negative pictures. Our data show that motivational intensity effects on attentional narrowing can occur independently of physiological arousal effects.

Highlights

In order to cope with threatening events, organisms often recruit extra resources
It remains to be shown whether the emotional modulation of the selective attention reflects non-specific arousal that can vary orthogonally to the valence of the present affective state or whether it is specific to negative, potentially threatening events
The aim of our study was to test whether attentional narrowing is due to general arousal or is selectively triggered by negative affective events

Summary

Introduction

In order to cope with threatening events, organisms often recruit extra resources. Regarding cognitive resources, there is evidence that affectively negative stimuli immediately prioritize the perceptual processing (Öhman et al, 2001) and recall (Christianson, 1992) of related information at the cost of other processes (Bocanegra and Zeelenberg, 2009; Pessoa, 2009), and it has been argued that these effects are mediated by the organism’s current state of arousal (Schimmack, 2005). Threatening events and stress have been demonstrated to narrow attention (Cohen, 1980; Chajut and Algom, 2003; Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010a; for a discussion of opposite effects in trait anxiety, see Pacheco-Unguetti et al, 2010), it is not clear whether these observations are due to non-specific arousal or the activation of affect-specific emotional/motivational systems (Bradley, 2000). Whether arousal can be conceived of as a unitary construct has been questioned (Lacey, 1967; Neiss, 1988, 1990) and it is not entirely clear how motivational intensity and arousal are conceptually related (cf Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010b) It remains to be shown whether the emotional modulation of the selective attention reflects non-specific arousal that can vary orthogonally to the valence of the present affective state or whether it is specific to negative, potentially threatening events

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