Abstract
Positive affect has been associated with improvement in performance in various attentional domains. Negative affect has been associated with narrowing of attention and lowering of performance in attentional tasks. Previous behavioral studies have put forth the diffuse mental state idea as the mechanism of these effects, where attentional resources are more evenly distributed during positive affect and more focused during negative affect. To explore neural correlates of this mechanism, a two-stream rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm with centrally presented, overlapping streams was used. Participants attended one of the streams at a time and steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEP) in response to the attended and unattended streams were recorded in a positive, negative or neutral affect state. We predicted that in the positive affect condition, ssVEP responses to the attended and the unattended stream would be more alike than in a neutral condition. In the negative affect condition, as an expression of a less diffuse mental state, ssVEP responses were predicted to be more dissimilar. Self-assessments confirmed the effectiveness of the emotional manipulation. In the negative affect condition power was found to be higher than in the neutral condition. However, the modulations in the ssVEP did not reflect the predicted neural correlate of the diffuse mental state mechanism. Thus, the results provide evidence for negative affect modulating attention but suggest that the diffuse mental state is not a spatially oriented phenomenon.
Highlights
Human attention has been shown to be flexible within a range of capacity
Previous behavioral studies have put forth the diffuse mental state idea as the mechanism of these effects, where attentional resources are more evenly distributed during positive affect and more focused during negative affect
A significant effect of the emotional manipulation found in both groups confirmed its effectiveness: the positive group had a significantly lower mean valence during the emotion conditions than during the neutral conditions [t(17) = −2.13, Table 1 | SAM Scores for both groups in both affect conditions
Summary
Human attention has been shown to be flexible within a range of capacity This has been explored in studies of temporal attention, in which mood changes are induced, or secondary working memory tasks introduced while participants perform a temporal attention task (Dreisbach and Goschke, 2004; Olivers and Nieuwenhuis, 2005, 2006). Olivers and Nieuwenhuis were the first to suggest that the mechanism by which this enhancement may work is that of a “diffuse mental state.” They explain this with respect to what they coined the “overinvestment hypothesis” in which they suggest that if too much attentional resource is invested in a task, distractors are likely to be processed and this may in turn impede target detection. Though they do not offer a detailed definition of the term “diffuse,” they indicate that this state is characterized by a more even distribution of attentional resources
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