Attention and Emotion

Emotional Stimuli and Varieties of Attention

Attention refers to a family of mechanisms that—although they converge in the service of stimulus selection—differ from each other in important ways; orienting of attention to spatial locations is not the same as selectively attending to some features of a stimulus while ignoring other features, and neither of these processes is necessarily identical with the attention mechanisms involved in bringing information to awareness. Although evidence does suggest dissociations between these types of attention, each of them appears to be strongly influenced by emotion; emotional information seems to “capture” and hold various aspects of attention more robustly than does non-emotional information. For example, when it comes to attending to some features of a stimulus over others, emotional Stroop experiments have shown how difficult it is for people to ignore emotional aspects of a stimulus even when such aspects are task-irrelevant. In a typical version of this task, participants try to name as quickly as they can the colors in which words or monochrome pictures appear (or are printed). Frequently, they are slower to do so when the words and pictures happen to have strong emotional significance, suggesting that people had difficulty tuning out the task-irrelevant emotional information to focus only on the relevant color information.

A large portion of research on attention-emotion interactions has focused on the orienting of spatial attention. One procedure commonly used to tap into spatial orienting is the dot-probe task, where pairs of words or faces are typically presented on a computer screen and are followed quickly by a dot at one of the word/face locations; [Page 117]participants are required to respond as soon as they detect the dot, and they tend to be faster when it appears at the former location of an emotional word or face than of a neutral one, suggesting that attention had already oriented to the emotional stimulus at that location (similar effects have been found even when people were not aware of the emotional stimulus). Similarly, in a cueing task—another measure of spatial orienting of attention—participants make speeded responses to targets, which could appear at one of at least two locations. On some trials, a cue appears before the target at one of the potential target locations, but the location of the cue does not predict the actual location of the subsequent target. In standard, non-emotional versions of this task, people tend to be slower to respond to the target when it appears away from the cue (an “invalid” cue) than when it appears at the same location as the cue (a “valid” cue), indicating that they had reflexively oriented to the cue despite knowing that doing so would not aid their performance. In emotional versions of this task, the cues themselves can be emotional or neutral stimuli (e.g., words or faces), and when they are emotional, their effects on spatial orienting are amplified. Notably, the emotional Stroop, the dot-probe, and various cueing experiments have revealed general biases to attend to emotional stimuli and have shown that such biases tend to be stronger among clinical and highly anxious individuals.

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