Most Steven B, Chun Marvin M, Widders David M, Zald David H
Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2005 Aug;12(4):654-61. doi: 10.3758/bf03196754.
Emotional stimuli often attract attention, but at what cost to the processing of other stimuli? Given the potential costs, to what degree can people override emotion-based attentional biases? In Experiment 1, participants searched for a single target within a rapid serial visual presentation of pictures; an irrelevant, emotionally negative or neutral picture preceded the target by either two or eight items. At the shorter lag, negative pictures spontaneously induced greater deficits in target processing than neutral pictures did. Thus, attentional biases to emotional information induced a temporary inability to process stimuli that people actively sought. Experiment 2 revealed that participants could reduce this effect through attentional strategy, but that the extent of this reduction was related to their level of the personality trait harm avoidance. Participants lower in harm avoidance were able to reduce emotion-induced blindness under conditions designed to facilitate the ignoring of the emotional stimuli. Those higher in harm avoidance were unable to do so.
情绪刺激常常会吸引注意力，但这对其他刺激的处理会造成怎样的代价呢？考虑到潜在的代价，人们在多大程度上能够克服基于情绪的注意偏差呢？在实验1中，参与者在一系列快速呈现的图片中搜索单个目标；一张无关的、情绪消极或中性的图片在目标出现前2个或8个位置呈现。在较短的延迟条件下，消极图片比中性图片在目标处理上自发地引发了更大的缺陷。因此，对情绪信息的注意偏差导致人们暂时无法处理他们积极寻找的刺激。实验2表明，参与者可以通过注意策略减少这种影响，但这种减少的程度与他们的人格特质“避免伤害”水平有关。在旨在促进忽略情绪刺激的条件下，“避免伤害”水平较低的参与者能够减少情绪诱发的盲目性。而“避免伤害”水平较高的参与者则无法做到。
