University of Southern California, Davis School of Gerontology,Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0191, USA.
Emotion. 2012 Dec;12(6):1367-72. doi: 10.1037/a0027860. Epub 2012 May 28.
Evidence from 2 experiments suggests that negative arousal increases biases in attention that result from differences in visual salience. Participants were exposed to negative arousing or neutral sounds before briefly viewing an array of letters. They reported as many of the letters as they could, and attention was biased to certain letters by increasing salience through visual contrast. Regardless of the type of sound heard, participants were more likely to recall high-salience letters than low-salience letters. However, on arousing trials recall of high-salience letters increased, while recall of low-salience letters did not. These findings indicate that negative emotional arousal increases the selectivity of attention, and provides evidence for arousal-biased competition theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011), which predicts that emotional arousal enhances representations of stimuli that have priority.
两项实验的证据表明，负性唤醒会增加由于视觉显著性差异而导致的注意偏差。参与者在短暂观察一系列字母之前，会接触到负性唤醒或中性声音。他们尽可能多地报告字母，并且通过视觉对比增加显著性，使注意力偏向某些字母。无论听到哪种类型的声音，参与者都更有可能回忆起高显著性字母，而不是低显著性字母。然而，在唤醒试验中，高显著性字母的回忆增加了，而低显著性字母的回忆则没有增加。这些发现表明，负性情绪唤醒增加了注意力的选择性，并为唤醒偏见竞争理论（Mather & Sutherland, 2011）提供了证据，该理论预测情绪唤醒会增强具有优先权的刺激的表示。
