Department of Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Cogn Emot. 2013;27(3):385-400. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2012.712949. Epub 2012 Aug 16.
In two experiments, we examined the extent to which automatic attentional biases, as indexed by performance in the emotional Stroop task (Experiment 1) and the dot-probe task (Experiment 2), are modulated by feature-specific attention allocation. In both experiments, participants were encouraged to attend to either affective stimulus information (affective groups) or non-affective semantic stimulus information (non-affective groups). In both experiments, an attentional bias towards negative stimuli was found in the affective groups but not in the non-affective groups. In Experiment 1, we also observed an attentional bias towards non-affective semantic stimulus information in the non-affective group but not in the affective groups. We argue that these effects are due to a modulation of automatic stimulus processing by feature-specific attention allocation. Our data demonstrate that automatic attentional biases toward negative stimuli are not unconditional but instead depend on the relevance of negative information. Moreover, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that attention is automatically biased towards non-affective stimulus dimensions that are currently relevant.
在两项实验中，我们考察了自动注意偏向（以情绪斯特鲁普任务[实验 1]和点探测任务[实验 2]中的表现为指标）在多大程度上受到特征特异性注意分配的调节。在这两个实验中，参与者被鼓励关注情感刺激信息（情感组）或非情感语义刺激信息（非情感组）。在两个实验中，情感组中都发现了对负性刺激的注意偏向，但非情感组中没有。在实验 1 中，我们还观察到非情感组中对非情感语义刺激信息的注意偏向，但在情感组中没有。我们认为这些效应是由于特征特异性注意分配对自动刺激处理的调节。我们的数据表明，对负性刺激的自动注意偏向不是无条件的，而是取决于负性信息的相关性。此外，实验 1 的结果表明，注意力会自动偏向当前相关的非情感刺激维度。
