Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e60548. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060548. Epub 2013 Mar 27.
Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle this controversy, the current study examined whether and to what degrees attention modulated processing of emotion using a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) paradigm. We conducted two flanker experiments using color scale faces in neutral expressions or gray scale faces in emotional expressions. We found SRC effects for all three dimensions (color, gender, and emotion) and SRC effects were larger when the conflicts were task relevant than when they were task irrelevant, suggesting that conflict processing of emotion was modulated by attention, similar to those of color and face identity (gender). However, task modulation on color SRC effect was significantly greater than that on gender or emotion SRC effect, indicating that processing of salient information was modulated by attention to a lesser degree than processing of non-emotional stimuli. We proposed that emotion processing can be influenced by attentional control, but at the same time salience of emotional information may bias toward bottom-up processing, rendering less top-down modulation than that on non-emotional stimuli.
情绪处理已被证明通过偏向注意力资源的分配而获得优先级。厌恶的图像或恐惧的表情会被快速自动地处理。许多现有研究结果表明，情绪信息的处理是前注意的，在很大程度上不受注意力控制。其他研究则认为，注意力控制了情绪的处理。为了解决这一争议，本研究使用刺激-反应兼容性（SRC）范式，考察了注意力是否以及在多大程度上调节了情绪的处理。我们使用中性表情的彩色量表面孔或情绪表情的灰度量表面孔进行了两项侧翼实验。我们发现所有三个维度（颜色、性别和情绪）都存在 SRC 效应，并且当冲突与任务相关时，SRC 效应比任务不相关时更大，这表明情绪的冲突处理受到注意力的调节，类似于颜色和面孔身份（性别）的调节。然而，对颜色 SRC 效应的任务调节明显大于对性别或情绪 SRC 效应的调节，这表明对显著信息的处理受到注意力的调节程度小于对非情绪刺激的调节。我们提出，情绪处理可以受到注意力控制的影响，但同时情绪信息的显著性可能偏向于自下而上的处理，因此对情绪刺激的自上而下的调节程度小于对非情绪刺激的调节。
