Wegbreit Ezra, Franconeri Steven, Beeman Mark
a Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior , Brown University Alpert Medical School , Providence , RI , USA.
Cogn Emot. 2015;29(4):668-77. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2014.922933. Epub 2014 Jun 5.
Spatial attention can operate like a spotlight whose scope can vary depending on task demands. Emotional states contribute to the spatial extent of attentional selection, with the spotlight focused more narrowly during anxious moods and more broadly during happy moods. In addition to visual space, attention can also operate over features, and we show here that mood states may also influence attentional scope in feature space. After anxious or happy mood inductions, participants focused their attention to identify a central target while ignoring flanking items. Flankers were sometimes coloured differently than targets, so focusing attention on target colour should lead to relatively less interference. Compared to happy and neutral moods, when anxious, participants showed reduced interference when colour isolated targets from flankers, but showed more interference when flankers and targets were the same colour. This pattern reveals that the anxious mood caused these individuals to attend to the irrelevant feature in both cases, regardless of its benefit or detriment. In contrast, participants showed no effect of colour on interference when happy, suggesting that positive mood did not influence attention in feature space. These mood effects on feature-based attention provide a theoretical bridge between previous findings concerning spatial and conceptual attention.
空间注意力的运作方式类似于一个聚光灯，其范围会根据任务需求而变化。情绪状态会影响注意力选择的空间范围，在焦虑情绪下聚光灯聚焦范围更窄，而在快乐情绪下则更宽泛。除了视觉空间，注意力也可以作用于特征，我们在此表明情绪状态也可能影响特征空间中的注意力范围。在诱发焦虑或快乐情绪后，参与者集中注意力识别中央目标，同时忽略侧翼项目。侧翼项目有时与目标颜色不同，因此将注意力集中在目标颜色上应该会导致相对较少的干扰。与快乐和中性情绪相比，焦虑时参与者在颜色将目标与侧翼项目区分开时干扰减少，但在侧翼项目和目标颜色相同时干扰增加。这种模式表明，焦虑情绪使这些个体在两种情况下都关注了无关特征，无论其有益还是有害。相比之下，快乐时参与者的干扰不受颜色影响，这表明积极情绪不会影响特征空间中的注意力。这些情绪对基于特征的注意力的影响在先前关于空间和概念注意力的研究结果之间架起了一座理论桥梁。
