Bendall Robert C A, Thompson Catherine
Directorate of Psychology and Public Health, School of Health Sciences, University of Salford Salford, UK.
Front Psychol. 2015 Oct 20;6:1592. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01592. eCollection 2015.
Past research provides conflicting findings regarding the influence of emotion on visual attention. Early studies suggested a broadening of attentional resources in relation to positive mood. However, more recent evidence indicates that positive emotions may not have a beneficial impact on attention, and that the relationship between emotion and attention may be mitigated by factors such as task demand or stimulus valence. The current study explored the effect of emotion on attention using the change detection flicker paradigm. Participants were induced into positive, neutral, and negative mood states and then completed a change detection task. A series of neutral scenes were presented and participants had to identify the location of a disappearing item in each scene. The change was made to the center or the periphery of each scene and it was predicted that peripheral changes would be detected quicker in the positive mood condition and slower in the negative mood condition, compared to the neutral condition. In contrast to previous findings emotion had no influence on attention and whilst central changes were detected faster than peripheral changes, change blindness was not affected by mood. The findings suggest that the relationship between emotion and visual attention is influenced by the characteristics of a task, and any beneficial impact of positive emotion may be related to processing style rather than a "broadening" of attentional resources.
过去的研究在情绪对视觉注意力的影响方面得出了相互矛盾的结果。早期研究表明，与积极情绪相关的注意力资源会得到拓展。然而，最近的证据表明，积极情绪可能对注意力没有有益影响，而且情绪与注意力之间的关系可能会受到任务需求或刺激效价等因素的影响。本研究使用变化检测闪烁范式探究了情绪对注意力的影响。参与者被诱导进入积极、中性和消极情绪状态，然后完成一项变化检测任务。呈现一系列中性场景，参与者必须识别每个场景中消失物品的位置。变化发生在每个场景的中心或边缘，预计与中性条件相比，在积极情绪条件下，边缘变化会被更快检测到，而在消极情绪条件下则会更慢。与之前的研究结果相反，情绪对注意力没有影响，虽然中心变化比边缘变化被检测得更快，但变化盲视不受情绪影响。研究结果表明，情绪与视觉注意力之间的关系受任务特征的影响，积极情绪的任何有益影响可能与加工方式有关，而不是注意力资源的“拓展”。
