School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington.
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh.
Emotion. 2018 Feb;18(1):26-38. doi: 10.1037/emo0000337. Epub 2017 Jun 12.
Attending to emotional stimuli is often beneficial, because they provide important social and environmental cues. Sometimes, however, current goals require that we ignore them. To what extent can we control emotional distraction? Here we show that the ability to ignore emotional distractions depends on the type of cognitive control that is engaged. Participants completed a simple perceptual task at fixation while irrelevant images appeared peripherally. In 2 experiments, we manipulated the proportion of trials in which images appeared, to encourage use of either reactive control (rare distractors) or proactive control (frequent distractors). Under reactive control, both negative and positive images were more distracting than neutral images, even though they were irrelevant and appeared in unattended locations. However, under proactive control, distraction by both emotional and neutral images was eliminated. Proactive control was triggered by the meaning, and not the location, of distracting images. Our findings argue against simple bottom-up or top-down explanations of emotional distraction, and instead show how the flexible use of cognitive control supports adaptive processing of emotional distractors. (PsycINFO Database Record
关注情绪刺激通常是有益的，因为它们提供了重要的社会和环境线索。然而，有时当前的目标要求我们忽略它们。我们在多大程度上可以控制情绪干扰？在这里，我们表明，忽略情绪干扰的能力取决于所涉及的认知控制类型。参与者在固定点完成简单的感知任务，同时无关的图像出现在周边。在 2 个实验中，我们操纵了图像出现的试验比例，以鼓励使用反应性控制（罕见的干扰物）或前摄控制（频繁的干扰物）。在反应性控制下，负性和正性图像比中性图像更具干扰性，尽管它们是无关的，出现在未被注意的位置。然而，在前摄控制下，情绪和中性图像的干扰都被消除了。前摄控制是由干扰图像的意义而不是位置触发的。我们的发现反对简单的自上而下或自下而上的情绪干扰解释，而是表明认知控制的灵活使用如何支持对情绪干扰物的适应性处理。
