University of Pecs.
Eotvos Lorand University.
Emotion. 2019 Jun;19(4):726-732. doi: 10.1037/emo0000478. Epub 2018 Sep 6.
Organisms have to be able to detect threats in order to activate their defensive mechanisms. Previous research has suggested that evolutionary old stimuli have an advantage during visual processing. Recent evidence indicates that negative emotional stimuli have a greater effect on the cognitive system regardless of evolutionary relevance. We suggest that the arousal level of the stimuli could account for these mixed results. We investigated how visual processing is influenced by evolutionary relevant and modern threatening emotional stimuli. Furthermore, we manipulated the level of arousal (medium, high) of the threatening cues. Participants performed an odd-one-out visual search task, in which the target was always a threatening picture. Our results showed that participants detected modern threatening targets faster than they did evolutionary relevant ones. However, the interaction with arousal revealed that this was only true at high-arousal level; there was no difference between evolutionary relevant and modern threatening targets when presented at medium-arousal level. To our knowledge, to date this is one of the first studies to show the importance of the arousal level of stimuli. On the basis of our findings, we suggest that increasing arousal level only heightens visual search performance with modern threatening cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
生物必须能够察觉威胁，才能激活其防御机制。先前的研究表明，进化古老的刺激在视觉处理过程中有优势。最近的证据表明，无论与进化的相关性如何，负面情绪刺激对认知系统的影响更大。我们认为，刺激的唤醒水平可以解释这些混合的结果。我们研究了视觉处理如何受到与进化相关和现代威胁性情绪刺激的影响。此外，我们还操纵了威胁线索的唤醒水平（中、高）。参与者执行了一项异类视觉搜索任务，其中目标始终是一张威胁性的图片。我们的结果表明，参与者检测到现代威胁性目标的速度比检测到进化相关目标的速度快。然而，与唤醒水平的相互作用表明，这仅在高唤醒水平下才是正确的；当以中唤醒水平呈现时，进化相关和现代威胁性目标之间没有区别。据我们所知，到目前为止，这是首次研究表明刺激唤醒水平的重要性的研究之一。基于我们的发现，我们认为，只有在提高现代威胁性线索的唤醒水平时，才能提高视觉搜索性能。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。
