Institute of Psychology, University of Pecs.
Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University.
Emotion. 2023 Sep;23(6):1606-1617. doi: 10.1037/emo0001189. Epub 2022 Nov 10.
Emotionally salient objects activate the survival circuits of the brain and are given priority in cognitive processing, even at the cost of inhibiting ongoing activities. These circuits arouse and prepare the organism to take swift action when needed. Previous studies have suggested, however, that not all emotional dimensions are equally prioritized. Threatening stimuli may have greater prominence than other emotional categories. Thus, we sought to compare the effects that stimuli of varying emotions would have on orienting and executive attentional processing. We performed two experiments to broaden our understanding of the attentional consequences of threats through the monitoring of participants' eye movements. Participants were exposed to emotionally charged (threatening, nonthreatening negative, positive) and neutral pictures as task-irrelevant distractors while performing a primary visual search task (under conditions of varying cognitive load). Behavioural results showed that participants found the first target number more slowly when the distractor image was threatening, but overall task completion times were actually speeded in this condition (relative to other valences). Further, participants fixated on threatening distractor images earlier and observed them longer than other valences. Results were more pronounced when the primary task was harder. These biases were not evident for positive and nonthreatening images, presumably because participants were able to ignore them, providing further support to the contention that threatening stimuli hold greater prominence than other emotional categories. Together, our results are in line with previous studies suggesting that the processing of threatening stimuli is speeded, potentially because of differences in the brain circuits involved. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
情绪相关的物体能激活大脑的生存回路，并在认知加工中优先处理，即使这需要抑制正在进行的活动。这些回路会唤起并准备好机体在需要时迅速采取行动。然而，先前的研究表明，并非所有的情绪维度都被同等优先处理。威胁性刺激可能比其他情绪类别更突出。因此，我们试图比较不同情绪刺激对定向和执行注意加工的影响。我们进行了两项实验，通过监测参与者的眼球运动，来拓宽我们对威胁所产生的注意力后果的理解。参与者在执行主要视觉搜索任务（在不同认知负荷条件下）时，将情绪激动（威胁性、非威胁性负性、正性）和中性图片作为无关的分心物进行暴露。行为结果表明，当干扰图像具有威胁性时，参与者找到第一个目标的速度会变慢，但在这种情况下（相对于其他效价），整体任务完成时间实际上加快了。此外，参与者比其他效价更早地注视威胁性干扰图像，并观察它们的时间更长。当主要任务更难时，结果更为明显。对于正性和非威胁性图像，这些偏差并不明显，这可能是因为参与者能够忽略它们，进一步支持了这样的观点，即威胁性刺激比其他情绪类别更突出。总之，我们的结果与先前的研究一致，表明威胁性刺激的处理速度加快，这可能是由于涉及的大脑回路存在差异。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。
