The effect of emotional arousal on visual attentional performance: a systematic review.

Although the arousal elicited by emotional stimuli, similarly to valence, is an integrative part of emotion theories, previous studies and reviews mostly focused on the valence of a stimulus and rarely investigated the role of arousal. Here, I systematically searched for articles that used visual attentional paradigms, manipulated emotional arousal by auditory or visual, task-relevant or task-irrelevant stimuli, measured behavioral responses, ocular behavior, or neural correlates. I found that task-relevant arousing stimuli draw and hold attention regardless of the modality. In contrast, task-irrelevant arousing stimuli impaired task performance. However, when the emotional content precedes the task or it is presented for a longer duration, arousal increased performance. Future directions on how research could address the remaining questions are discussed.