The Influence Of Positive Mood On The Inhibition Of Distraction Information In Selective Attention

Positive mood broadens the scope of selective attention by relaxing inhibitory control processes that filter out irrelevant information, and helps establish a "loose, flexible" cognitive processing mode. Positive mood impairs inhibitory processes of emotional information significantly. Studies of visual selective attention have demonstrated that individuals in positive mood are more easily affected by the distracting goal-irrelevant information. In those studies, two separate systems of inhibitory mechanism have been adopted, namely, identity inhibition and location inhibition, which have different visual pathways. A negative priming paradigm has also been used to explore distraction inhibition. Thus a question is put forward that whether the effect of mood induction on identity inhibition will be different from that on location inhibition. Based on mood induction, this study adopts the negative priming paradigm to investigate the effect of positive mood on inhibition of distraction from the two types of inhibitory processes. Furthermore, by using the improved negative affective priming paradigm, the study further tests the effect of positive mood on individual inhibitory process of emotional information made by foreign scholars.In this study, by way of advertisement, ordinary full-time college students are recruited as subjects. By using negative priming paradigm, the study tries to examine the effect of positive mood on the inhibition mechanism of selective attention through 3 behavioral experiments. In Experiment 1, participants are randomly divided into 3 groups, including the positive mood induction group, the negative mood induction group and the neutral group. Moods are induced by different video clips. Participants in each group complete a localization task that comprises two kinds of experimental condition. In this task, the participants respond to the target's location. The aim of this experiment is to test the effect of positive mood on location inhibition. In Experiment 2, participants are also randomly assigned to three mood induction groups. Moods are induced by the emotional pictures from Chinese Affective Picture System (CAPS). Participants in each group complete an identification task that comprises two kinds of experimental condition. In this task, the participants respond to the target's identity. The aim of Experiment 2 is to test the effect of positive mood on identity inhibition. In Experiment 3, participants are also randomly assigned to three mood induction groups. Moods are also induced by the emotional pictures from CAPS. Participants in each group complete a negative affective priming task that comprises three kinds of experimental condition and two kinds of emotional valence. In this task, the participants respond to the target's emotional valence. The aim of Experiment 3 is to test the effect of positive mood on inhibition process of emotional information.The results from the three experiments revealed that, compared with the neutral mood condition, inhibitory functions for localization and identification information are unaffected by negative mood. However, in positive mood induction group, location negative priming effect was smaller than in neutral mood condition and in negative mood condition; No identity negative priming effect and negative affective priming are found. In other words, the inhibitory process of identification information and emotional information are significantly impaired, while a reduction of inhibitory capacity towards localization information is presented.It can be concluded that positive mood brings to localization inhibition reduction and identification inhibition (including inhibition for emotional information) deficit. The loosening inhibitory control processes may make more information access to the scope of attention, facilitate performance on tasks, and foster creative and flexible thinking.