The Effect Of Implicit Emotion On Attentional Scope Under Different Priming Conditions

An abundance of research findings showed that positive emotions have the same influence on cognition and attention that positive affect and negative affect generate a broadened or narrowed attentional focus, respectively. The broaden-and-build model of positive emotions suggests that positive emotions broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire, thereby promoting the expansion of attention, encouraging people behavior more flexibly at a higher level, In turn, these broadened thought-action repertoires can have the often incidental effect of building an individual’s personal resources. While affect-as-information model argues that affect as a kind of information modulate individuals’ processing strategies, affective cues from moods and emotions provide experiential information about the value of whatever thoughts and responses happen to be accessible at the moment, affect tunes the perceptual and conceptual systems to focus either broadly or narrowly.Inspired by the notion that was recently emerged, implicit emotion is posited as a kind of person’s unconscious awareness of emotions or feelings, that should not bring any changes to individuals’perceptual and conceptual systems. Then, to explore whether exists a link between implicit emotion and attentional scope or not, can provide a solution for abovementioned theoretical divergence. Thus, this present research focused on the following questions:Does there actually exist any link between implicit emotion and attentional scope, what exactly is it? Does this link consistent or inconsistent with the link between positive affect and attentional scope? Under the different attentional priming condition, does the attentional scope turning also occur in response to the implicit positive emotion in the same way? In this research, ordinary full-time college students were recruited as subjects. Following the way that was used in Winkielman and Berridge’s experiments(2005), the research investigated the link between implicit emotion and attentional scope by testing the influence of subliminally presented happy versus angry faces from Chinese Facial Affective Picture System on the Flanker task through two behavioral experiments. Study1aimed to test the effect of different implicit emotion state(positive, negative&neutral) on the attentional scope turning, while study2aimed to explore whether the different attentional priming condition would lead to a change in the effect of implicit positive emotion on attentional scope or not. These two studies found that under implicit positive emotion state, individuals’ responses to the central target letter slower than both implicit negative and neutral emotion states, revealed a broadened attentional focus tendency; contrary to it, under implicit negative emotion state individuals’responses more faster than the other two states, revealed a narrowed attentional focus tendency. Also found that the link between implicit positive emotion and attentional scope was actually flexible rather than fixed, when a global focus was dominant, implicit positive emotion broadened attentional scope, when a local focus was dominant, implicit positive emotion narrowed attentional scope, revealed a kind of flexibility. Consistent with positive affect and negative affect generate a broadened or narrowed attentional focus, respectively, the current research showed that there actually existed a link between implicit emotion and attentional scope, provides evidence for the broaden-and-build model of positive emotions.