The Effects Of Short Film Emotional Priming On College Students’ Attentional Bias

The relationship between emotion and cognition has been one of an important research issues in the field of psychology. An attentional bias will happen when the individual’s cognition process interfered by the irrelevant emotional information. Movies, television, advertising and computer video and other audio-visual media always affect people anywhere in social life and work place. Emotion is most susceptible to video material, this effect may affect people’s attention. In order to investigate the effects of emotion priming on attention bias, this study use short film to prime the emotion and adopt dot-probe paradigm to examine the attention bias. The effects may be different between normal and high anxiety individuals. It is meaningful to explore the effects of emotion priming on attentional bias in college students’ emotion, it is helpful for them emotion regulation and intervention. That could also guide college students to think positively, so as to better adapt to social life, work and learning needs.On the basis of previous studies, in this study we use the short film to prime the emotion of participants, and adopt dot-probe paradigm to investigate whether different priming conditions have different influences on attentional bias between normal and high anxiety groups. In the first experiment, we chosen normal college students as subjects and adopted mixed experimental design, that is 3(groups:control, positive priming and negative priming) ×2(matched emotional type: positive-neural and negative-neural) ×2(consistency: consistent and inconsistent). In the second experiment, we adopted mixed experimental design to get subjects’ effective priming through watching a positive short film. That is 2(groups:normal and high anxiety) ×2(matched emotional type: positive-neural and negative-neural)×2(consistency: consistent and inconsistent). In the third experiment, we adopted mixed experimental design to get subjects’ effective priming through watching a negative short film. 2(groups:normal, high anxiety) ×2(matched emotional type: positive-neural and negative-neural) × 2(consistency: consistent and inconsistent).The results showed that:1. Normal individuals who are under no priming condition haven’t shown attentional bias towards positive faces nor negative faces. It indicates that normal people haven’t shown an attentional bias to emotional faces without short affective film priming.2. Normal individuals who are under positive priming condition have shown significant differences in the reactions between positive faces and negative faces, and have shown an attentional bias on positive faces. High anxiety individuals have shown significant differences in the reaction times between positive and negative faces, and have shown an attentional bias on negative faces.3. Normal individuals and high anxiety individuals who are under negative priming condition haven’t shown differences in the reactions between positive and negative faces, Both two groups haven’t shown an attentional bias on emotional faces, but high anxiety group under consistent condition shown faster reaction than inconsistent condition.