Effects Of Negative Emotions With Different Motivational Intensity On Attention Distribution

This article reviews evidence indicating that,in most circumstances,negative affect influences cognitive flexibility and attention,leading to daily life and work suffers.As we know,visual search performance and attention are closely linked,and emotional impact on the visual search process is still controversial.Previous studies have shown that the motivational intensity of emotions is the main reason for the emotional impact of attention,manifested as high motivation narrows attention,low motivation broadens attention.At present,it is not clear whether negative emotions with different motivational intensity affects the efficiency of visual search and the mechanism of influence.In visual search,the contextual cuing paradigm illustrates how visual context information is learned to guide visual behavior,which requires implicit learning and attention system.With that in mind,this study intends to use the contextual cuing paradigm to explore the effects of negative emotions with different motivational intensity on attention and implicit learning.This study includes three experiments.In the experiment 1,we use contextual cuing paradigm to explore the effect of negative emotions on contextual cuing.Experiment 2 separates the consistent and inconsistent configurations to examine how the contextual cuing are impacted by negative emotions with different motivational intensity.Experiment 3 focuses on the influence of negative emotions with different motivational intensity on the implicit learning guiding the deployment of attention.The results of this study show that:In Experiment 1,negative emotions with different motivational intensity will affect contextual cuing.Negative emotion with high motivational intensity(disgust)reduces contextual cuing,and negative emotion with low motivational intensity(sadness)and neutral emotion show significant contextual cuing effect;Experiment 2 creates two kinds of contexts(consistent or inconsistent configurations)to explore whether negative stimuli affect the configural representations of contexts.The results show that disgust stimuli lead to fewer attention to configural representations of contexts and sad stimuli show the significant contextual cuing effect of consistent configurations versus inconsistent configurations.The results of the last experiment suggest that disgust faces hinder the retrieval of implicit memory without affecting the implicit learning.The results of this study show that negative emotion with high motivational intensity causes subjects fail to take the overall configuration in contextual cuing into account,which have an influence on the retrival of implicit memory of the learned configurations.