The Influence Of Psychological Theory On Attention Bias Under The Initiation Of Positive Emotions

Theory of mind refers to the ability to reason about oneself and other people's mental state.It plays an important role in interpersonal communication,emotion recognition,social function,social anxiety and social adjustment.It is assumed that the mental state of others can be achieved through nonverbal minimal cues,such as facial expression processing.The processing of facial expression is mainly reflected in the attention bias of positive and negative emotions.It has been found that individuals with low levels of theory of mind have attention bias to threatening faces,but the study does not strictly distinguish levels of theory of mind of the subjects.In addition,the study on the influence of positive emotion on attention bias shows that positive emotions can weaken or relieve individuals' attention bias toward negative information.Accordingly,this study first examines the attention bias of individuals with different levels of theory of mind(after strict screening)on positive and negative emotional faces.Then,the positive emotional priming of individuals with low levels of theory of mind was used to observe the change of their attention bias toward negative emotions.Details as follows:Experiment 1: Explore the influence of different levels of theory of mind on attention bias of the emotional faces.Participants were screened by Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.Finally,25 people were selected in the high score group and 25 people in the low score group.The two groups perform point detection tasks including emotion faces.The results showed that: the response time of low score group under anger inconsistency was significantly shorter than that under anger-consistent condition,and there was no significant difference in the response time of high score group under the conditions of anger inconsistency and that under anger-consistent conditions.The response time of low score group under happiness inconsistency was significantly longer than the response time under happiness-consistency,there was no significant difference between the response time of high score group under the conditions of happiness inconsistency and happiness-consistency.This shows that low levels of theory of mind of individuals have attention bias for emotional faces,namely the avoidance of angry faces,the vigilance tendency towards happy faces;and high levels of theory of mind of individuals have no attention bias to emotional faces,they are assigned similar attention to emotional faces.Experiment 2: Experiment 1 has confirmed that individuals with low levels of theory of mind have a significant avoidance tendency toward angry faces,whereas individuals with high levels of theory of mind do not pay any attention bias to both angry faces and happy faces.Then,whether it is possible to adjust their attention bias towards angry faces by improving the emotional state of individuals with low levels of theory of mind is the main content of experiment two.The low score group(25 people)in experiment 1 was used as a control group.In order to avoid the practice effect,individuals with low levels of theory of mind(25 people)were re-selected from the college students as the positive emotion priming group and movie clips was used to induce positive emotions.The results showed that the control group had the attention bias towards the emotional faces,namely the avoidance of angry faces and the vigilance tendency towards happy faces.The affective priming group had no avoidance bias towards angry faces,but still showed a vigilance tendency towards happy faces.It shows that positive emotion can help individuals with low levels of theory of mind to change the original way of attention processing of angry faces.In summary,different levels of theory of mind have different effects on attention bias.Individuals with low levels of theory of mind evade angry faces,tend towards happy faces,and individuals with high levels of theory of mind do not have attention bias toward emotional faces.In addition,positive emotions help regulate the tendency of individuals with low levels of theory of mind to avoid anger.