The Different Influence Of Fear And Disgust On The Three Attentional Networks

The influence of emotion on attention has always been the focus of psychological research,especially the relationship between negative emotion and attention.Currently,many studies have examined the effects of negative emotions on attention,but they do not come to the same conclusions.It is worth noting that in these studies,attention is often seen as a whole.According to Posner and Petersen(1989),attention is not a unitary system,and it can be divided into three independent networks: alert,orienting,and executive control.Alert represents the ability to be sensitive to the environment,orienting serves to select information and shift attention,and executive control refers to the ability to detect and resolve conflict.Therefore,the contradiction of previous results may be due to different studies focusing on different attentional networks.Based on this assumption,the first objective of this study is to investigate the effects of negative emotions on different attentional networks.Furthermore,in previous studies,negative emotions were often seen as a unifying concept.However,many studies also have shown that fear,disgust exert different impacts on attention,sensory,perception and memory.Distinguishing between fear and disgust will help us to understand more fully the impact of negative emotions on the attentional networks.Thus,our second purpose was to examine different influences of fear and disgust on the attentional networks.What's more,mood and emotion can be distinguished on a number of counts,thus our third purpose was to explore different influences of disgust and fear mood on the the attentional networks.Participants were asked to complete the Attention Network Test-Interaction task(ANT-I)that was modified to include emotional pictures at the beginning of the task sequence.In Experiment 1,we used the negative and neutral pictures to explore the effect of negative emotion on the three attentional networks: alert,orienting and executive control.Results showed that negative emotion hindered the efficiency of oriented networks,but promoted the efficiency of executive control.In Experiment 2,the negative emotional pictures were replaced by fearful and negative pictures.The aim of this experiment was to explore the different impact of fear and disgust on the attentional networks.In order to select the pure fear and disgust emotion,we delete the strong fearful and disgusting pictures.Results showed that disgust emotion hindered the efficiency of orienting relative to neutral emotion.There was no difference in orientation between fear and the other two emotions,and there was no difference in alertness and executive control.In the Experiment 3,we use the three types of films: fearful,disgusting and neutral types to induce the three types of mood,in order to intensify the mood,we still put the same type of picture on each trail.Results showed that disgust mood have no effect on the efficiency of executive control,but relative to fear and the neutral mood,the response to the three levels of flanker become longer in the disgust mood.This may indicate that although the aversion mood has no significant effect on the response inhibition,it increases the disturbance of the unrelated stimulus.However,the fearful emotion did not show any difference with neutral emotion.These results suggest that the relationship between negative emotion and attention for non-emotional stimuli is influenced by the type of attentional networks and emotions,the intensity of emotions.These results expand the understanding of the relationship between negative emotions and attention.This study is the first to provide evidence that fear and disgust may affect attentional networks differently.These results expand the understanding of the relationship between negative emotion and attentional networks.