The Moderating Effect Of Emotional Stimuli On The Emotional Effect Of Attention Span

With the rise of positive psychology,the influence of positive emotion on cognition has been widely concerned by researchers.Previous studies have found that emotion influence attention,showing that positive emotion can broaden the breadth of attention and increase flexibility of cognitive function,people who experience positive emotion prefer to process information globally;Negative emotion can narrow the breadth of attention and prefer to process information locally.Recent findings point out the complexity of the influence of emotion on attentional breadth and show that these effect interact with factors such as individual characteristics and presented information.The current research further explored and deepened the understanding of the influence of emotion on attention,to reveal the complexity of the influence of emotion on attentional breadth that emotional stimulus could regulate the relationship between emotion and attention.The current research used three experiments to tested the effects of mood states on attentional breadth for emotional stimulus.We used a dual-task paradigm,a letter search task at fixation which manipulate the perceptual load,while emotional faces presented peripherally.The accuracy of the peripheral task was used as indicator to investigate the attentional breadth.In experiment 1,a positive mood state group,a neutral mood state group and a negative mood state group were set up.An improved inattentional blindness paradigm was used to investigate the processing of peripheral neutral target under different perceptual load conditions.On the basis of experiment 1,the processing of peripheral negative and positive target stimulus was investigated in experiment 2 and experiment 3.The research data show that:1.In the combined analysis of three experiments,under the condition of high perceptual load,there was no significant difference in the peripheral task performance of the positive group on the three emotional stimulus,indicated that under positive mood state,individuals can broaden the breadth of attention for neutral,negative and positive stimulus.2.In the combined analysis of three experiments,under the condition of high perceptual load,the accuracy of peripheral negative stimulus was significantly higher than that of the neutral and the positive stimulus in negative group,indicated that negative stimulus regulates the effect of negative mood on attentional breadth.Individuals have attentional bias toward negative stimulus under negative mood state,which weakens the effect of negative mood on narrowing the breadth of attention.3.Under the condition of high perceptual load,the accuracy of peripheral task in the positive group was significantly higher than that in the negative,indicated that individuals generate more attentional resources to process periphery stimulus under positive mood state.Based on the three experimental results,this research concluded that under positive mood state,individuals allocate more attention resources toward peripheral stimuli for processing so that positive emotion could broaden the attentional breadth;The effect of negative emotion narrow attentional breadth is regulated by negative stimuli.