Biases to emotional expressions in spatial attention.

摘要

Attentional biases toward emotional expression stimuli were investigated in psychologically healthy young adults in a series of five studies. Attentional biases to emotional stimuli have been linked to psychological disorders such as anxiety (Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998) as well as mood states (Bower, Monteiro & Gilligan, 1978), and thus their understanding provides insight into potential treatment of these disorders and detrimental mood states. Study 1's findings indicated that, when compared to neutral expressions, attention disengages more slowly from angry emotional expressions and disengages more quickly from happy emotional expressions. Study 2a showed that there was no difference in disengagement between different emotional expressions of the same valence (i.e., angry, and fearful), whereas Study 2b showed significantly faster disengagement from happy expressions than from neutral, angry, fearful or disgust expressions, from which attentional disengagement did not differ. Results of Study 3 indicated that attention to an emotional scene stimulus reduced the slowed disengagement for negative emotional expressions, and positive scene stimuli sped overall responding. Study 4 tested the idea that different types of emotional expressions might differentially influence the spread of attention to the environment, but no evidence was found to support this idea. Study 5 investigated biases for emotional expression stimuli in visual search, finding that angry expressions were detected faster in crowds of happy distracters than in crowds of neutral distracters, and altered this effect with adaptation to negative emotional expressions. Anxiety data were collected for Studies 1--3 and yielded a correlation between negativity biases and symptoms of anxiety even in the absence of psychopathology. Overall, the significant findings of this work are that attention is biased to disengage slowly from negative emotional expressions and quickly from positive emotional expressions. In addition, attention to other emotional stimuli and adaptation to emotional expressions may alter these biases. This work contributes to the area of cognitive bias manipulation (CBM; Koster, Fox, & MacLeod, 2009), which may serve to remediate psychopathological conditions in which oversensitivity to negative stimuli is a key symptom.