The persistence of attention to emotion: brain potentials during and after picture presentation

Emotional stimuli have been shown to elicit increased perceptual processing and attentional allocation. The late positive potential (LPP) is a sustained P300-like component of the event-related potential that is enhanced after the presentation of pleasant and unpleasant pictures as compared with neutral pictures. In this study, the LPP was measured using dense array electroencephalograph both before and after pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant images to examine the time course of attentional allocation toward emotional stimuli. Results from 17 participants confirmed that the LPP was larger after emotional than neutral images and that this effect persisted for 800 ms after pleasant picture offset and at least 1,000 ms after unpleasant picture offset. The persistence of increased attention after unpleasant compared to pleasant stimuli is consistent with the existence of a negativity bias. Overall, these results indicate that attentional capture of emotion continues well beyond picture presentation and that this can be measured with the LPP. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

The effects of anxiety upon attention allocation to affective stimuli

Pictures of emotionally aversive, neutral, and pleasant scenes were presented for 500 ms, followed by a probe presented in the same location (valid trials) or an alternate location (invalid trials) as the picture. Response-times to the probes were recorded in low (N=20) and high (N=27) trait anxious participants. Results revealed an overall negative cue validity effect of shorter reaction times (RTs) on invalid than valid trials, suggestive of an inhibition of return effect. Moreover, high trait anxious females showed a reduced negative cue validity effect for aversive pictures in comparison with neutral and pleasant pictures, suggestive of selective interference by the unpleasant material. By contrast, low trait anxious females showed an enhanced negative cue validity effect for aversive pictures relative to neutral and pleasant pictures, suggestive of attentional avoidance of the aversive content. The emotional content of picture cues did not significantly affect RTs in males, regardless of anxiety status. The results suggest that biased attention processes for aversive stimuli may contribute to the greater female propensity for anxiety disorders.     

Early modulation of visual perception by emotional arousal: Evidence from steady-state visual evoked brain potentials

Allocation of processing resources to emotional picture stimuli was examined using steady-state visual evoked brain potentials (ssVEPs). Participants viewed a set of 60 colored affective pictures from the International Affective Picture System, presented in a flickering mode at 10 Hz in order to elicit ssVEPs. Phase and amplitude of the 10-Hz ssVEP were examined for six picture categories: threat and mutilation (unpleasant), families and erotica (pleasant), and household objects and persons (neutral). Self-reported affective arousal and hedonic valence of the picture stimuli were assessed by means of subjective ratings. Viewing affectively arousing (unpleasant and pleasant) pictures was associated with enhanced ssVEP amplitude at parieto-occipital recording sites, as compared with neutral stimuli. Phase information suggested increased coactivation of right occipitotemporal and frontotemporal sources during processing of affectively arousing stimuli. These findings are consistent with reentrant modulation of early visual processing by distributed networks including subcortical and neocortical structures according to a stimulus's motivational relevance.     

Eye movements reveal mechanisms underlying attentional biases towards threat

Mechanisms underlying attentional biases towards threat (ABTs), such as attentional avoidance and difficulty of disengagement, are still unclear. To address this issue, we recorded participants' eye movements during a dot detection task in which threatening or neutral stimuli served as peripheral cues. We evaluated response times (RTs) in trials where participants looked at the central fixation cross (not at the cues), as they were required, and number and duration of (unwanted) fixations towards threatening or neutral cues; in all analyses trait anxiety was treated as a covariate. Difficulty in attentional disengagement (longer RTs) was found when peripheral threatening stimuli were presented for 100?ms. Moreover, we observed significantly shorter (unwanted) fixations on threatening than on neutral peripheral stimuli, compatible with an avoidance bias, for longer presentation times. These findings demonstrate that, independent of trait anxiety levels, disengagement bias occurs without eye movements, whereas eye movements are implied in threat avoidance.     

Threat-based cognitive biases in anxious children: comparison with non-anxious children before and after cognitive behavioural treatment

Attention and interpretation biases for threat stimuli were assessed in 19 anxious (ANX) children before and after cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and compared with responses from 19 non-anxious (NA) control children collected over the same period. Attentional bias was assessed using a picture version of the visual probe task with threat, neutral and pleasant pictures. Threat interpretation bias was assessed using both a homographs task in which children used homograph words in a sentence and their neutral or threatening meaning was assessed, and a stories task in which children rated their negative emotion, danger judgments, and influencing ability in ambiguous situations. ANX children showed attention biases towards threat on the visual probe task and threat interpretation biases on the stories task but not the homographs task at pre-treatment in comparison with NA children. Following treatment, ANX children's threat interpretation biases as assessed on the stories task reduced significantly to within levels comparable to NA children. However, ANX children continued to show larger attentional biases towards threat than pleasant pictures on the visual probe task at post-treatment, whereas NA children did not show attentional biases. Moreover, a residual threat interpretation style on the stories task at post-treatment was associated with higher anxiety symptoms in both ANX and NA children.     

Gaze Patterns When Looking at Emotional Pictures: Motivationally Biased Attention

Pictures of either emotionally neutral, pleasant (affectionate), or unpleasant (threat and injury) scenes were paired with nonemotional control pictures and presented for 3 s, while eye fixations were monitored. Preferential attention to the emotional picture of eah pair occurred at an early processing stage: The probability of placement of the first fixation and the proportion of viewing time during the first 500 ms were higher for both pleasant and unpleasant pictures than for neutral pictures, whereas later fixation location and time were not differentially affected. This suggests that, when emotional and nonemotional stimuli are presented simultaneously, emotional meaning captures initial overt orienting and engages attention early, as measured by gaze direction and duration. The possibility that this effect could be accounted for by perceptual differences—such as luminance and complexity—between emotional and neutral pictures was ruled out.     

Effects of emotion regulation on concurrent attentional performance

We explored the attentional demands of unpleasant picture viewing and emotion regulation strategies. Participants received instructions to view, reappraise, or suppress their emotional experience to unpleasant and neutral pictures, while performing a concurrent auditory discrimination task, both during and after the picture presentation period. Reaction times (RTs) were slower during unpleasant than neutral pictures, which persisted into the post-picture period. RTs were also slower during reappraisal and suppression than viewing and for earlier than later tones following picture onset. An enduring effect of negative emotion was found in the picture and post picture period for suppression but not reappraisal. Findings suggest that both viewing emotional stimuli and regulating one’s emotions using either reappraisal or suppression draw upon common attentional resources, but with suppression resulting in the distinct cost of maintaining the effects of negative emotion.     

Cross-modal attention capture by affective stimuli: Evidence from event-related potentials

The P3 component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an acoustic startle probe is modulated during picture viewing, with reduced P3 amplitude when participants view either pleasant or unpleasant, as opposed to neutral, pictures. We have interpreted this as reflecting capture of attentional resources by affective pictures, with fewer resources available for processing the secondary startle probe. In the present study, we tested this resource allocation hypothesis by presenting either pictures or sounds as foreground stimuli, with the prediction that P3 amplitude in response to secondary startle probes would be reduced for affectively engaging foregrounds regardless of modality. Using dense-array electroencephalography and a source estimation procedure, we observed that P3 amplitude was indeed smaller when startle probes were presented during emotional, as opposed to neutral, stimuli for both sound and picture foregrounds. Source modeling indicated a common frontocentral maximum of P3 modulation by affect. The data support the notion that emotionally arousing stimuli transmodally attract resources, leading to optimized processing of the affective stimuli at the cost of the processing of concurrent stimuli.     

Identification of angry faces in the attentional blink

According to cognitive and neural theories of emotion, attentional processing of innate threat stimuli, such as angry facial expressions, is prioritised over neutral stimuli. To test this hypothesis, the present study used a modified version of the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm to investigate the effect of emotional face stimuli on the attentional blink (AB). The target stimuli were schematic faces which depicted threatening (angry), positive or neutral facial expressions. Results showed that performance accuracy was enhanced (i.e., the AB was reduced) on trials in which the second target was an angry face, rather than a neutral face. Results extend previous research by demonstrating that angry faces reduce the AB, and that this effect is found for schematic facial expressions. These findings further support the proposal that, when there is competition for attentional resources, threat stimuli are given higher priority in processing compared with non-threatening stimuli.     

Evaluative ratings and attention across the life span: emotional arousal and gender

This study was designed to investigate the evolution of emotional processing over the whole adult life span as a function of stimulus arousal and participants’ gender. To this end, self-reported affective evaluation and attentional capture prompted by pleasant and unpleasant pictures varying in arousal were measured in a large sample of participants (n?=?211) balanced by gender and equally spread across seven decades from 20 to 90 years. Results showed age differences only for affective evaluation of pleasant stimuli, with opposite patterns depending on stimulus arousal. As age increased, low-arousing pleasant cues (e.g. images of babies) were experienced as more pleasant and arousing by both males and females, whereas high-arousing stimuli (e.g. erotic images) were experienced as less pleasant only by females. In contrast, emotional pictures (both pleasant and unpleasant) were effective at capturing attention in a similar way across participants, regardless of age and gender. Taken together, these findings suggest that specific emotional cues prompt different subjective responses across different age groups, while basic mechanisms involved in attentional engagement towards both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli are preserved in healthy ageing.     

Attentional bias toward fear-related stimuli: an investigation with nonselected children and adults and children with anxiety disorders

Research investigating anxiety-related attentional bias for emotional information in anxious and nonanxious children has been equivocal with regard to whether a bias for fear-related stimuli is unique to anxious children or is common to children in general. Moreover, recent cognitive theories have proposed that an attentional bias for objectively threatening stimuli may be common to all individuals, with this effect enhanced in anxious individuals. The current study investigated whether an attentional bias toward fear-related pictures could be found in nonselected children (n=105) and adults (n=47) and whether a sample of clinically anxious children (n=23) displayed an attentional bias for fear-related pictures over and above that expected for nonselected children. Participants completed a dot-probe task that employed fear-related, neutral, and pleasant pictures. As expected, both adults and children showed a stronger attentional bias toward fear-related pictures than toward pleasant pictures. Consistent with some findings in the childhood domain, the extent of the attentional bias toward fear-related pictures did not differ significantly between anxious children and nonselected children. However, compared with nonselected children, anxious children showed a stronger attentional bias overall toward affective picture stimuli.     

Reaction time normative data for the IAPS as a function of display time, gender, and picture content

This study aimed to extend the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005) norms by obtaining reaction time (RT) normative data for 308 selected photographs. Pictures were presented one at a time for 33, 100, or 250 msec, or under free-time display, to 96 women and 48 men. The participants’ task involved assessing the emotional valence of each picture and responding as quickly as possible as to whether it was unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant. RTs provided an index of processing efficiency. The manipulation of display time served to estimate the time course in the valence identification of each picture. Some categories of depicted scenes (e.g., erotica and mutilations) were classified more consistently and efficiently than were others as pleasant or unpleasant. There were minimal differences between men and women. Overall, the present data provide researchers investigating cognition/emotion relationships with an objective criterion to select pictorial stimuli on the basis of RTs. Data for all pictures may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Components of attentional bias to threat in high trait anxiety: Facilitated engagement, impaired disengagement, and attentional avoidance

There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating enhanced attention to threat in high trait anxious individuals (HTA) compared with low trait anxious individuals (LTA). In two experiments, we investigated whether this attentional bias is related to facilitated attentional engagement to threat or difficulties disengaging attention from threat. HTA and LTA undergraduates performed a modified exogenous cueing task, in which the location of a target was correctly or incorrectly cued by neutral, highly and mildly threatening pictures. Results indicate that at 100 ms picture presentation, HTA individuals more strongly engaged their attention with and showed impaired disengagement from highly threatening pictures than LTA individuals. In addition, HTA individuals showed a stronger tendency to attentional avoidance of threat at the 200 and 500 ms picture presentation. These data provide evidence for differential patterns of anxiety-related biases in attentive processing of threat at early versus later stages of information processing.     

Attentional bias during emotional processing: evidence from an emotional flanker task using IAPS

Attention is biased towards threat-related stimuli. In three experiments, we investigated the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this processing bias. An emotional flanker task simultaneously presented affective or neutral pictures from the international affective picture system database either as central response-relevant stimuli or surrounding response-uninformative flankers. Participants’ response times to central stimuli was measured. The attentional bias was observed when stimuli were presented either for 1500?ms (Experiment 1) or 500?ms (Experiment 2). The threat-related attentional bias held regardless of the stimuli competing for attention even when presentation time was further reduced to 200?ms (Experiment 3). The results indicate that automatic and controlled mechanisms may interact to modulate the orientation of attention to threat. The data presented here shed new light on the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this long investigated by still largely unknown processing bias.     

高低强迫清洗倾向个体对负性情绪注意偏向的差异

摘 要 本研究采用返回抑制范式,以诱发厌恶、恐惧和中性情绪的图片为线索,考察高、低强迫清洗倾向个体对负性情绪刺激注意偏向的差异及其发生机制。结果表明：（1）被试对诱发厌恶和恐惧的图片均产生了注意偏向且注意偏向是由注意解除困难所引起;（2）被试对诱发厌恶图片的注意偏向程度显著大于对诱发恐惧图片的注意偏向程度;（3）高、低强迫清洗倾向个体对诱发厌恶和恐惧图片的注意偏向程度之间的组间差异均不显著。     

The psychopath as observer: emotion and attention in picture processing

This study extended prior work showing abnormal affect-startle modulation in psychopaths. Male prisoners viewed specific categories of pleasant (erotic or thrilling) and unpleasant (victim or direct threat) slide pictures, along with neutral pictures. Acoustic startle probes were presented early (300 and 800 ms) and late (1,800, 3,000, and 4,500 ms) in the viewing interval. At later times, nonpsychopaths showed moderate and strong reflex potentiation for victim and threat scenes, respectively. For psychopaths, startle was inhibited during victim scenes and only weakly potentiated during threat. Psychopaths also showed more reliable blink inhibition across pleasant contents than nonpsychopaths and greater heart rate orienting to affective pictures overall. These results indicate a heightened aversion threshold in psychopaths. In addition, deficient reflex modulation at early times suggested a weakness in initial stimulus evaluation among psychopaths.     

Time course of attentional bias to emotional scenes in anxiety: Gaze direction and duration

Pictures of emotionally neutral, positive, and negative (threat‐ or harm‐related) scenes were presented for 3 seconds, paired with nonemotional control pictures. The eye fixations of high and low trait anxiety participants were monitored. Intensity of stimulus emotionality was varied, with two levels of perceptual salience for each picture (colour vs. greyscale). Regardless of perceptual salience, high anxiety was associated with preferential attention: (a) towards all types of emotional stimuli in initial orienting, as revealed by a higher probability of first fixation on the emotional picture than on the neutral picture of a pair; (b) towards positive and harm stimuli in a subsequent stage of early engagement, as shown by longer viewing times during the first 500 ms following onset of the pictures; and with (c) attention away from (i.e., avoidance) harm stimuli in a later phase, as indicated by shorter viewing times and lower frequency of fixation during the last 1000 ms of picture exposure. This suggests that the nature of the attentional bias varies as a function of the time course in the processing of emotional pictures.     

A time-course analysis of attentional cueing by threatening scenes

Models of attention and emotion have assigned a special status to the processing of threatening information: Facilitated attentional capture by threat and its prioritized processing would allow for swift and adequate action to potentially dangerous stimuli. In four experiments, we examined the time-course of facilitated orienting of attention to threatening scenes in the exogenous cueing paradigm. Threat value and presentation duration of the cues were systematically varied. Facilitated attentional capture by threat was limited to highly threatening pictures presented for 100 ms. No attentional effects were observed with a 28 ms cue presentation duration. At slightly longer cue presentations, 200 ms and 500 ms, results indicated no and even reduced attentional capture by threat compared with neutral information. The present results provide support for the idea that threat facilitates fast attentional orienting to its location, followed by the inhibition of attention to threat.     

Emotional Responses to Pictures of Oneself in Healthy College Age Females

Emotional responses related to self-perceptions were investigated in healthy college-aged females using a picture-viewing paradigm that consisted of four categories of pictures (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant, and full body pictures of themselves). The startle eye-blink reflex, facial EMG, and self-reported valence, arousal, and dominance measures were recorded for each picture. Startle reflex and facial EMG measures exhibited decreased activation for self-pictures compared to the other affective categories. Self-reports indicated self-pictures were rated as moderately pleasant, low arousing, and moderately dominant relative to the other affective picture categories. The findings of reduced startle blink reflex coupled with decreased activation for all facial EMG measures and the moderate self-report ratings suggest increased attentional processing for self-pictures. These findings provide an understanding of emotional responses to self-perceptions in healthy young females.     

Attentional biases toward humor: Separate effects of incongruity detection and resolution

Previous research has indicated that the comprehension of humor involves two stages: incongruity detection and incongruity resolution. However, little is known about the temporal parameters of these stages and the degree to which they influence attentional processing. In the current study, 155 participants completed a dot-probe task to examine these questions. On each trial, humor versus control, novel (incongruent but not humorous) versus control, or neutral versus neutral image pairs were presented for 300, 400, or 500 ms. A probe immediately replaced the experimental image (valid trial) or control image (invalid trial). An attentional bias toward humor and novelty by 300 ms was shown by faster probe-detection reaction times (RTs) on valid compared to invalid humor and novel trials for all three exposure times. When compared to the neutral trials, humor and novel stimuli elicited slower RTs, indicating a difficulty in attentional disengagement. An exploratory analysis found that subjective humor ratings predicted the disengagement bias at 500 ms, but not at 400 or 300 ms. These results suggest that incongruity detection biases attention by 300 ms, whereas incongruity resolution may only contribute at 500 ms.