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EMOTION AND PERCEPTION / ATTENTION :PENCIL2: P+C2 LECTURE 6 - Coggle…
EMOTION AND PERCEPTION / ATTENTION
:PENCIL2:
P+C2 LECTURE 6
Attentional Blink Task
One way to examine emotion and attention
Task designed to measure sequential attention.
Task 1: Report white Letter
Task 2: Is there an ‘x’ in the sequence? (single task)
Both of these tasks together = dual-task
Attention in time vs space.
Typical results...
% correct Task 2 responses are best for the single T2 task.
For the dual task, when T2 is roughly in the middle (Sequentially) of the task, % correct T2 responses is at its lowest.
This is a nice paradigm to investigate emotional pre-attentive processing
Attentional blink using emotive words...
15 words presented each for 130ms. Participants asked to ignore the black words and report the two green words.
Short lag was less than 4 intervening items between T1 and T2 (less than 600ms).
Long lag was more than 4 items.
Neutral words vs highly emotive words.
When the presentation of the second green word is.
Short lag = second word presented during the attentional blink.
Results: Classic blink effect...
Control participants show reduced attentional blink effects when the second stimulus (T2) is emotional.
Rapid pre-attentive processing of emotion facilitates perceptual processes.
Best recall was for the negative, emotive stimulus (e.g. 'rape') during the long-lag.
Bilateral Amygdala Damage
Patient S.P. who has bilateral amygdala damage showed no difference between emotional (circle) and neutral (triangle) stimuli.
-In contrast, Controls matched for neutral AB performance (red triangle) demonstrate advantage for emotional stimuli (red circle).
Summary
High level semantic processes such as word recognition take place unconsciously in a rapid sequence (AB task).
The emotional content of words facilitates conscious detection.
The amygdala is important for emotional word processing.
Emotional Stimuli and Attention
Capturing attention
Stroop (1935)
Takes people longer to respond on incongruent trials than in congruent ones.
The Stroop task supports the idea that emotion can capture attention. (
Williams et al. (1996)
)
Takes people longer to name the colour of these emotional words (e.g. cancer, death, fear) than it does the neutral words (e.g. chair, keep, house).
It is possible to measure effects of specific phobias via such techniques. For example, a person with a fear of snakes, would be especially impaired by words such as “venom”, “fangs”, “snake”, “constrictor”. This is an automatic measure of the clinical issues a patient may present with, rather than relying on an introspective report.
Pop-out effects in visual search tasks of emotional stimuli suggests emotion can capture attention...
There have been some mixed results, but overall there is evidence that emotional, especially angry faces, do capture attention.
Evidence suggests that participants are faster at detecting a sad face amongst neutral faces than a happy face (
Frischen et al. (2008)
).
Standard finding is faster reaction time to detect a target onset when it is cued. The cue shifts attention to the same side of space.
No evidence for emotion to facilitate strategic orienting when valid cues were predictive and intervals were short
Tipples, Young, Quinlan, Brooks & Ellis (2002)
Are people faster at identifying the spider in the context of the flowers or the flower in the context of the spiders?
More primed to process and identify seeing a single emotional stimuli such as the spider in amongst the more neutral stimuli of the flowers than we are to see the more neutral stimuli of the flower in amongst the more emotional, evocative images of the spider.
More evolutionarily beneficial to be able to identify and pay attention towards dangerous items such as spiders or snakes, and so we are primed to do that.
However, other researchers found that this pop out effect of searching for stimulation and searching for emotional stimuli is not just reduced to scary insects like spiders, but actually there are also other non-scary stimuli like cute little mice.
-However, it may be that we view all objects that can move as potentially threatening. A flower or coffee cup cannot approach, twist, turn and bite.
But all living animals have this potential. (
ANIMACY
)
The moving animal behind the tree is probably a young deer, but maybe it’s a tiger: better to be safe and orient to it quickly.
Emotion captures attention even while driving people miss brake lights ahead…
Trick et al. (2012)
Driving simulation.
Drivers are shown an emotionally-provocative video of someone at the dentist.
More driving faults occurred when drivers were shown the emotional video rather than a neutral video.
Maintaining attention
Disengaging/withdrawing attention from an emotional stimulus is impaired…
There is evidence that when attention is oriented to an angry face it is harder to withdraw.
Response to the target was slowed when previously attending to an angry face and now have to orient to the opposite side of the screen.
Emotion holds attention…
Mathewson et al. (2008)
An emotional stimulus at T1 causes a larger blink:
The previously discussed attentional blink task also demonstrates that it is hard to disengage attention from emotional stimuli.
Emotional state of participants on attention / perception
The anxiety state can influence the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli…
Eysenck et al. (1978)
Ambiguous words were spoken to people and they had to interrupt them.
Those with anxiety perceived the negative meaning such as ‘die’ rather than ‘dye’
Those with anxiety perceived the negative meaning, such as ‘pain’ rather than ‘pane’
So anxious people can interpret these ambiguous stimuli as more negative than non-anxious people.
Similar effect seen for ambiguous sentence interpretation...
“The doctor examined little Emily’s growth.”
Height or cancer?
Reinforces worries and beliefs about the world.
Mood manipulation
A person’s mood state can be changed via
drugs
or
therapy
.
However there are also subtle changes to the A person’s mood state can be changed via drugs or therapy. However there are also subtle changes to the
environment
that can also change mood.
For example, background
fragrance
can make people feel more relaxed or more alert.
Can these subtle background cues change emotion which in turn affects attention?
Attention, Fragrance and Mood
Warm et al. (1991)
Vigilance, or sustained attention tasks, require people to remain alert over long periods to detect infrequent and unpredictable events. E.g., air traffic controllers radar monitoring, quality control, long distance driving.
Failure to detect critical signals can have serious consequences.
Decline in performance on attention tasks can be seen within 30 minutes; increased cortisol levels.
Examined whether manipulating mood via fragrance could facilitate such demanding attention tasks:
Used two positive fragrances:
peppermint (alerting)
and
Lily (relaxing).
Attention and Fragrance
Had participants detect irregular occurrences.
Widening of two lines around a fixation point.
Researchers hypothesised that the peppermint fragrance might show more of an improvement in detection abilities.
But both fragrances increased detection ability just above the control condition.
Emotions on perceptions of people
(Rozin et al., 1999)
Disgust is elicited when individuals cause impurity or degradation to the self/others.
(Hutcherson & Gross, 2011)
or when individuals engage in what are perceived as intentional immoral behaviours .”
Disgust and perceptions of obese women
Vartanian et al. (2016)
Disgust predicted prejudice
Compared to a healthy woman, an obese woman elicited (male and female participants) - same woman used in both conditions
More disgust
Had ‘unfavourable’ attitudes towards her
More negative stereotypes (e.g. lazy, over-indulgent, poor hygiene, incompetent)
Harmful stereotypes.
Disgust and perceptions of gay men
Kiss et al. (2020)
Meta analysis (15 articles; N = 7322)
Disgust sensitivity (58)/ induced disgust (6)
Very strong effects on negative attitudes towards gay men, e.g. “Homosexual behaviour between two men is just wrong”
Lack of support for gay marriage, etc.
Attention influencing emotion
Bayliss et al. (2006)
It is possible for attention to change how we feel about a stimulus.
That is, when our attention is repeatedly oriented towards an object by another person, we start to like the object more.
Eye-gaze not just relevant in humans...
Researcher first makes eye contact with the chimpanzee.
She then looks up and over to the left.
The chimpanzee understands the social meaning of eye gaze and
looks where the researcher looks.
Dogs will look towards humans’ faces when seeking food, wolves do not.
Dogs have been selectively bred to cooperate with humans during social interactions.
Pigs are also very socially intelligent like dogs, and also look for eye contact to communicate with humans.
Baren-Cohen et al. (1995)
When you ask 4 year olds what sweets do you think Charlie likes, children will say polos simply because the image is looking at them.
Preferences for objects that have been looked at by others.