lecture 12- emotion & attention Flashcards
(27 cards)
1
Q
what is the attentional blink task?
A
- presented rapidly with different stimuli (can be different words, numbers, letters)
- have to do two different tasks- name white letter and then is x in the stimuli
- x different amount of time after white letter (short lag/long lag)
- if x briefly after white letter, harder to detect than is long time after
- attentional blink: decline in attention (slight rest) after fixating on something (drop in T2 task at 200-600ms after T1)
2
Q
what do we need to ask about emotion in terms of attentional blink?
A
does the emotional property of a stimulus influence the ability to detect a stimulus in the blink?
3
Q
how do emotional words impact performance in the attentional blink task? (Anderson & Phelps, 2001)
A
- reduced attentional blink when T2 was an emotional word
- this shows rapid pre-attentive processing of emotion facilitates perceptual processes
- there is preferential processing for emotional stimuli
4
Q
how do people with bilateral amygdala damage affect performance on emotional attentional blink task?
A
- controls: better in emotional than neutral
- SP: no difference between emotional and neutral stimuli
- shows amygdala plays primary role in processing emotional stimuli
- damage means don’t have preferential processing
5
Q
what did Brady, Gantman & Van Bavel (2020) find about using different types of emotional words in the attentional blink task?
A
- used distinctly moral, distinctly emotional, moral-emotional and neutral words
- all non-neutral words sohwed reduction in attentional blink
- suggests they capture attention to a greater extent than neutral words
- then did in ecologically valid setting (tweets- blue hastags)
- replicated this, morality and emotion prioritzied in visual attention (explains why they go viral)
6
Q
what did Brady, Gantman & Van Bavel (2020) find about online sharing?
A
- tweets with greater attention capture were associated with greater expected retweet counts
7
Q
how does the stroop task support the idea that emotion can capture attention?
A
- using emotional words disrupt naming the ink colour
- can use to measure effects of specific phobias (e.g by using word ‘snake’- makes them think about snakes)
- automatic measure of clinical issues (instead of relying on self report- slower to name colour if word associated with clinical condition)
8
Q
what did Frischen, Eastwood & Smilek (2008) find about pop-out effects in visual search tasks?
A
- p’s faster at identifying sad, angry or happy face in array of cartoon faces compared to neutral
- evidence that emotional (especially angry) faces do capture attention
- shows preattentive search processes are sensitive to facial expressions of emotion
- shows attention guidance is influenced by dynamic interplay of emotional and perceptual factors
- works for more complex stimuli- spiders capture attention more than flowers
9
Q
do threatening stimuli capture our attention more? (Tipples et al. 2002)
A
- faster detection and faster search rates for threatening animals than plants
- then found search rate advantages were also present for pleasant animals compared to plants
- then found no threat detection advantage depending on whether target was closer
- then no differences in RT to detect pleasant animals, threatening animals or fruit when not told they were going to appear
- concludes- no biases seem to exist for threatening stimuli
- more like we view any object that moves as potentially threatening (animals have potential to approach and bite, plants don’t)
- so might orient quicker to make sure safe (it’s not a threat) first
10
Q
how do different types of emotional words affect capturing and holding attention?
A
- threat words/faces had no advantage over neutral or positive words in attracting attention
- BUT presence of threatening words/faces had stronger impact on disengagement of attention (took longer to find target in different location when threatening stimuli was present in same display)
- conclude that threat related stimuli affect attentional dwell time and disengage component of attention
11
Q
what is the posner cuing task and how can we use it in attention?
A
- assesses ability to perform and attentional shift
- does having an emotional face as a cue (compared to a neutral) enhance detection?
- valid cues and short intervals = no evidence of facilitation
- invalid cues = withdrawing attention away from emotional cue is harder so slower response
12
Q
how does emotion holding attention affect attentional blink? what did Matthewson, Arnell & Mansfield (2008) find about taboo words?
A
- when T1 is an emotional stimulus, causes a larger blink
- larger blink when T1 was taboo word
- suggests taboo words received preferential attentional processing
- also found when taboo words were presented as to-be-ignored distractors in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)
- suggesting arousal-triggered changes in attentional allocation influence encoding of taboo words at the time they were encountered
13
Q
how does a persons emotional state affect how they perceive emotional stimuli?
A
- individuals high in trait anxiety tend to approach threatening stimuli, whereas those low in trait anxiety tend to avoid such stimuli
- suggests differences in processing of threatening stimuli as a function of trait anxiety
- differences only found under certain conditions (threatening and non shown together, minor rather than major threat)
- difference in high and low anxiety made up of pre-attentive, attentional and interpretative mechanisms
14
Q
what did Eysenck, McLeod & Matthews (1987) find about anxiety?
A
- anxiety can influence interpretation of ambiguous stimuli
- ambiguous words spoken and p’s asked to interpret
- those with anxiety perceived negative meaning
- biased interpretation which reflected anxious mood state
15
Q
what study did Warm, Dember & Parasuraman (1991) carry out about mood manipulation?
A
- p’s performed a visual sustained attention (vigilance) task while received periodic whiffs of pure air or muguet or peppermint (hedonically positive)
- p’s receiving either fragnance detected significantly more signals
- but fragnances had no impact on subjective reports (still found task stressful and demanding)
16
Q
what study did Hutchinson & Gross (2011) carry out about disgust?
A
- tasks validating the paper-and-pencil disgust scale
- elicited strong negative affect
- intercorrelations found 4 intercorrelated factors
1. food-related disgust
2. body-violation-and-death-related disgust
3. compliance motivation
4. embarrassability - shows no gold standard for perosnality assessment
- behavioural measures require going beyond face validity to assess threats (must include like embarrassment and compliance motivation)
17
Q
what is meant by dehumanized perception?
A
a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person (psychological mechanism facilitating inhuman acts like torture)
18
Q
what occurs in some people’s brains when witnessing drug addicts and homeless
A
- disgust
- increased insula activation
- reduced social cognition (mPFC)- associated with dehumanization
19
Q
what has been discovered in social neuroscience?
A
- social cognition recognises the other as human being subject to moral treatment
- p’s normally activate a social-cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people
- parts of this network fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets
- so suggests p’s may not consider these dehumanized groups’ minds
20
Q
what did Harris & Fiske find about social cognition?
A
- p’s do fail to spontaneously think about contents of targets’ minds when imagining day in their lief and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions
- these rating correlate with activation in brain regions BEYOND social-cognition network
- includes areas of disgust, attention and cognitive control
- suggests that disengaging social cognition affects number of other brain processes
21
Q
what can heightened emotions lead to?
A
- moral amplification of wrongness judgements
- e.g irrelevant feelings of disgust can amplify the severity of moral condemnation
- disgusting odours and tasts showed more reliable amplification than videos/pictures/memories
22
Q
what can also causes moral amplification apart from heightened emotions? (Wisneski & Skitka)
A
- attitude-specific emotions
- p’s shown disgust-inducing images (one group being about abortion)
- then all p’s asked about abortion
- moral conviction about abortion increases only for p’s exposed to abortion images as speed slow enough to allow conscious awareness
- relationship between attitudinally relevant disgust and moral conviction mediated by disgust, not anger or harm
23
Q
what have animal studies shown about attention influencing emotions?
A
- researcher first makes eye contact with the chimpanzee, she then looks up and over to the left
- chimpanzee understands social meaning of eye gaze and looks where 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 and look for eye contact to communicate with humans
24
Q
what did Baron-Cohen et al. (1995) find about gaze and liking in children?
A
- if ask child about what face in image likes, will say option because the face is looking at it
- children use eye-direction as a cue for mental states as do children with mental handicap (William’s syndrome)
25
how do children with autism differ in using eye-gaze?
- children with autism fail to use eye-direction to infer mental states
- normal/williams children show preference for eye-direction over unnatural cue when inferring mental state
- children with autism showed no preference
- explanation for gaze abnormalities in autism may be failure to comprehend that eyes convey info about a persons mental states
26
how can attention change how we feel about a stimulus?
- when our attention is repeatedly oriented towards an object by another person, we start to like the object more
27
what did Bayliss, Paul, Cannon & Tipper (2006) find about eye gaze and liking in adults?
- varied colour of cup and whether adult in image is looking at the cup
- p's say the adults prefer the blue cup if see images looking at it
- eye gaze clues us into social info
