Reducing attentional capture of emotion by broadening attention: Increased global attention reduces early electrophysiological responses to negative stimuli

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.02.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Decades of research has shown the influence of emotion on attentional capture, and more recently, the influence of emotion on neurophysiological processes related to attentional capture. The current research tested whether some of the earliest neurophysiological underpinnings of emotive attentional processes can be influenced by attentional manipulations of broadening versus narrowing. Previous research has shown that negative affects high in motivational intensity (e.g., disgust, fear) cause a relative narrowing of attentional scope (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010a, Easterbrook, 1959). Because of the strong link between motivation and attention, attentional scope should also influence the attentional capture of negative stimuli. The current study manipulated a local attentional scope or global attentional scope, then measured attentional capture towards disgust and neutral pictures using the N1 event-related potential component. Results revealed that a manipulated global attentional scope reduced N1 amplitude towards disgust pictures compared to a manipulated local attentional scope.

Highlights

► Attentional scope and withdrawal motivation have a bidirectional relationship: withdrawal motivation causes attentional narrowing (Easterbrook, 1959, Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010a, Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010b), and attentional narrowing (as opposed to broadening) causes greater withdrawal-oriented neural processing (the present study). ► Attentional scope (not the absence or presence of attention) influences emotional responses. ► Emotion and cognition are integrated during processing. ► Functional specialization of both withdrawal motivation and attentional narrowing is not attenuated, but enhanced by their bidirectional relationship.

Introduction

Over 50 years ago, Easterbrook (1959) proposed that “the innate response to a state of biological deprivation or noxious stimulation” is a reduction in the “range of cue utilization” (p. 184). Since then, numerous studies have found that attentional scope narrows following the evocation of motivationally arousing negative emotions such as fear and disgust (Chajut and Algom, 2003, Fenske and Eastwood, 2003, Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010a, Sanders et al., 1978).

Along these lines, evidence suggests that motivationally arousing emotional stimuli influence neurophysiological responses as early as 100 ms after the onset of stimuli (Keil et al., 2001). Specifically, the N1 event-related potential (ERP) component is larger in amplitude to negative than neutral pictures (Foti et al., 2009, Keil et al., 2002, Weinberg and Hajcak, 2010). Early attentional processes as evidenced by the N1 are likely driven by several structures, including the amygdala (Olofsson et al., 2008) and anterior cingulate cortex (Esposito et al., 2009). This early modulation of the N1 by negative stimuli is proposed to be associated with motivational processes related to attentional capture (Keil et al., 2001) or more focused, detailed processing of stimuli (Vogel and Luck, 2000). These results support the idea that stimuli that evoke motivationally arousing negative emotion narrow attention.

The present research sought to address a new question: Would a broadening of attentional scope decrease the attentional capture of motivationally arousing negative stimuli? We predicted it would. Because of the strong link between emotion and attentional scope, attentional scope may also influence emotion/motivational processes, even very early into the processing of the emotive stimuli.

Relative to a global attentional scope, a local attentional scope should increase the attentional capture of aversive pictures. Functionally, a narrowed attentional scope may enhance and allocate cognitive resources to attend on a specific object or goal. Aversive stimuli cause organisms to “zero-in”; they increase attentional focus and this focus of attention may increase motivational intensity toward the aversive object as greater cognitive resources are devoted to the object, thereby reducing the psychological distance. Along these lines, Liberman and Forster (2009) found that a manipulated narrowed attentional scope reduced the estimates of psychological distances of time, space, and social distance towards neutral objects. The enhanced cognitive processing of an object associated with a narrowed attentional scope may make the object more salient and immediate to the organism, thereby increasing the organism's ability to react to the object.

In contrast, a broadened attentional scope may cause a reallocation of cognitive resources to attend to distal and peripheral stimuli. Broadening attentional scope may reduce the cognitive resources devoted to a single object and allow one to consider and think about multiple objects or goals without focusing on any particular one, thus reducing the aversive reaction to an aversive object. This may assist with disengagement from aversive stimuli and cause the organism to become open to new and previously irrelevant possibilities (Klinger, 1975).

Consistent with the idea of a bi-directional relationship between attention and emotion, past research has shown that attentional manipulations to aversive stimuli alter affective processing. However, these studies have relied on direct attentional manipulations related to the affective stimuli such as directing visual attention towards or away from affective stimuli (Dunning and Hajcak, 2009, MacNamara and Hajcak, 2009), directing reappraisal of stimuli (Foti and Hajcak, 2008, MacNamara et al., 2011, Thiruchselvam et al., 2011, Urry, 2010), manipulating the salience of stimuli (Ferrari et al., 2008, Newman et al., 2010, Schupp et al., 2007), or biasing attention towards the valence of stimuli (Dandeneau et al., 2007, Goetz et al., 2008, MacLeod et al., 2002). In other words, past studies examining attention–emotion relationships have primarily manipulated attention toward the emotional stimulus, by either increasing or decreasing attention toward the emotional stimulus. In the present research, we sought to address a different question: Does attentional scope (not the absence or presence of attention) influence emotional responses?

The current study investigated whether manipulating a broadened as compared to narrowed attentional scope would alter the attentional capture of high-withdrawal motivated negative stimuli. Specifically, we predicted that relative to a manipulated narrowed (local) attentional scope, a broadened (global) attentional scope would attenuate the attentional capture of emotional stimuli and reduce N1 amplitude.

Section snippets

Methods

Twenty-nine (9 women) right-handed undergraduate students provided informed consent. Then, 59 EEG electrodes were applied.

Narrowed vs. broadened attentional scope was manipulated using the well-established measure of global or local attention, the Navon (1977) letters. This task has also been used extensively in research testing how affective states influence attentional scope (see review by Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010b). A Navon letter is a large letter composed of smaller closely spaced

Results

A 2 (disgust or neutral picture) within-subjects × 2 (local or global target) between-subjects ANOVA revealed a significant interaction, F(1, 24) = 5.15, p = .03, ηp2=.18 for the parietal N1 (see Fig. 1). Consistent with much past research (e.g., Foti et al., 2009, Keil et al., 2001), follow-up analyses revealed that N1s were larger to disgust pictures than to neutral pictures in the local attention manipulation condition, t(11) = 2.35, p = .03 (see Fig. 2). In other words, this local attention condition

Discussion

A manipulated global attentional scope attenuated the attentional capture of disgusting pictures compared to a manipulated local attentional scope. Attentional capture was measured using the ERP wave component N1, one of the earliest (100 ms) measures of motivated attentional processes. The manipulation of attentional scope influenced N1 responses to disgust pictures, and did not influence N1 responses to neutral pictures.

Manipulated local vs. global attentional bias was selective for enhanced

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS 0643348 awarded to Eddie Harmon-Jones.

References (36)

  • S.D. Dandeneau et al.

    Cutting stress off at the pass: reducing vigilance and responsiveness to social threat by manipulating attention

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2007)
  • J.P. Dunning et al.

    See no evil: directed visual attention modulates the electrocortical response to unpleasant images

    Psychophysiology

    (2009)
  • J.A. Easterbrook

    The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior

    Psychological Review

    (1959)
  • M.J. Fenske et al.

    Modulation of focused attention by faces expressing emotion: evidence from flanker tasks

    Emotion

    (2003)
  • V. Ferrari et al.

    Directed and motivated attention during processing of natural scenes

    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

    (2008)
  • D. Foti et al.

    Deconstructing reappraisal: descriptions preceding arousing pictures modulate the subsequent neural response

    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

    (2008)
  • D. Foti et al.

    Differentiating neural responses to emotional pictures: evidence from temporal–spatial PCA

    Psychophysiology

    (2009)
  • I.H.A. Franken et al.

    Effects of dopaminergic modulation on electrophysiological brain response to affective stimuli

    Psychopharmacology

    (2008)
  • Cited by (44)

    • Effects of rumination and distraction on inhibition

      2023, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
    • Does acute exercise benefit emotion regulation? Electrophysiological evidence from affective ratings and implicit emotional effects on cognition

      2022, Biological Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Incorrect trials or trials with artifacts exceeding ± 100μV were excluded. Previous review and research have found that the N1 to negative affective cues, is most prominent over the regions around PZ and POZ (Dan, Hajcak, & Dien, 2009; Hajcak, Weinberg, MacNamara, & Foti, 2010; Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2012). Therefore, the N1 mean amplitude was calculated by averaging data from parietal and parieto-occipital electrodes (PZ and POZ), calculating the peak latency of the negative deflection between 100 and 150 ms after stimulus onset.

    • The effects of emotional valence on insight problem solving in global-local processing: An ERP study

      2020, International Journal of Psychophysiology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Therefore, the later component may reflect the processing of forming remote associations. Additionally, we examined N1, which is related to the breadth of attentional scope caused by different processing types (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2012; Olofsson et al., 2008). N1 is an early ERP component (100–160 ms after stimulus onset) consisting of a larger negativity over occipito-parietal sites to the attended stimulus (Anderson and Taraschenko, 2018; Ho et al., 2012).

    • Assessing the Motivational Dimensional Model of emotion–cognition interaction: Comment on Domachowska, Heitmann, Deutsch, et al., (2016)

      2016, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Other studies have used different measures of attention to support the conceptual model (Finucane, 2011; Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010b,c; Gable, Poole, & Harmon-Jones, 2015; O'Toole, DeCicco, Hong, & Dennis, 2011; Price & Harmon-Jones, 2010). Most exciting have been the additional 16 published studies which have extended our theoretical model into other domains of research such as memory, categorization, perseverance/distractibility, embodiment, and neurophysiological processes (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2011b, 2012; Greenaway et al., 2015; Hart & Gable, 2013; Liu & Wang, 2014; McGregor, Nash, Mann, & Phills, 2010; Smallman & Roese, 2008). We would like to thank the replication team for the care taken to replicate – as directly as possible – our original work.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text