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