Emotion-induced attentional bias: does it modulate the spatial Simon effect?

ABSTRACT

Schlaghecken, F., Blagrove, E., Mantantzis, K., Maylor, E. A., & Watson, D. G. [(2017). Look on the bright side: Positivity bias modulates interference effects in the Simon task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(6), 763–770] found larger spatial Simon effects for happy than sad faces. Unexpectedly, this enhancement was also observed for nonvalenced objects requiring the same response as happy faces. We examined whether the increase of the spatial Simon effect is location- or object-based. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants pressed a left/right key in response to a happy/sad face or a left-/right-pointing arrow. These stimuli appeared on the left/right side of fixation, with location being task-irrelevant. Consistent with Schlaghecken et al., the spatial Simon effect was numerically larger for happy than sad faces regardless of whether faces and arrows were presented in different blocks (Experiment 1) or intermixed within blocks (Experiment 2). However, the spatial Simon effect for arrows was not modulated by the faces’ emotional valence. Similar findings were observed with pointing hands in Experiment 3. Our results imply that attentional bias is associated with specific objects (e.g. faces) not locations.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion-induced Simon effect
• Simon task
• attentional bias
• emotional valence

Acknowledgements

We thank Friederike Schlaghecken, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We also thank Andrew Morgan for providing technical support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Compliance with ethical standards

Declarations of Interest: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. All authors in this study also declare no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Notes

1 De Houwer and Eelen (1998) did not look at the congruency effect as a function of stimulus and response valence but averaged across positive and negative valence.

2 In Schlaghecken et al. (2017), each response key was always associated with either a positive, happy face or a negative, sad face for each participant. In Shaw et al. (2011), participants were asked to detect a specific target face (a happy or an angry face) and determined its location. Thus, each response key was not associated with any emotionally valenced face. The difference in designs could lead one to argue that the positivity bias in Schlaghecken et al. (2017) is driven by sustained attention towards the positive response side, whereas the N2pc reversal for the positive, happy face is triggered by spatial attention towards the negative, angry face location. Therefore, the results from these two studies may not necessarily contradict each other. While this view is possible, there was no evidence for the positivity bias in the present study.

3 The further t-test analyses were conducted on the congruency effect – the subtraction of proportion of error from two conditions (incongruent – congruent). We used the mean proportion of errors instead of arcsine transformed error rates as the latter is appropriate for proportions derived from count data (e.g. the ratio of the total number of errors to the total number of trials) and can only apply to positive values.

4 Pooled RT data were analysed as a function of handedness (left handers vs. right handers; a between-subject variable), stimulus location, and response location, averaged across the task type (face vs. arrow/hand). In the present study, the response location was assigned to a specific valence (e.g. positive for left and negative for right for a group but the assignment was reversed for the other group; see Figure 1, Panel B). Thus, we recoded the response location variable based on the valence for each group. We analysed the pooled data on RT including target type (face vs. arrow/hand). However, target type did not interact with any variables, Fs(1, 214) ≤ 2.51, ps ≥ .115, ${\eta }_p^2$ ≤ .01. Therefore, we excluded target type in the final analysis.