Attentional bias during emotional processing: evidence from an emotional flanker task using IAPS

ABSTRACT

Attention is biased towards threat-related stimuli. In three experiments, we investigated the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this processing bias. An emotional flanker task simultaneously presented affective or neutral pictures from the international affective picture system database either as central response-relevant stimuli or surrounding response-uninformative flankers. Participants’ response times to central stimuli was measured. The attentional bias was observed when stimuli were presented either for 1500 ms (Experiment 1) or 500 ms (Experiment 2). The threat-related attentional bias held regardless of the stimuli competing for attention even when presentation time was further reduced to 200 ms (Experiment 3). The results indicate that automatic and controlled mechanisms may interact to modulate the orientation of attention to threat. The data presented here shed new light on the mechanisms, processes, and time course of this long investigated by still largely unknown processing bias.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• emotion
• threat-related attentional bias
• flanker tasks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The main motivation for the series of experiments presented here was not to further investigate the well-known congruency effect during emotional processing (e.g., Horstmann et al., 2006). Our interest was to reveal the extent to which responses to targets could be affected by threatening flankers when such stimuli compete for attention under different experimental manipulations. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that in our Experiments 1 and 2, the factor Position assesses an effect akin to that described by Congruency. However, for the sake of consistency across the series of experiments presented here we opted for the term Position rather than Congruency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Colciencias (Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación) [grant number 122266140116], [grant number 111556933399].