The functional field of view becomes narrower while viewing negative emotional stimuli

Abstract

We investigated how viewing positive and negative emotional stimuli influences the functional field of view. Two types of emotional pictures were used, representing either a negative emotion such as disgust or fear, or a positive emotion such vigour or excitement. The participants' task was to detect and identify a digit presented in any of the four corners of a picture on the display, while discriminating a letter in the centre of the display. We used two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), of 500 and 3000 ms, between the picture and the digit. Performance was poorer in the negative condition than in the positive and non-emotional conditions. Performance in the 500 ms SOA condition was poorer than in the 3000 ms SOA condition. These results suggest that the functional field of view (FFOV) becomes narrower when people view negative emotional stimuli, whereas it does not change when viewing positive or neutral emotional stimuli.

Keywords:

• Emotional stimuli
• The functional field of view
• SOA

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant to the first author from the Research Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists and Grant no. 15330156 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of the Science to the second author.

The authors thank Sachio Nakamizo for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Notes

¹The IAPS slide numbers were as follows: positive, 4608, 4660, 5470, 8030, 8170, 8179, 8185, 8186, 8200, and 8490; negative, 1050, 1525, 2811, 3215, 3500, 3550, 6021, 6022, 6300, 6312, 6350, and 9921; neutral, 2102, 2393, 2396, 2579, 2850, 5530, 5731, 7034, 7179, 7205, 7490, and 7710. An ANOVA was performed on the pleasant ratings, arousal ratings, and the number of bytes of the compressed image file sizes with one factor of emotion (positive, negative, and neutral). In the pleasant ratings, the main effect of emotion was significant, F(2, 33) = 560.63, MSE=0.13, p<.001. A post hoc multiple comparison test using Ryan's method indicated that the positive picture (M=7.28) was higher than the neutral (M=5.25) or the negative (M=2.54) picture (p<.05), and the neutral picture was higher than the negative picture (p<.05). In the arousal ratings, the main effect of emotion was significant, F(2, 33) = 257.17, MSE=0.19, p<.001. A post hoc multiple-comparison test using Ryan's method indicated that the positive (M=6.64) or the negative picture (M=6.47) was higher than the neutral (M=3.04) picture (p<.05). In the number of bytes of the compressed image file sizes, a main effect of emotion was significant, F(2, 33) = 8.74, MSE=3641.56, p<.001. A post hoc multiple comparison test using Ryan's method indicated that the negative picture (M=112.83) was lower than the positive (M=187.00) or the neutral (M=211.33) pictures (p<.05).