On the role of goal relevance in emotional attention: Disgust evokes early attention to cleanliness

Abstract

Prior evidence has shown that aversive emotional states are characterised by an attentional bias towards aversive events. The present study investigated whether aversive emotions also bias attention towards stimuli that represent means by which the emotion can be alleviated. We induced disgust by having participants touch fake disgusting objects. Participants in the control condition touched non-disgusting objects. The results of a subsequent dot-probe task revealed that attention was oriented to disgusting pictures irrespective of condition. However, participants in the disgust condition also oriented towards pictures representing cleanliness. These findings suggest that the deployment of attention in aversive emotional states is not purely stimulus driven but is also guided by the goal to alleviate this emotional state.

Keywords:

• Attentional bias
• Goals
• Motivation
• Emotion regulation
• Disgust

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by Grant BOF/GOA2006/001 of Ghent University.

We thank Louisa Bogaerts for her help in collecting the data, the Ghent Experimental Psychopathology Group for valuable discussions, Peter de Jong for providing the questionnaire, and especially Laura Cooymans for her help with the stimulus material.

Notes

¹The numbers of the pictures were: 5500, 5720, 5731, 5740, 7020, 7030, 7031, 7050, 7140, 7217. (M _valence=5.26; SD _valence=1.19; M _arousal=2.82; SD _arousal=1.99)

²Additionally, we split the data from the dot-probe task into two blocks and repeated the reported analyses in order to investigate whether the effects changed during the task. Interestingly, the attentional bias to disgusting pictures in the control condition was only significant in the second block of the probe task (M=14.68, SD=22.65), t(18) = 2.83, p=.011, but not in the first block (M=0.68, SD=27.50), t(18) = 0.108, p=.915; Interaction disgust Congruency×Block, F(1, 18) = 2.73, p=.116. The attentional bias to clean pictures in the disgust condition tended to be significant in both blocks of the task, ts > 1.75, ps<.097. The interaction between cleanliness Congruency and block was not significant, F<1.