The influence of psychological resilience on the relation between automatic stimulus evaluation and attentional breadth for surprised faces

Abstract

The broaden-and-build theory relates positive emotions to resilience and cognitive broadening. The theory proposes that the broadening effects underly the relation between positive emotions and resilience, suggesting that resilient people can benefit more from positive emotions at the level of cognitive functioning. Research has investigated the influence of positive emotions on attentional broadening, but the stimulus in the target of attention may also influence attentional breadth, depending on affective stimulus evaluation. Surprised faces are particularly interesting as they are valence ambiguous, therefore, we investigated the relation between affective evaluation—using an affective priming task—and attentional breadth for surprised faces, and how this relation is influenced by resilience. Results show that more positive evaluations are related to more attentional broadening at high levels of resilience, while this relation is reversed at low levels. This indicates that resilient individuals can benefit more from attending to positively evaluated stimuli at the level of attentional broadening.

Keywords:

• Positive emotions
• Positively evaluated stimuli
• Attentional breadth
• Surprised faces

We would like to thank Dr Adriaan Spruyt for his help on the prime and filler stimuli for the affective priming paradigm.

This research was supported by Grant [BOF10/GOA/014] for a Concerted Research Action of Ghent University awarded to Rudi De Raedt.

We would like to thank Dr Adriaan Spruyt for his help on the prime and filler stimuli for the affective priming paradigm.

This research was supported by Grant [BOF10/GOA/014] for a Concerted Research Action of Ghent University awarded to Rudi De Raedt.

Notes

¹ BDI and STAI-trait scores were square root transformed. For the RS-nl acceptance subscale, PANASstate positive and negative, and PANAStrait positive and negative, non-parametric Spearman's correlations were calculated.

² Results are reported for the moderation analysis after exclusion of two cases that strongly influence the model as indicated by scores above 1 on the DfFIT fitting index. As both APT and ANI scores for surprised and neutral stimuli were correlated, we performed additional analyses to investigate the specificity of the moderation effect. However, resilience did not moderate the relation between APTsurprise and ANI for neutral faces, nor vice versa, all interaction terms ps> .10.