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ABSTRACT
In a widely cited paper, Jefferies et al. (2008) report a study in which they manipulated participants’ mood and examined the effects of this manipulation on their performance on the Attentional Blink task. Their results revealed an interaction between emotional valence and arousal: attentional control of participants who experienced a negative mood with low arousal (i.e. sadness) was best, whereas it was worst for participants who experienced a negative mood with high arousal (i.e. anxiety). Performance for participants who were in a positive mood, either with low arousal (i.e. calmness) or high arousal (i.e. happiness) had intermediate scores. In this study, I examined the replicability of this effect and performed additional analyses to investigate the extent to which this effect is due to perceptual or attentional processes and to examine the role of distraction on AB performance. Importantly, the results showed that the crucial interaction between emotional valence and arousal did not reach significance. This could be due a diversity of factors that are addressed in the discussion.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks Dr Lisa Jefferies for her helpful instructions regarding procedural details.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Because of several practical problems (e.g. many participants were not eligible for the experiment because of high BDI scores) data collection lasted longer than anticipated, making it impossible to meet the deadlines for the OSF paper.
2. Because Jefferies et al. do not report effect sizes and correlations between the means are not available, I could not calculate effect sizes for their ratings.