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Abstract and Figures
The brief presentation of an emotional distractor can temporarily impair perception of a subsequent , rapidly presented target, an effect known as emotion-induced blindness (EIB). How rapidly does this impairment unfold? To probe this question, we examined EIB for targets that immediately succeeded (" lag-1 ") emotional distractors in a rapid stream of items relative to EIB for targets at later serial positions. Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that emotional distractors interfere with items presented very soon after them, with impaired target perception emerging as early as lag-1. Experiment 3 included an exploratory examination of individual differences, which suggested that EIB onsets more rapidly among participants scoring high in measures linked to negative affect.
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... When an emotional distractor appears one or two items before the target (i.e. lag 1 and 2 trials), participants' target detection is reduced relative to when a neutral distractor appears (Kennedy & Most, 2015). This impairment weakens but still exists when the target appears four or six items after the distractor (i.e. ...
... Our primary interest in how visual field varied the size of the EIB effect informed the experimental design. First, we chose lags (i.e. the number of items between the distractor and target) where EIB reliably occurs (Kennedy & Most, 2015); we presented the distractor either two items before the target (lag 2)which generally yields a robust EIB effector four items before the target (lag 4)which generally yields a smaller EIB effect than lag 2. Second, we simplified the design by using exclusively negative, and not positive, distractors. Supporting this decision, studies that have included positive distractors (e.g. ...
... This result is inconsistent with other studies (e.g. Kennedy & Most, 2015) that have reported a stronger EIB effect at lag 2 than lag 4. In line with a leftward attention bias, participants were more accurate in detecting the rotation of left than right stream targets both when distractors were present and when they were absent. Taken alongside existing work (Mulckhuyse et al., 2017;Nicholls et al., 2017), this finding suggests greater activation in right-than left-hemisphere regions for visuospatial attention (Karolis et al., 2019) leads to superior detection of targets when they appear in the left, than the right, visual field. ...
People often need to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Irrelevant emotional distractors interrupt this process. But does the degree to which emotional distractors disrupt attention depend on which visual field they appear in? We thought it might for two reasons: (1) people pay slightly more attention to the left than the right visual field, and (2) some research suggests the right-hemisphere (which, in early visual processing, receives left visual field input) has areas specialised for processing emotion. Participants viewed a rapid image-stream in each visual field and reported the rotation of an embedded neutral target preceded by a negative or neutral distractor. We predicted that the degree to which negative (vs. neutral) distractors impaired target detection would be larger when targets appeared in the left than the right stream. This hypothesis was supported, but only when the distractor and target could appear in the same or opposite stream as each other (Experiments 2a-b), not when they always appeared in the same stream as each other (Experiments 1a-1b). However, this effect was driven by superior left-stream accuracy following neutral distractors, and similar left- and right-stream accuracy following negative distractors. Emotional distractors therefore override visuospatial asymmetries and disrupt attention, regardless of visual field.
... In other words, the emotional image temporarily "blinds," hence the term emotioninduced blindness. Emotion-induced blindness is most robust when the neutral target appears shortly after the emotional distractor (e.g., 100-200 ms; Kennedy & Most, 2015), and tends to dissipate as the latency between the emotional and neutral stimuli increases. Thus, researchers propose that emotion-induced blindness reflects early perceptual competition between emotional and non-emotional stimuli (e.g., Most & Wang, 2011). ...
... But prior research suggests emotion-induced blindness may also be influenced by individual differences in cognitive and affective inflexibility. Consistent with this idea, emotioninduced blindness has been linked with individual differences in difficulty terminating (but not initiating) episodes of worry assessed in daily life in a predominantly Caucasian sample (Berenbaum et al., 2018), and with self-reported repetitive negative thinking (using similar measures to the current study; Kennedy & Most, 2015;Onie & Most, 2017, but see Onie & Most, 2021). In an experiment with U.S. undergraduates, Haddara et al. (2019) found that emotion-induced blindness persisted at longer latencies (e.g., 400-700 ms) following an anticipatory anxiety induction (i.e., the threat of electric shock). ...
... However, other operationalizations also exist, such as using accuracy following negative distractors only (Onie & Most, 2017) or comparing accuracy following negative distractors at different lags to index emotional disengagement specifically (Kennedy & Most, 2015;Olatunji, 2021). We report analyses using these alternative operationalizations in the supplementary materials (Tables S1-S2). ...
Psychological inflexibility is theorized to underlie difficulties adjusting mental processes in response to changing circumstances. People show inflexibility across a range of domains, including attention, cognition, and affect. But it remains unclear whether common mechanisms underlie inflexibility in different domains. We investigated this possibility in a pre-registered replication and extension examining associations among attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures. Participants ( N = 196) completed lab tasks assessing (a) emotion-induced blindness , the tendency for task-irrelevant emotional stimuli to impair attention allocation to non-emotional stimuli; (b) emotional inertia , the tendency for feelings to persist across time and contexts; and global self-report measures of (c) repetitive negative thinking , the tendency to repeatedly engage in negative self-focused thoughts (i.e., rumination, worry). Based on prior research linking repetitive negative thinking with negative affect inertia, on one hand, and emotion-induced blindness, on the other, we predicted positive correlations among all three measures of inflexibility. However, none of the three measures were related and Bayes factors indicated strong evidence for independence. Supplementary analyses ruled out alternative explanations for our findings, e.g., analytic decisions. Although our findings question the overlap between attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility measures, this study has methodological limitations. For instance, our measures varied across more than their inflexibility domain and our sample, relative to previous studies, included a high proportion of Asian participants who may show different patterns of ruminative thinking to non-Asian participants. Future research should address these limitations to confirm that common mechanisms do not underlie attentional, cognitive, and affective inflexibility.
... Note also that the study by Kennedy and colleagues tested the relationship for both the standard EIB difference scores and the absolute scores. Similarly for anxiety, one study has found a relationship (Chen et al., 2020) while another has not (Kennedy & Most, 2015) and for harm avoidance, one has found a relationship , while another has not . These mixed findings are consistent with our experiences, sometimes we have found a relationship between EIB scores and DASS, while at other times we have not (unpublished data) and it was these inconsistencies that prompted us to consider the reliability of EIB scores and to explore whether their low reliability could be contributing to these mixed findings in the literature. ...
... That said, as discussed previously, most studies have failed to find a relationship between EIB performance (using either the standard EIB difference score or absolute scores) and individual difference scores. Additionally, those researchers who have found such differences have failed to replicate those findings in subsequent studies (Guilbert et al., 2020;Kennedy et al., 2020;Kennedy & Most, 2015;Most et al., , 2006Onie & Most, 2017;Perone et al., 2020). Why then do some studies find these relationships? ...
The emotion-induced-blindness (EIB) paradigm has been extensively used to investigate attentional biases to emotionally salient stimuli. However, the low reliability of EIB scores (the difference in performance between the neutral and emotionally salient condition) limits the effectiveness of the paradigm for investigating individual differences. Here, across two studies, we investigated whether we could improve the reliability of EIB scores. In Experiment 1, we introduced a mid-intensity emotionally salient stimuli condition, with the goal of obtaining a wider range of EIB magnitudes to promote reliability. In Experiment 2, we sought to reduce the attentional oddball effect, so we created a modified EIB paradigm by removing the filler images. Neither of these approaches improved the reliability of the EIB scores. Reliability for the high- and mid-intensity EIB difference scores were low, while reliability of the scores for absolute performance (neutral, high-, and mid-intensity) were high and the scores were also highly correlated, even though overall performance in the emotionally salient conditions were significantly worse than in the neutral conditions. Given these results, we can conclude that while emotionally salient stimuli impair performance in the EIB task compared with the neutral condition, the strong correlation between the emotionally salient and neutral conditions means that while EIB can be used to investigate individual differences in attentional control, it is not selective to individual differences in attentional biases to emotionally salient stimuli.
... That is, emotional valence alone might not be enough to capture attention in the EAB paradigm -participants must first attend to and semantically process the stimulus before its valence can draw resources away from a target to elicit an EAB. This distinction is crucial to fully understanding the EAB, given that emotional critical distractors used in EAB studies are often physically distinct from the surrounding RSVP stimuli (e.g., Huang et al., 2008;Kennedy & Most, 2015a, 2015bMost et al., 2005), which might influence the strength -or even the presence -of the EAB effect. ...
... First, all of the emotional images in Experiment 2 (Semantic + Distinct) and Experiment 4 (Perceptual + Distinct), and most emotional images in Experiment 1 (Perceptual + Similar), were unpleasant images containing human mutilation, threat, and gore. While these unpleasant images are more common in EAB studies (e.g., Baker et al., 2021;Hoffman et al., 2020;Kennedy & Most, 2015b;Most et al., 2005), studies have also used pleasant (erotic) images to evoke an EAB (e.g., Keefe et al., 2019;Keefe & Zald, 2020;Kennedy et al., 2019). Future research should investigate if the present results generalize to positive-valence or erotic distractors. ...
The attentional blink (AB) reveals temporal limits of goal-driven attention: the second of two proximate targets presented in a rapid stream of non-targets is often missed. In the emotional AB (EAB, also termed emotion-induced blindness), an emotionally valenced distractor replacing the first target yields a similar blink. However, the AB and EAB have not been adequately compared, and thus the extent of their mechanistic similarity remains unclear. The current study interleaved AB and EAB trials using identical stimuli in the same participants and observed that the AB is consistently larger than the EAB. Moreover, the four main experiments varied in both target-defining features (semantic vs. perceptual) and EAB distractor salience (emotion alone vs. emotion plus physical distinctiveness); an EAB was observed only when distractors were physically distinct. Even when a large EAB was observed, the AB was still larger using a task with identical targets and fillers in the same individuals. These results suggest that: (1) goal-driven attentional control (measured by the AB) has a greater influence than stimulus-driven attentional control (measured by the EAB: emotion valence and physical distinctiveness) on selection from a dynamic series of stimuli, and (2) emotional valence is insufficient on its own to trigger an EAB. However, these results are consistent with the account that when attention has already been captured by a physically salient distractor, emotional content can interfere with disengagement from the already-attended stimulus.
... For a more direct comparison into the online replication of more standard attentional blink paradigms, see previous work [e.g., 17,18]. Our design has similarities to picture based designs such as the emotional blink paradimgs [28][29][30], with the main difference being our use of Mondrian masks as fillers. As our paradigm generates a reliable attentional blink effect, it would be well suited for experiments that attempt to isolate the influence of particular image properties (e.g., emotional content) on attention. ...
The complex relationship between attention and visual perception can be exemplified and investigated through the Attentional Blink. The attentional blink is characterised by impaired attention to the second of two target stimuli, when both occur within 200 - 500ms. The attentional blink has been well studied in experimental lab settings. However, despite the rise of online methods for behavioural research, their suitability for studying the attentional blink has not been fully addressed yet, the main concern being the lack of control and timing variability for stimulus presentation. Here, we investigated the suitability of online testing for studying the attentional blink with visual objects. Our results show a clear attentional blink effect between 200 to 400ms following the distractor including a Lag 1 sparing effect in line with previous research despite significant inter-subject and timing variability. This work demonstrates the suitability of online methods for studying the attentional blink with visual objects, opening new avenues to explore its underlying processes.
... But, while most studies show this to be fear-specific, our results demonstrate that a bias for task-irrelevant emotion is present for threatening and positive faces as well. Since the behavioral performance was also poorest for neutral targets and disturbed by emotional distractors, the amygdala might be part of a distributed network that contributes to an involuntary attentional bias for emotion (e.g., Ciesielski et al., 2010;Kennedy & Most, 2015;Mitchell et al., 2008;Most et al., 2007;Schwabe et al., 2011; for review see McHugo et al., 2013). It most likely does not drive this bias on its own, as some show a preserved automatic attentional capture by emotional distractors in patients with uni-and bilateral amygdala damage (Piech et al., 2011;Tsuchiya et al., 2009). ...
The amygdala is assumed to contribute to a bottom-up attentional bias during visual processing of emotional faces. Still, how its response to emotion interacts with top-down attention is not fully understood. It is also unclear if amygdala activity and scalp EEG respond to emotion and attention in a similar way. Therefore, we studied the interaction of emotion and attention during face processing in oscillatory gamma-band activity (GBA) in the amygdala and on the scalp. Amygdala signals were recorded via intracranial EEG (iEEG) in 9 patients with epilepsy. Scalp recordings were collected from 19 healthy participants. Three randomized blocks of angry, neutral, and happy faces were presented, and either negative, neutral, or positive expressions were denoted as targets. Both groups detected happy faces fastest and most accurately. In the amygdala, the earliest effect was observed around 170 ms in high GBA (105-117.5 Hz) when neutral faces served as targets. Here, GBA was higher for emotional than neutral faces. During attention to negative faces, low GBA (< 90 Hz) increased specifically for angry faces both in the amygdala and over posterior scalp regions, albeit earlier on the scalp (60 ms) than in the amygdala (210 ms). From 570 ms, amygdala high GBA (117.5-145 Hz) was also increased for both angry and neutral, compared to happy, faces. When positive faces were the targets, GBA did not differentiate between expressions. The present data reveal that attention-independent emotion detection in amygdala high GBA may only occur during a neutral focus of attention. Top-down threat vigilance coordinates widespread low GBA, biasing stimulus processing in favor of negative faces. These results are in line with a multi-pathway model of emotion processing and help specify the role of GBA in this process by revealing how attentional focus can tune timing and amplitude of emotional GBA responses.
... This is known as emotion-induced blindness (Most et al., 2005). Furthermore, the degree to which negative stimuli cause emotion-induced blindness appears to predict individual differences in negative affect and persistent negative thought (e.g., Onie & Most, 2017;Kennedy & Most, 2015). ...
Emotionally negative stimuli are perceptually prioritized to such a degree that they can cause people to miss seeing subsequent targets that appear in front of their eyes. It is unclear whether this effect (known as emotion-induced blindness) reflects postperceptual interference, in which case unseen targets might still impact later responses, as in the seemingly similar “attentional blink”. An alternative is that emotional distractors prevent target encoding, and so leave no residual trace of target information. In this study, we used a priming task to assess these alternative possibilities. Each emotion-induced blindness trial was immediately followed by a speeded arrow judgment task, in which the arrow’s orientation could be congruent or incongruent with the orientation of an emotion-induced blindness target. Analyses revealed strong evidence that seen targets primed the arrow judgment, but there was moderate to strong evidence that unseen targets elicited no priming whatsoever. These results lend support to claims that emotion-induced blindness reflects failure to perceptually encode target information, and may reflect a different mechanism from the phenomenally similar attentional blink.
The amygdala might support an attentional bias for emotional faces. However, whether and how selective attention toward a specific valence modulates this bias is not fully understood. Likewise, it is unclear whether amygdala and cortical signals respond to emotion and attention in a similar way. We recorded gamma‐band activity (GBA, > 30 Hz) intracranially in the amygdalae of 11 patients with epilepsy and collected scalp recordings from 19 healthy participants. We presented angry, neutral, and happy faces randomly, and we denoted one valence as the target. Participants detected happy targets most quickly and accurately. In the amygdala, during attention to negative faces, low gamma‐band activity (LGBA, < 90 Hz) increased for angry compared with happy faces from 160 ms. From 220 ms onward, amygdala high gamma‐band activity (HGBA, > 90 Hz) was higher for angry and neutral faces than for happy ones. Monitoring neutral faces increased amygdala HGBA for emotions compared with neutral faces from 40 ms. Expressions were not differentiated in GBA while monitoring positive faces. On the scalp, only threat monitoring resulted in expression differentiation. Here, posterior LGBA was increased selectively for angry targets from 60 ms. The data show that GBA differentiation of emotional expressions is modulated by attention to valence: Top‐down‐controlled threat vigilance coordinates widespread GBA in favor of angry faces. Stimulus‐driven emotion differentiation in amygdala GBA occurs during a neutral attentional focus. These findings align with a multi‐pathway model of emotion processing and specify the role of GBA in this process.
The attentional functioning of nondysphoric, mildly dysphoric, and moderately to severely dysphoric college students was tested using the attentional blink (AB) paradigm. These groups performed equally well at reporting a single target appearing in a rapidly presented stream of stimuli. All groups showed an AB, with report sensitivity for a 2nd target being reduced when the 2 targets were presented less than 0.5 s apart. Nondysphoric and mildly dysphoric participants showed the same size ABs, but the ABs for moderately to severely dysphoric participants were larger and longer. As predicted, the results showed that moderately to severely dysphoric individuals have attentional impairments. These impairments, however, were evident only in the more demanding dual-task condition.
This study examined the role of self-reported attentional control in regulating attentional biases related to trait anxiety. Simple detection targets were preceded by cues labeling potential target locations as threatening (likely to result in negative feedback) or safe (likely to result in positive feedback). Trait anxious participants showed an early attentional bias favoring the threatening location 250 ms after the cue and a late bias favoring the safe location 500 ms after the cue. The anxiety-related threat bias was moderated by attentional control at the 500-ms delay: Anxious participants with poor attentional control still showed the threat bias, whereas those with good control were better able to shift from the threatening location. Thus, skilled control of voluntary attention may allow anxious persons to limit the impact of threatening information.
Several studies have shown that people who engage in ruminative responses to depressive symptoms have higher levels of depressive symptoms over time, after accounting for baseline levels of depressive symptoms. The analyses reported here showed that rumination also predicted depressive disorders, including new onsets of depressive episodes. Rumination predicted chronicity of depressive disorders before accounting for the effects of baseline depressive symptoms but not after accounting for the effects of baseline depressive symptoms. Rumination also predicted anxiety symptoms and may be particularly characteristic of people with mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms.
Emotion-induced blindness (EIB) refers to impaired awareness of items appearing soon after an irrelevant, emotionally arousing stimulus. Superficially, EIB appears to be similar to the attentional blink (AB), a failure to report a target that closely follows another relevant target. Previous studies of AB using event-related potentials suggest that the AB results from interference with selection (N2 component) and consolidation (P3b component) of the second target into working memory. The present study applied a similar analysis to EIB and, similarly, found that an irrelevant emotional distractor suppressed the N2 and P3b components associated with the following target at short lags. Emotional distractors also elicited a positive deflection that appeared to be similar to the PD component, which has been associated with attempts to suppress salient, irrelevant distractors (Kiss, Grubert, Petersen, & Eimer, 2012; Sawaki, Geng, & Luck, 2012; Sawaki & Luck, 2010). These results suggest that irrelevant emotional pictures gain access to working memory, even when observers are attempting to ignore them and, like the AB, prevent access of a closely following target.
To investigate the temporal allocation of attention, a series of 7 experiments using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) was designed to examine the relationship of the attentional demands of various target tasks to the production of the subsequent visual attentional deficit, or ''attentional blink'' (AB), recently reported by J. E. Raymond, K. L. Shapiro, and K. M. Arnell (1992). The principal finding is that AB occurs only when a target is an object and does not occur when the target is defined by a temporal interval. Target detection difficulty as estimated by d' analysis reveals no relationship between the attentional demands of the target and the production of the AB. A late-selection account of this phenomenon is offered in place of the early-selection account advanced in Raymond et al.'s previous report.
When people search for targets within rapid streams of images, irrelevant emotional distractors - relative to neutral distractors - spontaneously demand attention and impair subsequent target detection, an effect that can be likened to an emotion-induced "attentional blink". But what happens when emotional distractors appear after a target has already come and gone? Here, we describe new findings of retroactive emotion-induced effects on target awareness. First, emotion-induced impairments of target awareness extended even to targets that appeared immediately before emotional distractors (Experiment 1). Second, when targets preceded distractors by two items - rather than by one item - negative distractors led to enhanced target processing relative to when distractors were neutral (Experiment 2). In contrast, when a target appeared after an emotional distractor, target awareness was impaired regardless of whether it was the first or second subsequent item. These results potentially implicate separable impacts of emotion on target processing, which can be distinguished by their facilitatory versus disruptive effects and by their temporal dynamics.
Using a dual-target identification task during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), we examined facilitation and interference effects exerted by emotional stimuli. Emotionally arousing first targets (T1s) were encoded with higher accuracy than neutral T1s. At the same time, identification of a second neutral target (T2) was impaired reflecting a failure of disengaging attention from arousing T1s. Similar interference was triggered by arousing filler stimuli that were not voluntarily searched for in the RSVP stream (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, we showed that interference is reduced (though facilitation for arousing T1s is maintained) when the second task itself involves variations in emotional arousal. Vice versa, when arousal associated with the T2 stimulus was predictable, interference recurred (Experiment 4). Our findings indicate that the perceived emotional intensity of a stimulus is a determinant of successful identification during RSVP: Encoding of arousing stimuli is reliably facilitated. Interference effects with subsequent processing arise independently and are strongly modulated by the overall task context and specific processing strategies.