The Library

Tagging multiple emotional stimuli : negative valence has little benefit

Tools

Watson, Derrick G. and Blagrove, Elisabeth. (2012) Tagging multiple emotional stimuli : negative valence has little benefit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol.38 (No.3). pp. 785-803. ISSN 0096-1523

Preview

Text
WRAP_Watson_200812-watson_hpp2010_1892_accepted.pdf - Accepted Version
Download (683Kb) | Preview

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026730

Abstract

Six experiments examined the influence of emotional valence on the tagging and enumeration of multiple targets. Experiments 1, 5 and 6 found that there was no difference in the efficiency of tagging/enumerating multiple negative or positive stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that, when neutral-expression face distractors were present, enumerating negative targets was faster overall, but was only more efficient for small numbers of targets. Experiments 3 and 4 determined that this negative target advantage was most likely caused by increased attentional guidance to negatively-valenced stimuli and was not based on simple visual feature differences. The findings suggest that a multiple-target negative stimulus advantage will only occur under conditions of attentional competition, and for relatively small numbers of targets. The results are discussed in relation to theories of multiple- and single-item processing, threat-priority mechanisms, and the types of representations that support different attentional tasks.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Faculty of Science > Psychology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Psychological tests -- Design and construction, Emotions, Facial expression -- Testing, Searching behavior
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Publisher:	American Psychological Association
ISSN:	0096-1523
Date:	2012
Volume:	Vol.38
Number:	No.3
Page Range:	pp. 785-803
Identification Number:	10.1037/a0026730
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access
References:	Atkinson, J., Campbell, F. W., & Francis, M. R. (1976). The magic number 4_0: A new look at visual numerosity judgments. Perception, 5, 327– 334. Blagrove, E. & Watson, D.G. (2010). Visual marking and facial affect: Can an emotional face be ignored? Emotion, 10, 147-168. Blanchette, I. (2006). Snakes, spiders guns & syringes: How specific are evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,59,1484-1504. Brosch, T., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., & Scherer, K.R. (2008). Beyond fear: Rapid spatial orienting toward positive emotional stimuli. Psychological Science, 19, 362-370. Cerella, J. (1990). Aging and information-processing rate. In J. E. Birren & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of aging (3rd ed., pp. 201–221). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Cerella, J., Poon, L. W., & Williams, D. M. (1980). Age and the complexity hypothesis. In L. W. Poon (Ed.), Aging in the 1980s (pp. 332–340). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Cole, G. C., Kentridge, R. W., & Heywood, C. A. (2004). Visual salience in the change detection paradigm: The special role of object onset. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 464-477. Dimburg, U. & Öhman, A. (1996). Behold the Wrath: Psychophysiological Responses to Facial Stimuli. Motivation and Emotion, 20, 149-182. Duncan, J., & Humphreys, G. W. (1989). Visual search and stimulus similarity. Psychological Review, 96, 433–458. Eastwood, J., Smilek, D., & Merikle, P.M. (2001). Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion. Perception & Psychophysics, 63, 1004-1013. Eastwood, J.D., Smilek, D., & Merikle, P.M. (2003). Negative facial expression captures attention and disrupts performance. Perception & Psychophysics, 65, 352-358. Egeth, H.E., Leonard, C.J., & Palomares, M. (2008). The role of attention in subitizing: Is the magical number 1? Visual Cognition, 16, 463-473. Fenske, M. J., & Eastwood, J. D., (2003). Modulation of focused attention by faces expressing emotion: Evidence from flanker tasks. Emotion, 3, 327–343 Folk, C.L., & Anderson, B.A. (2010). Target-uncertainty effects in attentional capture: Color-singleton set or multiple attentional control settings? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 421-426. Folk, C.L., Remington, R.W. & Johnston, J.C. (1992). Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18, 1030-1044. Folk, C.L., Remington, R.W., & Wright, J.H. (1994). The structure of attentional control: Contingent attentional capture by apparent motion, abrupt onset, and color. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20, 317-329. Found, A & Müller, H.J. (1996). Searching for unknown feature targets on more than one dimension: Investigating a “dimension-weighting” account. Perception & Psychophysics, 58, 88-101. Fox, E., Lester, V., Russo, R., Bowles, R.J., Pichler, A., & Dutton, K. (2000). Facial expressions of emotion: Are angry faces detected more efficiently? Cognition & Emotion, 14, 61-92. Fox, E., Russo, R. Bowles, R., & Dutton, K. (2001). Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 681-700. Georgiou, G.A., Bleakley, C., Hayward, J., Russo, R., Dutton, K., Eltiti, S and Fox, E. (2005). Focusing on fear: Attentional disengagement from emotional faces. Visual Cognition, 12, 145-158. Hampton, C., Purcell, D. G., Bersine, L., Hansen, C. H., & Hansen, R. D. (1989). Probing “pop-out”: Another look at the face-in-the-crowd effect. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 27, 563-566. Hansen, C. H., & Hansen, R. D. (1988). Finding the face in the crowd: An anger superiority effect. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 54, 17-924. Horstmann, G., Borgstedt, K., & Heumann, M. (2006). Flanker effects with faces may depend on perceptual as well as emotional differences. Emotion, 6, 28-39. Horstmann, G., Scharlau, I, & Ansorge, U. (2006). More efficient rejection of happy than of angry face distractors in visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 1067-1073. Kaufman, E. L., Lord, M. W., Reese, T. W., & Volkman, J. (1949). The discrimination of visual number. American Journal of Psychology, 62, 498–525. LeDoux, J. E. (1998). Fear and the brain: Where we have been, and where are we going? Biological Psychiatry 44, 1229-1238. LeDoux, J.E. (1996) The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lipp, O.V., Derakshan, N., Waters, A.M. & Logies , S. (2004) Snakes and cats in the flower bed: Fast detection is not specific to pictures of fear-relevant animals, Emotion, 4, 233-250. Loftus, G.R., & Masson, M.E. (1994). Using confidence intervals in within-subjects designs. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 476-490. Lundqvist, D., & Öhman, A. (2005). Emotion regulates attention: The relation between facial configurations, facial emotion, and visual attention. Visual Cognition, 12, 51-84. Lundqvist, D., Esteves, F., & Öhman, A. (1999). The face of wrath: Critical features for conveying facial threat. Cognition and Emotion, 13, 691-711. Lundqvist, D., Esteves, F., & Öhman, A. (2004). The face of wrath: The role of features and configurations in conveying social threat. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 161-182. Martin, M., Williams, R., & Clark, D. (1991). Does anxiety lead to selective processing of threat-related information? Behaviour, Research and Therapy, 29, 147-160. Most, S.B., Smith, S.D., Cooter, A.B., Levy, B.N., & Zald, D.H. (2007). The naked truth: Positive, arousing distractors impair rapid target perception. Cognition and emotion, 21, 964-981. Nasrallah, M., Carmel, D., & Lavie, N. (2009). Murder, she wrote: Enhanced sensitivity to negative word valence. Emotion, 9, 609-618. Öhman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001) Fears, phobias and preparedness: Towards an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483-522. Öhman, A., Lundqvist, D., & Esteves, F. (2001). The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 80, 381–396. Olivers, C.N.L., & Watson, D.G. (2008). Subitizing requires attention. Visual Cognition, 16, 439-462. O'Regan, J. K., Rensink, R. A., Clark, J. J. (1999). Change-blindness as a result of 'mudsplashes'. Nature, 398, 34-34. Phelps, E.A., Ling, S., Carrasco, M. (2006). Emotion facilitates perception and potentiates the perceptual benefits of attention. Psychological Science, 17, 292-299. Puts, M. J. H., & de Weert, C. M. M. (1997). Does color influence subitization? Acta Psychologica, 97, 71-78. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1989). The role of location indexes in spatial perception: A sketch of the FINST spatial-index model. Cognition, 32, 65–97. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2000). Situating vision in the real world. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 197–207. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2001). Visual indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision. Cognition, 80, 127–158. Rensink, R. A. (2000). The dynamic representation of scenes. Visual Cognition, 7, 17-42. Salthouse, T. A. (1985). A theory of cognitive aging. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Seligman, M.E.P. (1970). On the generality of the laws of learning. Psychological Review, 77, 406-418. Seligman, M.E.P. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behaviour Therapy, 2, 307-330. Simon, T. J., & Vaishnavi, S. (1996). Subitizing and counting depend on different attentional mechanisms: Evidence from visual enumeration in afterimages. Perception & Psychophysics, 58, 915–926. Simons, D. J. (1996). In sight, out of mind: When object representations fail. Psychological Science, 7, 301-305. Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 261-267. Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 644-649. Svenson, O., & Sjo¨berg, K. (1983). Speeds of subitizing and counting processes in different age groups. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 142, 203–211. Tipples, J., Atkinson, A. P., Young, A. W. (2002). The eyebrow brown: A salient social signal. Emotion, 2, 288-296. Tottenham, N., Borscheid, A., Ellertsen, K., Marcus, D.J., & Nelson, C.A. (2002). Catgorization of facial expressions in children and adults: Establishing a larger 367 stimulus set. Poster presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting, San Francisco, CA. Treisman, A., & Sato, S. (1990). Conjunction search revisited. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 459-478. Trick, L. M., & Enns, J. T. (1997a). Clusters precede shapes in perceptual organization. Psychological Science, 8, 124–129. Trick, L.M., & Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1994). Why are small and large numbers enumerated differently? A limited-capacity preattentive stage in vision. Psychological Review, 101, 80-102. Watson, D.G. & Humphreys, G.W. (1997). Visual Marking: Prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects. Psychological Review, 104, 90-122. Watson, D.G. & Humphreys, G.W. (1998). Visual marking of moving objects: A role for top-down feature based inhibition in selection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24, 946-962. Watson, D.G. & Humphreys, G.W. (1999). The magic number four and temporo-parietal damage: Neurological impairments in counting targets amongst distractors. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 16, 609-629. Watson, D.G., Maylor, E.A., & Manson, N.J. (2002). Aging and enumeration: A selective deficit for the subitization of targets among distractors. Psychology and Aging, 17, 496-504. Watson, D.G., & Maylor, E.A. (2006). Effects of color heterogeneity on subitization. Perception & Psychophysics, 68, 319-326. Watson, D.G., Maylor, E.A., & Bruce, L.A.M. (2005a). Search, enumeration and aging: Eye movement requirements cause age-equivalent performance in enumeration but not in search tasks. Psychology and Aging, 20, 226-240. Watson, D.G., Maylor, E.A., & Bruce, L.A.M. (2005b). Effects of age on searching for and enumerating targets that cannot be detected efficiently. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58A, 1119-1142. Watson, D.G., Maylor, E.A., & Bruce, L.A.M. (2007). The role of eye movements in subitizing and counting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33, 1389-1399. Watson, D.G., Maylor, E.A., & Manson, N.J. (2002). Aging and enumeration: A selective deficit for the subitization of targets among distractors. Psychology & Aging, 17, 496-504. Watson, D.G., Maylor, E.A., Allen, G.E.J., & Bruce, L.A.M. (2007). Early visual tagging: Effects of target-distractor similarity and old age on search, subitization, and counting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33, 549-569. Williams, M.A., McGlone, F., Abbott, D.F., & Mattingley, J.B. (2008). Stimulus drivenand strategic neural responses to fearful and happy facial expressions in humans. European Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 3074–3082. Williams, M.A., Moss, S.A., Bradshaw, J. L., Mattingley, J.B. (2005b). Look at me, I‘m smiling: Visual search for threatening and non-threatening facial expressions. Visual Cognition, 12, 29-50. Wolfe, J. M. (1998). Visual search. In H. Pashler (Ed.), Attention (pp. 13-74). Hove, East Sussex, England: Psychology Press. Wolfe, J.M. (1994). Guided search 2.0: A revised model of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 202-238. Wolfe, J.M., Cave, K.R., & Franzel, S.L. (1989). Guided search: an alternative to the feature integration model for visual search. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 15, 419-433. Yantis, S., & Hillstrom, A. P. (1994). Stimulus driven attentional capture: Evidence from equiluminant visual objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20, 95- 107. Zeelenberg, R., Wagenmakers, E-J., & Rotteveel, M. (2006). The impact of emotion on perception: Bias or enhanced processing? Psychological Science, 17, 287-291.
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/47953