Effect of emotions on temporal attention

Prioritized Identification of Fearful Eyes during the Attentional Blink Is Not Automatic

The eye region conveys considerable information regarding an individual's emotions, motivations, and intentions during interpersonal communication. Evidence suggests that the eye regions of an individual expressing emotions can capture attention more rapidly than the eye regions of an individual in a neutral affective state. However, how attentional resources affect the processing of emotions conveyed by the eye regions remains unclear. Accordingly, the present study employed a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task: happy, neutral, or fearful eye regions were presented as the second target, with a temporal lag between two targets of 232 or 696 ms. Participants completed two tasks successively: Task 1 was to identify which species the upright eye region they had seen belonged to, and Task 2 was to identify what emotion was conveyed in the upright eye region. The behavioral results showed that the accuracy for fearful eye regions was lower than that for neutral eye regions under the condition of limited attentional resources; however, accuracy differences across the three types of eye regions did not reach significance under the condition of adequate attentional resources. These findings indicate that preferential processing of fearful expressions is not automatic but is modulated by available attentional resources.

Expectation modulates the preferential processing of task-irrelevant fear in the attentional blink: evidence from event-related potentials

Background

Reporting the second of the two targets is impaired when it occurs 200–500 ms after the first, the phenomenon in the study of consciousness is the attentional blink (AB). In the AB task, both the emotional salience and the expectation of the second target increase the likelihood of that target being consciously reported. Yet, little is known about how expectations modulate the prioritized processing of affective stimuli. We examined the role of expecting fearful expression when processing fear in an AB task. Participants were presented with an AB task where the 2nd target (T2) is either a fearful face or a neutral face, and had to report the target's gender. The frequency of fearful to neutral faces on a given block was manipulated, such that participants could either expect more or less fearful faces.

Results

In the Experiment 1, we found that fearful faces were more likely to be recognized than neutral faces during the blink period (lag3) when participants were not expecting a fearful face (low fear-expectation); however, high fear-expectation increased the discrimination of fearful T2 than neutral T2 outside the blink period (lag8). In the Experiment 2, we assessed ERP brain activity in response to perceived T2 during the blink period. The results revealed that fearful faces elicited larger P300 amplitudes compared to neutral faces, but only in the low fear-expectation condition, suggesting that expecting a fearful expression can suppress the processing of task-irrelevant facial expression and unexpected fearful expression can break through this suppression. Fearful T2 elicited larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than neutral T2, and this affective effect was independent of fear-expectation. Since no effect of expectation was found on the VPP amplitude while P300 exhibited significant interaction between expectation and expression, this suggests that expectations modulate emotional processing at a later stage, after the fearful face has been differentially processed.

Conclusions

These results provided clear evidence for the contribution of the expectation to the prioritized processing of second affective stimuli in the AB.

The Blink and the Body

Abstract. We evaluated the interaction of emotion, interoceptive awareness (IA), and attention using an attentional blink (AB) task. Healthy undergraduates completed a cardiac awareness task and, based on previously validated cut scores, were classified as high or average perceivers (n = 19 in each group; matched on age and gender). Participants completed an AB task with counterbalanced emotional and/or neutral lexical stimuli as the first target (T1) and/or the second target (T2). Both high and average perceivers exhibited retroactive interference in conditions where T2 immediately followed T1. However, only the average perceivers exhibited a significant blink effect: They reported T2 inaccurately in trials in which one intervening stimulus occurred between T1 and T2. High perceivers exhibited their best performance in trials where both targets were emotional; average perceivers exhibited their worst performance in these trials. These results contribute to a small but growing literature that suggests IA and exteroceptive attention are related systems.

Attentional blink with emotional faces depends on emotional expressions: a relative positive valence advantage

Contribution of emotional valence and arousal to attentional processing over time is not fully understood. We employed a rapid serial visual paradigm (RSVP) in three experiments to investigate the role of valence and arousal. In three experiments, participants had to identify the expression of the two targets (experiment 1 - happy and angry; experiment 2 - angry and surprise; experiment 3 - happy and surprise) presented among neutral upright face distracters. In the first and third experiments, the two targets differed both in valence and arousal ratings. In experiment 2, the surprise and angry expressions differed in terms of valence but were matched for arousal. There was a happy expression advantage (lesser attentional blink) when the first target was anger (experiment 1) or surprise (experiment 3) and a surprise expression advantage when the first target was anger (experiment 2). There was a backward blink with reduced detection of the first target primarily by the relatively more positive valence second target. These results indicate that the benefit for happy and surprise expressions in comparison to angry expression identification is probably due to valence (more positive) and not arousal. Our results demonstrate a novel dynamic interplay of emotional information on temporal attention.

Global-local processing and dispositional bias interact with emotion processing in the psychological refractory period paradigm

The reciprocal link between scope of attention and emotional processing is an important aspect of the relationship between emotion and attention. Larger scope of attention or global processing has been linked to positive emotions and narrow scope of attention or local processing has been linked to negative emotions. The nature of this relationship in the context of central capacity limitations and individual differences in attentional processing has not been studied in detail so far. To investigate such a relationship, here we used the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, in which we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA: 150 ms, 300 ms, 900 ms) of stimuli corresponding to two tasks in a sequence. The first task was identifying a number at the global or local level; the second task was recognizing the emotional expression (happy or angry). Additionally, predisposition towards local or global perceptual dimension was measured with the global-local task. Results indicated that global precedence modulated PRP effect and that response accuracy was impaired by the combination of local-angry task modalities. Interestingly, interference between simultaneous tasks was modulated by the predisposition to different perceptual levels resulting in different cognitive strategies for performing simultaneous tasks: locally biased subjects tended more towards serial processing, meanwhile globally biased ones were performing tasks in a parallel manner. This result suggest that individual differences may play a role in the choice of dual-task performing strategies.

Body Dissatisfaction Enhances Awareness and Facilitates the Consolidation of Body-Related Words During Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

Attentional biases have received considerable focus in research on cognitive biases and body dissatisfaction (BD). However, most work has focused on spatial allocation of attention. The current two experiments employed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task to investigate attention bias to body-related words in the temporal domain among young females with high and low BD. During this task, there were two targets presented in the same stimulus stream. The first target was defined as target one (T1) and the second was defined as target 2 (T2). Participants were asked to identify T2 while ignoring T1 in single task mode or identify both targets in the dual task mode. In the current study, Experiment 1 assessed the stimulus-driven attention of body-related stimuli. Participants were required to identify a target of neutral word (T2) as quickly and accurately as possible while ignoring the preceding target (T1) of neutral, fat-, or thin-related words. As expected, we observed spontaneous attentional blink (AB) effects elicited by both fat- and thin-related T1s among participants with high BD, suggesting enhanced awareness of body-related stimuli even when this information does not have to be identified. Such effects did not emerge among participants without BD. Experimental 2 investigated the goal-directed attention of body-related stimuli, during which participants needed to identify both the T1 and neutral T2. Participants with BD showed reduced AB effects after both fat- and thin-related T1, suggesting facilitated consolidation of body-related information in goal-directed attention among participants with BD. These findings have important clinical implications that it provided insight for creating more accurate attention bias modification (ABM) task aiming at reducing and preventing BD among young females.

Prepulse inhibition in patients with bipolar disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND

Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is a measurement method for the sensory gating process, which helps the brain adapt to complex environments. PPI may be reduced in patients with bipolar disorder (BD). This study investigated PPI deficits in BD and pooled the effect size of PPI in patients with BD.

METHODS

We conducted a literature search on PPI in patients with BD from inception to July 27, 2019 in PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library databases, and Chinese databases. No age, sex, and language restriction were set. The calculation formula was PPI = 100 - [100*((prepulse - pulse amplitude) / pulse amplitude)]. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) was used to assess the quality of studies.

RESULTS

Ten eligible papers were identified, of which five studies including a total of 141 euthymic patients and 132 healthy controls (HC) were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HC, euthymic patients with BD had significantly lower PPI at the 60 ms interstimulus interval (ISI) between pulse and prepulse (P = 0.476, I2 = 0.0%, SMD = - 0.32, 95% CI = - 0.54 - -0.10). Sensitivity analysis shows no significant change in the combined effect value after removing any single study. There was no publication bias using the Egger's test at 60 ms (P = 0.606). The meta-analysis of PPI at the 60 ms ISI could have significant clinical heterogeneity in mood episode state, as well as lack of data on BD I or II subtypes.

CONCLUSIONS

Euthymic patients with BD show PPI deficits at the 60 ms, suggesting a deficit in the early sensory gate underlying PPI. The PPI inhibition rate at a 60 ms interval is a stable index. More research is needed in the future to confirm this outcome, and to delve deeper into the mechanisms behind deficits.