The influence of affective state on exogenous attention to emotional distractors: behavioral and electrophysiological correlates

Carboni, Alejandra; Kessel, Dominique; Capilla, Almudena; Carretié, Luis · 2017 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-07249-x

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Summary

This study investigates the interplay between an individual’s baseline affective state and exogenous attention to emotional distractors, a relationship previously underexplored in healthy individuals. While attentional biases toward emotional targets are well-documented, the specific neural time course of how mood interacts with attention to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli remains unclear. The researchers aimed to determine whether current emotional states modulate the automatic, stimulus-driven processing of negative, positive, or neutral distractors during a primary cognitive task. To address this, thirty participants completed a concurrent but distinct target-distractor task involving digit categorization. Emotional distractors (negative, positive, or neutral background images) were presented simultaneously with the targets. Participants’ affective states were induced using short pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral movie clips, with arousal levels monitored via skin conductance level (SCL) to verify successful mood induction. The study employed a mixed design analyzing behavioral metrics (reaction times and error rates) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to capture the temporal dynamics of attention. Statistical analyses included two-way repeated measures ANOVAs for behavioral and ERP data, utilizing temporal principal component analysis to identify specific neural components such as N1, N2, and the late positive potential (LPP). Behavioral results revealed a significant negativity bias: negative distractors caused longer reaction times and higher error rates compared to neutral and positive distractors, regardless of the participant’s current emotional state. Electrophysiologically, the affective state modulated early processing, evidenced by increased N1 amplitudes during emotional states (both negative and positive) compared to neutral states, irrespective of distractor type. Conversely, the emotional charge of the distractors modulated the N2 component, with negative and positive distractors eliciting greater amplitudes than neutral ones, independent of the participant’s mood. Crucially, an interaction between affective state and distractor type emerged only at later latencies in the posterior LPP. Specifically, negative distractors elicited greater LPP amplitudes during neutral states, while positive distractors elicited greater amplitudes during negative states. The findings demonstrate that exogenous attention to emotional distractors operates independently of the baseline affective state during early, automatic stages of processing, suggesting an adaptive mechanism for detecting potentially relevant environmental cues regardless of current mood. However, the interaction observed in the LPP indicates that affective state and distractor valence converge during later, more sustained processing stages. This study provides novel evidence regarding the temporal dissociation of mood effects on exogenous attention, highlighting that while early attentional capture is robust and mood-independent, later evaluative processes are influenced by the congruence between the individual’s internal state and the external stimulus.

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Topics

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• affect cognition
• affect mood