Visual attention to emotional pictures: Striking parallels with neutral stimuli challenge emotion-specific accounts of influences on attentional biases.
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001614
URL: https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001614
archive: indexed pipeline: cataloged
Abstract
Converging evidence suggests that visual spatial attention is preferentially allocated to emotional over neutral stimuli, referred to as an attentional bias to emotional information. Intriguing questions emerged about whether this attentional bias is facilitated by an assumed right hemispheric dominance of emotion processing and by converging cross-modal information (Gerdes et al., 2021). However, we argue that a critical condition that would allow an interpretation in terms of an influence on an emotional attention bias is missing from the experimental design testing these effects: namely, a condition presenting only neutral pictures. To corroborate our argument, we conducted a replication and extension of the eye-tracking study by Gerdes et al. (2021), including this control condition. Both the supposed leftward bias of emotional attention and its supposed guidance by sounds emerged in striking parallelism for both unpleasant-neutral and neutral-neutral picture pairs. Thus, the paradigm gives no evidence for emotion specificity of results.
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Publisher: American Psychological Association