Attentional rubbernecking: Cognitive control and personality in emotion-induced blindness

Most, Steven B.; Chun, Marvin M.; Widders, David M; Zald, David H. · 2005 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/bf03196754

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

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Summary

This study investigates the cognitive costs of attending to emotional stimuli and the extent to which individuals can voluntarily override these attentional biases. The authors introduce the concept of "attentional rubbernecking," where irrelevant emotional information captures attention and impairs the processing of task-relevant targets. The research addresses two primary questions: whether emotionally negative distractors induce temporary blindness for sought-after targets, and whether this effect is automatic or subject to cognitive control influenced by personality traits, specifically harm avoidance. The researchers conducted two experiments using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. In Experiment 1, 21 participants (selected for high or low harm avoidance scores) searched for a rotated landscape or architectural photo within a stream of upright images. An irrelevant distractor—either emotionally negative, neutral, or scrambled-negative—appeared either two items (lag 2) or eight items (lag 8) before the target. Experiment 2 involved 22 participants who performed similar tasks but under two attentional conditions: a "specific" set where the target was always a building, and a "nonspecific" set where the target could be a building or a landscape. This manipulation tested whether specific target knowledge facilitated the ignoring of emotional distractors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that emotionally negative pictures induced significant deficits in target detection at lag 2, a phenomenon termed emotion-induced blindness. Accuracy for targets following negative distractors was significantly lower than those following neutral or scrambled-negative distractors. This impairment recovered by lag 8, indicating a temporary processing bottleneck. Contrary to initial predictions, harm avoidance scores did not modulate this effect in Experiment 1, suggesting the bias was automatic under general search conditions. However, Experiment 2 revealed that participants could reduce emotion-induced blindness when given specific target information. Crucially, this voluntary control was moderated by personality: participants with low harm avoidance scores successfully suppressed the distraction effect in the specific condition, whereas those with high harm avoidance scores remained impaired by negative distractors regardless of the attentional set. The findings indicate that while emotional stimuli automatically capture attention and impair concurrent processing, this bias is not immutable. Individuals can strategically override emotion-induced blindness, but the efficacy of this control depends on personality traits. Specifically, low harm avoidance is associated with greater cognitive control and the ability to filter out irrelevant emotional information when task demands allow for focused attention. These results suggest that anxiety-related traits like high harm avoidance may limit the ability to disengage from negative stimuli, highlighting the interplay between personality, cognitive control, and emotional processing.

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• inattentional change blindness