Research On The Influence Of Social Emotional Feedback On Value-driven Attention Capture In Depressed Groups

Stimuli previously associated with reward outcomes as a distraction to the target’s recognition was called value-driven attentional capture which is unconscious.Most of the studies on value-driven attention capture used normal subjects,and a few of the studies on depressed subjects used money as reward.The results showed that the depressive symptom group did not produce value-driven attention capture.In general,people with depressive symptoms were less sensitive to monetary reward.It is not clear whether groups of depressive symptoms have value-driven attentional capture when using social emotional facial expressions as reward and punishment.Objective:This research aim to investigate whether the group of depressive symptoms can generate value-driven attention capture in subsequent test tasks under the condition of positive emotional feedback as reward or negative emotional feedback as punishment.Methods:Three experiments in this study adopted the training-test paradigm.Experiment 1 was designed to inspect whether the positive emotional feedback can capture attention in the depression group.In the training phase,the red and green circle were targets,one of them followed by a higher frequent positive emotional feedback;another was reversed.In the test phase,the colour which followed by a higher frequent positive emotional feedback referred to as the higher distractor;another referred as lower distractor.Experiment 2 was designed to test whether the negative emotional feedback can capture attention in the depression group.In the training phase,the red and green circle were targets,one of them followed by a higher frequent negative emotional feedback;another was reversed.In the test phase,the colour which followed by a higher frequent negative emotional feedback referred to as the higher distractor;another referred as lower distractor.Experiment 3 was designed to test whether the search history can capture attention in the depression group.In the training phase,there was one target,so depressed subjects just need to make a choice of repeating goals.In the test phase,the repeating goals in the training phase turn into the distractor in test phase.Results:Experiment 1 and experiment 2 had the same results.In the training phase,there was no difference between the depression group and the normal group in the response time.In the test phase,the response time of the two groups under the high interference level was significantly higher than that under the low interference level and the no interference level,and the difference between the low interference level and the no interference level was not significant.In experiment 3,the response time was not significantly affected by the search history.Conclusion:(1)When positive emotional feedback was used as a reward,the depression symptom groups in the subsequent test stage all showed the value-driven attention capture effect.(2)when the negative emotional feedback was used as punishment,the depression symptom groups in the subsequent test stage all showed the value-driven attention capture effect.(3)The results of experiment 1 and experiment 2 were not contaminated by the selection history.