Attention Bias Of Individuals With Positive Emotional Emotions

As profoundly affecting the individual cognition, personality and psychological social adaptation, the affective style is the stable affective responding mode of personality structure and represents the stable and consistent difference in terms of the overall pattern of affective responding and emotion-regulation. As the emotional factors of affective style, trait affect includes positive affection and negative affect. High positive affect individuals often experience positive emotions with a high level of physical, mental health and more good social adaptation.Emotion widely affects the individual cognitive processing and external behavior. Prior attention to negative stimuli for individual survival and adaptation are of great significance. However, the abnormal attention pattern seems to be the reason of the cause, maintain and recurrence of psychological disease and emotional disorders. Attentional bias becomes the important indicator of individual mental health. Previous literature focuse on the negative attention bias of clinical and subclinical participants, but rarely explore the attentional bias of normal individuals and high positive emotional individuals. Studies of attentional bias about optimists and extraverts have confirmed the trait-congruency hypothesis that individual way of information processing is affected by emotional valence of personality traits and individuals tend to process information by the way of consistent with their personality traits. Therefore, the current study aims at exploring the way how trait affect effect individual attentional bias, especially exploring the attentional bias of high positive affect individuals, in order to provides evidence for trait-congruency hypothesis.The current study used Positive and Negative Affect Schedule to screen high positive affect individuals, high negative affect individuals and general participants and use affective words and international affective pictures as the experimental materials. In order to explore the characteristics and mechanism of attentional bias of the participants, the neutral stimulus pairs were added into the dot-probe paradigm. And on the basis of this work, we tested the trait-congruency hypothesis. Under the condition of affective words, experiment1investigated the differences of attention bias of the three groups of participants,27for high positive affect group,31for general group and27for high negative affect group. Under the condition of affective images, experiment2include27 participants for high positive affect group,28participants for general group and28participants for high negative affect group.Research results:(1) When the detection stimulation were present for500ms, normal subjects of different levels of positive affect did not exist attentional bias to affective words, but existed several kind of attentional bias to affective pictures.(2) High positive affect individuals and high negative affect individuals existed attentional avoidance of negative affective stimuli and also difficulty in disengaging from negative affective stimuli.(3) The general group do not exist any attentional bias toward affective words or pictures.(4)The high positive affect individuals showed the difficulty in disengaging from positive affective pictures and the avoidance of negative pictures.To sum up, the current study suggests that individuals belonging to different trait affect present different characteristics in spatial attention to affective stimuli in different valence. The current study confirms the trait-congruency hypothesis. Difficulty in disengaging from positive affective stimuli seems to be the right mechanism for high positive affect individuals of guaranteeing positive affect, mental health and social adaptation.