Optimism And Pessimistic Individual Attention To Emotional Stimulation

As important aspects of personality, different mental state and behavior adaptability of optimism and pessimism had drew researcher’s attention. Studies have found that optimism, a positive mood benefit individuals, which is closed related with good mood, indefatigable perseverance, success and physical health. In addition, the study also found that individual cognitive style and attribution style of optimism and pessimism is different between individuals. The difference contributes great to the behavior adaptability of optimism and pessimism. As an important cognitive behavior, Attentional Bias refers to individual’s high sensitivity to specific stimulation which is associated with selective attention. But studies are lacking in stimulation titers for optimistic and pessimistic individuals. This study adopts the method of Stroop paradigm and the probing detection task, which observe the Attentional Bias of optimistic and pessimistic individuals when they are stimulated by different facial expression. Thus further could reveal cognitive mechanism of different mental state and behavior adaptability for optimistic and pessimistic individuals.This research adopts the "optimism and pessimism scale of Chinese version (OPS-C)" on265college students to measure optimistic and pessimistic scores, including selecting40pessimistic subjects and40optimistic subjects. The experiment was designed by E-prime experiment, statistically analyzed by SPSS19.0which discusses the Attentional Bias of optimistic and pessimistic individuals when they are stimulated by different facial expression. Conclusions of the research are as follows:1. In the facial expression Stroop tasks, two groups of subjects conducted different attention bias when they were stimulated by two facial expressions face show. Optimistic group conducted attention bias by actively facial expression of the positive mood, and pessimistic conducted attention bias by negative facial expression, In the positive group, relative to negative facial expression, positive facial expression have strong interference suppression to optimistic group. And on the other hand in the negative group, compared with the positive facial expression, negative facial expression produces more interference suppression to the pessimistic group. The quality consistency hypothesis is confirmed in this experiment. 2. In the probing detection task, researchers observed the optimistic and pessimistic participants’Attentional Bias under different facial expressional pictures. The result indicates that optimism was more sensitive to positive facial expression, and attention to positive facial expression has increased. While pessimistic subjects are more sensitive to negative facial expression, and attention to negative facial expression strengthens. This also supports the quality consistency hypothesis.3. The results show that the optimistic individual conducted Attentional Bias to positive emotion, while pessimistic individuals have attention bias to negative emotional stimulation. Therefore, optimistic individuals are more likely to notice the positive stimulus; pessimistic individuals are more likely to notice the negative stimulus, which will have different effect on individual mental health.