Focus On Rewards: The Impact Of Anger On Reward And Threatening Information

Given the variety of stimuli in the environment, the ability to selectively pay attention to important and relevant information is crucial for survival. Emotions influence how people think and act, partly by affecting how people view the world around them. Attention is the first step of cognitive process, examining the relationship of anger and visual attention to rewarding and threatening information makes contribution to understanding how anger influence cognitive process(such as memory, attribution, decision and more) and act.However, the relation of anger and visual attention has yet to be investigated. So far, the little research adopted visual search task to explore the performative mode of anger influence visual attention to rewarding and threatening information. The research presented in this article will focus on the following issues:(1) Whether or not the performative mode is consistent under the different visual task, such as the dot probe paradigm.(2) How anger influence visual attention to rewarding and threatening information, in other words, what is potential mechanism of the performative mode.(3) What the performative mode and potential mechanism of attention to rewarding and threatening information in anger change over time.Therefore, we performed two studies to explore the effects, potential mechanism and time-course of attention to rewarding and threatening pictures in anger. In the current study, we used the video clips to induce emotions and manipulated attention bias by dot probe paradigm. Study 1 aimed to examine the performative mode and potential mechanism of attention to rewarding and threatening information in anger, including two sub-studies. Study 2 was designed to explore the time course of performative mode and potential mechanism.Study 1a investigated the peformative mode of attention to rewarding and threatening information in anger, the result found that: Compared to the neutral emotional state, anger increased visual attention to rewarding information, but not to threatening information.To further repeatedly confirm study 1a and verify motivational model of emotion can be used to predict the relation of emotion and visual attention, and to explore the potential mechanism of attention to rewarding information in anger, we conducted a study 1b. The results showed that:(1) Same with excitement, which is a positively valenced and approach-motivational emotion, anger, which is a negatively valenced and approach-motivational emotion, also increased attention to rewarding pictures, but not to threatening pictures. However, fear as a negatively valenced associated with avoidance-motivational emotion increased attention to threatening pictures not to rewarding pictures.(2) The potential mechanism of attention to rewarding pictures in anger was attentional vigilance. However, excitement had a stronger effect on the inability to disengage attention from rewarding pictures. This indicates that although opposite valence and same motivational emotions have same effects on attention to motivational information, there are distinct component processes.The main objective of study 2 was to investigate the characteristics of anger increasing visual attention to rewarding pictures and potential mechanism over time. The results showed that: At different time of presentation, including 100 ms, 500 ms, 1250 ms, and 2000 ms,(1) anger increased visual attention to rewarding pictures,(2) potential mechanisms of anger increasing attention to rewarding pictures was attentional vigilance.According to the above analysis, the present conclusions are as follows:(1) Anger has distinct effect on attention to rewarding and threatening information. Specifically, Anger increases attention to rewarding information not to threatening information.(2) The effects of emotions on visual attention are motivationally driven. Because anger is a negative emotion that reflects an approach motivational system, the effects of emotional states on overt visual attention depend on the motivational implications of emotions, rather than their valence.(3) Despite the same performative mode of attention to motivational information of each emotion, potential mechanisms are different,(4) The effect of attention to rewarding and threatening information in anger is stable in different time course.(5) Potential mechanism of attention to reward in anger is stable in different time course.