The Effect Of The Affects On Attention Breadth

The human affect is fairly complicated, which makes scientist interested. In past decades, researchers have explored the effect of positive affect state on cognition,their evidences shown that positive affects broadening cognition(Fredrickson, 2001).However, most of those studies focused on the valence but few on affect motivation,such as the different effect of positive and negative affect on cognition. Besides,increasing studies shown the relation between affect and cognition is not that simple.Recently, some studies were conducted on the approach motivational intensity of positive affect, they found that only those positive affect high in approach motivation would narrowing attention breadth, in contrast, positive affect low in approach motivation would broaden it. Gable and Harmon-Jones(2010a) proposed the Motivational Dimensional Model of Affect which predicted that negative affect would be similar to positive ones that negative affect high in motivation intensity(e.g. disgust)would narrow attention breadth but those low in motivation intensity(sadness) would broaden it. In addition, it also predicted that anger is a special affect which might carry high approach motivation in it. However, this is just prediction with few experimental researches.Three experiments and pictures rating are concluded in this study. Pictures are presented on slides, and students rate those pictures from three dimensions as pleasure,arousal and motivation on Likert9 after viewing them. Pictures are picked according to the data analysis. In the experiment, pictures are used to induce affects with different motivation intensity, after that Navon’s letter tasks are used to measure the attention breadth of the participants.The results shows: a) Desert picture induced high approach motivation successfully and scenery pictures low approach motivation. In contrast, positive affect high in approach motivation would narrow attention breadth and positive affect low in approach motivation would broaden it. b) Disgust pictures induced high motivationintensity affect and sadness pictures low motivation intensity. Individual attention breadth was narrowed after viewing the disgust pictures and broadened after sadness pictures. c) Pictures of Nanjing massacre truly induce anger. Although, attention breadth was not significantly narrowed, reaction time after viewing those pictures do longer than participant viewing neutral pictures, which means attention process slow down after viewing the pictures of Nanjing massacre.