The Effect Of Motivation-related Emotional Information On Attentional Bias

Individuals are filled with a variety of stimuli in their daily life.Compared with the neutral stimuli,the ecological emotional stimuli are more attractive and can occupy the attention resources,get fast and efficient processing,which is called attentional bias to the emotional information.Rapid detection of the emotional stimuli of potential aversive and rewarding in the environment are important adaptive behaviors for individuals.According to previous studies,negative threat stimuli and positive stimuli which associated with survival and development can cause individual attention bias.But what is the key factor in attention capture is still controversial.This study explained it from the emotional appraisal theories theory and the motivational dimension model of emotion,and suggested that a high-motivation related stimulus can cause attention bias.This study consisted of two parts:(1)Based on the motivational dimension model of emotion,after balancing the degree of arousal,the positive and negative stimuli were divided into high-motivation relevant and low-motivation relevant stimuli.Attentional bias to motivational relevance was investigated in a dot-probe task.The results showed that both participants in the positive and negative stimuli condition were significantly faster in the valid trials than those in the invalid trials when the high motivational relevance stimuli were presented.(2)There are two potential cognitive mechanisms of attentional bias—the facilitated attentional orienting and the impaired attentional disengagement.The second study was intended to explore which mechanism could cause the effect of attention bias.Due to the properties of stimuli and stimuli onset asynchrony have effect on attention bias,the conclusion was still controversial.In the long SOA,the individual might conceal the bias effect due to eye movement,so this study used an SOA 200 ms and two different cues in this experiment.Experiment 2a used a food picture and a biological-related threat picture;Experiment 2b used the gain-and loss-related stimuli to explore the attentional bias subcomponents.The results showed that the valid trials were faster than the invalid trials,and DI scores were significantly larger than 0,while the OI scores had no significant difference.The results were demonstrated as following:(1)Whether the positive or the negative stimuli,the individual showed attention bias to the emotional stimuli which were highmotivation related,and the low-motivation related emotional stimuli did not show attention bias.The results supported the emotional appraisal theories theory and the motivational dimension model of emotion.Motivational relevance had a critical influence on attentional bias.(2)In the SOA of 200 ms,the attention bias to the emotional pictures and the conditional emotional stimuli associated with the reward and punishment were caused by the difficult disengagement,and the effect of the two materials on the component mechanism of attention bias were consistent.