The Influence Of Emotional Inducement On The Attention Bias Of Shy University Students

As a personality trait,shyness has positive and negative effects.Excessive shyness affects people’s normal social life.Cognition and emotion interact with each other,and as a preliminary orientation of cognition,attention plays a key guiding role.To explore the relationship among shy individual attention,cognition and emotion,helps to understand the mental activities of shy individuals.At the same time,emotional inducement influences the attention bias of shy individuals,the exploration of which will help to prompt intervention methods to alleviate the shyness of shy individuals in the future.Sorting high and low shy groups by implicit association test,the purpose of this paper is to explore the differences of attention bias in two shy groups,under different time-course stimuli,by point detection task,and to induce high-shyness individuals’ specific emotions,to explore the influences of emotion inducement on attention bias.Study 1: The author used implicit association test and shyness scale to test 180 college students,and obtained 167 useable data.Correlation analysis was conducted on these IAT effect values and explicit shyness scores.The results showed that the correlation between them was not significant.That means,implicit shyness and explicit shyness appear independent of each other.Study 2: According to the implicit association test in Study 1,45 participants were selected as high shyness group,while another 45 participants as low shyness group,with a total of 90.Study 2 used four factors mixed design,which included shyness levels(high shyness and low shyness),time courses(100ms,500 ms and 1250ms),stimulus pair types(positive-neutral and negative-neutral)and the locations of the probe point(consistence and inconsistence),to explore the differences in the attention bias of positive and negative stimuli between two groups of subjects at different time-courses.As a result,the low shyness group did not produce any special attention bias in any time courses,while the high shyness individual had a bias towards negative stimuli at the time of 500 ms,and avoided negative stimuli at 1250 ms.Study 3: Study 2 has showed that 500 ms and 1250 ms are the time-points of high-shyness’ attention to bias and avoidance of negative stimulus.Study 3 divided 45 high shy subjects into 3 groups(anger group,sadness group and joy group),used four factors mixed design,including induced emotions(anger,sadness and joy),time courses(500ms and 1250ms),stimulus pair types(positive-neutral and negative-neutral)and the locations of the probe point(consistence and inconsistence),to induce the corresponding target emotions of each group respectively,and explore attention bias differences under different emotions.The results are as follow:(1)With anger emotion,high-shyness subjects increased their attention bias towards negative stimuli under 500 ms,while they showed avoidance of positive and negative stimuli under 1250 ms.(2)With sadness,high-shyness subjects had attention bias towards negative stimuli under 500 ms,but the biased intensity was not different from the situation before emotion induction,while under 1250 ms,it showed avoidance of positive stimulus.(3)With joy,high-shyness subjects had a tendency to pay attention to positive stimuli and difficult to relieve from it under 500 ms,while under the stimulation of 1250 ms,they showed avoidance of positive stimuli.