The Effect Of Approach Versus Avoidance Motivated Emotion On Attentional Scope

The human emotion has a close relationship with cognition.In past decades,researchers have explored the effect of positive emotion on cognition.Evidences from Fredrickson(2005,2008)show that positive emotional states broaden cognitive processes,including attentional scope,memory and reasoning.However,most of those studies focused on the valence but few on emotional motivation.Recently Hamon-Jones suggested that motivational intensity rather than emotional valence influences cognitive broadening/narrowing.That is,emotional states of low motivational intensity broaden cognition,whereas emotional states of high motivational intensity narrow cognition.Although a large number of works have emphasized the role of motivation intensity,positive emotion state was thought to be related to the approach motivational system and negative emotion state was associated with the avoidance motivational system.Some scholars found that anger was a negative emotion with aggression related to the approach motivational system.Envy was the same as anger.It obviously that the link between emotional valence and motivation was not fixed.The question remained in previous studies was that whether the impact of low approach-motivated positive emotion on increasing the breadth of attention caused by approach motivation or high avoidance-motivated negative emotion reduced attentional scope aroused by avoidance motivation? Because related researches had provided evidence that people in approach state generally show a tendency to focus broadly whereas avoidant people tune the attentional narrowly.These evidences suggests that past work had confounded valence with approach-avoidance motivation.Therefore,to explore the influence of approach and avoidance motivation on the link between emotional valence and attentional scope,the present research provides four experimental priming conditions under same motivational intensity,which are approach-positive emotion,approachnegative emotion,avoidance-positive emotion and avoidance-negative emotion.Experiment1(a)and(b)investigated the change of pereceptually attentional scope by having four kinds of participants respond to Navon task.Experiment2(a)and(b)were conducted to test the difference in conceptually attentional scope by having four kinds of participants respond to cognitive categorization task.Results: Experiment1(a)and(b)found that relative to neutral emotion state,emotions of approach state broadened attentional scope responding faster to global targets,whereas emotions of avoidance state narrow attentional scope responding faster to local targets.Positive participants caused a broader attentiona than negative particepants in approach-motivated state,but not in avoidance-motivated state.Experiment2(a)and(b)showed that relative to neutral emotion state,approach state broadened conceptually attentional scope broadened cognitive sope by showing that participants became more inclusive in their categorization of exemplars and avoidance state narrowed cognitive breadth by showing that participants became more inclusive in their categorization of exemplars.The difference between positive emotion and negative emotion vanished in both approach and avoidance motivational state.Conclusion: Taken together these current experiments demonstrate that approach-avoidance motivated state influence the relation between emotion valence and attentional scope,approach motivated state cause a broadening of attentional focus,in contrast,avoidance motivated state cause a narrowing of attentional focus.In addition,these results support the Motivational Dimensional Model of Affect indirectly by highlighting the importance of considering the motivational state of positive emotion in cognitive processes.