| Can the process of orienting attention to a visual stimulus be influenced by a learned emotional association to that stimulus? This thesis reports a series of experiments that answer this question in the affirmative. Learned emotional associations were hypothesized to have either a "general" effect on attentional orienting (i.e., emotional associations per se would bias orienting) or a "specific" effect (i.e., positive and negative associations would have different effects on orienting). The general paradigm was first to establish an emotional association to a particular location on a computer screen demarcated by a particular shape and then to examine attentional orienting to that "context." Emotional associations were established by showing positive, negative, and neutral color pictures in separate contexts. Participants rated each picture on a 7-point scale to indicate whether it evoked a negative, neutral, or positive feeling. Then, attentional orienting to each context was measured with a simple reaction time target detection task. Participants pressed a key when a target appeared in any one of four locations. For most of the trials, participants were cued to shift their attention to one location. On 75% of these trials, the cue validly predicted the location of the target, and on 25% of these trials, the target appeared in a different location from the cue (thus, the cue was invalid). This location cueing paradigm provided measures of whether attention was directed efficiently to a given context by comparing the time needed to respond to targets preceded by valid cues, invalid cues, or neutral cues.; In Experiment 1, voluntary orienting of attention was examined by using long cue-target intervals and a central cue. Voluntary orienting was affected in a general way by learned emotional associations. In Experiment 2, involuntary, reflexive orienting was examined by using short cue-target intervals and peripheral cues. Reflexive orienting was affected only by learned positive associations, but the effects were weak. In Experiment 3, a different type of voluntary attention was examined which involved categorizing emotional words. Words whose valence matched the learned association of the context in which they appeared were categorized faster than words whose valence did not match the association of the context. This experiment also verified that the associational learning paradigm was sensitive enough to elicit attentional biases. In Experiment 4, reflexive attentional orienting was re-examined with some paradigm changes made for Experiment 3. Stronger evidence for a specific effect of learned positive associations on reflexive orienting was found. The implications for attentional processes being affected by learned emotional associations are discussed, and individual differences are considered. The potential neural substrates of such attention/emotion interactions are also discussed. |
