The Effect Of Negative Emotions On Sustained Attentio

Emotions play a very important role in everyday life.The impact of emotions on cognitive processing has long been a topic of intense interest for researchers in the psychological community.Negative emotion is an emotion caused by external or internal factors that can have a detrimental effect on people’s work,learning and thinking.Sustained attention,in which individuals remain engaged with a particular task for an extended period of time,plays a very important role in learning and work as the basis for attention.Many researchers have found that emotions have a significant impact on attention,perception,decision-making,inhibitory control,memory,and problem solving.Whether and how negative emotion affects sustained attention is a question worth exploring.There are various classifications of negative emotion,and it is also worth exploring how the motivational intensity of negative emotion affects sustained attention based on the motivational dimension of emotion.Therefore,this study first used a questionnaire to investigate the relationship between negative emotions and attentional functioning,followed by an experimental method to investigate the effect of self-reported negative emotions on sustained attention,and finally,the effect of motivational intensity of negative emotions on sustained attention by inducing different motivational avoidance of negative emotions.Study 1 used a questionnaire to investigate the emotional state,attentional control level and attentional failure of 299 university students by selecting the Positive and Negative Emotion Scale,the Attentional Control Scale and the Cognitive Failure Scale.The findings revealed that negative emotions and attentional control were significantly negatively correlated;and were positively correlated with attentional failure.Regression analysis revealed that negative emotions negatively predicted attentional control and positively predicted attentional failure,indicating that negative emotions are an important factor in attentional functioning.In Study 2,24 college students in the high and 24 low negative affect groups were randomly selected to complete the Sustained Attention Response Task(SART)based on the distribution of scores on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale in Study 1,ranked from highest to lowest total negative affect item scores.The results of the study revealed that the high negative affect group had faster reaction times,greater variability in reaction times and more response errors in completing the SART task than the low negative affect group.Study 3 examined the effects of negative emotions of different motivational intensity on sustained attention from the emotional motivation dimension,using the validity and arousal of emotions as control variables.The findings revealed that high and low motivational avoidance of negative emotions differed on behavioural indicators in a sustained attention response task,with high motivational avoidance of negative emotions eliciting more false responses,shorter reaction times and greater variability in reaction times.The findings of this study were as follows:(1)Negative emotion was negatively associated with attentional control and positively associated with attentional failure.(2)Individuals in the high negative affect group had impaired sustained attention,as evidenced by greater reaction time variability and more incorrect responses.(3)Sustained attention was influenced by the motivational intensity of negative emotion,as evidenced by impaired sustained attention,increased variability at response time,and more incorrect responses due to high avoidance of negative emotion.