Attentional capture for emotional words and images: The importance of valence and arousal.

• DOI: 10.1037/cep0000154
• Publication Date: 2018-08-20T13:42:49Z
• Authors: Tina M. Sutton; Ciara Lutz
• Keywords: Adult; Male; Emotions; 05 social sciences; Young Adult; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Space Perception; Reaction Time; Humans; Attention; Female; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences

Categorical negativity theory suggests that valence guides attention; whereas the arousal hypothesis suggests that arousal modulates attention. The current study examined the manner in which both valence and arousal influence the attentional capture of emotional words and images using a dot-probe task. The results revealed the standard congruency effect for negative words, but not positive words, consistent with categorical negativity theory. For the images, all of the negative images, and the positive, highly arousing images attracted attention indicating that valence and arousal interact when processing emotional images. The current results suggest that words and images do not influence visual spatial attention in the same manner, and the results of a study using one type of emotional stimulus (e.g., words) may not generalise to all emotional stimuli (e.g., images and faces). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).