The effect of induced sadness and moderate depression on attention networks

This study investigates how sadness and minor/moderate depression influences the three functions of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control using the attention network test. The aim of the study is to investigate whether minor to moderate depression is more similar to sadness or clinical depression with regards to attentional processing. It was predicted that both induced sadness and minor to moderate depression will influence executive control by narrowing spatial attention and in turn this will lead to less interference from the flanker items (i.e., less effects of congruency) due to a focused attentional state. No differences were predicted for alerting or orienting functions. The results from the two experiments, the first inducing sadness (Experiment 1) and the second measuring subclinical depression (Experiment 2), show that, as expected, participants who are sad or minor to moderately depressed showed less flanker interference compared to participants who were neither sad nor depressed. This study provides strong evidence, that irrespective of its aetiology, sadness and minor/moderate depression have similar effects on spatial attention

The effect of fear and sadness on spatial and temporal attention

Originally, emotion and attention were treated as separate entities; with the metaphor of “hot” emotion and “cold” attention used to emphasis their independence. However, both neurological and behavioural evidence have demonstrated that emotion and attention strongly influence one another, and in particular an emphasis has been placed on how emotion moderates selective attention. Consequently, studying the relationship between emotion and attention has become an important topic within psychology. Emotion and attention is in itself a vast subject where still many important questions are left unanswered. The present thesis contributes towards the understanding of how emotion influences attention by investigating the extent to which fear and sadness influences spatial and temporal attention. This thesis is divided into a theoretical and empirical part. The theoretical part provides an overview of studies and theories about emotion, attention, and their interaction. I discuss different ways emotion can be induced in the laboratory, as this has become one of the key challenges to my experimental work. In the empirical part of my thesis, I present fear and sadness in two separate sections. This is because I investigate each emotion independently from one another. However, an important theoretical theme underpinning all of my experimental work is the idea of global-local processing and how this is influenced by spatial and temporal attention. Consequently, I use a range of attentional tasks including: the Navon letter task, the shape discrimination task, the contextual cueing task, the attentional network task, and the RSVP task. I view each experimental chapter (4-8) as independent of each other and explain how the emotion-attention interaction is important to the specific experimental context

The effect of sadness on global-local processing

Gable and Harmon-Jones (Psychological Science, 21(2), 211-215, 2010) reported that sadness broadens attention in a global-local letter task. This finding provided the key test for their motivational intensity account, which states that the level of spatial processing is not determined by emotional valence, but by motivational intensity. However, their finding is at odds with several other studies, showing no effect, or even a narrowing effect of sadness on attention. This paper reports two attempts to replicate the broadening effect of sadness on attention. Both experiments used a global-local letter task, but differed in terms of emotion induction: Experiment 1 used the same pictures as Gable and Harmon-Jones, taken from the IAPS dataset; Experiment 2 used a sad video underlaid with sad music. Results showed a sadness-specific global advantage in the error rates, but not in the reaction times. The same null results were also found in a South-Asian sample in both experiments, showing that effects on global/local processing were not influenced by a culturally related processing bias

Does online delivery impact programme engagement and outcomes as part of a Widening Participation intervention?

This study examines whether programme engagement and outcomes differ based on the mode of delivery (in person versus online) for a UK-based Widening Participation (WP) programme during the Covid-19 pandemic. In total, 2507 school students attended academic in-person tutorials, and 2505 attended academic tutorials online. The findings show that tutorial attendance did not significantly differ based on the mode of delivery. We also see similar programme outcomes for both in-person and online programmes. However, the completion of the 'baseline assignment' , which was the first piece of work undertaken by students on the programme, was negatively impacted by the online setting (i. e., lower submission rates). This suggests that further considerations are needed to engage students with activities that happen early in the online programme. As part of the study, we also collected feedback from programme staff about their reflections of running a WP programme virtually. Based on these insights, we make suggestions for how WP can best utilise digital forms of delivery in the future

Looming fear stimuli broadens attention in a local–global letter task

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on emotion and global/local processing and presents an empirical study exploring how the combination of motion and emotion influences the focus of attention. In two experiments, fear-related pictures either loomed toward the observer or were stationary, and in one of these experiments the emotional content was masked (i.e., scrambled pictures). In the context of fearful pictures, it was expected that the additional element of looming motion would further focus attention based on looming motion's behaviorally urgent properties. However, the combination of a fearful image and looming motion was shown to broaden as opposed to narrow attention. This effect did not occur with simply neutral/looming or fearful/static images. Further, the separation of the emotional content from looming motion (scrambled pictures) revealed no effect on attentional breadth. This suggests that it is the unique combination of the fear-related content and the looming motion, which is broadening attention

EDITORIAL - On Creative Approaches to Research

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When being narrow minded is a good thing : locally biased people show stronger contextual cueing

Repeated contexts allow us to find relevant information more easily. Learning such contexts has been proposed to depend upon either global processing of the repeated contexts, or alternatively processing of the local region surrounding the target information. In this study, we measured the extent to which observers were by default biased to process towards a more global or local level. The findings showed that the ability to use context to help guide their search was strongly related to an observer's local/global processing bias. Locally biased people could use context to help improve their search better than globally biased people. The results suggest that the extent to which context can be used depends crucially on the observer's attentional bias and thus also to factors and influences that can change this bias