The effect of fear and sadness on spatial and temporal attention

Abstract

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