Control over emotion-induced blindness: The roles of context, expectation, and motivation

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Copyright: Zhao, Jenna
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Abstract
Emotional stimuli can impair perception of temporally neighbouring items, a phenomenon termed emotion-induced blindness (EIB). EIB seems resistant to influences that modulate emotional distraction in other emotion-attention tasks. This thesis assessed whether EIB can be modulated by context, proactive control, and motivational state. Following an overview (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 investigated whether multiple emotional distractors within a trial causes between-distractor competition, thereby reducing emotional distraction. Results showed that accuracy was higher on trials with multiple distractors compared to trials with only a single distractor. This benefit of multiple exposures only emerged when distractors were matched in valence, suggesting spontaneous coding of distractor emotionality in a way that modulates their interaction with each other. Chapter 3 examined whether increased exposure to emotional distractors across an experiment (instead of within a trial) would reduce EIB. Emotional distractor trials occurred at either a high or low frequency, a manipulation thought to modulate recruitment of proactive control. Across four experiments, EIB was uninfluenced by proportion of emotional trials. Chapter 4 further tested the influence of proactive control by forewarning participants about exactly when either a distractor or target would appear in each trial. Participants showed reduced EIB when they knew when to expect targets, but not when they knew when to expect distractors. Chapter 5 explored whether EIB by positive and negative distractors was impacted by participants' motivational focus (reward vs loss). Contrary to the hypothesis that reward-focus would increase EIB caused by positive distractors and that loss-focus would increase EIB caused by negative distractors, participants performed similarly on all distractor-types under both conditions. Together, these studies indicate that whereas proactive "bracing" against emotional distractors does not modulate EIB, proactive strategies focusing on target enhancement can be effective. Manipulating participants' motivational state appears not to alter the degree to which the emotional content of distractors causes EIB, but emotional content influences the degree to which distractors interact with each other, thereby modulating EIB. This thesis provides insight into how EIB fits in the context of other emotion-attention tasks, and identifies ways in which emotional distraction can be controlled.
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Author(s)
Zhao, Jenna
Supervisor(s)
Most, Steven
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Publication Year
2018
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Thesis
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PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
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