Research Information System
Conference of the Consortium of European Research on Emotion (CERE), Grenoble, France, 16 - 18 July 2025, pp.162, (Summary Text)
Many studies have shown that negative stimuli – especially for threat-related contentare prioritised in the visual field compared to neutral stimuli. More recently, research on emotional attention has increasingly focused on the effects of positive stimuli. In the present study, attentional biases for negative (threat, disgust) and positive stimuli (romantic couple/baby face, food) were examined across three experiments using three different methods: spatial cueing task (Exp 1), dot probe task (Exp 2), and eye-tracking method (Exp 3). We also aimed to investigate the effects of motivational relevance on attention by manipulating participants’ hunger state, in addition to examining intrinsic relevance of stimuli. In the first two experiments, an attentional bias was found for threat-related stimuli, whereas no attentional advantage was observed for stimuli with positive content. In the final experiment, results from the eye-tracking study revealed attentional biases toward both positive and negative stimuli in both early (initial orientation) and later (disengagement) stages of attention. However, disgust stimuli had enhanced attentional advantage compared to other emotional content in the both components of attention. The effects of motivational processes on attention—specifically, attention bias to food stimuli in hungry participants—were only observed in later attentional mechanisms. Overall, the results seem to support the relevance hypothesis; however, the disgust advantage in attention needs to be discussed in detail.