An Unsuccessful Attempt to Demonstrate Attentional Orienting Within the Purely Emotional Domain

Inhibition of return (IOR) is an attentional effect that has been much researched in the spatial domain, whereby people are slower to respond to stimuli presented in a previously attended location. Recently, Chao (2010) reported that participants were slower to respond to a negative schematic facial...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Emotion (Washington, D.C.) D.C.), 2016-02, Vol.16 (1), p.6-10
Main Authors: Poliakoff, Ellen, Latif, Alya, Maehr, Anna M, Marshall, Hannah, Roesser, Andrea, Scurr, Tom, Short, Victoria, Whitaker, Grace A, Lander, Karen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attention
Attention - physiology
Cues
Emotions
Facial Expression
Facial Expressions
Female
Human
Humans
Inhibition (Psychology)
Male
Orientation - physiology
Reaction Time
Spatial Perception
Young Adult
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Inhibition of return (IOR) is an attentional effect that has been much researched in the spatial domain, whereby people are slower to respond to stimuli presented in a previously attended location. Recently, Chao (2010) reported that participants were slower to respond to a negative schematic facial target compared with a positive facial target if they had previously viewed a cue with a negative expression, which he interpreted as IOR in the purely emotional domain. That is, once their attention is drawn away, people are slower to reattend to negative emotions. Here, we investigated whether this effect could be observed when controlling for the valence of the target and when using a more naturalistic human facial expression as a cue. We replicated Chao's findings using real face cues, observing slower responses for negative cues followed by negative versus positive targets, and faster responses for positive cues followed by positive versus negative targets. However, our reanalysis indicates that these effects are better accounted for by the valence (positive/negative) of the target, with responses being slower to negative compared with positive facial expressions regardless of the preceding cue. In conclusion, orienting in the emotional domain could not be measured using a cue-target task, as the effect of responding to emotional targets eclipsed any potential emotional cuing effect.
ISSN:1528-3542
1931-1516
DOI:10.1037/a0039508