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There is a large body of research, indicating that threatening stimuli with evolutionary history are prioritised in visual processing. It has been proposed that all threatening stimuli are prioritised, irrespective of evolutionary age, but it was argued that the method used to produce the results was not suitable for investigating the phenomenon. We present a new visual search task and provide evidence that it is an appropriate tool for future research. In Experiment 1, we investigated how the influence of emotional stimuli on visual search performance varies with valence (negative, positive, and neutral) and arousal (medium and high). Negative valence found to have a greater impact. Furthermore, our results underscore the importance of controlling for arousal. Experiment 2 confirmed these findings and also revealed that negative valence decreases performance by diverting attention away from the task, but arousal can compensate for this by increasing attentional capacity. This mechanism does not seem to be affected by the evolutionary history of the stimulus. In Experiment 3, we reproduced these results using a touchscreen monitor and controlling for variance in low-level visual features. We claim that these results support the notion of preferential processing of threatening cues, regardless of evolutionary origin. However, the level of threat, i.e., how arousing the cue is, has to be taken into account to explain the findings.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a significant challenge to wellbeing for people around the world. Here, we examine which individual and societal factors can predict the extent to which individuals suffer or thrive during the COVID-19 outbreak, with survey data collected from 26,684 participants in 51 countries from 17 April to 15 May 2020. We show that wellbeing is linked to an individual's recent experiences of specific momentary positive and negative emotions, including love, calm, determination, and loneliness. Higher socioeconomic status was associated with better wellbeing. The present study provides a rich map of emotional experiences and wellbeing around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak, and points to calm, connection, and control as central to our wellbeing at this time of collective crisis.

Organisms have to be able to detect threats in order to activate their defensive mechanisms. Previous research has suggested that evolutionary old stimuli have an advantage during visual processing. Recent evidence indicates that negative emotional stimuli have a greater effect on the cognitive system regardless of evolutionary relevance. We suggest that the arousal level of the stimuli could account for these mixed results. We investigated how visual processing is influenced by evolutionary relevant and modern threatening emotional stimuli. Furthermore, we manipulated the level of arousal (medium, high) of the threatening cues. Participants performed an odd-one-out visual search task, in which the target was always a threatening picture. Our results showed that participants detected modern threatening targets faster than they did evolutionary relevant ones. However, the interaction with arousal revealed that this was only true at high-arousal level; there was no difference between evolutionary relevant and modern threatening targets when presented at medium-arousal level. To our knowledge, to date this is one of the first studies to show the importance of the arousal level of stimuli. On the basis of our findings, we suggest that increasing arousal level only heightens visual search performance with modern threatening cues. (PsycINFO Database Record

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