When does hearing laughter draw attention to happy faces? Task relevance determines the influence of a crossmodal affective context on emotional attention

Abstract

Prior evidence has shown that a person's affective context influences attention to emotional stimuli. The present study investigated whether a crossmodal affective context that is induced by remembering an emotional sound modulates attention to visual emotional stimuli. One group of participants had to remember a positive, negative, or neutral sound during each trial of a dot probe paradigm. A second group of participants also had to encode the valence of the sound. The results revealed that attention was preferentially deployed to stimuli that were emotionally congruent to the affective context. However, this effect was only evident when participants had to encode the valence of the affective context. These findings suggest that a crossmodal affective context modulates the deployment of attention to emotional stimuli provided that the affective connotation of the context is task-relevant.

Explicit vs. implicit emotional processing: The interaction between processing type and executive control

“…Taken together, these findings suggest that during simple cognitive tasks, explicit emotion processing is associated with greater emotional effects compared to implicit emotional processing (Spruyt et al, 2009;Stein et al, 2009;Van Dessel & Vogt, 2012). On the other hand, during tasks that recruit EC processes, or when prefrontal regions are highly activated, explicit emotional processing is associated with reduced emotional response compared to implicit emotional processing (Egner et al, 2008;Etkin et al, 2006;Hariri et al, 2000;Lieberman et al, 2007).…”

“…Specifically, emotional interference for congruent stimuli was predicted to be larger, while emotional interference for incongruent stimuli was expected to be smaller in the explicit, compared to the implicit task. These predictions were based on findings showing that explicit emotional processing influence performance to a greater extent than implicit emotional processing in simple cognitive tasks (Spruyt et al, 2009;Stein et al, 2009;Van Dessel & Vogt, 2012), but the opposite pattern emerge when EC processes are activated (Egner et al, 2008;Etkin et al, 2006;Hariri et al, 2000;Lieberman et al, 2007). We also expected to find an interaction between congruity and valence in the discrimination task of Experiment 2, indicating reduced emotional interference following incongruent compared to congruent stimuli.…”

“…Stein et al (2009) demonstrated that fearful faces induced stronger attentional blink when the emotion of the faces had to be reported (explicit emotional processing), compared to when the gender of the face had to be reported (implicit emotional processing). In addition, Van Dessel and Vogt (2012) found that attending to the valence of auditory stimuli led to attentional bias towards visual stimuli with the same valence. This effect was not found, however, when participants were required to identify whether two auditory stimuli were identical or not.…”

“…Explicit emotional processing has been found to be more potent than implicit emotional processing in affecting task performance (e.g., Stein et al, 2009;Van Dessel & Vogt, 2012). Stein et al (2009) demonstrated that fearful faces induced stronger attentional blink when the emotion of the faces had to be reported (explicit emotional processing), compared to when the gender of the face had to be reported (implicit emotional processing).…”

“…It is possible that processing the pictures' content would have led to different interactions with EC. Indeed, there are numerous findings which indicate that the processing type of emotional stimuli (namely, whether the emotional content by itself or a non-emotional aspect of these stimuli is processed) modulates the influence of these stimuli on task performance and on emotion-related brain activations (e.g., Critchley et al, 2000;Cunningham, Raye, & Johnson, 2004;Hariri, Bookheimer, & Mazziotta, 2000;Spruyt, De Houwer, & Hermans, 2009;Stein, Zwickel, Ritter, Kitzmantel, & Schneider, 2009;Van Dessel & Vogt, 2012).…”