Emotion and attention - CE2

Question 1

What is the difference between a single task and a dual task in the attentional blink task?

Answer 1

single = ask about a single letter (e.g. was an x there?)
dual = a letter in another colour first to say what that was, then the x comes after and the time before this varies

Question 2

What are the general findings for a standard dual attentional blink test?

Answer 2

It is harder to perceive the x overall and, if presented between 200 and 500 ms after the white letter, it is not perceived

Question 3

What happens in the attentional blink test when the stimulus (T2) is an emotional word compared to neutral?

Answer 3

there are reduced attentional blink effects

Question 4

What happens to people who have bilateral amygdala damage when they do an emotional attentional blink test?

Answer 4

there is no difference between emotional and non-emotional words

Question 5

What happened when moral, emotional and moral emotional words were used in an attentional blink test?

Answer 5

They all showed reduced blink effects compared to neutral words, and purely emotional words showed the greatest effect

Question 6

What happened when moral, emotional and moral emotional words were used in tweets in an attentional blink test? What does this suggest?

Answer 6

They all showed reduced blink effects compared to neutral words, and purely emotional words showed the greatest effect
Tweets may go viral because of these types of words in hashtags

Question 7

What are tweets containing emotional and moral content more likely to do?

Answer 7

be shared and stand out

Question 8

What can emotional stroop tasks tell us about phobias?

Answer 8

they will respond more slowly to words to do with their phobia, suggesting an automatic response and measure of their phobia

Question 9

What are pop out effects in emotional visual search tasks?

Answer 9

people find emotional faces, especially angry faces, faster than neutral faces in a find the odd one out task of a face array

Question 10

What happens when you show someone flowers with a spider or spiders with a flower?

Answer 10

they are faster to identify the single spider in flowers than the other way around

Question 11

Why might living creatures be better at capturing our attention?

Answer 11

they pose more of a threat because they can move suddenly and potentially attack

Question 12

What happened in the Posner cueing task when angry and neutral faces were used as cues? Why might these results have happened?

Answer 12

• there was no difference in RT
• maybe it was too quick for people to register what the face was

Question 13

how does emotion affect detecting the stimulus onset and detecting a target in clutter?

Answer 13

onset = no effect
clutter = emotion enhances

Question 14

What happens to response to a target when an angry face is shown?

Answer 14

it is harder to withdraw from the angry face so RT is slower

Question 15

What happens in an attentional blink task when T1 is also emotional?

Answer 15

It takes longer to be able to recognise T2, because it is harder to disengage attention

Question 16

What is Yerkes-Dodson law?

Answer 16

suggests that extremely high or low levels of arousal can cause poor memory encoding
there is a sweet spot in the middle for optimal encoding

Question 17

What happened when an emotional word was presented in the periphery while remembering a central word?

Answer 17

• they remembered the central word well
• recall of neutral ignored words declined but emotional words were still remembered 24 hours later

Question 18

How did people with anxiety interpret ambiguous words/sentences?

Answer 18

said the more negative meaning more often than controls

Question 19

how does mood induction work? (2)

Answer 19

• test initial mood
• read self referential statements designed to make them happy or sad

Question 20

What was found in a vigilance task when there were different smells?

Answer 20

performance always gets worse over time but people in fragrance conditions had better detection than just air overall

Question 21

Where is there more activation and less activation when people look at homeless people and drug addicts? What do these relate to?

Answer 21

insula increased = more disgust
medial prefrontal cortex reduced = dehumanisation

Question 22

What did high levels of baseline and induced disgust relate to in the homosexuality study?

Answer 22

negative attitudes towards gay men (less so for lesbian women)

Question 23

How can humans and animals share attention? (3 examples)

Answer 23

• monkeys look where a human looks
• dogs look at human faces when seeking food
• pigs look for eye contact to communicate

Question 24

What effect does eye gaze have on 4 year olds judging which sweets are a face’s favourite?

Answer 24

they will say they like the one they are looking at more

Question 25

What happens when you show adults images of people looking at one particular object a lot?

Answer 25

they will begin to prefer it over another object that isn’t looked at