Selective Visual Attention to Emotion

Abstract

Visual attention can be voluntarily directed toward stimuli and is attracted by stimuli that are emotionally significant. The present study explored the case when both processes coincide and attention is directed to emotional stimuli. Participants viewed a rapid and continuous stream of high-arousing erotica and mutilation stimuli as well as low-arousing control images. Each of the three stimulus categories served in separate runs as target or nontarget category. Event-related brain potential measures revealed that the interaction of attention and emotion varied for specific processing stages. The effects of attention and emotional significance operated additively during perceptual encoding indexed by negative-going potentials over posterior regions (∼200–350 ms after stimulus onset). In contrast, thought to reflect the process of stimulus evaluation, P3 target effects (∼400–600 ms after stimulus onset) were markedly augmented when erotica and mutilation compared with control stimuli were the focus of attention. Thus, emotion potentiated attention effects specifically during later stages of processing. These findings suggest to specify the interaction of attention and emotion in distinct processing stages.