The effects of emotional target and mood state of participants on attentional blink

Abstract

Previous studies have found that attentional blink (AB), a failure to report targets temporally close to each other, can be attenuated separately by (1) emotionally significant test stimuli (T2) and (2) the emotional state of the observer. In the present study, we asked whether and how the (1) and (2) interact. Participants were induced with either positive or negative music and asked to complete an AB task which consisted of low-arousal positive, neutral and negative words as T2. We found low arousal negative words significantly reduced AB more than did other words, while no main nor interaction effect for mood was observed. However, on repeating the experiment and replacing low arousal words with high-arousal ones we not only were able to replicate the finding of an advantage of negative words over others, but detected an effect for the mood of the observer: participants who were induced to become happier using music performed better in detecting T2 across lags and word categories than did participants who became sadder. Our findings suggest an interaction of arousal level of emotional target with the induced mood of participants although the underlying mechanisms responsible for this effect need further investigation.