To understand the role that attention plays in the deployment timeline of hypnotic anger modulation, we composed an Attentional Blink paradigm where the first and second targets were faces, expressing neutral or angry emotions. We then suppressed the salience of angry faces through a “hypnotic numbing” suggestion. We found that hypnotic suggestion just attenuated the emotional salience of the second target (T2). By implementing drift-diffusion decision modelling, we also found that hypnotic suggestion mainly affected decision thresholds. These findings suggest that hypnotic numbing resulted from belated changes in response strategy. Interestingly, a contrast against non-hypnotized participants revealed that the numbing suggestion had the instruction-like feature of incorporating emotional valence into the attentional task-set. Together, our results portray hypnotic anger modulation as a two-tiered process: first, hypnotic suggestion alters the attentional task-set; second, provided processing and response preparation are not interrupted, a hypnotizability-dependent response based on said altered task-set is produced through late cognitive control strategies.

为了理解注意力在催眠愤怒调制的部署时间表中的作用，我们构建了一个注意力闪烁范式，其中第一个和第二个目标是面部，表达中性或愤怒的情绪。然后，我们通过“催眠麻木”的建议来抑制愤怒面孔的显着性。我们发现催眠暗示只会减弱第二个目标（T2）的情绪显着性。通过实施漂移扩散决策模型，我们还发现催眠建议主要影响决策阈值。这些发现表明，催眠麻木是由反应策略的迟到变化引起的。有趣的是，与未受催眠的参与者的对比表明，麻木的建议具有将情绪效价纳入注意力任务集的类似指令的特征。一起，我们的结果将催眠愤怒调节描述为一个两层过程：首先，催眠建议改变注意力任务集；其次，如果处理和反应准备不被中断，基于所述改变的任务集的催眠依赖反应是通过后期认知控制策略产生的。