Abstract
Appraisal theories of emotion sustain that stimuli containing high biological relevance preferentially capture our attention, regardless of their valence. In this work, we study the priming effect of both cute and threatening pictures on global/local visual processing. Seventy-eight males and 168 females in different menstrual cycle phases performed the global/local Navon letter task immediately after observing cute (infants and baby animals), threatening (animals in aggressive poses) or neutral pictures. Hierarchical stimuli were made up of global and local letters that could be either congruent (e.g. global H, localH) or incongruent (e.g. global H, localS). While we observed no interaction between affective primes and sex/menstrual cycle phase, each of these variables did have an independent effect on the global/local task. Thus, letter identification was significantly slower in the global task (only) after cute vs. neutral primes. Relevantly, the local-minus-global RT index revealed an attentional narrowing after both cute and threatening primes (vs. neutral primes) in incongruent trials. As for sex effects, a facilitation of global vs. local processing was observed in both sexes. However, women registered slower RTs than men, whereas women in the luteal phase showed faster RTs than those in follicular phase in the local task. This suggests that women, mainly those in their luteal menstrual phase, tend to rely on a more analytical style of processing while attending to hierarchical stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli containing high biological significance drive narrowing of the attentional focus in global/local visual processing, especially in conditions of higher attentional demand.
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Data availability
Datasets generated during the current study and all materials needed to rerun the experiment can be retrieved here https://osf.io/anxcm/.
Notes
The following IAPS pictures were used: threatening pictures (eight global: 1080, 1113, 1114, 1120, 1205, 1304, 1820, 1932; eight local: 1050, 1052, 1201, 1202, 1300, 1301, 1321, 1930), cute pictures (eight global: 1463, 1630, 2035, 2045, 2057, 2058, 2153, 2165; eight local: 1460, 1710, 2070, 2071, 2075, 2080, 2260, 2332) and neutral pictures (nine global: 7001, 7006, 7012, 7018, 7025, 7040, 7052, 7062, 7100; eight local: 7002, 7004, 7009, 7014, 7021, 7035, 7045, 7056).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to H. Nittono and another anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments that allowed us to improve this manuscript. We also thank J. Wintle for proofreading the present document.
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Preparation of this manuscript was supported by Grant PGC2018-094937-B-100 from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España and by research contracts supported by Comunidad de Madrid and co-financed by the European Social Fund (PEJD-2017-PRE/SOC-4240, PEJD-2018-PRE/SOC-9185 and PEJD-2018-PRE/SOC-8992).
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Conceptualization: JI and EIO; Project administration: JI and EIO; Funding acquisition: JI and EIO; Investigation: AÁ-SM, JI and EIO; Data collection: AÁ-SM; Visualization: AÁ-SM; Methodology: AG and EIO; Formal analysis: AG and AÁ-SM; Writing—original draft: AÁ-SM, JI and EIO; Writing—review & editing: JI and EIO; Supervision: JI and EIO. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Álvarez-San Millán, A., Iglesias, J., Gutkin, A. et al. Both cute and threatening images drive narrowing of attention in men and women. Psychological Research 86, 1215–1229 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01548-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01548-9