Attention-emotion interactions: Investigating the affective consequences of selective attention

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Attention and emotion are important for virtually every aspect of human life. In normal functioning, the interaction of attention and emotion processes guide perception, influence decision making, and are critical for cognitive control and emotional self-regulation. Our survival, quite literally, depends on proper functioning of these systems. The prevailing notion of how attention and emotion are related is guided primarily by the evidence that affective states and emotionally salient stimuli can impact the allocation of attention. Much less is known about the impact of attention on emotion. A recent series of behavioural results suggest that visual attention can in fact produce affective responses for otherwise neutral objects and faces. For example, ignoring an abstract visual pattern (versus attending to it) leads to a subsequent emotional devaluation of that pattern. The goal of the cognitive neuroscience research proposed here is to establish how visual attention impacts emotion. A series of purely cognitive-behavioural studies will be used to reveal the fundamental characteristics of the effects of attention on emotional responses. A complementary set of cognitive neuroimaging studies will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal the network of brain regions that allow attention and emotion to operate together in this way. The results of this program of research are expected to lead to a better understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for interactions between attention and emotion, and thereby provide a foundation for addressing impairments in function that occur when these systems are affected by illness, neurological disorders, and stroke.