Attention Influences Emotional Judgment and Decision Making

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Most research in judgment and decision making examines the influence of emotion on attention. This project examines the converse: how does attention influence emotion and what are the implications for perceptions of risks such as social threats, environmental hazards, and terrorism? Understanding how attention intensifies emotion and risk perception is fundamental to effective communications by governments, nonprofits, and other organizations. For example, public health campaigns seek to raise awareness of health risks regarding smoking. Environmental campaigns seek to raise awareness of climate change. Public safety campaigns seek to raise awareness of terrorism threats associated with international travel. To be effective, these communication efforts must take into account how attention influences emotion and risk perception. This research will provide such understanding. The results will also help explain why some major threats fail to arouse alarm, whereas other relatively minor concerns such as commercial airline travel can be unduly alarming. This work will also support scientific training of a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students. This research will test the hypotheses that attention intensifies emotion, and that attention consequently increases risk perceptions associated with environmental hazards, terrorism, and social threats. The underlying idea is that attention intensifies emotion because attention increases the vividness of attended objects. The project will use three procedures to experimentally manipulate attention. In one study series, participants will repeatedly search for target images in a series of sequentially presented images. This procedure mimics searching for objects, as in security screening, medical scans, and grocery stores. In a second study series, participants in a multi-tasking experiment repeatedly orient attention to images located at the periphery of their visual field. Attention is oriented toward some images more frequently than others, without a designated target. This procedure mimics looking at pop-up advertisements that appear on screen or selectively attending to headlines on a news website. In a third procedure, participants monitor letters presented on one side of a computer screen while two images are presented: one attended image just below the letters, and one unattended image on the opposite side of the screen. This procedure orients attention as an incidental byproduct of monitoring letters. Preliminary results using all three procedures suggest that people judge attended images as more emotionally intense and vivid - but not more (or less) liked compared with unattended images. A fourth series of studies uses the three procedures to examine whether attention increases perceived risks of environmental hazards, terrorist activities, and social threats.