Journal
HUMAN FACTORS
Volume 53, Issue 2, Pages 132-141Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0018720811401385
Keywords
attention; emotion; picture processing; sustained attention; vigilance
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Background: Previous research indicates that emotional stimuli can capture spatial attention. Research on the effect of negative emotional and neutral visual stimuli on temporal aspects of attention has not, however, been researched in detail. Method: For this study, 51 participants (15 men and 36 women) were assigned at random to one of three vigilance conditions: a visual vigil with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures, a visual vigil with task-irrelevant neutral pictures, or a no-picture visual vigil control. Vigilance performance was assessed in all conditions. Results: Overall performance efficiency was negatively influenced by the negative-arousing pictures and was interpreted to favor resource depletion to boredom-mindlessness accounts of vigilance performance. Conclusion: Task-unrelated negative emotional stimuli appear to impair absolute levels of target detections in a vigilance task. Application: In monitoring settings where negative emotional stimuli are present, the intrusion of negative emotional stimuli should be mitigated via alterations in the system design, or if this is implausible, the monitors may need additional stress coping and emotional resilience training.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available