ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that negative emotion stimuli strongly influence the automatic allocation of visual attention. The experiment was conducted within subjects There were three levels of Emotional Focus stimuli (Negative, Neutral, Positive), and five levels of Target Location. There were two groups of stimuli in the study; Emotion Focus stimuli and single letter Target stimuli. The Focus stimuli were sets of Negative, Neutral and Positive Emotion words. Following a fixation cross subjects viewed an emotion word presented for 300 ms. After a 100 ms ISI a target was presented at one of 5 positions and remained visible until the subject's response. Target Classification time following a negative focus stimulus was 580 ms. No such facilitation was observed for targets that followed a focusing stimulus from the positive or neutral set.
