Attention and Emotion
Attention and Emotion
The chapter reviews the role of attention during the processing of emotion-laden visual information, discussing evidence both for and against automaticity. It emphasizes that several of the terms most often used to describe affective processing—“preattentive,” “automatic,” and “unaware”—are saturated with both intended and unintended connotations. The chapter advances a processing efficiency framework as a way out of the current impasse observed in the literature, a framework in which terms like “preattentive” and “automatic” do not exist because the binary dichotomies are replaced by a continuum of processing efficiencies. The framework incorporates important capacity limitations that moderate the impact of emotional information in the brain and behavior.
Keywords: attention, emotion, automaticity, resources, awareness
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