We cannot fully avoid processing signals of danger

What is it about?

Emotionally-charged objects have been shown to automatically activate key brain areas, suc as the amygdala and the periaqueductal gray. As a consequence, they are also said to be processed and understood without effort or conscious control. Here, we asked if these cues – even when they are tangential to an ongoing task – exert a distracting effect that interferes with performance. An important innovation of our work (over prior studies) is that we addressed the fact that not all emotionally-charged objects are equivalent, and thus those with certain emotions may be more (or less) easy to inhibit. More specifically, we examined the extent to which people could ignore emotional pictures (those that were threatening, negative, or positive), using emotionally-neutral pictures as a baseline. Primary task performance involved visual search for a sequence of numbers in a randomized, chessboard-like configuration. We found that participants were slower to complete the task when threatening pictures appeared near the primary search stimulus, but they were quite good at ignoring pictures with other emotional valences. This suggests that threatening stimuli hold greater prominence, and are more privileged in cognitive processing than stimuli that evoke other emotions.

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Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Conscious control of our cognitive – and in particular, attentional – processing is one of the most important functions of our visual system. We are using a new approach in this study that addresses key shortcomings of prior literature that has investigated threat perception. A fuller account of visual processing should include a better understanding of how we perceive cues to potential threats in our environment, and how this differs from the processing of other emotion-invoking stimuli. Moreover, the degree to which we are capable of consciously controlling what we attend to – especially when that stimulus may be perceived as threatening – is important for understanding the development and maintenance of various fears and phobias. Our results could have important implications in applied scenarios such as the treatment of emotion-related mental health issues (e.g., anxiety), addictions, and neurological disorders (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder).

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