Affective Influences of Selective Attention

Processes of selective attention and emotion operate together in prioritizing thoughts and actions. Abundant evidence suggests that emotionally salient stimuli and affective states can determine how visual attention is allocated. However, the brain regions mediating the effects of attention and emotion include shared and reciprocally connected structures. This raises an intriguing question about a reciprocal effect: Does attention also influence emotional responses? Here we review a series of studies that show that indeed it does. The results indicate that attention has a negative affective impact for otherwise neutral visual stimuli (abstract patterns and unfamiliar faces) that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited during the performance of a task. Finding that selective attention has distinct affective consequences for visual stimuli represents a new, fundamental discovery about the relation between the two main systems of prioritization in the human brain.