Visual attention to emotional pictures: Striking parallels with neutral stimuli challenge emotion-specific accounts of influences on attentional biases.

Converging evidence suggests that visual spatial attention is preferentially allocated to emotional over neutral stimuli, referred to as an attentional bias to emotional information. Intriguing questions emerged about whether this attentional bias is facilitated by an assumed right hemispheric dominance of emotion processing and by converging cross-modal information (Gerdes et al., 2021). However, we argue that a critical condition that would allow an interpretation in terms of an influence on an emotional attention bias is missing from the experimental design testing these effects: namely, a condition presenting only neutral pictures. To corroborate our argument, we conducted a replication and extension of the eye-tracking study by Gerdes et al. (2021), including this control condition. Specifically, we presented pairs of pictures and lateralized sounds in a free-viewing paradigm and tested the effect of picture position, sound position, and sound valence on an attentional bias score (BS), a difference value for the number of first fixations to unpleasant pictures compared to neutral ones. Importantly, we included a neutral-neutral condition and computed a corresponding BS for an arbitrary set of neutral pictures. Both the supposed leftward bias of emotional attention (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if they are presented on the left) and its supposed guidance by sounds (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if a sound was heard on the same side as the unpleasant picture) emerged in striking parallelism for both unpleasant-neutral and neutral-neutral picture pairs. Thus, the paradigm gives no evidence for emotion specificity of results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).