The Influence of Stimuli Valence, Task Difficulty, Neuroticism and Emotion Regulation on Visual Search Within Real-world Scenes

Affective traits are essential in clinical psychology, including neuroticism and emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression). Both neuroticism and emotion regulation has been associated with the development of affective disorders, and emotion regulation therapies have been used in clinical treatment. Therefore, the current study of neuroticism and emotion regulation may provide a more effective intervention for people who suffer from affective disorders. In previous studies, real-world emotional scenarios have been demonstrated to affect visual search tasks. But whether affective traits will influence neutral target search in the real emotional world is still unknown. Although task difficulty, i.e., cognitive load, can affect visual search, it hasn’t been investigated as an independent variable. A neutral target visual search paradigm will be used in the present experiment. The experiment will be divided into manageable and challenging tasks in which participants will be asked to identify neutral targets embedded in moving images. Findings from the present experiment increase our understanding of neuroticism, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, and task difficulty in our ability to distribute attention while viewing real-world scenes during the visual search task.