title: On the role of goal relevance in emotional attention: disgust evokes early attention to cleanliness.
abstract: Prior evidence has shown that aversive emotional states are characterised by an attentional bias towards aversive events. The present study investigated whether aversive emotions also bias attention towards stimuli that represent means by which the emotion can be alleviated. We induced disgust by having participants touch fake disgusting objects. Participants in the control condition touched non-disgusting objects. The results of a subsequent dot-probe task revealed that attention was oriented to disgusting pictures irrespective of condition. However, participants in the disgust condition also oriented towards pictures representing cleanliness. These findings suggest that the deployment of attention in aversive emotional states is not purely stimulus driven but is also guided by the goal to alleviate this emotional state.
authors: Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. julia.vogt@UGent.be
authors: Julia
authors: J
authors: Vogt
authors: Ljubica
authors: L
authors: Lozo
authors: Ernst H W
authors: EH
authors: Koster
authors: Jan
authors: J
authors: De Houwer
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D006920:Hygiene; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time