title: Lack of habituation to shocking words: the attentional bias to their spatial origin is context free.
abstract: Following a suggestion made by Aquino and Arnell (2007), we assumed that the processing of emotional words is influenced by their context of presentation. Supporting this idea, previous studies using the emotional Stroop task in its visual or auditory variant revealed different results depending on the mixed versus blocked presentation of the stimuli (Bertels, Kolinsky, Pietrons, & Morais, 2011; Richards, French, Johnson, Naparstek, & Williams, 1992). In the present study, we investigated the impact of these presentation designs on the occurrence of spatial attentional biases in a modified version of the beep-probe task (Bertels, Kolinsky, & Morais, 2010). Attentional vigilance to taboo words as well as non-spatial slowing effects of these words were observed whatever the mixed or blocked design, whereas attentional vigilance to positive words was only observed in the mixed design. Together with the results from our previous study (Bertels et al., 2010), the present data support the reliability of the effects of shocking stimuli, while vigilance to positive words would only be observed in a threatening context.
authors.affiliation: Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS, Brussels, Belgium. jbertels@ulb.ac.be
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bertels
authors.forename: Régine
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kolinsky
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Morais
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods / Q000523:psychology; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013609:Taboo / Q000523:psychology*