Behavioral and physiological attention biases to positive emotional stimuli

Abstract

Prior research has examined attention to emotional stimuli with the conclusion that fear-relevant information automatically facilitates attention and autonomic nervous system activity. While appraisal theories of emotion suggest that all classes of biologically relevant stimuli capture attention, few studies have explored the interface between attention and biologically relevant positive emotional stimuli, such as infants. The survival of nascent offspring is essential to the continuance of any species, which makes attending to such stimuli of high adaptive value. Furthermore, Lorenz (1943) observed that infants elicit positive emotions, such as warmth and fondness. This study examines behavioral and physiological attention biases to infants, a form of biologically relevant positive emotional stimuli. Results confirm attention capture by infant images when presented in the right visual field, suggesting a left cerebral hemisphere advantage in the perception of infant faces. Sex differences in autonomic reactivity to the positive stimuli indicate that females were more responsive to the infants. Overall findings support the notion of automatic attention capture by biologically relevant positive emotional stimuli.