Broaden and build theory (Attentional Bias) Key Paper: Fredrickson (2001)

 (Lench et al., 2016):

o Positive mood
 Nonspecific motivation to explore
 Expansion of current & creation of new action programs
 Increased perceptual and conceptual breadth
 Relaxes the central inhibitory control that normally acts to filter or limit
the amount of information in focus of attention
 More likely to include fringe examples in a category
o Negative mood
 Increased attention to details, Quick actions, tailored to specific
environmental challenges

 Different effects within positive and negative affective states due to differences in
approach motivation: Anger or lust (positive stimuli associated with high approach
motivation) attentional breadth narrow perceptual and conceptual cognitive scope,
while sad or happy mood lead to broadened attention (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010;
Gable et al., 2015; Domachowska et al., 2016)

 After reviewing the literature new framework that incorporates the often contradictory
findings concerning the effects of mood on attention (Vanlessen et al., 2016)
o Effects of positive mood (joy) on perception:
 Impacts the balance between internally and externally directed
attention
 Possibly a mobilization of processing resources towards
external information
 A positive internal state seems to enhance coarse processing of all
stimuli, in a less selective way
 Stronger processing of peripheral stimuli, but apparently not at the
expense of foveal task performance (at the centre of vision)
 Depending on how demanding the task is, the effects
(broadening/narrowing) are mediated by the involvement of pro- as
well as reactive cognitive control
o Negative mood seems to be characterized by reduced processing of certain
(external) information due to increased or prioritized processing of internal
information. Effects on attentional breadth:
 Narrowing (processing and behaviour goal-focused).
 “Broadening” in the sense of hypervigilance, often associated with
impairments in goal-related processing.
Eye Tracking

 (Wadlinger & Isaacowitz, 2006): Positive mood broadens visual attention to positive
stimuli
o appears to be the first study employing eye tracking to link induced positive
mood with attention to emotional stimuli
o Attentional breadth as dependent variable assessed with
 percentage viewing time to peripheral images
 number of visual saccades per slide (looking around the screen)
o Positive mood group
 fixated more on peripheral images of highly positive emotional valence
than the control group, F(1, 53)=6.11, p<.05 than their peers in the
control condition (M=49.57, SD=9.37)
 More frequent saccades for slides of neutral and positive valence in
positive mood
o high positive valence category was not significantly different between groups
o No significant group differences emerged in number of saccades made while
viewing stimuli of negative valence.
o Participants, regardless of induction condition, looked the longest at the
peripheral images of low negative valence which contained images of
threatening animals (tarantulas, sharks, and snakes)
o first fixations, number of fixations, time spent looking at emotional faces
emotional and cognitive components of subjective wellbeing were related to a
general bias to attend to happy faces and avoid sad faces
 The Authors propose that the selective attentional broadening to
positive stimuli helps to:
 Facilitate later building of resources
 Maintain current positive affective states
 Positive emotions mediate the influence of life satisfaction on attention
to happy faces (Sanchez & Vazquez, 2014)
 In this study, positive emotions, rather than life satisfaction,
were responsible for the positive information-processing bias

o Applied Science Laboratories Eye Tracking System Model 504 with Magnetic
Head Transmitter
 measures attentional gaze fixations, or fixations where a participant
focuses within one visual degree of angle on a visual location for 100
ms or more, within pre-designated Areas of Interest (AOI) locations in
nearly real time
 data derived from the eye tracker was recorded as percent gaze
fixation times, instead of mean values, to minimize the effects of
momentary recording failures

o Mood induction & rating

 valence of the slides varied throughout the presentation in a way that
would have served to mute any mood-changing effects of the images
per se
 PANAS inventory (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) was used as a
self-report measure of trait positive and negative affect
  Depression was measured with the CES-D depression scale (Radloff,
1977)
 Anxiety was assessed with the Speilberger State/Trait Anxiety Scales
(Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983)
 optimism was measured with the 12-item Life Orientation Test (Scheier
& Carver, 1985)
 Snellen Visual Acuity test to ensure adequate visual acuity,
 measures that tested for positive and negative affect, anxiety,
optimism, and depressive symptoms (do other variables influence the
relationship of positive mood on attention?)
 self-report measures including six demographic questions, the CES-D,
STAI, PANAS, and LOT

o Positive mood induction:

 presenting the participants with a small bag of candy (approximately
five chocolate pieces) as a token of appreciation for their participation
in the study after completion of the questionnaire packet and
immediately prior to the slide presentation
 Participants were asked not to eat the candy until the conclusion of the
experiment, at which time control participants also received the candy
gift (effective means of inducing state positive affect)

o participants that wore hard contact lenses or had severe visual abnormalities
were excluded from the experiment as they render unreadable data to the eye
tracker
(Duque & Vazquez, 2015): Attentional Bias for negative faces (i.e. first fixation duration and
total fixation time) in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD)
o assess different components of visual attention (orienting attention and
maintenance of attention)
o MDD group spent a marginally less amount of time viewing happy faces
compared with the ND (No Depression) group
o No differences were found between the groups with respect to angry faces
and orienting attention indices
o results support the notion that attentional biases in depression are specific to
depression-related information and that they operate in later stages in the
deployment of attention

 (Shechner et al., 2013): Biased orienting to threat-related stimuli in anxious youth

o unrestricted free viewing of angry, happy, and neutral faces
o Angry-neutral and happy-neutral face pairs for 10s
o Greater attention bias toward angry faces in anxious youth
o In the earliest phases of stimulus presentation Anxious youth more likely to
 direct first fixation to angry faces
 make faster fixations to angry than neutral faces
o threat biases in eye-tracking patterns are manifest at initial attention orienting
 (Schmid et al., 2011): participants in a happy mood processed information more
globally compared to when they were in a sad mood. global processing was only
positively and local processing only negatively related to emotion recognition when
participants were in a sad mood. in a happy mood, processing style was not related
to emotion recognition performance
 o test the assumption that emotion recognition accuracy depends on the use of
global versus local information processing styles and that people in a happy or
a sad mood use different information processing styles
 Previous research suggests that when people are recognizing emotions, they process
faces globally rather than locally, meaning that the face is more likely to be processed
as a whole and not in a piecemeal fashion.
o a global information processing style is more favorable for emotion recognition
than a local information processing style. However, this link could only be
found when participants were primed with a sad mood, but not when they
were primed with a happy mood
 in general, people reliably recognize emotions from faces, yet this ability seems to
vary between individuals (Herba & Phil- lips, 2004; Moore, 2001).
o Not only affective disorders, but also normal variations in mood states in
healthy people have consequences for the perception of emotional
expressions. Sad, compared to happy, people tend to perceive more sadness
and less happiness in faces (Bouhuys, Bloem,&Groothuis, 1995; Niedenthal,
Halberstadt, Margolin, & Innes-Ker, 2000)
o Sad people showed a decrease in recognition accuracy for happy emotions,
whereas happy people showed a decrease in recognition accuracy for sad
emotions (Schmid & Schmid Mast, 2010)
 Analysis/Eye Tracking
o regions of interest for four face features: the left eye, the right eye, the nose,
and the mouth.
o only analyzed eye movements that were performed before the response to the
facial expression was given
o only eye data of correctly recognized emotions were analysed
o Saccades that were performed between two regions of interest are referred to
as interfeatural saccades
o durations of fixations performed within the regions of interest were added up
and are referred to as feature gaze duration.
o Ration of amount of interfeatural saccades divided by total number of
saccades performed. The higher the score on this ratio, the more global the
information processing style
o Longer feature gaze duration indicates more local processing.
o to test for relations between information processing and emotion recognition
accuracy
 computed correlations between the interfeatural saccade ratio, feature
gaze duration, and sensitivity
 a global information processing style is more favorable for emotion recognition than a
local information processing style
 negative correlations between interfeatural saccade ratio and feature gaze duration
for happy mood
 Mood priming had no effect on sensitivity
 significant main effect of mood priming on the interfeatural saccade ratio (global
processing),
 Mood priming had no effect on feature gaze duration (local processing)
 women performed better than men. women tended to process information more
globally (M = .45) than men (M = .34). Moreover, gender significantly affected feature
gaze duration, F(1, 25) = 7.99, p < .01; women processed information less locally (M
= 320.40) than men
 interactions between interfeatural saccade ratio and feature gaze duration were not
significant
 Feature gaze duration correlated negatively with sensitivity for fearful faces when
participants were in a sad mood, r(29) = –.48, p = .01. Shorter feature gaze duration
was, therefore, related to better recognition accuracy for fearful faces when partici-
pants were primed with a sad mood.
 effect of positive and negative mood on gazing behavior in multi-alternative forced
choice situations (Gere et al., 2017)
 significant effects (α=0.05) were observed in the case of strong, interested, excited,
enthusiastic and attentive on the positive affect scale. In the case of these items, the
positive mood group had significantly higher scores.
 Among the negative items, distressed, jittery, hostile, irritable and nervous were found
to be significantly different between the two mood states
 mood has significant effect on eye-movements in terms of longer total
fixation and dwell durations and more total fixation and dwell counts
 decision time increases with the number of alternatives but only in the case of
positive mood. high number of fixations on an AOI means that it was difficult to make
the choice for the participant.
 convert the images into gray-scales and equalize them in size. Finally, the cumulative
brightness was normal- ized across all images using an in-house script written in
MATLAB.

 (Peters et al., 2015): Dispositional and induced optimism lead to attentional

preference for faces displaying positive emotions
 Negative and neutral AOIs in IAPS-Pictures (initially designated by researchers, rated
for valence and arousal by 11 independent judges)
 2 times eye tracking, optimism manipulation in between
 Gazing time at faces (joy, anger, pain, neutral)
 High dispositonal optimism: gaze longer on joy faces
 Participants showing increase in state optimism after induction
o Sign. decrease in gaze duration for anger faces
o Not sign. increase for joy faces

 Humans that experience positive affective states (and are not aware of them) are
more willing to take risky decisions (Gasper & Clore, 2000)
 might influence how extensive observers make use of whole range of the visual
analogous scale during QBA
 quantitative and qualitative measurements of behaviour were affected by the
information about housing or environmental conditions the observers had obtained
(Tuyttens et al., 2014)
 teachers evaluated students’ writing differently after induction of positive or negative
emotions, although only 14% actually believed it influenced their grading performance
(Brackett et al., 2013)
 People tend to judge the personalities of others in congruence with their own (Forgas
& Bower, 1987)
 Emotional empathy of observers influenced speed and intensity of rating
photographs of faces of dogs (Kujala et al., 2017)
 currently depressed persons or such with a history of depression are less sensitive in
the recognition of dynamic emotional expressions and seem to exhibit a bias towards
 interpreting happy and sad faces as angry (Jenness et al., 2016) (citing Joormann &
Gotlib, 2006; LeMoult, Joormann, Sherdell, Wright, & Gotlib, 2009) .

Technique/Method

Statistics/Metrics and Visualisation

Most commonly and often used: bee swarms, scanpaths, and heat maps. Application to
dynamic stimuli is possible, but very labour intensive, ISeeCube includes an editor that can
be used to annotate AOIs before the gaze data is analyzed, or in combination with additional
information gained from the visualized data (Kurzhals et al., 2013)