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Chapter 15 - Top-Down Attention and the Processing of Emotional Stimuli

from Section IV - Cognitive-Emotion Interactions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

By
Luiz Pessoa ,
Leticia Oliveira  and
Mirtes Pereira
Edited by
Jorge Armony  and
Patrik Vuilleumier
Jorge Armony
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Patrik Vuilleumier
Affiliation:
Université de Genève
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Summary

This chapter briefly talks about the following concepts: preattentive, automatic, and unaware. These terms, routinely used when describing the effects of emotional information, have many unintended meanings and relationships. The chapter reviews some specific evidence against and for the idea that attention is required for emotional processing. It reviews the role of attention in the processing of emotion-laden visual information and discusses both evidence for and against automaticity. A study presented here reveals that the contrast of affectively significant and neutral Miss trials did not reveal significant differential responses in the amygdala. In summary, the results from attentional blink experiments suggest that emotion-laden stimuli are also subject to the blink, which goes counter to the notion of strong automaticity. Two more studies described here provide important insights about the temporal unfolding of affective responses in the brain.

Keywords

autonomic activationemotionemotional responsesspinalresponsespainnociceptionnoxious stimuli
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience , pp. 357 - 374
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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