Motivationen inom emotionen: Affekt, motivationell intensitet och dess verkan på uppmärksamhet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the study was to investigate how attention is influenced by emotions with different Motivational Intensity (MI). Previous research found that it is the valence of an emotion that influences attention (broadens or narrows), but more recent studies have focused on Motivational Intensity (MI). In our study (n=81), we examined positive emotions with high MI, positive emotions with low MI, negative emotions with high MI and negative emotions with low MI, and neutral, which has never before been examined in the same study. We predicted that emotions with high MI would narrow the attentional scope whereas emotions with low MI would broaden the attentional scope, according to previous studies. The experiment consisted of pictures inducing different emotions and Navon’s letter task to assess attentional breadth. The result did not indicate significant interaction between affect and local vs. global attention. A possible explanation being discussed is that the pictures did not induce the affect strongly enough. Since there are only a few studies in this field, we believe that more research needs to be done with methods inducing affect more efficiently. Instead of using self-assessments, EMG could be a better and more sensitive option for the the manipulation check.