Emotion → Attention: The Influence of Emotions on Attention in Decision Making

Emotions shape how individuals allocate attention in decision-making: while negative emotions such as fear and anxiety narrow attention and increase vigilance, positive emotions broaden attentional scope, promoting flexibility and creativity. Mechanisms that explain how emotions influence attention in decision making suggest that when we design decision governance, it needs to stimulate positive emotions during decision making. The text presents a summary of these mechanisms.

This text is part of the series on decision governance. Decision Governance is concerned with how to improve the quality of decisions by changing the context, process, data, and tools (including AI) used to make decisions. Understanding decision governance empowers decision makers and decision stakeholders to improve how they make decisions with others. Start with “What is Decision Governance?” and find all texts on decision governance here.

The diagram below visualizes the mechanisms through variables and labeled edges reflecting the rules used to describe each mechanism. Labels match section numbers below.

1. Attentional Bias Mechanism

Attentional bias refers to the tendency of emotions to direct attention toward emotionally salient information while filtering out less relevant details. Emotional stimuli, particularly those associated with threats or rewards, have been found to capture attention more rapidly than neutral stimuli.

• Threat-related emotions (e.g., fear, anxiety) → Increased selective attention to danger-related stimuli: Fear and anxiety heighten vigilance, leading individuals to focus more on threatening stimuli while neglecting neutral or positive information.
• Positive emotions (e.g., happiness, excitement) → Increased selective attention to rewarding stimuli: Happiness and excitement increase openness to rewarding stimuli, promoting broader and more flexible attention.

2. Emotion-Induced Perceptual Narrowing

Perceptual narrowing is a phenomenon in which heightened emotional states, particularly negative ones, cause a constriction of attentional focus. This effect, often referred to as “tunnel vision,” leads to an overemphasis on central details at the expense of peripheral information.

• Increased emotional arousal → Increased selective attention to central stimuli: High arousal emotions focus cognitive resources on the most critical elements of a scene, often at the expense of contextual details.
• Amygdala activation → Decreased attention to peripheral stimuli: The amygdala enhances focus on central emotional stimuli, reducing awareness of peripheral information.

3. Mood-Congruent Attentional Bias

The mood-congruency effect suggests that individuals’ current emotional states influence the type of information they selectively attend to. Specifically, people in a positive mood tend to focus on positive information, while those in a negative mood prioritize negative stimuli.

• Positive mood → Increased selective attention to positive stimuli: A positive mood enhances the perception of positive information, reinforcing an optimistic outlook.
• Negative mood → Increased selective attention to negative stimuli: Negative emotions increase sensitivity to potential risks and negative events, reinforcing a defensive outlook.

4. Approach-Avoidance Attention Mechanism

The approach-avoidance framework suggests that different emotions promote either attentional flexibility or rigidity, depending on their motivational orientation.

• Approach-related emotions (e.g., happiness, excitement) → Increased attentional flexibility, fostering exploration: Positive emotions encourage a broader range of attentional focus, leading to increased creativity and exploration.
• Avoidance-related emotions (e.g., fear, disgust) → Increased selective attention to threats, reducing exploration: Negative emotions heighten threat detection, limiting cognitive flexibility and reducing exploratory behavior.

5. Affective Influence on Selective Attention

Selective attention refers to the ability to focus on specific stimuli while ignoring others. Emotions influence this process by acting as filters that determine which information is deemed relevant or irrelevant.

• Fear and anxiety → Increased selective attention to potential threats: Fear and anxiety heighten vigilance, ensuring that potential dangers are prioritized in attention allocation.
• Anger → Increased selective attention to sources of perceived injustice: Anger focuses cognitive resources on identifying the source of frustration or perceived wrongdoing.
• Happiness → Increased attentional flexibility and openness to diverse stimuli: Happiness broadens attentional scope, leading to increased creativity and holistic information processing.

6. Emotional Stroop Effect

The Emotional Stroop Effect is a cognitive phenomenon where individuals take longer to process emotionally salient words compared to neutral words, indicating that emotional stimuli demand greater attentional resources.

• Emotionally salient stimuli → Increased cognitive interference, requiring more processing time: Emotionally charged stimuli consume cognitive resources, making it harder to process unrelated information efficiently.
• Negative emotions → Increased attentional capture compared to positive emotions: Negative emotions often exert a stronger influence on attention due to their role in survival-related vigilance.

7. Cognitive Load and Emotion Interaction

Emotions influence cognitive load, which in turn affects attentional capacity. Strong emotional states consume cognitive resources, reducing the ability to focus on complex tasks.

• Emotional arousal → Increased cognitive load, reducing attentional resources: Strong emotional responses compete for cognitive resources, reducing the capacity to process additional information.
• High stress → Decreased executive function, leading to heuristic-based decisions: Under stress, decision-making shifts from careful deliberation to reliance on cognitive shortcuts.

8. Fear and Hypervigilance Mechanism

Fear triggers hypervigilance, a heightened state of attention where individuals become excessively sensitive to potential threats.

• Fear → Increased amygdala activation, increasing selective attention to threats: Fear engages the amygdala, increasing sensitivity to threat-related stimuli while deprioritizing neutral stimuli.
• Prefrontal cortex dysregulation → Reduced ability to shift attention away from threats: Fear weakens executive control, making it difficult to disengage attention from perceived dangers.

9. Emotional Disengagement and Attention Avoidance

Some emotions, particularly those associated with depression and burnout, lead to disengagement from external stimuli.

• Depressive states → Suppressed dopamine activity, reducing attentional motivation: Depression lowers dopamine levels, diminishing motivation to engage with the environment and reducing attentional focus.
• Emotionally overwhelming situations → Increased avoidance mechanisms, reducing cognitive flexibility: High emotional distress leads to avoidance behaviors, decreasing the ability to adapt attention to changing circumstances.

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