Updated 21st November, 2022
This page is a list of published papers that investigate, use, or discuss emotion-induced blindness. If you know of any additions or updates that should be listed, please let me know: s.most@unsw.edu.au.
What is emotion-induced blindness?
Emotional stimuli grab attention to such a degree that they can sometimes cause people to fail to see other things... even when those other things are the only thing they are looking for and when they are looking right at them. This is demonstrated in an emotion-induced blindness task: on each trial, people search for a single target embedded in a rapid stream of items (e.g., a 90-degree rotated landscape image embedded in a stream of upright landscape images, all flashing by at a rate of 100-ms/item). Despite the fast presentation rate, people are generally good at seeing the target, but their ability to see the target is spontaneously impaired when it appears within about half-a-second after (or sometimes immediately before) an emotional picture, much more so than when the distracting picture is non-emotional. This occurs both when the distractor is emotionally negative and when it is emotionally positive, as long as the evoked emotion is intense enough. It has also been found to be caused by emotional words and by otherwise non-emotional stimuli that people have learned to associate with rewards or punishments.
Mechanistically, emotion-induced blindness appears to be unique. It does not index the shifting of spatial attention, unlike the widely used "dot probe" task. It also appears to be distinct from the phenomenally similar "attentional blink", although the degree to which this is true is a matter of some debate. The effect is sometimes called the emotional attentional blink, but my lab calls it emotion-induced blindness to reflect its potential distinctiveness from the attentional blink (where people are asked to report two targets, one of which can be emotional). Our lab has proposed a spatiotemporal competition account of emotion-induced blindness, wherein emotional distractors outcompete spatiotemporally neighboring items to drive neural responses in the visual system. However, others have proposed alternative accounts.
Peer-reviewed journal articles & chapters (in roughly chronological order)
Most, S.B., Chun, M.M., Widders, D.M., & Zald, D.H. (2005). Attentional rubbernecking: Cognitive control and personality in emotion-induced blindness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 654-661.
Most, S.B., Chun, M.M., Johnson, M.R., & Kiehl, K.A. (2006). Attentional modulation of the amygdala varies with personality. NeuroImage, 31, 934-944.
Smith, S.D., Most, S.B., Newsome, L.A., & Zald, D.H. (2006). An “emotional blink” of attention elicited by aversively conditioned stimuli. Emotion, 6, 523-527.
Most, S.B., Smith, S.D., Cooter, A.B., Levy, B.N., & Zald, D.H. (2007). The naked truth: Positive, arousing distractors impair rapid target detection. Cognition & Emotion, 21, 964-981.
Arnell, K. M., Killman, K. V., & Fijavz, D. (2007). Blinded by emotion: Target misses follow attention capture by arousing distractors in RSVP. Emotion, 7(3), 465–477.
Mathewson, K. J., Arnell, K. M., & Mansfield, C. A. (2008). Capturing and holding attention: the impact of emotional words in rapid serial visual presentation. Memory & Cognition, 36, 182–200.
Most, S.B. & Jungé, J.A. (2008). Don’t look back: Retroactive, dynamic costs and benefits of emotional capture. Visual Cognition, 16, 262-278.
Bocanegra, B. R., & Zeelenberg, R. (2009). Dissociating emotion-induced blindness and hypervision. Emotion, 9, 865–873.
Peers, P. V., & Lawrence, A. D. (2009). Attentional control of emotional distraction in rapid serial visual presentation. Emotion, 9(1), 140–145.
Ciesielski, B. G., Armstrong, T., Zald, D. H., Olatunji, B. O. (2010) Emotion modulation of visual attention: categorical and temporal characteristics. PLoS One, 5(11), e13860.
Most, S.B., Laurenceau, J.P., Graber, E., Belcher, A., & Smith, C.V. (2010). Blind jealousy? Romantic insecurity increases emotion-induced failures of visual perception. Emotion, 10, 250-256.
Piech, R.M., Pastorino, M.T., & Zald, D.H. (2010). All I saw was the cake. Hunger effects on attentional capture by visual food cues, Appetite, 54, 579-582,
Most, S.B., & Wang, L. (2011). Dissociating spatial attention and awareness in emotion-induced blindness. Psychological Science, 22, 300-305.
Olatunji, B.O., Ciesielski, B., Armstrong, T., Zald, D. (2011). Making something out of nothing: Neutral content modulates attention in generalized anxiety disorder. Depression and Anxiety, 28, 427-34.
Olatunji, B. O., Ciesielski, B., Zald, D. (2011) A selective impairment in attentional disengagement from erotica in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 35, 1977-82.
Piech, R.M., McHugo, M., Smith, S.D., Dukic, M.S., Meer, J.V.D., Abou-Khalil, B., Most, S.B., & Zald, D.H. (2011). Attentional capture by emotional stimuli is preserved in patients with amygdala lesions. Neuropsychologia, 49, 3314-3319.
Wang, L., Kennedy, B.L., & Most, S.B. (2012). When emotion blinds: A spatiotemporal competition account of emotion-induced blindness. Frontiers in Psychology: Special Topic on Emotion and Cognition. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00438
Kennedy, B.L., & Most, S.B. (2012). Perceptual, not memorial, disruption underlies emotion-induced blindness. Emotion, 12, 199-202.
McHugo, M., Olatunji, B. O., & Zald, D. H. (2013). The emotional attentional blink: what we know so far. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 151. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00151
Olatunji, B. O., Armstrong, T., McHugo, M., & Zald, D. H. (2013). Heightened attentional capture by threat in veterans with PTSD. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 122, 397–405.
Most, S.B. (2014). The regulation of vision: How motivation and emotion shape what we see. In J.P. Forgas & E. Harmon-Jones (Eds.), Motivation and its regulation: The control within (pp. 153-168). New York: Taylor & Francis.
de Jong, P. J., Koster, E. H. W., Wessel, I., & Martens, S. (2014). Distinct temporal processing of task-irrelevant emotional facial expressions. Emotion, 14, 12–16.
Kennedy, B.L., Rawding, J., Most, S.B., & Hoffman, J.E. (2014). Emotion-induced blindness reflects competition at early and late processing stages: An ERP study. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 1485-1498.
Chen, W., Lu, J, Liu L., & Zhou, Y. (2014). Emotion-induced Blindness: A Kind of Particular Functional Blindness. Advances in Psychological Science, 22, 422-430.
Failing, M. F., & Theeuwes, J. (2015). Nonspatial attentional capture by previously rewarded scene semantics. Visual Cognition, 23, 82–104.
Kennedy, B.L. & Most, S.B. (2015). The rapid perceptual impact of emotional distractors. PLoS ONE, 10(6): e0129320. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0129320
Kennedy, B.L. & Most, S.B. (2015). Affective stimuli capture attention regardless of categorical distinctiveness: An emotion-induced blindness study. Visual Cognition, 23, 105-117.
Yokoyama, T., Padmala, S., & Pessoa, L. (2015). Reward learning and negative emotion during rapid attentional competition. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 269. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00269
Wang, L. & Most, S.B. (2016). The cost of seeing the meaning: Conceptual processing of distractors triggers localized target suppression. Visual Cognition, 24, 473-486.
Flaisch, T., Steinhauser, M., & Schupp, H. T. (2016). Emotional aftereffects: When emotion impairs subsequent picture recognition. Emotion, 16, 987–996.
Hudson, A., Olatunji, B. O., Gough, K., Yi, S., & Stewart, S. H. (2016). Eye on the prize: High-risk gamblers show sustained selective attention to gambling cues. Journal of Gambling Issues, 34, 100–119.
Le Pelley, M.E., Seabrooke, T., Kennedy, B.L., Pearson, D., & Most, S.B. (2017). Miss it and miss out: Counterproductive nonspatial attentional capture by task-irrelevant, value-related stimuli. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 79, 1628-1642.
Onie, S. & Most, S.B. (2017). Two roads diverged: Distinct mechanisms of attentional bias differentially predict negative affect and persistent negative thought. Emotion, 17, 884-894.
MacLeod, J., Stewart, B. M., Newman, A. J., & Arnell, K. M. (2017). Do emotion-induced blindness and the attentional blink share underlying mechanisms? An event-related potential study of emotionally-arousing words. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 17(3), 592–611.
Singh, D., & Sunny, M. M. (2017). Emotion Induced Blindness Is More Sensitive to Changes in Arousal As Compared to Valence of the Emotional Distractor. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1381. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01381
Borton, J. L. S., Oakes, M. A., & Lengieza, M. (2017). Fixated on rejection: Attentional blindness following socially rejecting faces in people with defensive self-esteem. Self and Identity, 16, 62–81.
Ní Choisdealbha, Á., Piech, R.M., Fuller, J.K., & Zald, D.H. (2017). Reaching back: the relative strength of the retroactive emotional attentional blink. Scientific Reports, 7. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep43645
Camalier, C.R., McHugo, M., Zald, D.H., Neimat, J.S. (2018) The Effect of Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy on Fear-Related Capture of Attention in Parkinson’s Disease and Essential Tremor: A Comparison to Healthy Individuals. Journal of Neurological Disorders, 6, 377-92.
Kennedy, B. L., Newman, V. E., & Most, S. B. (2018). Proactive deprioritization of emotional distractors enhances target perception. Emotion, 18, 1052–1061.
Kennedy, B.L., Pearson, D., Sutton, D., Beesley, T., & Most, S.B. (2018). Spatiotemporal competition and task-relevance shape the spatial distribution of emotional interference during rapid visual processing: Evidence from gaze-contingent eye-tracking. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80, 426-438.
Jin, M., Onie, S., Curby, K. M., & Most, S. B. (2018). Aversive images cause less perceptual interference among violent video game players: Evidence from emotion-induced blindness. Visual Cognition, 26, 753–763.
Berenbaum, H., Chow, P., Flores, L., Schoenleber, M., Thompson, R., & Most, S.B. (2018). A test of the initiation-termination model of worry. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology. epub: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2043808718778965
Zhao, J. L., & Most, S. B. (2019). Manipulations of distractor frequency do not mitigate emotion-induced blindness. Cognition & Emotion, 33, 442–451.
Haddara, N., Ravid, J., Miller, E. L., O'Hagan, M., Caracciolo, C., & Miskovic, V. (2019). Anxious anticipation prolongs emotional interference for rapid visual detection. Emotion, 19, 1127–1137.
Le Pelley, M. E., Watson, P., Pearson, D., Abeywickrama, R. S., & Most, S. B. (2019). Winners and losers: Reward and punishment produce biases in temporal selection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45, 822–833.
Gutiérrez-Cobo, M. J., Luque, D., Most, S. B., Fernández-Berrocal, P., & Le Pelley, M. E. (2019). Reward and emotion influence attentional bias in rapid serial visual presentation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72, 2155–2167.
Keefe, J. M., Sy, J. L., Tong, F., & Zald, D. H. (2019). The emotional attentional blink is robust to divided attention. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 81(1), 205–216.
Kimonis, E. R., Kidd, J., Most, S. B., Krynen, A., & Liu, C. (2020). An elusive deficit: Psychopathic personality traits and aberrant attention to emotional stimuli. Emotion, 20, 951–964.
Guilbert, D., Most, S. B., & Curby, K. M. (2020). Real world familiarity does not reduce susceptibility to emotional disruption of perception: evidence from two temporal attention tasks. Cognition & emotion, 34, 450–461.
Proud, M., Goodhew, S. C., & Edwards, M. (2020). A vigilance avoidance account of spatial selectivity in dual-stream emotion induced blindness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27, 322–329.
Singh, D. & Sunny, M.M. (2020). Attention Interacts With Emotion to Drive Perceptual Impairment of Images in an RSVP Task. Collabra: Psychology, 6 (1): 14626. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.14626
Hoffman, J.E., Kim, M., Taylor, M., & Holiday, K. (2020). Emotional capture during emotion-induced blindness is not automatic, Cortex, 122, 140-158.
Jia, L., Wang, L., Sung, B., Wang, C., Chen, D., & Wang, J. (2020). Habituation to emotional distractors attenuates emotion-induced blindness. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000917
Aznar-Casanova, J., Gavilán, J., Moreno Sánchez, M., & Haro, J. (2020). The Emotional Attentional Blink as a Measure of Patriotism. The Spanish Journal of Psychology,23, E30. doi:10.1017/SJP.2020.32
Keefe, J. M., & Zald, D. H. (2020). Emotional distractor images disrupt target processing in a graded manner. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000893
Kennedy, B. L., Huang, R., & Mather, M. (2020). Age differences in emotion-induced blindness: Positivity effects in early attention. Emotion, 20, 1266–1278.
Brown, C. R. H., Berggren, N., & Forster, S. (2020). Testing a goal-driven account of involuntary attentional capture by threat. Emotion, 20(4), 572–589.
Baker, A. L., Kim, M., & Hoffman, J. E. (2021). Searching for emotional salience. Cognition, 214, 104730. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104730
Onie, S., & Most, S. B. (2021). On the relative sensitivity of spatial and nonspatial measures of attentional bias: Emotion-induced blindness, the dot probe, and gradations in ratings of negative pictures. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000855
Berrisford-Thompson, J., Sayers, S., Bell, J., Dondzilo, L., & Kennedy, B. L. (2021). Blinded by bodies: Elevated eating disorder symptomatology is associated with increased attentional priority for thin bodies. Body image, 39, 237–247.
Olatunji, B O. (2021). Emotional induced attentional blink in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 283, 101-107.
Olatunji, B. O., Liu, Q., Zald, D. H., & Cole, D. A. (2022). Emotional induced attentional blink in trauma-exposed veterans: associations with trauma specific and nonspecific symptoms. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 87, 102541. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2022.102541
Goodhew, S. C., & Edwards, M. (2022). Don't look now! Emotion-induced blindness: The interplay between emotion and attention. Attention, perception & psychophysics, 10.3758/s13414-022-02525-z. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-022-02525-z
Kirsten, H., Seib-Pfeifer, L. E., Schmuck, J., & Gibbons, H. (2022). Event-related potentials of food-induced blindness in the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Appetite, 180, 106344. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2022.106344
Moeck, E. K., Mortlock, J., Onie, S., Most, S. B., & Koval, P. (2022). Blinded by and Stuck in Negative Emotions: Is Psychological Inflexibility Across Different Domains Related?. Affective science, 1–13. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00145-2
Singh, D., & Sunny, M. M. (2022). Spatial distribution of emotional attentional blink under top-down attentional control. Cognitive processing, 10.1007/s10339-022-01109-x. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-022-01109-x
Boonstra E.A., Bais, M.N., van Schouwenburg M.R., van den Munckhof, P., Smit,
D.J.A., Denys, D., & Slagter, H.A. (2022). Conscious perception and the role of the basal ganglia: preliminary findings from a deep brain stimulation study. bioRxiv preprint. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.15.516581
Onie, S., MacLeod, C., & Most, S.B. (in press). Gone for Good: Lack of Priming Suggests Early Perceptual Interference in Emotion-Induced Blindness. Emotion.