Smith, N. K., Larsen, J. T., Chartrand, T. L., Cacioppo, J. T., Katafiasz, H. A. & Moran, K. E. (in press).  Being Bad Isn't Always Good:  Affective Context Moderates the Attention Bias Toward Negative Information.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

            Research has demonstrated that people automatically devote more attention to negative information than to positive information.  We conducted three experiments to test whether this bias is attenuated by a person’s affective context.  Specifically, we primed participants with positive and negative information using traditional (e.g., subliminal semantic priming) and nontraditional (social interactions) means, and measured the amount of attention they allocated to positive and negative information.  Using both event-related brain potentials (Experiment 1) and the Stroop task (Experiments 2 and 3), our results suggest that the attention bias to negative information is attenuated or eliminated when positive constructs are made accessible.  The implications of this result for other biases to negative information and for the self-reinforcing nature of emotional disorders are discussed.

Please address requests for preprints to nksmith@owu.edu