5.3.1. Experiment 1

The purpose of Experiment 1 was to determine the impact of emotions on subsequent attention. If normal participants use avoidant processing or perceptual defense to process negative information, target processing could benefit from the increased attention available after the priming of a negative stimulus (relative to a neutral or a positive stimulus.) We used an ISI of 90 ms for the complete separation and initial low-level competition between emotional and target stimuli. The emotional stimulus was presented for 30 ms and the participant had 120 ms to react before target processing. We propose that the emotional impact is small and rapid within the dot probe detection task, so we wanted to measure the emotional impact on attention just after presentation of the emotional stimulus. Schematic facial expressions were used for the emotional stimuli, rather than emotional words, to avoid interference between two semantic activations, elicited by colour and emotional words.