The effect of different negative emotional context on involuntary attention: an ERP study

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the different negative emotional contexts on involuntary attention, induced by a task-irrelevant sound, in an auditory-visual distraction paradigm. The emotional contexts comprised sad, fearful and neutral, and the irrelevant auditory stimuli consisted of repetitive standard sounds (80%) and environmental novel sounds (20%). The present results revealed that there were apparently different mismatch negativity (MMN) and Novelty-P3 components among these emotional contexts. Specifically, the amplitude of MMN showed no significant difference, indicating that the early stage of involuntary attention was not affected by the emotional context. Then, the amplitude of Novelty-P3, indicating the involuntary orienting of attention to novel sounds, attenuated greatest in the sad context. This pattern of results was more likely due to the competition for attention resources between affective processing and the novel sounds. That is to say, sad inhibit the involuntary attention to some extent, whereas perceiving fear cues facilitated novelty detection.