Tough doughnuts: affect and the modulation of attention

Positive affect has been associated with improvement in performance in various attentional domains. Negative affect has been associated with narrowing of attention and lowering of performance in attentional tasks. Previous behavioral studies have put forth the diffuse mental state idea as the mechanism of these effects, where attentional resources are more evenly distributed during positive affect and more focused during negative affect. To explore neural correlates of this mechanism, a two-stream rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm with centrally presented, overlapping streams was used. Participants attended one of the streams at a time and steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEP) in response to the attended and unattended streams were recorded in a positive, negative or neutral affect state. We predicted that in the positive affect condition, ssVEP responses to the attended and the unattended stream would be more alike than in a neutral condition. In the negative affect condition, as an expression of a less diffuse mental state, ssVEP responses were predicted to be more dissimilar. Self-assessments confirmed the effectiveness of the emotional manipulation. In the negative affect condition power was found to be higher than in the neutral condition. However, the modulations in the ssVEP did not reflect the predicted neural correlate of the diffuse mental state mechanism. Thus, the results provide evidence for negative affect modulating attention but suggest that the diffuse mental state is not a spatially oriented phenomenon.