Research Projects

In 2014, Hustler Hollywood opened a shop in Oklahoma City, leading to 8 car accidents within two weeks. Emotional/motivational stimuli capture attention spontaneously, interfering with goal-directed behavior. Previous research has primarily examined attentional capture using intrinsic emotional stimuli, but some studies have used extrinsic emotional value acquired in lab settings. Both types of emotional stimuli produce similar behavioral outcomes in attention tasks, but engage different neural networks. Incorporating both types of affective stimuli in the same experiment will provide robust empirical evidence on their unique capacity to capture attention. This proposal aims to examine the attentional mechanism underlying implicit and explicit emotions when they are competing with each other, as well as the modulation of attention orienting by reward vs. punishment or motivational saliency.