Images of pleasure and winning have unique distracting power

Images related to pleasure or winning attract attention from demanding tasks, while equally intense but negative images and those associated with losing can be fully ignored, finds a new UCL study. 51 volunteers completed attention tasks involving search for 'target' items. They were found to be highly distracted by emotional images, whether positive or negative, when the search was easy. However when the search was harder and demanded high focus of attention people were able to completely ignore the negative images, while the positive images continued to be highly distracting. Positive images included graphic photographs of romantic scenes, happy faces, and neutral faces that were previously associated with winning points in a betting task. Negative images included gory photographs, angry faces and neutral faces previously associated with losing points in the betting task. The study, published in the journal Emotion, suggests that it is easier to ignore negative images than positive ones when we are focusing on other things.