PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

lack of a central-peripheral trade-off in memory for positive objects is also
consistent with research showing that positive emotions lead to a broadening of
attention (e.g. Bless et al., 1996). We found no evidence for an effect of
positive emotion on the spatial distribution of attention across stimuli.
However, our measure of attention was based purely on eye movements and it
is possible that people widen their spotlight of attention, and so make cognitive
processing easier, without affecting eye movements. An alternative
measurement of attention could be a task such as the dot probe task which has
been used to demonstrate attentional biases towards and away from emotional
stimuli (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). The lack of attentional narrowing with
positive stimuli may seem inconsistent with evidence that additional attentional
resources at encoding can completely account for a positive emotional
enhancement of memory for pictures (Talmi et al., 2007). However, these
additional attentional resources may be used to more deeply encode and
ruminate on the semantic meaning of the positive emotional stimuli, rather than
to affect the spatial distribution of attention. The negative emotional stimuli
used in this experiment were of a threatening nature that would have the same
meaning to most people (e.g. a knife, a severed arm) whereas, the positive
emotional stimuli may have required more interpretation to fully experience the
emotion (e.g. a birthday cake). Alternatively, positive emotions may enhance
memory through a different route than negative emotions and this may be
unrelated to attention. Positive stimuli may be more successfully encoded, and
subsequently remembered, as a result of the faster processing of positive than
negative information (Unkelbach, Fiedler, Bayer, Stegmuller, & Danner,
2008). In this study participants’ attention may have been initially attracted to
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