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

peripheral elements of emotional and non-emotional scenes has suggested that
attention narrowing may occur with negative stimuli (Kensinger et al, 2007b).
There are suggestions that whilst negative emotion leads to a narrowing of
attention, positive emotion leads to a broadening of attention (Fredrickson,
2001). It has been argued that a positive mood may lead to a shift in
information processing style by relaxing inhibitory control, leading to a
reduced tendency to narrowly focus attention (Freitas, Katz, Azizian, &
Squires, 2008; Rowe, Hirsh, & Anderson, 2007). The degree to which attention
is broadened with positive emotion has been found to depend on the level of
approach motivation. Low approach motivated positive affect has been
associated with a greater breadth of attention than high approach motivated
positive affect (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2008).
Attention narrowing at the time of first witnessing an event has been
invoked to account for the phenomenon of weapon focus in memory, where
there is an impairment of memory for an event in which there was a weapon
present (Loftus et al., 1987). Groeger (1997) argued that attention narrowing
may not be due to narrowing in the distribution of attention across an event, but
a narrowing in the span of attention on different parts of an event. It may be
that with attention narrowing less information can be attended to but that what
is attended to is well remembered (Groeger, 1997).
Other researchers have investigated memory with alternative definitions
of central and peripheral elements of a scene and have found indications of the
involvement of attention. Cook, Hicks, & Marsh (2007) found that increased
attention toward valenced material led to a reduction in the binding of its
contextual details into memory (another possible aspect of peripheral
32