Attentional bias to affective information in college students with optimistic and pessimistic attributional style / 中国心理卫生杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To investigate the attentional bias to emotional information in college students with optimistic and pessimistic attributional style.Methods:A total of 83 college students (20 males and 23 females in optimistic group,20 males and 20 females in pessimisticgroup) were recruited online.The 2 cue validity (valid,invalid) × 2 emotional type (positive,negative) × 2 attributional style (optimistic group,pessimistic group) hybrid design was used to investigate the attentional bias to emotional information in college students with optimistic and pessimistic attributional style,adopting the cue-target paradigm.Results:Under valid situation,optimistic group had responded to positive (cue) target faster than pessimistic group [(311.4 ± 26.6) ms vs.(324.1 ±± 47.0) ms,P ＜ 0.05],while there was no significant difference in reaction times (RTs) on negative (cue) target between two groups (P ＞ 0.05).Under invalid situation,optimistic group had responded to negative target faster than pessimistic group [(331.0 ±± 31.7) ms vs.(337.4 ± 50.0) ms,P ＜ 0.05],whereas there was no difference in their RTs to responding to positive target(P ＞ 0.05).Conclusion:It suggests that optimistic individuals and pessimistic individuals respectively have selective attentional bias to positive information and negative information.