Expectations don’t protect us from emotional distractions

TL;DR

The study shows that expecting emotional distractions does not help people ignore them better, and sometimes makes the distraction worse.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that expectation of emotional distractions does not improve attentional control and may even increase distraction.

Findings

Emotional images were more distracting than neutral ones.

Predictability of emotional distractors did not improve participants' ability to ignore them.

Incentives to use sequential distractor patterns did not reduce distraction.

Abstract

We often attend to irrelevant information to the detriment of our goals. Emotional stimuli, in particular, capture attention effectively. Usually, this capture is adaptive – alerting us to possible threats or rewards – but can be costly when attention is required elsewhere. Previous studies show that we are less distracted by emotional stimuli when they appear frequently, consistent with the claim that expectation of upcoming conflict encourages the use of effective proactive attentional control. An alternative explanation, however, is that better attentional control arises through greater experience with frequent distractors. To distinguish between these alternatives, we conducted three experiments that tested the effects of expectation on attentional control of emotional distractors while holding experience constant. Participants performed a simple letter identification task while emotionally neutral or negative task-irrelevant images also appeared on 25% of trials, either predictably (on every fourth trial) or unpredictably. As expected, emotional images were more distracting than neutral ones. However, predictability of upcoming emotional distractors did not improve participants’ ability to ignore them; indeed, it sometimes made distraction significantly worse. Similar findings were observed even when participants received incentives to use the sequential presentation of distractors to improve performance. Our findings imply that simply expecting distraction to occur does not help to prevent it.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-025-03085-8.

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