Abstract
Previous studies have found that affective state can influence attentional breadth and the attentional blink. The affective dimension responsible for attentional effects remains under debate. Some studies suggest that attentional effects depend on the valence dimension of the affective state. Others have proposed that attentional effects depend on the motivational intensity of the affective state. In two preregistered experiments, we tested the effect of inducing affective states with different valence and motivational intensity on the attentional blink and attentional breadth. In both experiments, we compared four affective states with different combinations of valence (positive vs negative) and motivational intensity (low vs high). We used an RSVP digit identification task to measure the attentional blink and used the local-global visual processing task to measure attentional breadth. For both tasks, affective pictures were presented before each trial to induce the intended affective state. In Experiment 1, the affective pictures were chosen to have similar average arousal across conditions, while in Experiment 2, arousal was allowed to co-vary with expected motivational intensity. Contrary to previous findings, we observed no effects of affective state on either the attentional blink or attention breadth. Induction of positive and negative affect produced no differences in the strength of the attentional blink or the breadth of attention. There were also no detectable differences between affective state conditions with low or high motivational intensity. The same pattern was observed in both experiments. Our results suggest that either the affective induction method is not reliably effective, or there is not a direct relationship between the valence or motivational intensity of affective state and the distribution of attention.