Abstract
In addition to pain relief, previous research has shown that acetaminophen can blunt evaluative and emotional processing. The extent to which these pharmacological effects of acetaminophen can be attributed to changes in attentional processing remains unknown. Here we used the emotional attentional blink (EAB) paradigm to assess acetaminophen’s impact on emotion-attention interactions. The EAB consists of a rapid serial visual presentation of 17 images that last for 100ms each. Participants were instructed to identify a rotated image and indicate its orientation while ignoring positive, negative, or neutral distractors, which were taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) image set. The target could appear either 2 or 5 positions after the critical distractor (lag-2 or lag-5); target report is generally more accurate at lag-5 than at lag-2 since participants are often still processing the distractor when the target is presented. If acetaminophen blunts the prioritization of emotionally-valent images at early stages of attention, then we should see improved lag-2 target accuracy for the treatment group compared to the control groups. We randomly assigned participants to either a control (cornstarch placebo) or treatment (acetaminophen) group in a double-blind manner before having them perform the EAB task. Although we replicate a robust emotional attentional blink for both positive and negative images, our results show no differences in performance between groups, suggesting that acetaminophen did not attenuate the magnitude of distraction by the emotionally-valent images. However, it is possible that participants were insufficiently processing the semantic content of the distractors to see a modulatory effect of acetaminophen, or that acetaminophen delays the disengagement of attention from emotional distractors rather than influencing attentional engagement, which might be more robustly evident at intermediate lags.