The Bias in Attention to Emotional Information in Individuals with Dispositional Optimism and Pessimism

Dispositional optimism/pessimism is an important personality and plays an important role in regulating individual cognitive process. Previous studies have found that optimistic individuals are more likely to notice positive factors in the environment and ignore negative clues while pessimistic individuals are just the opposite. A dot-probe task is employed to explore the attentional bias of individuals with dispositional optimism/pessimism in face of emotional information. Different valence pictures (positive, negative and neutral) are chosen from CAPS and arranged in pairs of three types (positive-neutral, negative-neutral and neutral-neutral) as the stimulus material. A three-factor mixed design is adopted, in which picture emotion (positive, negative and neutral) and consistency (consistent and inconsistent) are manipulated within subjects and personality trait (optimistic and pessimistic) is manipulated between subjects. The results indicate that optimistic individuals are biased to attention to positive stimuli, revealing the specific source of the tendency. However, there is no significant attentional bias in pessimistic individuals.