乐观者积极而务实? 基于情绪和中性词分心抑制的证据

Are Optimists Positive and Pragmatic? The Evidence from Distractor Inhibition on Emotional and Neutral Words

本研究采用负启动范式,考察乐观、中性和悲观个体对情绪词和中性词的分心抑制。实验1以情绪词为材料,结果发现,当启动分心词为负性时,乐观组出现负启动;启动词为正性时悲观组出现负启动;无论正或负性启动词,中性组均出现负启动。实验2以中性词为材料,结果发现仅悲观组和中性组出现负启动。说明乐观个体对正性和中性信息不实施分心抑制,这可能与注意在这些刺激上的维持及乐观者拥有积极的认知图式有关。本研究为乐观者积极而务实的说法提供了一定依据。

Dispositional optimism refers to the personality that has a total positive expectation for the future. Previous studies have shown that optimists were more positive in their lives, could focus on the problem itself, and strove to seek the solutions to questions that resulted in the higher achievement and healthier state. Therefore, some researchers began to explore the cognitive mechanisms under the positive behaviors of optimists. The emotional words were used previously as distractors to examine whether optimists could effectively suppress them in order to explore the attentional characteristics of optimists. However, previous studies had the following three shortcomings. Firstly, they used the Stroop paradigm, in which obvious interference was missing between the word’s color and its meaning. Secondly, previous studies did not answer whether optimists could suppress the neutral information. Finally, the past studies investigated the distractor suppression of emotional information by the dichotomy of optimistic and pessimistic which could not provide the dynamic changes of inhibition on the different optimism levels. Because of the complexity on groups and conditions, the present study examines the distractor inhibition of optimistic, neutral, and pessimistic subjects through two experiments. Positive and negative emotional words are used in Experiment 1, while the neutral(living and non-living) words are in Experiment 2. In first, we filter out 54 optimistic, neutral and pessimistic participants respectively by the Life Orientation Test-Revised which is randomly divided into two groups to participate in our Experiment 1(24 people per group) and Experiment 2(30 people per group) respectively. Participants are asked to respond to the prime and probe target for the positive or negative judgment in Experiment 1 and for a living and non-living judgment in Experiment 2. The target in the prime and probe display is red, and the distractor is green which is located directly above or below the fixation point randomly. Experiment 1 is designed using a 2×2×3 three-factor mixed design. The within-subjects variables are the valence of emotional word for probe target(positive, negative) and the prime condition(consistent valence, inconsistent valence);the between-subjects variable is group(optimistic, neutral, pessimistic). Experiment 2 is a 2×3 two-factor mixed design. The within-subjects variable is the prime condition(consistent category, inconsistent category);the between-subjects variable is group(optimistic, neutral, pessimistic).The result of Experiment 1 is that the optimistic group has a significant negative effect when the prime distractor is a negative emotion word, the pessimistic group has a significant negative effect when that is positive, and the significant negative effects are observed in the neutral group whether the prime distractor is positive or negative. In Experiment 2, the pessimistic and the neutral group show significantly negative effects.The present study demonstrates that optimists do not implement distractor inhibition on the positive and neutral information. It may be related to the maintenance of attention on these stimuli and the positively cognitive patterns of optimists. This study provides some evidences for the positive and pragmatic behavior of optimistic individuals.