Attentional biases towards negative information are implicated in various emotional disorders. The literature probing this relationship relies on assumptions that the tasks used to measure attentional biases are sensitive to the negative emotional qualities of stimuli, but are such assumptions justified? We assessed the degree to which two widely used tasks – the dot probe and emotion-induced blindness – displayed sensitivity to gradations in valence and arousal ratings for negative emotional pictures. For emotion-induced blindness (the failure to see a target the follows an emotional distractor in a rapidly presented sequence of items), there was strong evidence of sensitivity to gradations in both valence and arousal. For the dot probe (a spatial attention task where latency to respond to a target depends on whether it appears at or away from the location of an emotional stimulus), there was moderate evidence of sensitivity to emotional vs. neutral stimuli, but there was also moderate to strong evidence that the task was insensitive to gradations in valence and arousal. That said, in the dot probe, response latency regardless of spatial relationship between the target and the emotional image appeared sensitive to gradations in stimulus emotionality; suggesting that such sensitivity may be characteristic of non-spatial, rather than spatial, aspects of attention. Implications for attentional bias studies are discussed. Notably, the finding that emotion-induced blindness was sensitive to gradations in ratings of emotional pictures supports claims that the effect arises due to stimulus emotionality rather than simply differences in visual features of pictures (e.g., color, brightness, complexity).
