Author(s)

Jing Li, Jie Liu, Conghui Liu

Corresponding Author

Conghui Liu

ABSTRACT

P According to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions (such as happy) can broaden an individual’s thought-action repertoires, whereas negative emotion can narrow an individual’s thought-action repertoires. Previous studies have demonstrated that happiness expands individual’s scope of attention. Pride which is concerned with individuals’ achievement is also a kind of positive emotions. However, the effect of pride on the scope of attention has not been investigated yet. The current study investigated the influence of pride and happiness on the range of attention. We carried out 3 experiments using different emotion-inducing methods and global-local tasks to examine the influence of pride on the scope of attention. In experiment 1, we used the methods of imaginary situation which requires participants to write down their own experience of pride and happiness to induce emotions. Seventy and five undergraduate students were randomly assigned to pride, happy, or neutral conditions. The global-local task were used to assess the scope of attention. In experiment 2, the purpose was to examine the different effect between pride and happiness on the scope of attention. We adopted video clips to elicit pride and happiness. Seventy and eight undergraduate students were randomly assigned to pride, happy, or neutral conditions. We use the global-local task, which is the same as the task in experiment 1. In experiment 3, we used emotional pictures to elicit emotions. We added a shame condition which is lacked in experiment 1 and 2. Thirty-five university students completed the Navon letter task which requires participants to indicate whether the stimulus was H or L.

KEYWORDS

Pride; positive emotion; scope of attention