Emotionally-arousing stimuli modulate visual search in real-life scenes irrespective of stress manipulation

Previous literature suggests that acute stress may alter attention control by reducing top-down filtering with a consequent enhancement of bottom-up capture. Although emotional stimuli are thought to capture attention automatically in a bottom-up fashion, the impact of stress on attentional selection involving emotionally arousing stimuli is still largely unexplored. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether/how stress modulates top-down vs. bottom-up attention mechanisms. We used a visual search task employing real-life scenes (which include a high level of competition among objects), in which emotional elements (positive or negative) were either task-relevant or task-irrelevant (i.e., they were or they were not the current target to be searched for). We elicited stress through a “frustrating competition” procedure, in which participants repeatedly lose (“stress” group), or repeatedly win (“no-stress” group) at the visual search task against a fictitious player (i.e., faster search of the current target). We found that the stress manipulation affected the general strategy used to perform the visual search task, with stressed participants searching faster but less accurately for the target, irrespective of whether the target was emotional or neutral. This is in line with the idea that stress produces more automatic and less controlled responses. However, the stress manipulation did not elicit any differences in the pattern of emotional search: Irrespective of stress condition, participants were faster and more accurate in detecting task-relevant emotional objects than other neutral elements in the scene. Overall, these findings suggest that bottom-up attentional capture driven by emotional stimuli is resistant to stress manipulation.