Relationship between resilience and emotional processing tested with an attentional blink paradigm

Abstract

Resilience is the capacity to cope with stress, characterized as an activation process that protects one from psychological damage in adapting to personal and situational changes. Resilience is related to emotional processes including the attentional system and has been studied with spatial attention tasks. However, the relationship between resilience traits and temporal attention to emotional stimuli has not been studied. We investigated this relationship using an attentional blink (AB) paradigm. Observers searched two target upright faces (T1 and T2) inserted in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of inverted pictorial faces. The T1 and T2 tasks involved gender judgment and facial expressions (neutral, anger, and happy) judgment, respectively. A multivariate regression analysis showed that resilience scale score significantly predicted AB magnitude in response to negative stimuli, suggesting that resilience is related to temporary attentional bias toward negative information within a second.