The interactive effect of cognition, emotion, and motivation on behaviour

This thesis aims to understand the interactive effect of the availability of attention and salient affective distractors (emotion and motivation) on perception. Recent studies have shown that (a) attention bias to affective distractors depends on the ongoing task’s difficulty or the demand it places on our attention; and (b) attention bias to affective distractors also varies based on evaluative dimensions of the distractor, such as valence and predictability. The thesis argues that when performing attention-demanding tasks, negative valance distractors (e.g. angry and loss-related) can affect our performance negatively. However, positive valence distractors (e.g. happy and gain-related) did not detrimentally affect performance.