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. 2025 Jul;87(5):1544-1560.
doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03085-8. Epub 2025 May 23.

Expectations don't protect us from emotional distractions

André Botes  1   2 , Imogen A Moore  1   2 , Gina M Grimshaw  3   4
Affiliations

Expectations don't protect us from emotional distractions

André Botes et al. Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Jul.

Abstract

We often attend to irrelevant information to the detriment of our goals. Emotional stimuli, in particular, capture attention effectively. Usually, this capture is adaptive - alerting us to possible threats or rewards - but can be costly when attention is required elsewhere. Previous studies show that we are less distracted by emotional stimuli when they appear frequently, consistent with the claim that expectation of upcoming conflict encourages the use of effective proactive attentional control. An alternative explanation, however, is that better attentional control arises through greater experience with frequent distractors. To distinguish between these alternatives, we conducted three experiments that tested the effects of expectation on attentional control of emotional distractors while holding experience constant. Participants performed a simple letter identification task while emotionally neutral or negative task-irrelevant images also appeared on 25% of trials, either predictably (on every fourth trial) or unpredictably. As expected, emotional images were more distracting than neutral ones. However, predictability of upcoming emotional distractors did not improve participants' ability to ignore them; indeed, it sometimes made distraction significantly worse. Similar findings were observed even when participants received incentives to use the sequential presentation of distractors to improve performance. Our findings imply that simply expecting distraction to occur does not help to prevent it.

Keywords: Attention; Distraction; Dual mechanisms of control; Emotion; Emotional distraction; Proactive control; Reactive control.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval Ethics approval: All experiments received approval from the Human Ethics Committee of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Sparing the lack of preregistration for Experiment 1, the experiments reported here were performed in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration. Consent to participate: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in all studies. Consent for publication: Participants provided informed consent for publication of their data. Open practices statement: Aggregate data and materials for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/kjgr9/ . The hypotheses and analyses of Experiment 2 were preregistered ( https://osf.io/s8jtr ) as were those of Experiment 3 ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/AJEMH ). Conflicts of interest/competing interests: The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial conflicts of interest to disclose.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Trial structure of Experiment 1. (A) An example of a neutral distractor-present trial. (B) Examples of the target display for a distractor-absent trial (left) and a neutral distractor-present trial (right). Representative image sourced from https://www.pexels.com/@av-photography/ as IAPS images cannot be reproduced for this figure
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Experiment 1 mean distraction indices. Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean corrected for within-subjects comparisons (Morey, 2008). * p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Trial structure of Experiment 2. (A) An example of a neutral distractor-present trial. (B) Examples of the task array for a scrambled-distractor trial (left) and a neutral intact-distractor trial (right). Representative image sourced from https://www.pexels.com/@av-photography/as IAPS images cannot be reproduced for this figure
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Experiment 2 mean distraction indices. Error bars indicate the standard error corrected for within-subjects comparisons (Morey, 2008). * p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Trial structure of Experiment 3. (A) Progression of a trial in the baseline and unrewarded trials. (B) Progression of a rewarded trial. Representative image sourced from https://www.pexels.com/@av-photography/as IAPS images cannot be reproduced for this figure
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Experiment 3 mean distraction indices. Error bars indicate the standard error corrected for within-subjects comparisons (Morey, 2008)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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