Cristina Menchaca, 2007-49018

Love is blind?

Try jealousy.

Last week our group conducted our experiments which were on inattentive blindness. Inattentive blindness is a phenomenon that surrounds the idea that our visual awareness of things in the environment dependslargely on our ability to direct our attention to them. By focusing on specific things, we fail to see other things that are right in front of us. The question now is, can jealousy cause blindness?

Why jealousy? We tend to prioritize emotional stimuli to the extent that our visual awareness of nearby, non-emotional stimuli is impaired. Various studies have proven that our close relationships with others, one of the primary contexts for the experience of emotion, can affect our moods, behaviors, and health. Putting these two ideas together, the question then, which the researches sought to answer, is ‘Can fluctuations in perceived social context affect us to the extent of influencing our visual processing of the world?’

The idea for this study came from a previous study done on women, which tried to determine whether or not the presence of social support within the context of a romantic relationship decreases affective reactivity to an emotionally aversive stimulus, such as an electric shock. The study showed so, that holding a person’s hand reduces threat-related activity in the brain, with greater attenuation of the hand was of the woman’s husband. Additionally, how much the threat was attenuated depended on the husband-wife relationship: more attenuation correlated with higher self-reported marital satisfaction. Based on this study, the researchers then thought about the opposite. Could it be that a perceived threat to the relationship would induce a heightened state of sensitivity (such as anxiety or unease) given emotionally aversive cues? This would then mean that, possibly, fluctuations in security regarding one’s romantic relationship can literally affect how one sees or perceives the world.

Two studies were used. Heterosexual couples were recruited and the tests were administered to the females, who had to search for a target within a sequence of fleeting images while trying not to be distracted by a neutral or emotional picture that would appear. (Typically, there is more difficulty reporting a target when an emotional distractor appears before or right after the target that when the distractor is neutral). For the set-up with perceived relationship threat, the females performed the task while their male partners rated the attractiveness of landscapes, and then attractiveness of other romantically accessible women. Since relationship threat manipulation could be different for each of the women, they were all asked at the end of the experiment to report how uneasy they were about their partners rating other women. This was then correlated with emotion-induced blindness (the task of the women). Having the males rate landscapes also ensured a substantial ‘practice’ before relationship threat manipulation. These were also included in analyses so that the researchers could be sure that results really came from relationship threat manipulation and not from individual differences.

Results showed that the degree to which women reported their unease about their partners rating the attractiveness of other women was significantly and inversely correlated with target detection accuracy following a negative distractor, and not with accuracy following neutral distractions or trials with no distractions. In other words, this is a significant correlation with emotion-induced blindness caused by negative distractors. A good prediction for these results could be that a heightened state of anxiety could increase general distractibility, but in both experiments, self-reported unease was correlated with performance decrements induced by distractors considered emotionally negative, not neutral distractors, erotic distractors, or baseline conditions. Also, unease about having one’s romantic partner rate the attractiveness of other women correlated with emotion-induced blindness only when the partner was rating other women and not while he was rating the attractiveness of landscapes. This suggests that heightened sensitivity to emotional distractions was a function of the effectiveness of the relationship threat manipulation, not simply a function of a more general association between trait anxiety and a stronger bias to attend to emotional information.

Why was did tht in a relatively homogenous population’ (or, to eliminate as much noise as possible in ratings of general unease). How would males react if they were the ones who took the test instead? How about males in same sex relationships, or females in same sex relationships? Further research on such samples could give us not just an idea of how jealousy affects visual perception but also how similar and different results can be given a gender or sexual orientation. Perhaps age can also be considered. Would there be a difference if the attractive stimuli were older, younger? That could imply that reactions are very specific to stimuli, just like modules. How about race of the stimuli? Results on such a study could tell us about what people find attractive, or on an opposite extent, it may even give us a picture of racial discrimination, should a certain race evoke no threat to a person. Finally, another interesting thing to consider would be the other emotions, which could affect visual perception just as jealousy has been shown to have an effect. How about anger, sadness, excitement, etc.?

I should say though, that I did like a couple of things about this experiment. One was that put ideas together: the fact that we attend to more emotional things and miss out non-emotional ones, and that close relationships can effect our emotion, behavior, etc. I also liked that this study tried to see the opposite of a previous study, which looked at how social support (from a romantic partner) decreases affective response to threat. Finally, and most of all, I liked that this study made use of things such as a self-report of unease, a task for males to rate landscapes and then women, and different types of stimuli, to ensure that results were not based on noise. By using such techniques, the researchers could be sure that the results were not based on individual differences, were because of negative emotional stimuli, and that reactions were solely based on the manipulations and not from a general reaction to negative stimuli.

As many of us know, the language of social relationships is filled with visual metaphor (beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but love is blind). Isn’t it quite interesting that such phrases can actually connect to reality in a concrete way? Social emotions influence us so deeply that they can actually affect our processes in visual awareness, just as jealousy has shown. Who knows how else our visual (even other sensory) processes are affected by our moods. This isn’t just something that advertisers would love to hear and take advantage of, but it has big implications on how we react to and deal with things, and how we should see others in this light. Is love blinding? We have yet to find out, along with other emotions. For now, based on this study, we can actually say that jealousy is blinding.

Source:

Most, S., Laurenceau, J., Graber, E., Belcher, A., & Smith, C. V. (2010). Blind Jealousy? Romantic Insecurity Increases Emotion-Induced Failures of Visual Perception. Emotion, 10(2), 250-256.