Is that true? Does being optimistic or pessimistic influence which parts of our environment we pay attention to? To answer this question, we focus on the interplay between two important cognitive phenomena displayed by humans: optimism bias and positive attention bias. His famous saying implies that we do not notice the good things around us with a pessimistic attitude. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭharlie Chaplin once said that “you’ll never see a rainbow, if you’re looking down”. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data can be found in the Supporting Information files ( S1 Data file) of the paper.įunding: This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation ( ) grant PP00P1_150492 awarded to T. Received: JAccepted: FebruPublished: February 21, 2018Ĭopyright: © 2018 Kress et al. PLoS ONE 13(2):Įditor: Jan de Fockert, Goldsmiths University of London, UNITED KINGDOM Our findings elucidate the cognitive mechanisms underlying optimism and attention bias, which can yield a better understanding of their benefits for mental health.Ĭitation: Kress L, Bristle M, Aue T (2018) Seeing through rose-colored glasses: How optimistic expectancies guide visual attention. Thus, the current data can help clarify why optimistic expectancies are difficult to overcome. As revealed in our studies, selective attention to rewarding versus punishing evidence when people are optimistic might explain this updating asymmetry. A key characteristic of optimism bias is that people selectively update expectancies in an optimistic direction, not in a pessimistic direction, when receiving feedback. However, the effect of optimistic (rather than pessimistic) expectancies on attention deployment was stronger. Additionally, in Experiment 2, participants’ attention was guided toward punishment compared with reward when pessimistic expectancies were induced. In both experiments, participants’ attention was guided toward reward compared with punishment when optimistic expectancies were induced. In a subsequent visual search task, we examined participants’ attention to positive (i.e., rewarding) and negative (i.e., punishing) target stimuli, measuring their eye gaze behavior and reaction times. To test this causal relation, we conducted two experiments in which we manipulated optimistic and pessimistic expectancies regarding future rewards and punishments. In the current project, we hypothesized that optimistic expectancies can exert causal influences on attention deployment. Investigating the causal relationships between these biases can improve the understanding of their underlying cognitive mechanisms, leading to new directions in neurocognitive research and revealing important information about normal functioning as well as the development, maintenance, and treatment of psychological diseases. Optimism bias and positive attention bias have important highly similar implications for mental health but have only been examined in isolation.
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