Emotions, Perceptions and Attention
A person's emotional state-whether he is angry, happy, sad, or excited-has a lot to do with his perception. A strong emotion, such as fear, can make a person perceive danger on all sides. People have been known to shoot bushes, trees, and, fense posts when they anticipated danger. Such common expressions as "blind rage," "love is blind," and "paralyzing fear" dl'scrJbe the influence which emotion may have on a person's perception of a Iiituation and his reaction to it.
Influence Without Awareness
In a study on emotion and perception, children at a summer camp judged the characteristics of faces in photographs before and after playing a "scary" game of "murder." The amount of maliciousness or evil seen by the C'hildren in the faces was much greater after the game than before. The emotional state aroused by the game caused the youngsters to perceive the faces differently than before.
Emotional states may even operate at a level so primitive that they influence perception before the individual is aware of the stimulus. This is indicated by an experiment in which subjects studied a list of nonsense syllables. Certain of these syllables were always accompanied by an electric shock on the subject's hand. Shock normally induces an electrical skin response which can be accurately recorded. After a number of pairings of syllable and shock it was possible to omit the shock and get the electrical skin response by presenting only the syllable. Now the experimenter presented the syllables in an exposure device for extremely short periods of time. The subjects gave the electrical sldn response before they recognized the syllable. For syllables that were not accompanied originally by shock, the effect was not nearly so pronounced. It would seem that the shock syllables came to be threatening syllables, and their general fearful character was perceived before the detailed makeup of the syllables themselves.
ATTENTION
At this point in your reading about perception, it should be clear that in getting to know the world one selects or filters out stimuli from the sense organs and organizes them in a meaningful way. We use certain stimuli and reject others or else relegate them to minor roles. The fact that the perceiver picks out certain kinds of stimuli is another way of saying that he attends to only a few at n time. When you pay attention, you focus your attention on something. What, now, are the conditions which cause us to focus on what is going on in the outside world? Y should have some ready answers. One's past experience, sets, need, and emotions play important roles. And so does the way the world is organjzed in tenns of figure and ground, similarity, nearness, other principles of organization. But certain additional caus attention warrant specific mention, especially in view of their use in applied psychology.
Factors In Attention
The changing quality of a stimulating situation makes us focus on it. Change attracts attention: change from one color to another; chang from present to absent; change from one intensity to another; chan from moving to stationary; change from big to small. Your cat igno the stationary ball of yarn but pounces on it when it moves. Yo scarcely notice the traffic noises on a busy street, but if the volume o. traffic decreases, the "quiet" attracts your attention.
Repetitiveness is another determinant of attention. "Help, help, help!" will attract attention when a single "Help!" would pas noticed. Repeated taps on the shoulder attract attention more su than a single signal. A weak stimulus frequently repeated may more effective than a strong one presented only once. But ther limits to the effectiveness of repetition. If a stimulus is repeated times, it ceases to hold attention, because of its monotony, or yiel some other stimulus that has the advantage of novelty and change.
Intensity, of course, is a powerful determiner of attentlon. When we are not focusing on anything in particular, we are likely t notice the loudest noise, a bright flash over a faint twinkle, the most pungent perfume. With visible objects, size has the same effect intensity. Small details are less likely to catch the attention than large objects.
Some stimuli are more potent than others in attracting attention because of their novelty or unusual quality. Recall how attent demanding is a dog who runs onto the football field during a game. A new suit or hat, the smell of smoke where usually there is none-all these are examples of attention arrest by unusual or novel stimuli.
Difference of contrast, somewhat like change, contributes t the focusing of perception. Anything that is different from its gen surroundings stands out and catches the eye: a hole in the carpet, smudge on a smooth wall, a dark spot in a bright landscape, a small pebble inside one's shoe.
Social suggestions may cause people to attend to a particul stimulus. You probably know the old stunt in which several studentf. gazing intently at an ordinary notice on a bulletin board soon attr crowd. And perhaps you have tried the prank of looking intently at the sky, moving your head slowly in a wide arc, and having other people do the same thing even w!len there is nothing of interest to see. People pond to social suggestions by paying close attention to something hich other persons are apparently observing.
