Features of processing emotional information (anti-saccade study)
The study aims at studying investigating the relationship between emotion, perception, and an observer's emotional traits using the anti-saccade task. The anti-saccade task is one of the methods for studying attention in clinical psychology. A peripheral stimulus is presented to the subject, who is instructed to either look at the stimulus as fast as they can (pro-saccacade) or to look in opposite direction (anti-saccade). The anti-saccade task is used mainly to study the voluntary control. The subject is required to inhibit the automatic reaction to look at the stimulus (pro-saccade) and afterwards make an effort to look away from the target stimulus (anti-saccade). In some studies, people with anxiety are shifting their attention to a "potential threat" and experience difficulty with positive stimuli. Anxiety is associated with the deficient attentional processing of positive information. The personal traits of the observer and their perception of emotions could be congruent. That means that a person has a tendency to attribute those traits to the emotional state of other people, which correspond to their emotional state. Our study is aimed at researching mood congruence and mood incongruence of the emotional facial expressions perception. We used the anti-saccade task paradigm in which the participants were asked to pro-saccade towards or anti-saccade away from happy, sad, angry, fearful, and neutral faces. The ANOVA showed no significant effect of the type of emotion factor. Our results demonstrated that participants with salient scores sadness, fear, and anger, that is negative emotions, showed the decrease of the maximum speed of pro-saccades for positive emotion stimuli. Furthermore, we observed a positive correlation between anger scale score and the score of latent period of anti-saccade for anger related stimuli. That is during the presentation of anger related stimuli subjects with manifested emotion of fear had harder time shifting the gaze from stimuli related to a complementary emotion.