Commentary: Neural Control of Vascular Reactions: Impact of Emotion and Attention

Recent studies have claimed that processing of negative emotional information is modulated by the attentional demands of the task (Pessoa et al., 2002; Okon-Singer et al., 2007; Gupta and Srinivasan, 2015; Gupta et al., 2016). For example, Okon-Singer et al. (2007) manipulated low and high perceptual load of the primary letter-search task and used negative and neutral pictures as distractors. They found that negatively valenced distractors (compared to neutral) capture attention only in the low-load condition however, not in the high-load condition. These results fit with the perceptual load theory of attention for distractor processing (Lavie, 1995). According to Lavie, processing of distractors is only prevented if the perceptual load of the primary task is sufficiently high to exhaust available attentional capacity.