Do all negative images similarly retain attention? Time course of attentional disengagement from disgust- and fear-evoking stimuli.

While disgust and fear are both negative emotions, they are characterized by different physiology and action tendencies, which might in turn lead to different attentional biases. However, the potential disgusting aspect of threatening stimuli has somehow been neglected which might contribute to discrepancies in the literature. The goal of this study was to examine whether fear- and disgust-evoking images produce different attentional disengagement patterns. We pre-selected IAPS images according to their disgusting, frightening, or neutral character and presented them as central cues while participants had to identify a target letter briefly appearing around them. To investigate the time course of disengagement from those central images, we used 4 different cue-target intervals (200, 500, 800 and 1100 ms). Reaction times were significantly longer with the disgust-evoking images than with neutral- and fear-evoking images at the 200 ms interval only. This suggests that only disgust- and not fear-related images hold participants'attention for longer. This might be related to the need to perform a more comprehensive risk-assessment of disgust-evoking pictures. These results have important implications for future emotion-attention research as they indicate that a more careful selection of stimulus materials that goes beyond the dimensions of valence and arousal is needed.