Emotion, personality, and selective attention.

Interest in the relationship between cognition and behavior has prompted personality researchers and clinicians to incorporate models of information processing in their own theories. Recently, prominent cognitive psychologists have also advocated broadening the focus of human information processing research to include emotional, motivational, cultural, and situational factors that mediate cognition. Selective attention phenomena may be particularly sensitive to these human factors, providing a potential bridge between the findings and theories of human information processing research and the interests of many personality researchers and clinical psychologists. In this study the effect of presenting emotionally salient information when attention is focused away from the information was examined. This was accomplished by embedding emotionally salient material in the ignored channel of a dichotic listening task. The mediating effects of several personality states and traits on performance in the task were also examined. The emotional quality of the information presented in the ignored channel—outside awareness—exerted an influence on processing of information in the attended channel—within awareness. In particular, sexually explicit information presented in the ignored channel was found to enter or intrude upon awareness, whereas other kinds of information did not. State anxiety scores were predictive of these intrusions from outside awareness. Other personality measures were predictive of processing only when intrusions did not occur or when the information was presented to awareness. These findings indicate that shadowing and other selective attention techniques may be very useful for clarifying the relationship among personality, emotionality, cognition, and awareness.