The interplay between attention and long‐term memory in affective habituation

Abstract

Previous studies have consistently shown that repeated exposure to emotional stimuli leads to a reduction in cortical and autonomic responses (affective habituation). These findings emerge from studies conducted within a single experimental session, preventing the possibility of disentangling short‐term from long‐term habituation effects. The present study investigated whether affective habituation reflects a short‐living learning process, or a more stable change involving long‐term memory. Participants went through a first habituation phase consisting of 80 repetitions of the same set of emotional and neutral pictures, when event‐related potentials and oscillatory activity were measured (Session 1). Crucially, after a 1‐day interval, the same participants were exposed to a second habituation phase with the same stimuli that had been seen before. Results showed that the attenuation of the late positive potential (LPP) affective modulation prompted throughout repetitions of Session 1 remained unchanged after a 1‐day interval, and this between‐session habituation effect, which was specific to repeated exemplars, was consistent across different emotional contents. Alpha desynchronization was clearly enhanced for pictures of erotica and mutilation and this modulatory pattern remained fairly stable over repetitions. Altogether, these findings suggest that LPP affective habituation is not a short‐living learning process, but, rather, reflects a strengthened long‐term memory representation of specific repeated stimuli.

Re-Living Suspense: Emotional and Cognitive Responses During Repeated Exposure to Suspenseful Film

“…These two measures represent the degree of suspense experienced; therefore, the findings support the hypothesis that the viewers' suspense diminished upon repeated viewing. The outcome is in line with the results of Brewer's (1996) experiment, which examined suspense text rereading, studies on affective habituation (Codispoti et al, 2006(Codispoti et al, , 2016Ferrari et al, 2020), and research on desensitization by Fanti et al (2009). This implies that the primary effect of repeated exposure to suspenseful stimuli is the decrease of suspense and arousal.…”

“…Therefore, suspense accompanying threat toward the protagonist attracts the audience's attention. Consequently, as the degree of suspense decreases upon repeated exposure, attention can also decrease as was shown in previous studies regarding diminished attention for repeated exposure to emotional stimuli (Codispoti et al, 2016;Ferrari et al, 2020). When attention to the stimulus decreases, cognitive resources allocated primarily to encoding decrease, which can be observed by the increase in HR (Bolls et al, 2001;Lang et al, 2005b).…”

“…A study that explored the effect of repeated exposure to violent media experiences showed that the psychological impact lessened upon repeated experience due to a desensitization effect (Fanti et al, 2009). Moreover, it was shown that repeated exposure to emotional pictures results with affective habituation (Codispoti et al, 2006(Codispoti et al, , 2016Ferrari et al, 2020). In particular, SC and HR habituated rapidly with repetitive presentations of emotional pictures (Codispoti et al, 2006).…”

Case‐by‐case: Emotional stimulus significance and the modulation of the EPN and LPP

“…Stimulus categories included stimuli from the International Affective Picture System (e.g., Schupp et al., 2004), emotional facial expressions (Schindler & Bublatzky, 2020), emotional words (Schindler & Kissler, 2016), symbolic gestures (Flaisch et al., 2011), clashing moral statements (Van Berkum et al., 2009), cues predicting painful stimulation to the partner (Wu et al., 2017), and personal trait feedback provided either by a human sender or computer (Schindler et al., 2015). Furthermore, the phenomenon has been observed for varying exposure times (Cuthbert et al., 2000; Junghöfer et al., 2001; Peyk et al., 2009; Schupp, Flaisch, et al., 2006) and shown to be stable across stimulus repetition (Codispoti et al., 2007; Ferrari et al., 2020; Schupp, Stockburger, et al., 2006). These findings support the notion that the EPN and LPP may serve as a neural indicator of the processing of emotionally arousing stimuli.…”

Time will tell: Object categorization and emotional engagement during processing of degraded natural scenes

“…Previous studies have systematically examined the impact of natural scene perception on the engagement of cortico‐limbic appetitive and defensive systems (hereafter referred to as emotional engagement; Bradley et al., 2001; Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2007; Ferrari et al., 2020; Sabatinelli et al., 2013; Schupp et al., 2004). Emotional scenes elicit a broad range of autonomic, cortical, behavioral, and subjective changes that reflect the engagement of motivational systems (Lang & Bradley, 2010).…”