159 Studia Psychologica, Vol. 61, No. 3, 2019, 159-174 doi: 10.21909/sp.2019.03.780 Interference of Emotional Information in Briefly Presented Scene Arrays Michaela Porubanova, Ryan Priefer Department of Psychology State University of New York- Farmingdale State College Farmingdale, NY, USA Research has shown that the presentation of emotional information interferes with the pro- cessing of neutral information. The present study examined whether one can suppress this interference when being asked to ignore an emotional scene before attention is engaged with a target or if emotional information always engages attention, resulting in attentional capture. We examined participants’ ability to actively inhibit emotional scenes of different valence and arousal when identifying neutral scenes. In three experiments, a 4-scene array was presented for 250 ms while one emotional scene was present in the display. The scene was either to be ignored or freely available in the array. The results show that the interference from emotional scenes is a pervasive phenomenon, suggesting an involuntary attentional capture by emotional scenes. Moreover, despite the vast literature on the evolutionary advantage of preferential processing of negative information, we show a potent attentional bias toward positive information. Key words: attentional bias, directed inhibition, emotional interference, Sperling paradigm, visual attention Introduction There is a preponderance of evidence sup- porting the notion that emotional information is selected automatically without the need for attention (Anderson, Christoff, Panitz, Rosa, & Gabrieli, 2003; Bradley, Keil, & Lang, 2012; Oca, Villa, Cervantes, & Welbourne, 2012; Pessoa, Padmala, & Morland, 2005; Schupp, Junghöfer, Weike, & Hamm, 2003) and that attention is pref- erentially allocated to emotional events even when those stimuli are not consciously per- ceived (Anticevic, Barch, & Repovs, 2010; Calvo, Nummenmaa, & Hyönä, 2008; Dolcos & McCarthy, 2006; Kalanthroff, Cohen, & Henik, 2013; Padmala, Bauer, & Pessoa, 2011). For ex- ample, an emotional event is more likely to per- meate consciousness as documented through paradigms such as inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998; New & German, 2014; Wiemer, Gerdes, & Pauli, 2013), attentional blink (Choisdealbha, Piech, Fuller, & Zald, 2017; Most, Chun, Widders, & Zald, 2005; Oca et al., 2012), or continuous flash suppression (Yang, Zald, & Blake, 2007), demonstrating a privileged status of emotional information in visual atten- tion. The facilitation and preferential processing of emotional information at the expense of neu- tral information is well documented through in- terference of emotional information when pro- cessing other neutral information (Keil & Ihssen, 2004; New & German, 2015; Yiend et al., 2008; Yiend, 2010). In other words, attention is effectively captured by a distracting, task-irrel- Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Michaela Porubanova, Department of Psychology, Knapp Hall 57, State University of New York - Farmingdale State College, 11735, Farmingdale, New York, USA. E-mail: michaela.porubanova@farmingdale.edu Received January 4, 2019