Blind Jealousy? Romantic Insecurity Increases Emotion-Induced Failures of Visual Perception Steven B. Most, Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, Elana Graber, Amber Belcher, and C. Veronica Smith University of Delaware Does the influence of close relationships pervade so deeply as to impact visual awareness? Results from two experiments involving heterosexual romantic couples suggest that they do. Female partners from each couple performed a rapid detection task where negative emotional distractors typically disrupt visual awareness of subsequent targets; at the same time, their male partners rated attractiveness first of landscapes, then of photos of other women. At the end of both experiments, the degree to which female partners indicated uneasiness about their male partner looking at and rating other women correlated significantly with the degree to which negative emotional distractors had disrupted their target perception during that time. This relationship was robust even when controlling for individual differences in baseline performance. Thus, emotions elicited by social contexts appear to wield power even at the level of perceptual processing. Keywords: emotion-induced blindness, attention, close relationships, threat sensitivity, visual awareness “It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.” —Lawrence Durrell, Justine, 1957 It is widely recognized that social relationships impact our moods, behaviors, and health (Reis, Collins, & Berscheid, 2000), and insights into their power to do so are as much the domain of poets and philosophers as they are of psychological scientists. However, some have argued that psychological science has yet to consider fully the boundaries at which close relationship contexts can influence basic cognitive and perceptual processes (Reis & Collins, 2004). Can fluctuations in perceived social context affect us so deeply as to influence even our visual processing of the world? This question is not far-fetched: visual awareness of items in the environment depends largely on our ability to direct attention to them (Chun & Marois, 2002; Mack & Rock, 1998; Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005; Most et al., 2001; Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Simons & Chabris, 1999), and we tend to prioritize emo- tional stimuli to such a degree that doing so can impair visual awareness of nearby nonemotional information (Most & Junge ´, 2008; Most et al., 2007; Most, Chun, Widders, & Zald, 2005). The degree to which emotionally significant items capture attention seems to be modulated by one’s mood and temperament (e.g., Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001), and thus, to the degree that social contexts influence one’s affective state, it is conceivable that they impact the processes involved in visual awareness as well. Close relationships are one of the primary contexts for the experience of emotion (Berscheid, 1983) and recent evidence from the neuroimaging literature suggests that social context modulates activity within neural regions typically responsive to threat. For example, while in a functional MRI scanner, married women viewed cues that either were or were not indicative of potentially imminent electric shock, and while viewing these cues they either held the hand of their husband, the hand of a male stranger, or no hand at all (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). Not surprisingly, brain regions associated with response to threat showed enhanced activation following cues predicting a shock, but—importantly— threat-related activity in such regions was diminished when the participant held her husband’s or a stranger’s hand. Moreover, holding one’s husband’s hand was associated with greater attenu- ation of threat-related brain activation than holding a stranger’s hand, and the degree to which holding one’s husband’s hand attenuated such activation was correlated with self-reported mar- ital satisfaction. If the presence of social support within the context of a romantic relationship aids in the down-regulation of affective reactivity to emotionally aversive stimuli, it could be that a perceived threat to the relationship would have the opposite effect, inducing—perhaps by increasing anxiety or unease—a heightened state of sensitivity to emotionally aversive cues. If so, given that reflexive attention to emotional stimuli can temporarily impair conscious perception (Most et al., 2005), it would raise the intriguing possibility that fluctuations in security regarding one’s romantic relationship can literally affect how one sees the world. We investigated this possibility in two studies. We recruited heterosexual romantic couples and administered a rapid attention task to the female partner, in which she searched for a single target within a sequence of fleeting images, all the while trying not to be Steven B. Most, Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, Elana Graber, Amber Belcher, and C. Veronica Smith, Department of Psychology, University of Delaware. Preparation of this article was facilitated by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to J-P Laurenceau (K01MH64779). Thanks to Matt Shaffer, Patrick Ewell, Ben Hadden, Elizabeth Sullo, and Lauren Pulinka for their help in running participants. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Steven B. Most or Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, 108 Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19716-2577. E-mail: most@psych.udel.edu or jlaurenceau@psych.udel.edu Emotion © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 10, No. 2, 250 –256 1528-3542/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0019007 250