By India McCarty
A new study has found that negative images can affect you long after you’ve seen them, impacting everything from your mental health to your attention span.
“This is the first study to show that when people are sustaining attention, distractions that are upsetting or unpleasant are most likely to disrupt that focus. These kinds of emotionally negative distractions also make us feel worse, and we are more likely to remember them later,” study author and co-director of the Boston Attention and Learning Lab Michael Esterman explained to PsyPost.
In the study, researchers showed test subjects upsetting images, like injured animals or people in distress, while completing tasks. They were told to ignore the images but were later quizzed on them.
Researchers found that those negative images negatively impacted people’s attention more than positive or neutral ones. An example of the visual test with the positive images appears below.
“Sustained attention, the ability to maintain focus on a specific task for an extended period without significant lapses in concentration, is a foundational cognitive process that underlies many other cognitive functions, impacts daily functioning and is commonly impaired across a range of clinical populations,” Esterman explained.
He continued, “While upsetting thoughts and experiences can disrupt one’s ability to focus attention while performing everyday tasks, translating this phenomenon to the laboratory has remained elusive. We were inspired to design a paradigm that could capture this experience in the lab so we could better study it.”
In a statement about the study, Easterman shared his hopes for what the findings might mean for other scientists.
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“We believe this study will help scientists measure how distractible a person is, what is most distracting to them, and whether those distractions intrude in their memories,” he said. “We also believe it can open new opportunities to study attention in clinical populations and their neural mechanism alongside brain imaging, both of which are directions we are currently pursuing.”
Easterman and his team’s findings match up with other information related to the effect of troubling images on the brain.
“Visual input feels more real and immediate to the brain than a written or verbalized description of a scene or event. As a result, the central nervous system tends to respond to disturbing images as it might respond to a true-life threat,” an article from Alive To Thrive initiative explained.
The article continued, “When confronted with real danger, our brains slip into the fight, flight, or freeze mode. The limbic system, which works much faster than the analytical prefrontal cortex portion of our brain, kicks into gear. Rational thought recedes into the background. Everything becomes part of a mindless reactive pattern. Something similar happens when our brains are exposed to a disturbing or shocking visual image.”
This new study reinforces the idea that we should all be more conscious of what we look at online, as it can affect us long after we first see the image.
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