ATTENTION, EXPOSURE DURATION, AND EMOTIONS: INCREASED PLEASURE AND HABITUATION

Abstract

A more pleasant stimulus is more likely to attract increased attention and, in the consumer behavior framework, to be chosen. But its intrinsic characteristics left alone, would more exposure duration and attention make a visual image more pleasant? Whether we are talking about a product image on a website, a video clip, or packaging, marketing practitioners from branding agencies to designers try to produce the most pleasing offerings for their target audience, and they are right to do so. More often than not, however, competitors would quickly cause most stimuli in a given category to become of average intensity and value, and radical changes cannot be done too frequently. The present study examined the extent to which the duration of exposure and attention to stimuli (images from the Open Affective Standardized Image Set) of slightly above and below average valence modulate the emotions these stimuli generate. Exposure duration varied between four and eight seconds, and electroencephalography (EEG)-based metrics values were used for attention, valence, and intensity; for the last two, self-answers were also used. For images of above the average starting valence, attention was highly correlated with intensity and valence, whether measured or self-reported, and so was the exposure duration. For negative intrinsic valence images, increasing duration increased self-reported valence and decreased self-reported intensity, while attention positively correlated with both intensity and valence, measured and self-reported. Even if some correlation coefficients failed significance tests, the results suggest that simply increasing the duration of exposure and the attention given to a stimulus can improve the emotions it elicits.