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Media Multitaskers and Attentional Bias Toward Emotional Stimuli

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Abstract

Individuals with high propensity toward media multitasking have been found to be vulnerable toward attention problems and mind wandering behavior. Their “breadth-biased” behavior style inclines them to pay attention to a large set of stimuli. As a result, they become susceptible to interferences. However in the environment, the nature of stimuli can be emotional—positive, negative, or neutral. In the realistic scenario, one may ask whether the media multitaskers follow the breadth-biased focused style or are they biased toward any one of the positive, negative, or neutral stimuli on the basis of their recurrent thoughts. The present study attempts to explore the nature of attentional bias among the high- and low media multitaskers (HMM and LMM) through the “facial dot probe task” paradigm.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Human Factors and Applied Cognition Lab at Indian Institute of Technology Indore for all the technical and experimental support during the execution of this project and acknowledge UGC, Government of India for support.

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Correspondence to Shanu Shukla .

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Shukla, S. (2016). Media Multitaskers and Attentional Bias Toward Emotional Stimuli. In: Leung, MT., Tan, L. (eds) Applied Psychology Readings. SCAP 2016. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2796-3_3

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