Abstract/Summary

Paying attention to an emergency is a prerequisite for helping. However, previous evidence suggests that people often fail to notice emergencies. In contrast, the present study investigated whether inducing a background goal to notice the emotional state of others will enable attention allocation to others’ distress. To examine this assumption, we tested whether hearing emotional sounds (i.e. screams for help) increases attention towards emergency scenes while also manipulating the task relevance of the emotional value of the sounds. Specifically, participants performed a dot probe task that measured attention allocation towards emergency and matched neutral scenes. Emotional (i.e. screams for help) or neutral sounds were presented before the scenes. Participants had to encode either the valence of the sounds or the sound quality (a control condition) for a secondary task. Participants displayed an attentional bias to emergency scenes when the auditory stimulus was emotional but only when they encoded the emotional value of the sound. These results suggest that attention to emergencies is not a default but requires that paying attention to others’ suffering is relevant to the observer.