Emotionally disturbing images can significantly impair people’s ability to stay focused, according to a new study published in Behavior Research Methods. Using a newly developed task, researchers found that negative emotional distractions — such as images of distressed people or threatening animals — disrupted participants’ sustained attention more than neutral or positive visuals. These negative images also led to more negative feelings and were more likely to be remembered afterward.
Sustained attention is a basic mental function that allows people to maintain focus over time. It’s central to everyday activities such as reading, driving, or working and is often impaired in conditions like depression, anxiety, and attention disorders.
While past research has explored how internal factors like motivation or fatigue can interrupt sustained attention, far less is known about how external distractions — especially emotional ones — influence this process. Emotional stimuli, especially negative ones, tend to capture our attention more easily. Yet, researchers lacked a reliable way to test how these emotional distractions affect the ability to concentrate over extended periods.
“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,” said study author Michael Esterman, principal investigator at the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System, co-director of the Boston Attention and Learning Lab, and associate professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.
“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.”
The researchers developed a new version of a well-established attention task called the gradual-onset continuous performance task (gradCPT). This version, dubbed the “emogradCPT,” involved a neutral digit-based attention task overlaid on emotional images. The goal was to see how the emotional content of these background images affected people’s ability to focus.
Participants in the first experiment included 64 individuals who were asked to perform a 9.6-minute task where they had to respond to a stream of digits, pressing a button for every number except the digit “3.” These digits were presented one after the other with gradual visual transitions. Behind the digits, task-irrelevant background images were continuously displayed. These images were categorized as negative, positive, or neutral. Importantly, the images were not related to the task and were not supposed to be attended to, but they remained visible throughout the task duration.
To validate their emotional effect, the researchers ensured that the images significantly differed in how negative or arousing participants perceived them to be. Negative images included scenes such as injured animals or distressed people, while positive images showed smiling babies or cute pets. Neutral images were devoid of emotional content, such as landscapes or everyday objects.
In addition to tracking accuracy and reaction time, the researchers incorporated self-report thought probes that asked participants about their focus and emotional state after each block of images. Later, participants completed a surprise memory test to assess how well they remembered the images, even though they were told during the task to ignore them.
The researchers found that negative background images impaired attention more than positive or neutral ones. Participants made more errors and had slower reaction times during blocks with negative images. They also reported feeling worse and being more distracted in those blocks. For instance, average accuracy during negative image blocks was significantly lower than during positive or neutral blocks, and reaction times were slower by around 20 to 30 milliseconds.
These effects weren’t just fleeting impressions. Participants were more likely to remember negative images in the surprise recognition test conducted 30 minutes after the task, even though the images were never directly relevant to their goal. The fact that these images left a stronger memory trace suggests they captured attention more effectively, interfering with the primary task.
“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,” Esterman told PsyPost. “These kinds of emotionally negative distractions also make us feel worse, and we are more likely to remember them later,”
The researchers also found that people’s subjective experience matched their performance. When participants reported being more distracted or feeling worse, they also performed worse on the task. These associations held across multiple blocks of the task, providing further validation for the emogradCPT as a tool to measure the impact of emotional distraction.
“I was genuinely surprised that the more upsetting distractors were more likely to be remembered, even when we told participants to actively try to ignore the distractors,” Esterman said.
To further confirm the reliability of the findings, a second experiment was conducted with 50 new participants. This time, the researchers replaced the neutral images with blank backgrounds to test whether any visual image — even a neutral one — was distracting. Again, negative images disrupted attention more than either positive or blank backgrounds, and they were remembered more often. The results from this second group largely matched those from the first experiment.
In a third round of testing, a subset of participants performed the task again inside a brain scanner. Even months later, the negative distraction effect persisted. Performance on the emogradCPT remained consistent, providing evidence that the task could be used in future neuroimaging studies to understand how emotion and attention interact in the brain.
Together, these results highlight that emotionally negative distractions have a measurable and lasting impact on attention. Unlike many tasks that measure short bursts of attention, the emogradCPT captures how focus is maintained over time — a more naturalistic reflection of real-world demands, such as staying attentive during a long drive or focusing at work while surrounded by emotional news or social media.
The researchers argue that their new task offers a useful tool for understanding how emotional content disrupts focus in both healthy individuals and clinical populations. People with anxiety or trauma-related conditions often show stronger reactions to emotional material, and this task could help researchers investigate whether they are particularly vulnerable to distraction by emotionally negative cues.
The study has some limitations. The set of images used was specific to the current experiments and may not generalize to other visual materials or contexts. Participants might have become aware of the blocked structure of the task, which could influence both performance and self-reports. Additionally, although reliability of the task was good, it could be improved with additional testing sessions or more focused experimental designs.
“One limitation, and area for future research, is to determine if distractibility as measured by this new task (the emogradCPT) is related to clinical conditions (like PTSD and ADHD) as well as distractibility in more real-world settings,” Esterman noted.
Despite these limitations, the emogradCPT offers a new way to investigate how emotion and attention interact in a sustained manner. It may prove especially valuable for clinical research aimed at understanding emotional biases and attentional control in people with psychological disorders. Future studies could also adapt the task to explore personalized distractions — such as substance-related cues in addiction — or use eye-tracking and brain imaging to pinpoint the exact cognitive processes involved.
“The world is full of distractions, from intrusive memories, worries about the future, reminders of things to do, and our phone lighting up all day long,” Esterman said. “This study represents a new tool that could help characterize the ability to resist these types of everyday distractions.”
“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. We also believe it can open new windows to studying attention in clinical populations and their neural mechanism alongside brain imaging, both of which are directions we are currently pursuing.”
“Specifically, we hope these findings will assist in characterizing and treating anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorders,” he explained. “We are currently pursuing a VA-funded study using these tasks to better understand PTSD.”
The study, “Characterizing the effects of emotional distraction on sustained attention and subsequent memory: A novel emotional gradual onset continuous performance task,” was authored by Michael Esterman, Sam Agnoli, Travis C. Evans, Audreyana Jagger‑Rickels, David Rothlein, Courtney Guida, Carrie Hughes, and Joseph DeGutis.
