Do arousal and valence have separable influences on attention across time?

Previous research has shown that emotions differentially influence attention across time, especially when the valence of the attended stimuli is congruent with the emotion of observer. Sadness produces a larger attentional blink while fear and happiness produce smaller attentional blinks. We report on four dual-task rapid serial visual presentation experiments in which participant emotion and the affective features of the first target (T1) were systematically varied to determine whether arousal and valence have unique and consistent influences on attention performance.