The relationship between valence and attention is not clear to me, and I don’t know of a literature which tackles this (though imperativist analyses of valence are related). Here are some scattered thoughts and questions which make me think there’s something important here to be clarified:
There’s a difference between a conscious stimulus having high saliency/intensity and being intrinsically attention focusing. A bright light suddenly strobing in front of you is high saliency, but you can imagine choosing to attend or not to attend to it. It seems to me plausible that negative valence is like this bright light.
High valence states in meditation are achieved via concentration of attention
Positive valence doesn’t seem to entail wanting more of that experience (c.f. there existing non-addictive highs etc.), whereas negative valence does seem to always entail wanting less.
That is all speculative, but I’m more confident that positive and negative valence don’t play the same role on the high-level functional level. It seems to me that this is strong (but not conclusive) evidence that they are also not symmetric at the fine-grained level.
I’d guess a first step towards clarifying all this would be to talk to some researchers on attention.
The relationship between valence and attention is not clear to me, and I don’t know of a literature which tackles this (though imperativist analyses of valence are related). Here are some scattered thoughts and questions which make me think there’s something important here to be clarified:
There’s a difference between a conscious stimulus having high saliency/intensity and being intrinsically attention focusing. A bright light suddenly strobing in front of you is high saliency, but you can imagine choosing to attend or not to attend to it. It seems to me plausible that negative valence is like this bright light.
High valence states in meditation are achieved via concentration of attention
Positive valence doesn’t seem to entail wanting more of that experience (c.f. there existing non-addictive highs etc.), whereas negative valence does seem to always entail wanting less.
That is all speculative, but I’m more confident that positive and negative valence don’t play the same role on the high-level functional level. It seems to me that this is strong (but not conclusive) evidence that they are also not symmetric at the fine-grained level.
I’d guess a first step towards clarifying all this would be to talk to some researchers on attention.