Effects of psychosocial stress on prosociality: the moderating role of current life stress and thought control.

To date, only a few studies have examined whether and when stressed individuals are still prosocially motivated and willing to help others, which is in contrast to the relevance and importance that helping others has for our society. The present study investigates the impact of affective and biopsychological acute stress responses on prosociality (prosocial motivation, helping behavior) under controlled laboratory conditions. In addition, it was examined whether this relationship is affected by individuals' current life stress and the cognitive ability to keep stress-related thoughts at bay. To induce acute stress responses (heart rate, negative affect, salivary alpha-amylase, cortisol), 55 individuals (28 women, M = 24 years old, SD = 4.53) were exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Current life stress (cortisol) was assessed over two days of participants' everyday lives. Thought control ability was assessed with the think/no-think paradigm and was additionally manipulated after the acute stress intervention (TSST) via instructions. The results showed that acute stress was positively associated with prosociality. Specifically, negative affect was positively related to prosocial motivation and salivary alpha-amylase was positively associated with helping behavior. Current life stress moderated the relationship between salivary cortisol and helping behavior: the association was positive at low levels of current life stress. The instruction to control one's thoughts but not participants' general ability to do so reduced stress responses (negative affect). In sum, the findings suggest that prosociality increases following acute stress and that this effect depends on the level of current life stress. Additionally, adopting the strategy of controlling stress-related thoughts was found to be promising for attenuating individuals' stress responses.

The neural mechanisms underlying the modulation of attentional deployment on emotional stability.

Emotional stability, the change of emotion response among situations, was associated with mental illness, such as depression. The current study aimed to explore the modulation of attentional deployment on emotional stability by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a sequential risk-taking task. During the task, participants were asked to open a series of boxes consecutively and decided when to stop. Each box contained a reward, except one containing a devil to zero reward in the trial. When participants stopped, both collected gains and missed chances were revealed. The attentional deployment was manipulated during the outcome feedback, i.e., inducing participants to focus on the good part (GF context) or the bad part (MF context) of the decision outcome. Besides, the Control context was also set, in which the attentional deployment was not manipulated. The behavioral results showed that the emotional stability was stronger in GF context relative to MF and Control contexts. At the neural level, with outcomes getting better, activations of ventral striatum (VS) and superior frontal gyrus (SFG) increased faster in GF context than that in MF and Control contexts. In addition, in GF context, the changing of SFG activation with outcomes getting better was associated with emotional stability. The current study highlighted that focusing on the good part of decision outcomes could enhance emotional stability effectively and SFG played a vital role in this process.

Interplay between supramodal attentional control and capacity limits in the low-level visual processors modulate the tendency to inattention.

When engaged in a demanding task, individuals may neglect unexpected visual stimuli presented concomitantly. Here we use a change detection task to show that propensity to inattention is associated with a flexible allocation of attentional resources to filter and represent visual information. This was reflected by N2 posterior contralateral (N2pc) and contralateral delay activity (CDA) respectively, but also during high-order reorienting of attentional resources (known as anterior directing attention negativity, ADAN). Results show that differences in noticing and failing to notice unexpected stimuli/changes are associated with different patterns of brain activity. When processing (N2) and working memory (CDA) capacities are low, resources are mostly allocated to small set-sizes and associated with a tendency to filter information during early low-level processing (N2). When resources are high, saturation is obtained with larger set-sizes. This is also associated to a tendency to select (N2) and reorient resources (ADAN) to maintain extra information (CDA).

Effects of attentional deployment training for relieving negative emotion in individuals with subthreshold depression.

OBJECTIVE: As a prodromal stage to major depressive disorder (MDD), subthreshold depression (StD) has a higher prevalence in the population, resulting in a greater healthcare burden. StD individuals' current negative emotion could be moderated by attentional deployment. However, it remains unclear whether attentional deployment training can mitigate subsequent negative emotion in StD individuals. METHODS: Based on 160 participants, we combined decision task (Experiment 1, N = 69), eye-tracking (Experiment 2, N = 40), and EEG (Experiment 3, N = 51) techniques to investigate how one-week attentional deployment (gain-focus, GF) training modulated the emotional processing of negative stimulus and its underlying neural correlates in StD individuals. RESULTS: After one-week GF training, StD individuals significantly reduced the first fixation time and total fixation time on the negative part (missed opportunities) of decision outcome and showed a decrease in emotional sensitivity to missed opportunities. An increase in N1 and decrease in P3 and LPP (late positive potentials) amplitudes, as well as a decrease in alpha oscillation, were observed when StD individuals faced missed opportunities after training. Additionally, the extent of reduction in StD individuals' emotional sensitivity to missed opportunities could be significantly predicted by the degree of decrease in alpha oscillation. CONCLUSION: One-week attentional deployment training could modulate negative emotion in StD individuals and the degree of change in alpha oscillation might act as an objective indicator for the effectiveness of training. SIGNIFICANCE: Our study provides a convenient and effective approach to alleviate the negative emotion of StD individuals.

Regulation of negative emotions through directed attention in high-trait-anxious women: Evidence from event-related potentials and eye-tracking.

Abnormal emotional responses in high-trait-anxious (HTA) individuals may be related to the use of emotion regulation strategies. Directed attention is a substrategy of attention deployment, which has been proven to be effective in regulating individual negative emotions. The present study investigated whether HTA women can effectively utilize directed attention to decrease negative emotions. Two studies were conducted using the same directed attention paradigm, with one focusing on event-related potentials (ERPs) and the other utilizing eye-tracking techniques. Participants viewed negative and neutral pictures and rated their negative emotions experienced during viewing. During directed attention, attention was directed towards highly arousing aspects, less arousing aspects of negative pictures, or less arousing aspects of neutral pictures. In study 1, late positive potentials (LPP) were recorded in 26 HTA and 24 low-trait-anxious (LTA) women. In study 2, the latency of first fixation, the proportion of gaze duration and fixations in the specific area were recorded in 27 HTA and 23 LTA women. Both the HTA and LTA groups revealed a decrease in negative emotional ratings and LPP amplitudes when their attention was directed towards the less arousing aspects of negative pictures. Furthermore, in this condition, the HTA group had a shorter latency of first fixation on highly arousing aspects and a higher proportion of gaze duration on less arousing aspects of negative pictures compared to the LTA group. These results indicate that when confronted with negative pictures, HTA women are able to regulate their emotional responses through directed attention, which may be accompanied by attentional vigilance and avoidance tendencies.

Emotional labor as emotional regulation: Italian adaptation and longitudinal validation of the scale among undergraduate nursing students.

AIM: The aim of the present study is to perform a longitudinal Italian validation of the scale and to adapt it to the nursing education contest. BACKGROUND: Research on emotional labor has shown that the roles played by surface acting and deep acting are still uncertain. To overcome this gap, scholars suggest observing emotional labor through the lens of the emotional regulation theory. Andela and her colleagues developed a fine grained instrument, which differentiates attentional deployment, cognitive re-evaluation and expressive suppression, emotional amplification and emotional dissonance. DESIGN: To fulfill our aim, a longitudinal study was performed in an Italian University. METHOD: The adapted scale was administered to 168 nursing students across the three years of attendance in the course. RESULTS: Our results confirm the five-factor structure, and the instrument shows good psychometrical properties. CONCLUSION: Having shown satisfactory psychometric properties, this scale can be considered a useful instrument to assess those emotional elements of clinical practice, which are important for the assurance of education quality to the under graduated nursing students.

The modulation of attentional deployment on emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity in depressive individuals: An event-related potential study.

BACKGROUND: Depression affects individuals' physical and mental health seriously. It's important to explore the pathological mechanisms underlying depression. However, the emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity in depressive individuals and whether attentional deployment influences it remain unclear. The exploration of these questions could help to find novel approaches for the treatment of depression. METHODS: Experiment 1 investigated the emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity in depressive participants during a sequential risk-taking task relative to healthy participants. Experiment 2 added attentional deployment manipulation to the task, i.e., inducing participants to focus on the positive or negative part of decision outcome, and investigated the modulation of attentional deployment on depressive participants' emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity and the neural mechanisms underlying this process by using EEG. RESULTS: Depressive participants showed stronger emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity and LPP was a biomarker of this sensitivity. Moreover, focusing on the positive part of outcome reduced depressive participants' emotional sensitivity to missed opportunity effectively, and alpha power in the parietal area played a key role in this process. CONCLUSIONS: The current study primarily revealed that depressive individuals were more sensitive to missed opportunity and attentional deployment was an effective way to modulate this sensitivity.

Prefrontal tDCS Attenuates Self-Referential Attentional Deployment: A Mechanism Underlying Adaptive Emotional Reactivity to Social-Evaluative Threat.

Social-evaluative threat (SET) - a situation in which one could be negatively evaluated by others - elicits profound (psycho)physiological reactivity which, if chronically present and not adaptively regulated, has deleterious effects on mental and physical health. Decreased self-awareness and increased other-awareness are understood to be an adaptive response to SET. Attentional deployment - the process of selectively attending to certain aspects of emotional stimuli to modulate emotional reactivity - is supported by fronto-parietal and fronto-limbic networks, with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex being a central hub. The primary aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of active (versus sham) prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on self and other-attentional deployment during the exposure to a SET context. Seventy-four female participants received active or sham tDCS and were subsequently exposed to a rigged social feedback paradigm. In this paradigm a series of social evaluations were presented together with a photograph of the supposed evaluator and a self- photograph of the participant, while gaze behavior (time to first fixation, total fixation time) and skin conductance responses (SCRs; a marker of emotional reactivity) were measured. For half of the evaluations, participants could anticipate the valence (negative or positive) of the evaluation a priori. Analyses showed that participants receiving active tDCS were (a) slower to fixate on their self-photograph, (b) spent less time fixating on their self-photograph, and (c) spent more time fixating on the evaluator photograph. During unanticipated evaluations, active tDCS was associated with less time spent fixating on the evaluation. Furthermore, among those receiving active tDCS, SCRs were attenuated as a function of slower times to fixate on the self-photograph. Taken together, these results suggest that in a context of SET, prefrontal tDCS decreases self-attention while increasing other-attention, and that attenuated self-referential attention specifically may be a neurocognitive mechanism through which tDCS reduces emotional reactivity. Moreover, the results suggest that tDCS reduces vigilance toward stimuli that possibly convey threatening information, corroborating past research in this area.

Attentional deployment training impacts neural responses to subsequent regret.

As a common negative emotion in daily life, regret is harmful to mental health and even inclined to induce mental illness. Therefore, to modulate and reduce regret is of wide concern. The current fMRI study aimed to investigate the modulation of attentional deployment training on subsequent regret by using a sequential risk taking task. On each trial of the task, participants were asked to open a series of boxes consecutively and decided when to stop. Each box contained a reward, except for one containing a devil to zero one's gain in the trial. After participants stopped, both collected gains and missed chances were revealed. The study consisted of training and testing stages. At training stage, attentional deployment manipulation was carried out during the outcome feedback of the task, i.e. participants were induced to focus on gains or missed chances by highlighting different parts of the outcome. In the testing stage followed, participants completed the task with no attentional deployment manipulation. Behaviorally, after a training stage focusing on gains, participants felt less regret when encountered with worse outcome at testing stage. At the neural level, more activities of reward related brain regions such as right putamen and cognitive control related brain regions such as dmPFC, SFG and MFG were observed at testing stage followed by a training stage focusing on gains. The current study highlighted that attentional deployment training could modulate the subsequent regret effectively, and that dmPFC, SFG and MFG played a key role in this process.

The role of attentional deployment during distancing in adolescents with major depression.

Individuals with major depression (MD) show deficits in cognitive reappraisal. It is yet unexplored how the act of directing visual attention away from/towards emotional aspects impacts on cognitive reappraisal in MD. Thus, we examined the role of attentional deployment during cognitive reappraisal (specifially during distancing) in adolescent MD. 36 MD adolescents and 37 healthy controls (12-18 years) performed a cognitive reappraisal task during which they a) down-regulated self-reported negative affective responses to negative pictures via distancing, or b) simply attended to the pictures. During the task, attentional focus was systematically varied by directing participants' gaze to emotional vs. non-emotional picture aspects. The validity of this experimental manipulation was checked by continuous eye-tracking during the task. Across groups and gaze focus conditions, distancing diminished negative affective responses to the pictures. Regulation success significantly differed between groups dependent on gaze focus: MD adolescents showed relatively less regulation success than controls in the emotional gaze focus condition, while the reverse was true for the non-emotional gaze focus condition. The results suggest that in MD adolescents, an emotional context might interfere with emotion regulatory aims. The findings can provide an important starting point for the development of innovative training regimes that target deficient reappraisal processes in adolescents suffering from MD.

Emotion Regulation Tendencies and Leadership Performance: An Examination of Cognitive and Behavioral Regulation Strategies.

Emotion regulation is advocated to be an important factor underlying effective leadership given the task demands and interpersonal stressors facing organizational leaders. Despite the recognition of emotion regulation processes in leadership literature, there is a need for additional theorizing and empirical research on the specific cognitive and behavioral strategies utilized by leaders. This effort attempts to address this gap by examining individual tendencies in four emotion regulation strategies, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive reappraisal, and suppression, and their association with leadership task performance. Using an undergraduate student sample, this correlational study assessed the relationship between emotion regulation tendencies and performance in emotionally-relevant domains of leadership. Results provide partial support, suggesting that situation modification and cognitive reappraisal are positively related to leadership performance, whereas suppression was found to relate negatively with performance. Emotion regulation strategies were also found to account for variance in leadership performance above and beyond other emotion-related individual differences. Taken together, these findings suggest that certain regulation processes may be more functional for leaders and extend emotion regulation research in the leadership domain. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.

Neural Markers Associated with the Temporal Deployment of Attention: A Systematic Review of Non-motor Psychophysical Measures Post-stroke.

In recent years, evidence has emerged to suggest abnormal temporal dynamics of attentional processing in stroke patients, especially those presenting with neglect symptoms. However, there has been little profiling of the nature and extent of such temporal anomalies. In addition, many paradigms currently used to measure the time required to deploy visual attention in stroke require a psychomotor response, and may therefore confound performance outcomes. Thus, the aim of this systematic review was to identify and evaluate studies that have employed non-motor psychophysical paradigms to characterize the temporal deployment of visual attention in space. A total of 13 non-motor psychophysical studies were identified, in which stimulus exposure times were manipulated to measure the time course of attentional deployment. Findings suggest that prolonged attentional deployment thresholds are more likely to occur with lesions within more ventral areas of the fronto-parietal network, irrespective of whether patients presented with neglect. Furthermore, this deficit was greater following right-hemispheric lesions, suggesting a dominant role for the right-hemisphere in facilitating efficient deployment of attention. These findings indicate that area and hemisphere of lesion may serve as putative markers of attentional deployment efficiency. In addition, findings also provide support for using non-motor psychophysical paradigms as a more rigorous approach to measuring and understanding the temporal dynamics of attention.

Regulating emotions uniquely modifies reaction time, rate of force production, and accuracy of a goal-directed motor action.

We investigated how emotion regulation (ER) strategies influence the execution of a memory guided, ballistic pinch grip. Participants (N=33) employed ER strategies (expressive suppression, emotional expression, and attentional deployment) while viewing emotional stimuli (IAPS images). Upon stimulus offset, participants produced a targeted pinch force aimed at 10% of their maximum voluntary contraction. Performance measures included reaction time (RT), rate of force production, and performance accuracy. As hypothesized, attentional deployment resulted in the slowest RT, largest rate of force production, and poorest performance accuracy. In contrast, expressive suppression reduced the rate of force production and increased performance accuracy relative to emotional expression and attentional deployment. Findings provide evidence that emotion regulation strategies uniquely influence human movement. Future work should further delineate the interacting role that emotion regulation strategies have in modulating both affective experience and motor performance.

Cut! that's a wrap: regulating negative emotion by ending emotion-eliciting situations.

Little is known about the potentially powerful set of emotion regulation (ER) processes that target emotion-eliciting situations. We thus studied the decision to end emotion-eliciting situations in the laboratory. We hypothesized that people would try to end negative situations more frequently than neutral situations to regulate distress. In addition, motivated by the selection, optimization, and compensation with ER framework, we hypothesized that failed attempts to end the situation would prompt either (a) greater negative emotion or (b) compensatory use of a different ER process, attentional deployment (AD). Fifty-eight participants (18-26 years old, 67% women) viewed negative and neutral pictures and pressed a key whenever they wished to stop viewing them. After key press, the picture disappeared ("success") or stayed ("failure") on screen. To index emotion, we measured corrugator and electrodermal activity, heart rate, and self-reported arousal. To index overt AD, we measured eye gaze. As their reason for ending the situation, participants more frequently reported being upset by high- than low-arousal negative pictures; they more frequently reported being bored by low- than high-arousal neutral pictures. Nevertheless, participants' negative emotional responding did not increase in the context of ER failure nor did they use overt AD as a compensatory ER strategy. We conclude that situation-targeted ER processes are used to regulate emotional responses to high-arousal negative and low-arousal neutral situations; ER processes other than overt AD may be used to compensate for ER failure in this context.