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. All T1s connoted affect. Results showed that the emotional experience of negative affect with high arousal led to better second target (T2) detection than negative affect with low arousal. In conditions where positive affect was the experienced emotion, low arousal resulted in better T2 detection than high arousal. When participant arousal was held constant at a low level there were no differences in performance. When participant arousal was high, a cross-over effect was observed in which negative affect produced better performance than positive affect at early positions and negative affect produced better performance at late. The first targets in these experiments varied in arousal and valence to test for emotion congruent effects, but none were found. It was concluded that the experience of varied levels of arousal and types of valence do not have separable influences on attention across time. Rather, their influence is more consistent with emotion-specific mechanisms.

Boredom proneness and emotion regulation predict emotional eating.

Emotional eating is considered a risk factor for eating disorders and an important contributor to obesity and its associated health problems. It has been suggested that boredom may be an important contributor to overeating, but has received relatively little attention. A sample of 552 college students was surveyed. Linear regression analyses found that proneness to boredom and difficulties in emotion regulation simultaneously predicted inappropriate eating behavior, including eating in response to boredom, other negative emotions, and external cues. The unique contributions of these variables to emotional eating were discussed. These findings help to further identify which individuals could be at risk for emotional eating and potentially for unhealthy weight gain.

Mood-specific effects in the allocation of attention across time.

Participants completed single and dual rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks. Across five experiments, either the mood of the participant or valence of the target was manipulated to create pairings in which the critical target was either mood congruent or mood noncongruent. When the second target (T2) in an RSVP stream was congruent with the participant's mood, performance was enhanced. This was true for happy and sad moods and in single- and dual-task conditions. In contrast, the effects of congruence varied when the focus was on the first target (T1). When in a sad mood and having attended to a sad T1, detection of a neutral T2 was impaired, resulting in a stronger attentional blink (AB). There was no effect of stimulus-mood congruence for T1 when in a happy mood. It was concluded that mood-congruence is important for stimulus detection, but that sadness uniquely influences post-identification processing when attention is first focused on mood-congruent information.

The emotional blink: adult age differences in visual attention to emotional information.

To assess age differences in attention-emotion interactions, the authors asked young adults (ages 18-33 years) and older adults (ages 60-80 years) to identify target words in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The second of two target words was neutral or emotional in content (positive in Experiment 1, negative in Experiment 2). In general, the ability to identify targets from a word stream declined with age. Age differences specific to the attentional blink were greatly reduced when baseline detection accuracy was equated between groups. With regard to emotion effects, older adults showed enhanced identification of both positive and negative words relative to neutral words, whereas young adults showed enhanced identification of positive words and reduced identification of negative words. Together these findings suggest that the nature of attention-emotion interactions changes with age, but there was little support for a motivational shift consistent with emotional regulation goals at an early stage of cognitive processing.

Self-efficacy and choice of coping strategies for tolerating acute pain.

Participants who reported either low or high self-efficacy for tolerating painful stimuli were randomly assigned to conditions, in which they either did or did not have a choice of strategies for coping with arm shock. Choice and self-efficacy were positively associated with increases in perceived control. Being given a choice, in comparison to having no choice, led to increased tolerance of arm shock and lower pain reports for those with high self-efficacy. Providing a choice of strategies did not benefit those with low self-efficacy. This study demonstrates that the benefits of allowing individuals the opportunity of choosing among an array of coping options depend on a prior conviction that one is able to cope.

Cognitive therapy for depression: a comparison of individual psychotherapy and bibliotherapy for depressed older adults.

Thirty-one community-residing older adults age 60 or over either received 16 sessions of individual cognitive psychotherapy (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979) or read Feeling Good (Bums, 1980) for bibliotherapy. Posttreatment comparisons with the delayed-treatment control indicated that both treatments were superior to a delayed-treatment control. Individual psychotherapy was superior to bibliotherapy at posttreatment on self-reported depression, but there were no differences on clinician-rated depression. Further, bibliotherapy participants continued to improve after posttreatment. and there were no differences between treatments at 3-month follow-up. Results suggest that bibliotherapy and that individual psychotherapy are both viable treatment options for depression in older adults.

Dual-task attention deficits in dysphoric mood.

The attentional functioning of nondysphoric, mildly dysphoric, and moderately to severely dysphoric college students was tested using the attentional blink (AB) paradigm. These groups performed equally well at reporting a single target appearing in a rapidly presented stream of stimuli. All groups showed an AB, with report sensitivity for a 2nd target being reduced when the 2 targets were presented less than 0.5 s apart. Nondysphoric and mildly dysphoric participants showed the same size ABs, but the ABs for moderately to severely dysphoric participants were larger and longer. As predicted, the results showed that moderately to severely dysphoric individuals have attentional impairments. These impairments, however, were evident only in the more demanding dual-task condition.

Can anxiety help us tolerate pain?

It was hypothesized that anxiety which is relevant to the source of pain exacerbates pain, whereas anxiety which is irrelevant to the source of pain reduces the experience of pain. Female subjects were given either high or low anxiety provoking information about a cold pressor task (relevant anxiety) or high or low anxiety provoking information about a potential shock (irrelevant anxiety). Subjects were then exposed to the cold pressor. The results demonstrated that subjects who were highly anxious about the cold pressor reported experiencing the most pain. Subjects who were highly anxious about the shock reported the least pain and reported significantly less pain than subjects who were highly anxious about the cold pressor. These findings clearly demonstrate that the relationship between anxiety and pain is not always positive or unidirectional.