Can training change attentional breadth? Failure to find transfer effects.

Recently, there is increasing interest in the causal relationship between attentional breadth and emotion regulation. To test this causal relationship, attentional breadth needs to be manipulated stringently. The aim of the current research was to establish whether visual attentional breadth could be manipulated through experimental training procedures.

Adaptive cognitive emotion regulation moderates the relationship between dysfunctional attitudes and depressive symptoms during a stressful life period: a prospective study.

Background And Objectives: Dysfunctional cognitions are known to emerge in stressful situations and are critical for the onset of depressive symptoms. The goal of this study is to investigate whether adaptive and/or maladaptive emotion regulation strategies moderate the relationship between dysfunctional attitudes and depressive symptoms under stress.

Methods: In a longitudinal study, 92 healthy but unselected undergraduates were followed for three months including a stress period (four weeks of examinations).

Mindful attention and awareness mediate the association between age and negative affect.

Objectives: Later life is often accompanied by experiences of loss and bereavement in several life domains. In spite of this, older adults experience less negative affect than their younger counterparts. Several explanations for this paradoxical finding have been put forward, but the mechanisms underlying the association between age and negative affect remain largely unclear.

Effects of positive mood on attention broadening for self-related information.

Studies on cognitive effects of positive emotions have associated positive emotions to broadened attention. Given the widely investigated relationship between self-focused attention and mood, it is important to investigate the effect of positive mood on visuospatial attention for self-related information. We used a performance-based measure to assess fluctuations in attentional broadening from self-related contrasted to not-self-related information.

Happy but still focused: failures to find evidence for a mood-induced widening of visual attention.

In models of affect and cognition, it is held that positive affect broadens the scope of attention. Consistent with this claim, previous research has indeed suggested that positive affect is associated with impaired selective attention as evidenced by increased interference of spatially distant distractors. However, several recent findings cast doubt on the reliability of this observation.