This is a classic edition of Adrian Wells and Gerald Matthews' award-winning textbook on attention and emotion, now including a new introduction. Attention and Emotion: A Clinical Perspective critical ally reviews the liter at ure on attention and emotion, and presents an integrative cognitive attention model of the development and maintenance of emotional disorders.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION TO THE CLASSIC EDITION
In the first section of the book, we presented the most important psychological theories of attention of the time. In the last part of the book, we presented a theoretical ethical model for attention and self-regulation.
INTRODUCTION
Mandler (1979) sees emotions as the result of a cognitive evaluation of the current state of the world. Two further questions of particular clinical importance are the role of attentional manipulation in cognitive therapy (Chapter 10) and whether self-report measures of cognitive functioning actually predict later pathology. (Chapter 11).
ATTENTION
Conjunction search requires the allocation of attention to the corresponding locations of the different feature maps to identify which features are associated with the same perception. At present, it is not possible to find a decisive solution to the conflict of early-late selection. In contrast, theories about the operation of other sources of dual-task interference are poorly developed.
The hypothesis that automatic attentional responses are generated by pre-attentive analysis of the trigger stimulus has also been challenged. Hoffman, Nelson, and Houck (1983) demonstrated that two CM search tasks showed dual-task interference within a POC paradigm characteristic of resource-limiting a tions: Schneider (1985) attributes this finding - tion of the task stimuli blocking automatic detection. Mutual inhibition of the color units inside the module serves to prevent activation to the threshold of alternative colors.).
Abnormalities of attentional selection may be driven by abnormalities in the connections of the lower-level network, or by the person's voluntary plans and strategies for selection. One interpretation of this is that evaluations reflect selective attention to mood-congruent elements of the stimulus, driven by a schema associated with the mood. Second, priming effects require a number of logically distinct stages: encoding of the prime, activation of knowledge, and processing of the later (primed) target stimulus.
ATTENTIONAL BIAS IN EMOTIONAL DISORDERS
An emotional stimulus can occur in one of the two channels. It is expected that the choice of location is influenced by the emotional content of the stimuli that are first presented. Theoretical implications of the attention data are discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
In other words, it appears that depressed students are distracted from the task at hand by the depression-related content of the words. Stability of depression was assessed by two administrations of the BDI. Studies of the emotional Stroop suggest that interference from words consistent with the patient's disorder occurs across a wide range of anxiety-related occurrences.
More compelling evidence is provided by studies on the role of self-reference. Two of the more promising paradigms for establishing differences between anxiety and depression appear to be controlled priming and memory refinement. However, simple selective attention tasks sometimes show biases related to (1) emotional stimuli in general and (2) specific concerns of the individual.
AFFECTIVE BIAS IN ATTENTION
However, Bower's (1992) formulation of the concept is too general to be able to predict attentional bias. Subjects can also have conscious awareness of the emotional valence without awareness of other information about the word (Bargh et al., 1992). The second criterion for automaticity is that the subject must lack voluntary control over the initiation and termination of the response.
This claim rests on the assumption that anxiety effects on attention at the two locations are interdependent, a view that requires further consideration of the role of probe stimulus position. The mechanism may be different in the anxious learners of MacLeod and Mathews (1988), where the data suggest the threat stimulus influencing the speed of the shift of attentional focus to a specific focus. c location. However, the feature information associated with individual words is unlikely to be sufficiently predictive of the word for this process to operate.
The bias may be stronger when analyzing after attention and attentional regulation. We have argued that neither the auto matric locus nor the preattentive locus of bias has been convincingly established. Much of the data on anxiety and attention is compatible with attention tending to focus on dangerous substances after exposure.
EMOTIONAL DISORDERS
The facilitating effect of secondary task performance is sometimes called the 'easy' effect of secondary task performance. There are several possible explanations: (1) the secondary task is not as demanding as depressive rumination; (2) improved performance of the primary task. In summary, depressed people show a general slowness in performing attentional tasks.
In summary, anxiety, and in particular state worry, appears to be associated with fairly general performance declines. The RTT's Worry Scale appears to be related to poorer performance on tasks involving anagram solution (Sarason & Turk, 1983), digit symbol substitution (Sarason, 1984, Study 2), and general knowledge (Sarason et al., 1986a, Study 2B). Also in the latter study, the task-relevant thoughts subscale of the CIQ was negatively related to performance.
Provision of social support also appears to reduce performance impairment, cognitive impairment, and self-concern in subjects with anxiety (Sarason, 1981). Matthews (1992a) reviews a program of research on the relationship between lack of energy and the performance of highly demanding tasks. Energy is also more strongly related to dual-task performance than to single-task performance (Matthews, Davies, & Westerman, 1990d; Matthews & Margetts, 1991).
ATTENTIONAL CONTENT
Furthermore, they see the worry process as a problem-solving effort: "The worry process represents an attempt to engage in mental problem-solving about a matter whose outcome is uncertain but contains the possibility of one or more negative results. In summary, there appear to be differences between anxious and intrusive thoughts, and perhaps differences between these events and automatic negative thoughts. Turning to depression, the content of cognition is characterized by what Beck and colleagues refer to as the negative cognitive triad (e.g., Beck et al., 1979), in which the depressed individual has negative thoughts about the self, the world, and the future.
Studies using questionnaires such as the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (Hollon & Kendall, 1980) and the Cognitive Checklist (Beck et al., 1987) have provided evidence that negative thoughts predominate in depressed patients. this guy. Activation of memory propositions leads to activation of associated negative affect, and attention is directed to the affective qualities of this distress. Self-preoccupation intensifies negative affect and related arousal, and also causes a narrowing of attention.
Despite the clinical importance of negative thoughts, a number of unresolved issues remain. The third issue is the functional significance of negative thoughts and worries. In addition, worry may be associated with enhanced appraisal of threat, as well as preparation for dealing with threat (Eysenck, 1992). The distinction between appraisal and coping is discussed further in Chapter 8.) It is uncertain whether different types of worry associated with different functions should be distinguished.
INTERACTIONIST APPROACHES TO STRESS
Emotion-focused cognitive strategies include positive reappraisal of the situation or self-criticism. The dependence of the personality relationship on the second assessment provides insight into the instability of individual differences noted by Folkman et al. Subjects high in N and PU tended to rate situations as more threatening and loss-related, and all three variables were related to secondary appraisals of situational change.
They suggest that the quality of social support and its connection to the needs of the situation may also be important. Perception of social support during a stressful episode may be biased by the severity of the stress outcome. It is difficult to assess the nature of the causal relationship between negative social cues and negative self-beliefs.
To simplify something, negative affect is associated with differences between the appreciation of actual characteristics of the self, and appraisal of ideal and ought self-guides. The type of negative affect generated depends on the nature of the discrepancy: actual-ideal discrepancies are associated with dejection and. Stokes and McKirnan's (1989) analysis implies that much research on social support may overestimate the direct effects of social interaction by neglecting the personality factors that can influence both perceptions and stress outcomes.
