An information-processing paradigm was used to examine attentional biases in clinically depressed participants, participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and nonpsychiatric control participants for faces expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. Faces were presented for 1000 ms, at which point depressed participants had directed their attention selectively to depression-relevant (i....

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 METHOD 9 Participants Measures Stimuli Procedure RESULTS 15 Mood Induction Mood Reactivity & Recovery Attentional Bias Bias for sad stimuli Bias for happy stimuli Mood reactivity as a moderator Bias for sad faces Bias for happy faces Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation as a mediator Emotion regulation processes and mood reactivity and...

AIMS To investigate biases in overt orienting of attention to smoking-related cues in cigarette smokers, and to examine the relationship between measures of visual orienting and the affective and motivational valence of smoking cues. DESIGN Smokers and non-smokers took part in a single session in which their attentional and evaluative responses to smoking-related and matched control pictures ...

Attentional bias toward threatening or emotional information is considered a cognitive marker of anxiety, and it has been described in various clinical and subclinical populations. This study used an emotional Stroop task to investigate whether math anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias toward math-related words. Two previous studies failed to observe such an effect in math-anxious in...

In recent years, cognitive neuroscientists have began to explore the process of how sensory information gains access to awareness. To further probe this process, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used while testing subjects with a paradigm known as the "attentional blink." In this paradigm, visually presented information sporadically fails to reach awareness. It was...

The implicit self-recognition process may take place already in the pre-attentive stages of perception. After a silent stimulus has captured attention, it is passed on to the attentive stage where it can affect decision making and responding. Numerous studies show that the presence of self-referential information affects almost every cognitive level. These effects may share a common and fundame...